Episode 70: Make Your Marketing Easier with AI with Menekşe Stewart

[00:00:00] Today. I have a very special episode for you because we are talking about the biggest trend buzzword, whatever you want to call it, going on not only in our industry but pretty much across the world, which is AI, which stands for Artificial Intelligence. And I’m sure at this point you’ve heard the phrase ChatGPT. And let me tell you that AI goes so much deeper than that. And it is something that I’ve had a pulse on but kind of ignoring. And today I decided to bring on a guest who is in my mastermind and built her own AI app to help make your marketing easier. She is seriously one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and we had a fantastic conversation all about AI and the impacts on both us as humans and our businesses. And I think you’re really going to enjoy this conversation. So before we jump in, I just want to introduce her. Her name is Menekşe Stewart [00:01:00] and she helps creatives and content creators make their marketing sparkle. She’s a marketing specialist with a background in evergreen marketing and product management for creators and thought leaders. Menekşe is a developer of marketing Magic, an AI powered business growth tool that helps small business owners grow their brands, not their to do list. I feel like we can all get behind that. So I am going to turn it over now to Menekşe and let’s learn more about her and all things AI. You are listening to the Empowered Business podcast. I’m your host, Monica Froese, and if you’re like me, you want to grow a business you love that gives you financial freedom and fits your lifestyle. Every week you’ll get strategy and unfiltered opinions from me and other successful business owners that will inspire you to make big moves in your business. When we work together, we not only grow faster, we also amplify each other’s voices. Are you ready to build your business on your terms? Let’s jump in. The [00:02:00] next show. Welcome to the Empowered Business podcast. I am so excited to talk to you about all things today.

[00:02:08] Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

[00:02:11] Yes, I is the one thing that not that I’ve buried my head in the sand, but have not necessarily been the the most earliest adopter. So I’m glad that we have you, because clearly you are. And you can educate everyone about it in ways that I cannot. So before we dive into all things, I would love for you to tell us about your entrepreneurial journey, how you got started and, well, kind of spoiler alert you’re doing today, but your business is much more than that, too. So tell us all about it.

[00:02:40] Yeah. So I actually started working full time when I was 13 in my family’s business. So my dad is originally from Istanbul in Turkey and he moved to the UK in the 80s and he has had a kebab shop for a lot of those years At classic Turkish immigrant job is like open a kebab shop anyway. [00:03:00] Unfortunately, due to a variety of circumstances, I started working in the family business because we were sort of struggling with some legislation that the local council had put in place that basically my dad like lost 35% of his business revenue overnight even after we like lobbied and stuff. So I had been working a few hours a week and then when I turned 15.5, my grandma in Istanbul had a stroke and my dad had to go out and look after her for about six months and just kind of like left me running the shop. So I was 15.5 and I was working like 4 p.m. until 3 a.m. in the kebab shop while he was in Istanbul. And I always swore that I would never run my own business since I was like, I am not for this life. This is too difficult. I’m never, ever opening way in business. So just before my dad had to go to Istanbul to earn a little bit of extra money, I started working as [00:04:00] an SEO freelancer via I can’t even remember how I first got the project, but I was working with this agency and I think we were based out of Poland and they used to pay me $3 per article to do keyword research and rewrite medical articles for the early versions of things like WebMD.

[00:04:17] I always say to.

[00:04:19] People, if you had any health anxiety for 2008 when Google fixed that algorithm, I apologize because I wrote so many articles and I was like this 15 year old kid who was working in a kebab shop and then spending like four hours, five hours when I got home from work writing these medical articles. So that is.

[00:04:37] Like, wait a minute, Like that was like, not a good idea.

[00:04:42] It feels very illegal. And I was a child, so like, it was illegal in like many ways. Wow. Okay.

[00:04:49] That’s an interesting detour of the story. Okay. Okay. So you’re educating the world on medical issues as a 15 year old. That’s good.

[00:04:56] Yeah. So I’ve always since then worked as a [00:05:00] freelancer, even when I was studying. And then I tried to be an accountant for two and a half years because my dad was like, you know, get a stable job. And I was like, Yeah, Accountant feels stable. And then realized like, I just do not have the personality type for accountancy. It’s too like routine and repetitive and under stimulating. And then, you know, I got like diagnosed with ADHD and I was like, Oh, that explains why accountancy was a total bore. Because if you’re creative in accountancy, you normally end up in jail. So you just want to.

[00:05:31] Yeah, not a good idea. Yeah.

[00:05:33] So, yes, I did that for two and a half years, but even during then I was still continuing to do work with like agencies as a white label contractor for projects that involve keyword research like search engine optimization and a lot of copywriting specifically aimed at SEO. And then, you know, fast forward to about 2016. I opened an e-commerce marketplace for faith based gifts. That’s I still run that. And I decided [00:06:00] to go full time with the marketing. So I’d been working as a project manager for 15 hours a week and then doing marketing the rest of the time. And I was like, I’m just going to I’ve got enough like clients that I’m going to go full time with this. And so I spent about a year doing copywriting. Seo, consultancy and different projects. Then in 2017, I started to work more with clients doing marketing strategy for like content based businesses. So people who are thought leaders, coaches, authors, anyone who’s got a large body of content that they teach. So my longest client, I worked with her for two years was a coach for preschool directors and she did a lot of leadership coaching and performance coaching. And the sort of marketing strategy fits in really nicely with that model of business because a lot of the strategic positioning is to do with content, it’s to do with the customer journey, the keyword research piece and people [00:07:00] finding you organically.

[00:07:01] And I’m actually a massive introvert, so I’ve always had a preference for marketing that does not require you to be a personality and to have to show up and sort of be entertaining. Like I’m entertaining, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t want to have to build my platform based on me feeling like I’m going to be entertaining on a given day. And so, yeah, I’ve basically I loved marketing. I have read as many books about marketing, listened to as many podcasts, done loads of courses, just for the joy of learning about it. I just love it. And over the course of sort of 2017 through to, you know, last year, I’ve worked with quite a number of different people. A guy called Jordan Rayner, a guy called Jay Shetty, doing things that are really focused on evergreen funnels and evergreen marketing strategies and then launching content based things, whether it’s things like books or podcasts or courses. So yeah, that’s, that’s been going on in the background. Is it from a professional [00:08:00] point of view?

[00:08:01] So you’ve been doing a lot of things working for other people, like behind the scenes, that’s where you learned a lot, but then now you have your own brand.

[00:08:09] So yeah, so marketing manager. I’ve been working like under that brand since 2017 or so, and I’ve had like I do courses, courses and things like that for e-commerce and creative businesses because I’ve done a lot of work with brands like that through different agencies and then customer journey courses, keyword research, you know, things like that. But typically live programs that tend to have between 30 and 50 people in them for 6 to 12 weeks. And I’ve been doing that like once or twice a year since about 2018, I think was the first live cohort that I did. And then, you know, creating I’ve got like all these templates. I mean, I joined your mastermind because I’ve got like 120 plus templates and things that I’ve created but never listed in a shop to sell anywhere. Because for me, I just have really enjoyed the creative process. So that’s a work in progress [00:09:00] in itself, but it’s really body of work that has been built over the course of about 5 or 6 years.

[00:09:06] So are you saying that basically until this year you weren’t really selling your old things, you were creating, not really selling them?

[00:09:13] Yeah, 100%. I’ve never consistently. Sold my own things beyond the sort of live programs that I had run once or twice a year. Oh, wow.

[00:09:23] Okay. And first, let’s talk about what the app that you develop is the name of it and like its purpose, but then like how it even came into existence, like you’re working behind the scenes in all these businesses, you’re not even really selling your own stuff. And now you have an app like, Yeah, what?

[00:09:41] So I just had a lot of like confidence issues where. I haven’t really talked about this publicly at all up until this point. So in 2020, a lot of really like the world changed, right? Everyone was dealing with stuff I had like my therapist was open mouthed [00:10:00] when I was telling her what happened to me in just the last few months of 2020, like she literally could not control her facial expression. It was really rough and I had thought that I had ADHD for a while, but my business coach at the time was like, Do you think it’s time to go and talk to somebody professional about this and explore this further? Because you know, is a lot. And so I did go to the appointments, take 90 minutes only it took him 55 minutes to be like, you have got very severe ADHD and it’s a miracle you have managed to get this far without anyone picking it up. And so anyway, that sort of really was a catalyst for me realizing a lot of the things that I didn’t really feel like people’s perception of me matched what I thought inside. And I’ve never thought of myself as like being an intelligent person, for instance. But then it was like, okay, but like as in it’s just not a cool part of my it’s not how I think about myself if I describe myself. But then I was like faced with this situation where I would hire people into [00:11:00] my business and they would work like eight times more slowly than me.

[00:11:04] So I would give them a task and we would have meetings and it would just it was so frustrating. And I was like, I know exactly what we need to do and I’m briefing you on what to do. But it’s either not getting done because people and basically people’s brains were melting because I was explaining things to them at my processing speed and their processing speed was not that, but it really took that experience of like, okay, there’s a disconnect here. And it is because my brain is working faster than I realized. And so a lot of the like confidence pieces and just do I know what I’m doing and all of those sorts of things that you go through really were resolved over the course of the last like 2 or 3 years. And that’s kind of why I haven’t actively sold as much because I’ve been creating all of this stuff, which I now know is really good, but at the time was like, Who am I to do this? I’ve worked full time in a kebab shop and being 13, like I didn’t go to university and study marketing. Like who am I to sell this stuff? And [00:12:00] I think we all ask ourselves this questions, right? Who am I to do this? But the reality is that I just love learning and I will, you know, do a course in a weekend for fun. I did the funnel gorgeous spy marketer course in 72 hours, including all three assessments over Black Friday weekend.

[00:12:18] Okay. So for anyone who doesn’t know, that’s like it’s a certification funnel building program. And it is I have access to it. Needless to say, I have not been certified because I it’s like designed to be done in 6 to 12 months. Yeah. Okay. Well, you know what? When you say like you’re a brain processes at a much faster speed, that makes sense to me. Why? It was easy. I don’t know if easy is the right word, but why you jumped on the train and could develop an app? Because I is such a different way of thinking and seeing things. And just like I can be a fast processor in a lot of ways. Probably wouldn’t be in business if I wasn’t somewhat of a fast processor. But I’m [00:13:00] also very I observe for a long time and I get the sense that you see and you’re like, I can do something with this. And you move.

[00:13:08] Yes and no.

[00:13:10] Okay.

[00:13:11] I am actually a major tinfoil hat person. I joke like that with my community all the time. Like we always say, my next is a typical hat person. I do not use Siri, I do not use Alexa. I have never used Siri or Alexa. I, I make sure that my my apps don’t have access to my microphone or my camera. Like, I’m like, I know people are harvesting our data and manipulating us with it and I opt out aggressively. So I just will not like get on to the smart home thing. I’m a very slow adopter of things that require a big shift and also like understanding that over the last 15 years with our personal data, whether we’re happy for it to be shared or not, we have created billionaires. You know, Mark Zuckerberg is a billionaire because he has taken our data and ultimately exploited [00:14:00] it in a way that has led him to be fined billions of dollars by the EU. But whether or not we’re, you know, happy to share our data, it is taken and it is used for commercial gain for other people. And understanding the way that digital marketing works makes me very cautious to adopt things quickly. However, I’ve actually been researching AI in one form or another since about 2018.

[00:14:25] Google’s algorithm updates around those times were much more focused on machine learning and moving away from exact match keywords into more broad match. And just picking up a little bit more. There were words like latent semantic indexing and stuff being thrown around for a while jargon, but basically machine learning had started to become much more of a consideration in search engine optimization. You weren’t having to optimize pages with the, you know, one example I use is if you Google ultimate Guide to SEO and then you skim down the Google listings, all [00:15:00] of those titles are going to be different. It’s not that every single result has got the exact words ultimate guide to SEO in them, So machine learning had already started to shift SEO and content in one form earlier than 2020 and 20, even 2019, 2020. The way that we approach AI as business owners is often that if it makes our lives easier, but it’s not really obtrusive, we don’t question it. So there are also things like our Google Smart compose that happens in Google Docs and Gmail that’s also, you know, generous. It’s generative AI. So where it’s really smashed into people’s consciousnesses is because of ChatGPT being such an easily accessible way for people to engage with these generative content models.

[00:15:53] A couple of years ago there were tools like Jasper that had launched that used generative AI technology. So it’s been [00:16:00] of interest for a while and I’ve sort of been keeping an eye on it because I and the way that we interact with generative AI significantly changes people’s approach to content and search. So search engine optimization in itself is going to change so dramatically in terms of how we approach that. And yeah, been keeping an eye out on it. And there’s a few interesting things like the BlackRock, the investment company that owns about, you know, they control about 20 to 25% of the world’s wealth. They created an AI algorithm in 1981 called Aladdin, I think it was 1981. And it is the tool that they use to identify market opportunities. And all of the money is basically managed by this AI algorithm that they built. And then the UK and US governments, I believe it was actually consulted with them to use Aladdin to resolve the 2008 recession. So, so AI has been part of our financial systems [00:17:00] for like 40 years, over 40 years. And then companies like Walmart, Amazon, anywhere where there’s like a big shipping and logistic operation, especially grocery based stuff, because of the nature of getting things out quickly, typically will have a really large team of software engineers who are responsible for creating AI in both the dispatch of things, but also in terms of the robotics and the sort of factory hardware.

[00:17:28] So there’s a company called Ocado in the UK and they’ve got 2000 software engineers on their team who help with the logistics and dispatch. And that’s been, again, they were a case study in a book that I read back in like 2018. So they’ve had those things building for a good period of time in order to get to the point where they had 2000 engineers at that point. So it’s really that we can’t ignore it now, and that’s why it really isn’t going anywhere. So a lot of people are still feeling really uncomfortable with it. And we are still in the sort of early [00:18:00] adoption phase because the people who had been adopters of it previously, you know, knew a lot more about how it worked and stuff, but we can’t just ignore it and hope that it’s a fad or a trend or it’s passing because it really is has been intrinsic to many of the household names and where they’ve grown to in the corporate space, and it just is becoming easier to use it en masse now.

[00:18:22] Okay. So. When Jasper launched. So for anyone who doesn’t know what Jasper is, basically it was an app that was built to allow you, like the way they marketed it, was that you could use it to quickly create blog posts that were SEO driven. And basically it was supposed to be a content marketer’s dream, right? And so in the blogging space, which I know a lot of people in the blogging space, it was like all the rage. I mean, if I had said Jasper out on the street. Jasper Nobody knew what I was talking about. I say, ChatGPT And the general public kind of has an idea of what’s going on. I’ve I was in [00:19:00] the waiting room at a medical procedure the other day, and they were talking about how AI is affecting the job market and how the job market’s moving from, you know, like needing that education to very skills based type things. And AI is going to be a big thing. And so now it’s getting all this awareness. But why, in your opinion, was it ChatGPT that blew up and allowed it to be like in the mass conscious?

[00:19:22] So ChatGPT is a it’s a consumer facing product from OpenAI and OpenAI are the company who have been there’s a few companies who are doing it, but they’re the main company that has been in the news, that have been creating large language models. So the language models are these. The easiest way to explain it is like you’ve got a huge database of content and then from that there are predictive rules that are applied for trends in which words follow logically the next one. So it’s like maths at a really large scale. And so when you’re using generative AI [00:20:00] each word, it’s choosing based on the likelihood that word should follow the word that has preceded it. So NII has been building this out and got an investment of $11 billion from Microsoft. So that allowed them to use Microsoft servers to do in 30 days what should have taken 30 years in terms of data processing. Now they are the main language model and part of the reason that people are it’s the to build a language model takes a huge amount of energy and a huge amount of data. So the focus has been on effectively creating AI monopolies because of the amount of energy they consume and environmental concerns and all of that. Microsoft invested allowed them to really speed up the process of this. Their language model is actually behind a lot of these tools that we saw coming out like two years ago. So when we [00:21:00] think about those tools. Yeah, exactly. So Jasper’s a really interesting one to look at because in December 2022, they received a valuation of $1.5 billion and they got $125 million investment based on that valuation and they’d grown in two years. There was a lot of talk about it in the sort of tech entrepreneur space. Ai is actually OpenAI. It’s not a proprietary system. So it’s a really interesting space. Economically, it’s grossly over funded as well.

[00:21:30] So wow, that’s like kind of mind blowing. They got a $1.2 billion valuation, 1.5.

[00:21:37] Billion, 1.5.

[00:21:38] Billion based on using the OpenAI platform.

[00:21:43] Yeah, not having a proprietary language model. Wow. Honestly, the tech space is wild at the moment. It’s the most overfunded industry at the moment in terms of startups and there’s been a few interesting. So there’s one in Europe that had just started. It was four weeks [00:22:00] old and it got $125 million valuation. I think about that, but like it was like a lot of like a lot of money and they’re wanting to build their own language model so they would be a competitor of OpenAI effectively.

[00:22:14] Your app uses OpenAI, right?

[00:22:16] It does, yeah. It integrates directly because so ChatGPT is like the front end of OpenAI. And they had all this money from Microsoft as well, but I think really would have helped to push it out into people’s consciousnesses. But the interesting thing with ChatGPT is that when you interact with it, you are teaching its future model. So it’s free to use, but it’s free because the data that they collect from you as you converse with it is more valuable to them than you paying to access it. So ChatGPT is free. That’s great. And I’m all for like using things for free. But what we want to always remember when we use it is that we are creating future billionaires. When we put our data into that program and our [00:23:00] data is going to be used in ways that we can’t predict yet because we don’t know where the space is going to innovate to. And there’s already so many questions around how data is scraped and what’s fair use and all of that stuff. So all of these issues are like super interesting to like read more about. And you know, there’s people who’ve been working on it for years and this is the thing that I adopted. I personally, based on having done a lot of research about the pros and cons and about how things are used. But the key thing with ChatGPT is that it’s worth it for them to give it to you for free.

[00:23:33] It’s costing them a lot of money to run it for free for people, but they are collecting so much information that it allows them to improve really rapidly. So GPT three was the chat model that they launched ChatGPT with, and then GPT four has just rolled out across. It’s available on paid chat, GPT plus accounts, or if you have an account with OpenAI directly, you now can use [00:24:00] chat GPT for as so like. For instance, users of marketing magic can use GPT four with marketing magic because you have access to it directly via your OpenAI account. But the reason they’ve been able to launch that language model so quickly is because of the huge volume of content that has been put into chat GPT since it became available for people at the end of last year. And it’s allowed them to just really rapidly create something that’s much, much better. So it’s an interesting one. But GPT has had such an interesting effect on how people search for knowledge. So in January, Substack had an 11% reduction in site visitors, and Substack is a website that developers use to talk to other developers and fix problems in their code. And developers were just going to ChatGPT to fix their code instead of going to substack. So Substack saw this huge reduction in site visitors.

[00:24:55] What about the Google SEO reduction?

[00:24:58] So this is where we start [00:25:00] to see a bit of a PR war happening. Like what we’re seeing in the news headlines is these tech giants like the tech gods basically that we’ve created who control our thoughts, our opinions, we go to them to ask them for what’s true. You know, we go to Google to double check our facts, all of those kinds of things like and they’re at war with each other and they’re using mainstream media headlines to try and control their narrative. And this, again, you know, tinfoil hat miniature coming out, but am going to give you some examples. So and you can take from this what you will and just, you know, look at it for yourself. But Google has a 92.6% market share and it’s not really a market share, is it? It’s a monopoly on search in the US and the UK. So just to use those as specific examples, the closest competitor that they have is Microsoft with Bing. And the market share of Microsoft or Bing is like less than 5% who invested $11 billion in A.I.. [00:26:00]

[00:26:00] So this I remember I did listen to some podcasts, I think it was. The daily I was listening to when this all started going down. And I, you know, I was like, I’m not going to ignore. I just like so I have been keeping somewhat up on it. And I remember that was the big spin. Like they put the $11 billion in because they can’t compete. Bing can’t compete with Google. As it stands. They had to do something different. So it makes sense. They put the $11 billion in. Everyone’s now like, Oh, let’s see what this ChatGPT thing is. And now they’re going to start taking market share because it does function kind of like Google. We built our whole European itinerary on it. We plugged in what we had already planned and then it spit back it like put it into an itinerary with like suggestions. And then like then we would say like, okay, well, if you’re suggesting this tour, where should we get the tour from an English speaking tour. That is the kind of thing you would put in Google. But we were putting it in and honestly. Oh, wow. Okay. So now that we’re talking about this, Google [00:27:00] is not getting nearly as much information back by us searching for certain things as ChatGPT is because yeah, you might like search something on Google and it doesn’t give you necessarily what you want it and you might start over again. But it’s like with ChatGPT you’re having an actual conversation like you would in the real world almost. Yeah.

[00:27:21] So you’re sharing much more explicit and kind of information, whereas Google is having to guess a lot of the intent from a phrase that you put into it. And just the AdWords product alone in Google’s suite of tools brings them $60 billion a year in revenue. So that solely relies on traffic happening via Google in order for them to make that amount of money per year. So if you look at that over the next 3 to 5 years, we are seeing billions and billions of dollars of revenue at risk. If ChatGPT or [00:28:00] AI based search overtakes what we know to be search today. And it’s effectively going to close a lot of the tech businesses that we know of if they don’t adopt it. So Google’s been working on Bard, but it’s been an embarrassment for them when they’ve done, you know, activations and rollouts and things. They are six months behind OpenAI at least. And so what we saw happen in the first quarter of this year was ex-google employees getting like headlines around the English speaking world at least, and. They were like is going to destroy humanity. Ex-google, chief of AI says AI is going to destroy humanity. Is it going to destroy humanity? Or is a tech giant with billions and billions of dollars left to lose saying, Oh, you’re leaving? Let’s create a PR campaign to be like, you know, Oh, I’m [00:29:00] leaving so I can speak out about the truth of it, you know, the legitimacy built into it.

[00:29:04] There’s this sense that, like, I’ve worked inside it and therefore you can trust what I have to say about it. It’s totally rubbish. If you’ve worked for a company like Google, you still have shares when you leave. You still financially benefit. And plus you made a lot of money while you were there because they pay you incredibly well. And if you’ve gotten to be the chief of something, you’re getting paid a lot of money. So we’re seeing these people who are like chief of AI, you know, the godfather of AI, all these things that nobody can necessarily prove that people are the godfather of AI coming out with these scaremongering stories about the fact that, you know, that totally lacked context when there were headline on the front page of a newspaper. But it’s creating mass panic so that people slow down their adoption of AI and allow space to catch up. And I just do not trust. I don’t trust headlines because I’ve seen so many PR campaigns where there is a spin put on it. Anything where there is a current tech innovation like I would never [00:30:00] take a headline at first glance, you always want to look into it further because people have an agenda and these companies have a huge amount of money and a huge amount of influence in order to be able to.

[00:30:12] Share that, then that take on it in a way that we can do nothing but see because it’s so far reaching. So again, I’m not meaning us all to sound like I’m a conspiracy theorist. It’s more just as we look at the messages that we’re seeing around technology, it can be really easy to naturally shy away from AI because we do copywriting and we’re like, Oh, it’s never going to replace me as a human. Our value as humans in a capitalist society fundamentally does come back to what we do, right? It’s a natural part of existing in a society where you go to school to learn how to get a good job and then you have a good job. And for better or worse, the value that we have really intrinsically connects to our safety in society. And so if our job is at risk, [00:31:00] it does feel like our identity is at risk and AI is going to feel scary for people because of that. And then we see these headlines and we’re like, Oh, my fear is justified because look, it’s going to end humanity like the newspaper say. So yeah.

[00:31:13] Never replace human connection. Like the way I’ve explained it to people who have asked me about it, like what my opinion is when they were like in freak out mode about it. I’m like, Listen, unless we’re going to become robots and like our maternal instinct is moms are going to go away and our kids aren’t going to need nurturing If that happens, if we get to that place in society, sure, we would have to become robots for that to happen. Ai is still and will be like You can train it to seem like it has emotion, I’m sure. Right? But there’s no physical touch from it. There’s no like humans need things that I cannot physically provide to us. So I think it’s I’ve always seen through I’m like you, I’ve seen through all the headlines and I roll my eyes when people are like, Hey, he’s going to ruin [00:32:00] the world. I’m like, I’m not.

[00:32:03] It’s only if your definition of a human is cognitive or intellectual ability, because when we look at the industrial revolutions that have happened through history, the agriculture to industrial and all of the ways in which commerce changes naturally over time, when we look at machinery, it’s automating the manual labor of humans. This is automating the cognitive and intellectual labor of humans. It’s just automating a different part of the work that we were doing, but it ultimately is mimicking what humans do. It isn’t going to gain consciousness in the way that humans experience consciousness because it isn’t embodied and huge amounts of who we are as people like. It’s so problematic to think that I could destroy humanity because what does that say of what do you think of people who don’t have your cognitive ability? What do you think of humans who don’t share your IQ? Are they less human because they don’t have the same intellectual capacity that you have? That’s a good [00:33:00] point. It’s we really have to just ask ourselves how we define humanity. If we think I could replace it because and like you said, we’re embodied, we are physical people, we have experiences and relationships and communities, and we go through messy, inexplicable, like experiences. And the exciting part of AI for business owners is that you can automate things that are currently held over you by yourself, but they’re just weighing you down and you’re spending all of your time like hustling and trying to get to the bottom of the list and you can free yourself up for human relationships and human connection and to have more time and life in your life. And that’s where we can see the benefit of it within our businesses for sure.

[00:33:46] Well, it’s also why entrepreneurs like us will have an easier time adapting and adapting it because we’re not in the traditional workforce feeling the headlines and being threatened by it either. Like for us, we have a choice [00:34:00] to adopt it and adapt to it in a way that will help us because we have more freedom in our decisions versus being in a specific job or industry that it might feel like it’s threatening, which actually that makes sense. I mean, entrepreneurs usually are the first to adopt things in the tech world and test them out and try them out and have the voice to say, how is it going to work? How is it not going to work? Should this go to the masses? I mean, this is very typical of how this works. Yeah.

[00:34:28] Where it’s going to be really interesting to see is this gets into like economics and stuff, but it’s an interesting one. Basically, the productivity to pay ratio is what has shifted hugely over the last number of decades and people aren’t being paid in line with that inflation and that change. And what is going to be really interesting with AI is how much people. Value emotional labor, relational labor, the things that historically in our societies are not at all paid [00:35:00] or recognized as being valuable, you know, for people who are stay at home moms, that sense of like what makes you valuable when you’re in social settings and the value is in our ability to relate and nurture to each other with one another and to be present with one another. And the way that AI is going to change work will force us as business owners to put a higher value on the invisible labor that has gone before because that invisible labor is how we survive when we are in workspaces that just require huge amounts of robotic productivity out of us because we’re not designed to be like that. So it’s just, you know, these interesting shifts over the next number of years are have the potential to impact a lot of the underserved parts of our communities and society, but only when business owners who care and understand about that take their voice in the space of AI and technological development. [00:36:00]

[00:36:00] If we leave the likes of Elon Musk to exist in a tech bro bubble of AI development, then the future of AI is scary for women and for people who are marginalized. But if we step into the space and say, No, we can use this to improve the human experience of community in life, that is going to shape and shift what the next 20 years looks like. And I think that while we’re being scared out of adopting it, we’re also not able to have an influence in what it looks like as it’s shaped and as it becomes part of the workforce and it isn’t going anywhere. So that’s the thing that I’ve been really challenging business owners to do, is that because we’re entrepreneurs, because we understand a little bit more about the business space and we understand how to make money and all of those things that we are positioned to use our voices for future good when it comes to the shape of work in the future [00:37:00] and the shape of industry and community and what things look like moving forwards.

[00:37:06] Well, okay, so let’s talk about marketing magic now because it’s powered by OpenAI, which now you explained. First of all, what does the app, who does it serve? What does it do?

[00:37:19] So it’s an AI powered business growth tool is the sort of shortest description of it, and it’s designed for small business owners. And I built it because I was trying to build something for myself that was like, if I just cleaned my brain into an AI tool, then I can at least get some of these big, like heavy projects that are just require monotonous work off my plate and then figure out all of the team stuff and how we work effectively together. Once that has been like cleared off the decks and so that’s when I started building it really to automate my own processes. And then, yeah, everyone that I was in [00:38:00] Elizabeth Goddard’s Playground Mastermind and at the time and everyone was like, Next year I really want this. And I was like, okay, well like you can be, you know, test user and see what you think. And everyone loved it and it kind of grew from there. And then there were, you know, hundreds and hundreds of people signed up for it within the first like three weeks. And I was like, okay, I did not have this on my bingo card for 2023.

[00:38:22] And then it just got to the point where because I’d built the MVP out using Google sheets and it got to the point where I was like, this is providing like support is not feasible for, you know, hundreds and hundreds of different drives and Google sheets. So then I was like, Oh, how hard can it be to build an app? Turns out pretty hard. Anyway, it was fine and I spent like I’ve spent it’s probably been like two months of super intensive work on the app, but it’s like my intensive work and I have been doing like 18 hours a day and I haven’t been unable to speak. At the end of it, it’s like really sent me to the end of my like in my own cognitive ability. But I did [00:39:00] use ChatGPT to help out with some of the development stuff because I’ve never built something like that from scratch before. I’ve just been like, my marketplace is a custom build and I’ve worked with developers for that and project managed it. So I know a lot about the tech space, but I’d never built something from scratch before.

[00:39:16] So yeah, okay. So what kind of stuff can the app do? Yeah.

[00:39:20] So the one that I always mention first for online business owners is you can create a sales page in less than three minutes and there are different tools for different business models. So you save your brand information and then you upload just the bare bones of your product information. And the product can be a course or a program or a digital product or a service or a physical product for e-commerce. And then you can use the tools and just choose your the brand and choose the product and then hit, generate and then make yourself. So with the funnel one funnel magic, you can create a buyer persona and then a sales page checkout page bump, copy. So there’s different versions of the sales page, so you can [00:40:00] create a tripwire or an upsell. And then there are tools like content plan for your product to help you create five blog posts or pieces of content that map against the customer journey. So really has got built into it. The last 18 years of being a marketing nerd and all of the things that I’ve learned over the course of many different projects, content projects, then being a marketing strategist and all of that. So it really just helps people do without needing to learn before they do.

[00:40:29] How much information do you have to put in to get good results from it? Like, do you like hardly anything.

[00:40:35] So you can just put in like that your marketing specialist. So if I use know as an example marketing specialist and my areas of expertise are like SEO, marketing, automation, marketing strategy and marketing, and my ideal audience is small business owners and that is going to create a full customer journey map for all five stages of the customer journey with bullet points of what my customers [00:41:00] are likely to be doing, thinking and feeling for each stage of the customer journey, and then questions that they’re likely to ask and long tail keywords and things like that. And you can create like an Etsy product description in a click descriptions for your Shopify store if your product based business owner. So yeah, it just is relatively minimal on the input side because the question that I asked myself when I started building it was what would it take to go from idea to implementation in ten minutes? That was my like problem to solve when I started designing it, and it does that pretty well. That’s the ten minutes, you know, depending on how if I’m like super focused, I can do it in ten minutes. But it’s really fun. It’s a dopamine buzz. Every time you click generate and you see something new pop up and you’re like, Oh, that actually sounds like me.

[00:41:45] Well, here’s my disconnect with AI in general when it comes to these apps that are being built on top of it, because we’re having some apps being built that basically automate our framework in the digital shop experience. And I’m [00:42:00] a very visual person, so I keep saying like I conceptually understand what we’re talking about here, but I will definitely get it once I see it in action. So where I struggle with connecting the dots with these things are So you’re taking all of your knowledge of marketing and the customer journey. That’s like the framework for the app, but then open AI, which is what feeds ChatGPT is feeding your app. But like how does it like how does your expertise layer on that with OpenAI? Like that’s it’s a disconnect for me.

[00:42:33] Yeah. So basically there are like 600 plus variables in any given tool within the app. So there’s like loads and loads. I’ve basically like worked out my thinking to like such a granular degree that if I saw it outside of the framework that it’s in with the AI, it would probably make me cry with overwhelm. So it’s like super, super granular. So basically the variables are just to do with [00:43:00] online business strategy, product management, you know, the strategies that apply to specific products. So how do you sell a service or how do you sell a funnel based product like a course or something? And then the tool itself is like the marketing framework, and then it submits to AI, the requests for information, and then responds to that and gives you the results. So you can use OpenAI directly, but you have to do all of that work yourself. So you have to understand what you need in order to get good results from it. Does that make sense?

[00:43:31] Oh, yes, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, so.

[00:43:34] Garbage in, garbage out. If you ask it for something basic, it will give you something basic. If you ask it for something that has the context that you would look at professionally speaking, then you are going to get much closer results. And it effectively is the your business is the car marketing magic is like part of the engine and then OpenAI is the fuel. So marketing magic is great for like parts of your marketing, [00:44:00] but what? Well, all your marketing, it helps you with your sales and marketing assets like it’s meant to literally help you with anything that you are possibly procrastinating at the moment. It’ll help you out with. And if it if it doesn’t, you can request a feature and I’ll build it. But the interesting thing with AI and like what we’re going to see more of in the future and why I say like marketing magic is part of the engine is that we really have scratched the surface of what is possible with the generative AI technology, like the absolute bottom of the barrel thing that we could have done is be like, Oh, I can make it create marketing content because it’s like literally giving us marketing content so, well, you know, OpenAI to say, Here’s something that will write for you and us to say, Great, let’s make it A marketing writer is actually a relatively basic approach to what it can do.

[00:44:47] What we’re going to see more and more of as people. Come comfortable with. That is how it is integrated into the problems that we see in our calendars and our inboxes and things like that. So what does it look like to have [00:45:00] a smart calendar that will talk to your inbox and some of those things where people are applying it still to business problem, but not specifically within the generative content for sales and marketing space. Now that’s where we come back to data privacy as being a really core issue that we all need to be aware of moving forward. It’s why marketing magic is built the way that it is. And you set up an account with OpenAI directly on platform Openai.com and through that you can create your own API key. And then that’s the API key that you use with marketing magic. What that means is that anything that you create stays like within your account. Like nobody else can submit your data.

[00:45:44] Openai cannot use it to go feed like ChatGPT. So I put in my proprietor proprietary information about my product and ChatGPT is not benefiting from it.

[00:45:54] Yes, exactly. So when we use ChatGPT, we are feeding it and [00:46:00] it’s free because we’re paying with our data. When we go directly to OpenAI, which is like the behind the scenes bit like ChatGPT, we are paying with tokens and the tokens are 0.000 $0.02 per 1000. So like really negligible. It costs $0.02 an hour to be hammering the marketing magic app with the GPT 3.5. So for $0.02 an hour to not have your business data inform future AI learning models, I am like I will happily pay that and I use GPT four which is more expensive for tokens because it’s a much higher quality output and that’s $0.06 per thousand tokens. So that works out about $1.50 per hour, but I’m rarely using it for a full hour. I’m using it for like a funnel or for a specific piece of content. So it’s, you know, negligible. I was averaging even with development costs and doing a huge amount of testing, I was averaging $0.34 [00:47:00] a day during May and June. So and that’s with all of the development like that’s so far beyond these that the majority of business owners would ever have. But the benefit of having an API account, I’m not saying like, oh, use that so I don’t have to pay for your tokens. I’m saying use that because this is the earliest phase of OpenAI being applied to business tools and you having an open account means that you can build out your business engine with marketing magic.

[00:47:27] And then like if you see a smart calendar, an inbox tool that you want to use, you can use it for that and know that your data isn’t going to be used to inform future language models because it’s automatically excluded. When you go to platform Openai.com and you don’t use the ChatGPT front end. So that’s really why I wanted to build something as well, was because I work with creatives and creatives. We do not want our intellectual property and the interesting ways that we think and the interesting ways that we explain things to create future [00:48:00] billionaires. Our system in the tech space at the moment in terms of the economy of it looks much more like the feudal system than a free market capitalist society. It is so interesting to see, but if we continue to pay with our data, we are continuing to create really rich overlords. And it’s that sense of like, no, I don’t want to know everything about me. I don’t want everything about me to be on the internet. And this is the other thing of you should only ever expect your generations, even when they are really great, like they are marketing magic to get 70 to 80% of the way there because you do not want it to have your anecdotes and your life experiences and your ability to share a story about making cookies in Istanbul with your grandma when you were a kid.

[00:48:48] You don’t want API to be able to add that kind of information because if it can, it knows too much about you and it is dangerous and it can manipulate you. So we really want to be aware of what our expectations [00:49:00] are. And expecting 70 to 80% is great. The marketing magic app does get you to sort of 80 to 85% of the way there. And I usually go through and like take out some of the British stereotypes. It always talks about the Loch Ness Monster when asked to use the English fellow. But all of the users who use that have said this has saved me so much time going back and forth with ChatGPT because it would have taken, you know, ten questions of going back and forth to get what I’ve gotten just with clicking a button in the app because of that context, it’s already pre provided, so you’re not having to type it in from scratch every time. So yeah.

[00:49:34] That makes a lot of sense. That actually cleared up a lot of my confusion about like the difference between GPT and all these other sort of apps like yours that are coming out to solve different problems, which is why it’s also a digital product because it’s solving problems. Problems at solving while it’s helping you get your content out there faster, it’s helping you get your sales pages up faster so that you can make more money faster. That’s the problem with solving. So one question before [00:50:00] we wrap up that I’m selfishly very curious about why a one time price versus recurring fee.

[00:50:08] It’s a one time price currently until the end of this month, and then it is going to be an annual recurring price. The price is basically licensing my marketing framework, right? So I have been happy to give that to users afters. Yeah. So $297 because they have been so patient helping me work through bugs and like figuring out if features, you know, could be improved. And they’ve given loads of feedback and I really appreciate and value their patience because there is no human emotion stronger than the negative response we have to frustrating technology. I think it’s just like we just get so frustrated and the people who’ve like signed up for it, you know, they use the Google sheet version of this and gave me so much feedback and everything. And then now it’s moved over on to the app and they’ve gone through the bugs of that and just been super patient with it and been really happy [00:51:00] to share their working experiences and say, Actually I did this way. I wondered if there’s a way to improve it or make it faster. So the, you know, being part of the early crowd is we often think, oh, I get the benefit of a lifetime cost, but the company benefits from having you using and giving feedback as well. And so for me, as the person who’s built it, I have just really appreciated the community that has been providing sort of early days input so that we can shape it into something that just is incredibly helpful and useful and gets you outside so you can touch grass instead of spending your day on your computer feeling stressed about 20 hours of sales page writing. And in order for you to sell the thing that you want to sell. So yeah, that’s why it’s a one time fee at the moment, but it is going up.

[00:51:49] That makes a lot of sense. I mean, that’s the early adopters for every program of mine. Got it for one third the price, but in the expectation was always set out that, you know, being [00:52:00] in a like we call them founding members early, you know, all whatever you want to coin it. But the whole point is that when you’re going through the content, you’re helping us refine it. Like, you know, we’re human, We miss things along the way, and something might be intuitive to us and not intuitive to the masses. And so it helps you create the best product you can. It’s actually a very smart thing to do, okay, But it makes a lot more sense to me. That’s moving to a recurring model because I’m like, all of this work that you have to put in and it’s not just like I built it, it’s done. You’re going to have a product roadmap enhancements as you get feedback, marketing, landscape changes in certain ways that you’re going to have to stay up on. So it makes a heck of a lot more sense That’s moving to a recurring charge. Okay, So that helps. I also selfishly want to know, as we were talking about like the valuation of Jasper and all of that little feed in the back of my head was saying, Oh, are you building this to sell it at one point, do you think?

[00:52:56] No. Like built it to solve a problem for myself, which is [00:53:00] like true of pretty much everything I’ve done. So here’s the thing, right? If we all just build things to sell them, then the same people own it and the same people own the Internet. So you just end up with a situation where you have these like huge tech monopolies. I do quite like the fact that I’ve intentionally have built this without going for investment or anything like that, because it just means that I’m not having to deal with shareholder pressure. I can just focus on serving my customers. And for a lot of people that might not be, you know, an approach that they can manage. But I’m like, at what point do you have enough? And that actually the value to being able to provide this because this is the this ties into the price of it as well. Other tools that are out there charge a lot more per month and I could charge a lot more per month for this. But I do want this to be accessible for flexible businesses. I have a lot of people, a lot of friends who’ve got chronic illnesses, who are the primary parent for their children, like people who want to [00:54:00] make in the UK are amounts are much smaller for our salaries. But let’s just say just to frame that before you just think like that’s not livable. I have people in my audience who want to make 30,000 pounds a year in their business and that is how much they want to make and that is manageable for with their children and their, you know, family responsibilities and things as well.

[00:54:21] And that’s their goal. And I just think it should be enough for us to have goals that are relevant to our lives and our contexts and to be able to afford the tools that help us to do that without needing to scale to a certain amount so that you can pay $100 a month for something if you’re not going to see the return on that. So I really did want to make it a price point that works for businesses who can’t afford tools that are $100 a month or more, but still would. Like to be able to get back the time because actually they’re very their time is a very precious resource as well. And so the pricing with that, I would hate to ever sell it in the future [00:55:00] to people who sold it for what it could be sold for, because a lot of the people who are going to benefit the most from it are people who would not be able to pay $1,000 or more a year for the tool. So it kind of just ties into a lot of my personal feelings around how we free ourselves and again, what we value. Like do we value the fact that people are always going to work part time because they are caring for their families and children. So, you know, that’s a conversation for another time. But yeah, that’s just a bit behind the pricing strategy. It really is informed by the people that I hope it is helpful for.

[00:55:34] Interesting to the little anecdote when I’m listening to you. So when I was in Europe, we were in London and I met a guy that my husband works with and he comes to the States frequently because it’s a global company and it was very interesting to hear his opinions on like the American political system and things like that. And when I realized because we got into this capitalist conversation is that, wow, [00:56:00] our Americans super programed to be capitalistic. So like and I am in my business like, so your values I completely relate to. I mean, it’s a lot of why I started redefining mom and like the advancement I want to see for women in marginalized communities and like the access I want them to have to things. But I still evaluate things in my business. Like if I was building this app, I would still be like my mind. And this you know, I grew up in corporate tech. I worked for publicly traded companies. So it’s a very programed thing. As an American, I feel like to be like, okay, well, what would this be worth? What could I make off of it? Like, that’s where my mind goes before I create assets. And so it’s just interesting to hear your perspective on your pricing model and why you’re doing it the way you just want to.

[00:56:45] Clarify as well. Like nothing that I’ve said has been intended as a like criticism of capitalism at all. It’s more just a commentary on some of the natural consequences that we see of that system. But any political system has negative consequences [00:57:00] as well, and any economic system has negative consequences. So it’s really not meant so much as that, but more that I definitely is going to push some of the buttons that we have seen negative consequences of already. And for me personally, like I mentioned, that I’ve got a faith based marketplace. Like I am a Christian, my husband is a church leader, and I don’t talk about that a lot in my marketing business because I am like, it’s you know, it’s not relevant for what I’m talking about in my business, but my desire to like, impact my community and my society is really from a place of everybody is unique and different. And often what we do see is that you feel like you need to be a certain way in order to make money or have a sustainable income or get a good job. And what if that wasn’t true? What if the, like, weirdest people could run businesses that are just based on their like, deepest interests and joys and and, you know, just asking some of these questions around like, what does it look like to be [00:58:00] with people? So for me, I don’t feel a sense of wanting to sell it for any other reason.

[00:58:08] Then I would find it like sticking it to the system would be really satisfying because I’m a female founder, I’ve built it on my own with like no tech. You know? It’d be a satisfying thing to be like. Like up yours. Look, I did this, and it didn’t need any of your help to get here kind of thing. But it wouldn’t be for, like, the money because I’m like, Well, we’ve got enough as it is. Like, I don’t need to earn more money in order like our life wouldn’t change. We still have to live in a vicarage and we still are like in our same community, like, and we wouldn’t want our lives to substantively change. So once it’s making a certain amount per year, after that it’s just a number. So that’s kind of the.

[00:58:45] No, it makes sense, honestly. It’s a big reason why all like the pressure to like grow every year. Like we’ve we’ve talked about this on some podcast episode. We slipped back 22% revenue last year for the first time ever. And it was completely intentional on my part. It was necessary for my [00:59:00] life. We had to stabilize in ways to allow me to be more present for my children. And so like the whole like I’m definitely capitalistic in nature. I know this about myself and that’s kind of like my fire under my butt. But I do it for the same reasons that you’re saying. Like, I don’t do it because I want to feed the system that has already like suppressed so many of us. It’s more to like be like, No, how about we get the seat at the table to, like, you know, move over? There’s room for different and what we define as living a good life. Like I want to use my brain in the business, but I would also like to be present for my children. How do I make that happen? And why do I don’t want to choose? Because we were told so long that you had to choose, or that doing one made you a bad at the other. And it’s like, that’s garbage. Like, let’s challenge. You know, and I use my capitalism roots to do that. This could be a whole other podcast, but. Right. Thanks for going so long as it is. This is a very fascinating episode [01:00:00] for me. I’ve learned so much about AI and it really like helped connect some dots that I was still missing. So I hope it does for other people.

[01:00:05] It’s the definition of labor, right? So and and this is, you know, just to pick up what you said about the capitalistic thing is that we define labor as paid labor. And so what forces us to do is assess what we assume labor to be and then bring emotional and home based and relational labor up to being socially equal with paid labor, because we have to recognize that one cannot exist without the other. So it’s just, you know, some of those changes in the way that we ourselves think about what Labor looks like. And so you to not do any work on your business, but you spend the day with your children and doing things around your house, you’ve still had a workday. And for you to be able to say, I’ve done a workday, yes, it hasn’t been in my business, but it’s okay that I haven’t done anything my business because I’ve had a workday. Those are the things that we naturally aren’t great at. And like I’m like, Oh no, I haven’t done anything. I should do a bit before bed or whatever. And you know, releasing some of that I think is going to be a challenge [01:01:00] for a lot of us. But it’s a really interesting conversation that we’ll be able to kind of explore and see how things play out over the next few months and years.

[01:01:07] Absolutely. Oh, my gosh. So fascinating. Okay. If you’re interested, I will link in the show notes if you’re interested. I haven’t made the link yet, but the link I’ve decided in this conversation is going to be if you want to go get marketing magic, our link is going to be Monica froze.com/magic. So that will exist by the time they are listening to this. You can go check it out, see what it’s all about. Connect with Monica. What’s the easiest way for people to connect with you directly?

[01:01:31] So you can find me on Facebook. My Facebook is just an extra Stewart. There’s no other Turkish people with the surname Stewart, so I’m really easy to find online. And then my website is marketing with my next.com and there’s like demos and resources and all kinds of things over there. If you want to put a bit of joy back into your marketing, there’s all kinds of things that you’ll be able to explore and see what takes your fancy.

[01:01:55] Well, awesome. We’ll make sure to link to all of that as well. Thank you so much for showing up and [01:02:00] just imparting all your amazing knowledge on AI and how you’re hoping that it’s going to impact us for the better. And we can now ignore all these big headlines that we keep hearing, you know, and actually understand that it’s meant to be fear mongering and we should do a little bit more digging before disbelieving that AI is going to ruin our life because it’s not. So thank you so much. It was great talking to you.

[01:02:22] Thanks for having me.

[01:02:23] Okay, friends, if you got to this part in the episode, I just want to thank you so much for hanging in there. I know that that was a pretty long conversation. It might actually be the longest episode in the podcast history, but I think the topic of AI, given how much attention it’s getting out there and the potential for it to really change our lives and businesses for the best, I really wanted to give it its due diligence and I couldn’t think of a better person than Menekşe to share all of that amazing knowledge with us. If you are a small business and you think you could benefit from her marketing magic app, [01:03:00] I can tell you that we use it. I love it. There’s so many cool things you can do with it. If you want to go and learn more about it, head on over to our affiliate link which is Monica froze.com/magic. We’ll also link to that in the show notes. And of course, don’t forget to connect with Monica. She is truly one of the most pleasant people I’ve ever met, and she’s just a wealth of knowledge. So let’s go embrace AI together.