Episode Transcript
Speaker0: Hey what's going on welcome to the doug show i'm doug cunnington and today basmir is going to join me and i was recently introduced to, basmir and i was i was like hey wait a second i think i know a lot of this stuff that this guy has worked on so he's been in the digital marketing and affiliate marketing space for the last 20 years, one of the founders of affiliate world and the stm forum And in the last 10 years, he's been running SaaS businesses and is now focused on XeroRank. So welcome to the show. How are you doing today?
Speaker1: Hey, Doug. First, thanks for having me. Yeah, it's a real pleasure being here.
Speaker0: So I want to jump into the affiliate world exit. So you worked there and founded it in the beginning. And a few years ago, things changed. And you were like, okay, I need a change or something like that. So what's the story with the exit?
Speaker1: Yes. Okay, so one small detail. Basically, I've been doing affiliate marketing since forever. This is the first and only thing I ever did. I finished university and I never worked a job. I got straight into affiliate marketing. So I did that from the time that I was like 21 or 22 till we exited affiliate world. So basically, I've been immersed in the affiliate marketing world for all these years. And even though we had a very good company, very interesting, and we met a lot of people, there was a stage in my life that I wanted to do something different. And it was the same for my business partners. So we decided that,
Speaker1: okay, we've been in the industry for 12, 13 years, 15 years, I don't even remember. And we achieved quite a bit. So everyone wanted a new challenge. So that was the main idea behind exiting Affiliate World. And from a business perspective, maybe it wasn't even the best move because it's a company that is still growing and it's very successful and people love the brand. But for us, basically, it was time for a change and another challenge.
Speaker0: That makes perfect sense to me. I seem to have an attention span of about five years or so because it's front-loaded with a lot of learning And then you kind of, whatever you, you become skilled in that area and then there's kind of a wind down period. So, and everyone has a different attention span. Some people want to stick with something for 30 years and some people are like, a few years is good for me. So that makes sense. Is that about right? You were just like, all right, like it's time.
Speaker1: Yeah, yeah. As I said, I've been doing affiliate marketing for a long time, and I also am very passionate about technology. So I wanted to kind of switch and basically challenge myself in something new, which was basically building and running SaaS products, because I already had a very strong tech background. I had a strong marketing background, especially with Paydesk from running affiliate marketing all these years. So I said, okay, I'm going to try to combine these two and try to create these SaaS businesses and grow them. So this was basically my next challenge.
Speaker0: All right, cool. And then we'll back into some of the other projects that you have worked on. But one of the things I definitely want to talk about is ZeroRank because that's the current project. And what is ZeroRank for people that don't know and haven't heard of it?
Speaker1: Yes. So as you know, like lately, AI and LLMs has been the craze. And everyone is trying to find the best way how they can use them, how they can get visibility to them. And we had the same problem with our other SaaS products. Basically, we wanted to get as much visibility as we could for these products. And basically, we couldn't find anything that would solve our problem. So we could see how we were doing in the various LLMs and how we could improve our rankings. Things. So I basically teamed up with my ex-CTO at Affiliate World Conferences and we had this idea, okay, why don't we build something for ourselves?
Speaker1: And if we see that it is really useful, then we can try to make it a product. And we did it. It was actually very useful because it did help our own susses to rent better, have better visibility in the LLMs. And then from there, we created it as a separate product, did a launch, and yeah, this is the story and now like it's getting a lot of traction.
Speaker0: Got it. And just for the scope, I'm jumping around the time, but for how big was affiliate world when you left? Or you could give us just an idea of the scope number of employees how many attendees?
Speaker1: Sure, sure, sure. So when we left, we were at around 5000 5500 attendees per event, And this is quite a bit because this wasn't like one of these free or relatively cheap conferences. You had to pay quite a bit for the tickets and the booths. So getting 5,000 people in one place three times a year because we used to do three conferences in Barcelona, Dubai, and Bangkok. So getting 6,000 people in the city that were also highly qualified because they're paying like high ticket prices, yeah, it wasn't easy. But this is like the size and the company wasn't huge. At the peak, I think we were around like 70 people, but then we downsized quite
Speaker1: a bit because a lot of it was not full-time employees, but staff we'd get just for the event. So let's say we had an event in Barcelona, we'd get like local staff to help us set up the venue and everything, but the company itself wasn't very big.
Speaker0: Got it. Very cool yeah that's a ton of people and, yeah very cool i was gonna say the other thing that you mentioned you were like ah it's still growing like maybe it wasn't the best move i usually talk to people that wait too long to sell something and then, it's you know they get a worse price and you know if you sell it while it's still growing that's a good upside for the the buyer which is in that i mean you want everybody to have a nice transaction and be out at the end of the day.
Speaker1: Yeah. No, we were confident in the company we were selling. We knew it would grow because it had a very good brand. It was just a point in our lives that we wanted something different. So it was more like a personal choice than a financial choice because financially, it would have made sense to stick for a few more years.
Speaker0: Yeah. So you've worked on several SaaS products. You want to run through and give a couple highlights of maybe one that worked really good And maybe a couple of failures too. Those are fun.
Speaker1: Sure, sure, sure, sure. I mean, to be honest, I was pretty lucky because right now I'm running, along with ZeroRank, five SaaS products. And they're all doing very well. They're all profitable businesses, successful. I am biased because they are still in the internet marketing niche. So it's an environment that I know very well and I knew the problems. I had the distribution. So, honestly, I'd like to say that I tried a lot and failed, but these actually worked out of the bat, most of them. Obviously, it took their time to build and to market. All of them turned out to be successful. And the other four,
Speaker1: they are all tooled for digital marketers. So for people that buy paid ads, it's a landing page builder, an analytics platform, an auto-optimization platform, an ad intelligence platform. And they're all part of one suit. So the same customer could need them all. So it's a very strong upsell opportunity. And ZeroRank is the one that stands apart because it's in a new, basically, niche and field that I wasn't super proficient. I mean, I did start with SEO like many, many years ago, but I've been disconnected for many years and getting into AI, LLM visibility was something new and turned out to be really, really fun.
Speaker0: Got it. And that totally makes sense. I mean, it's the smarter move, right? Like you build products for the industry that you're an expert in, not one that you don't know. So very cool. And for zero rank one of the things i want to run through here and maybe this is perfect so you kind of knew some seo when you got started and then you know you've moved you moved on to other things um sounds like a lot more paid ads and that sort of thing and then running the company, so one of the things that i want to get into is like you kind of relearning seo and then, learning how it is impacted or what you need to do to rank in an LLM or,
Speaker0: you know, whatever chat form people are using for AI, whatever, you know, makes a difference for them. So, yeah, let's go back to kind of the beginning when you were first learning SEO, you know, whatever, you're right out of grade school or whatever.
Speaker1: Yeah, yeah. It's really funny because when I first started, I was creating websites that grow to a certain point and then try to sell them. I'm not sure if you remember back in the day, like SitePoint or Digital Forums. Yes, it is. I was doing this. I was growing these sites via SEO, and I managed to grow and sell quite a few of these. And the money that I got from selling these sites was basically my initial capital that I used for paid ads. And then I basically learned and scaled affiliate marketing. So my real beginning, it could be said that it was SEO. And I had a strong understanding because I was basically creating sites from
Speaker1: zero with no investment, no money, and just growing them to a certain amount and selling them. And then it was transitioned to paid ads. Now, after all these years of being basically disconnected from SEO, I saw the disruption that AI LLMs were bringing. So I wanted to, you know, I was curious, I'm a very curious person by nature, so I wanted to understand how this works. And I have this philosophy that basically guided me on my affiliate marketing years,
Speaker1: No matter how much you read, how much content you consume, you listen to your favorite shows or gurus, some things you can only learn by experience and by iteration. So you have to test things out, you have to measure to see how they work, and then iterate. So double down on the winners and cut the losers. And this is the strategy that I use for affiliate marketing, and it really helped me. Because instead of relying on what other people tell me, I'll just go straight away and test things out. And this is one of the reasons why we started ZeroRank, because I wanted to do all these experiments to see how my rankings would change if I change certain
Speaker1: things on my websites and where I was being mentioned, but there was no way to track it properly. So ZeroRank initially was built, okay, I need a way to track how these changes are affecting me, and then I will iterate based on those. So we built ZeroRank to track these things. It worked really well. And then from there, we did our experiments, we saw the results, and then we added another layer to ZeroRank, which was also ZeroRank now. Apart from tracking your performance, also suggesting what you should do. So this was basically the whole story. How it started, why did it start, and where basically we stand right now.
Speaker0: Okay. And from a feature and functionality standpoint, where does ZeroRank track? Like, where should people care? Yeah.
Speaker1: I mean, ZeroRent tracks, I think it's the only tool that tracks across 13 LLMs. The usual ones around, they track the biggest ones, such as GPT, Cloud, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Navy Grok, but we track 13 of them. And we track it in such a way that we send thousands and thousands of requests. Because as you know, in LLMs, you will never get the same answer twice right away. So people think, okay, this is useless because there There is no pattern. You do many, many searches, and you try to get some statistics out of the data to normalize, then obviously you can see some patterns. And this is why ZeroRank
Speaker1: is useful, because if you get a single snapshot in time, it won't be very useful. It could be random. If you do a thousand of them, and then you change something in your strategy, you can see the visibility going up or down. So you know exactly what you're doing. Is it working, or it is not.
Speaker0: Got it. And I'm curious, do you happen to know the market share for whatever, say the top four LLMs out there? Do you know how it breaks down?
Speaker1: I don't know the exact numbers, to be honest, but I know from experience which are the ones that at least for us, they bring
Speaker1: the most customers. So we do track a lot of data because across our four susses and across our clients, we can dig into data. And for whatever reason, chat GPT and perplexity bring the highest quality of customers. In our case, I don't want to generalize it. This is from the data we have inside ZeroRank and our own suss businesses. But yeah, for whatever reason,
Speaker0: There's a difference. Okay. And I assume like, you know, search engines in the past, like you would have a certain type of user that was on Bing and a certain type of user that would use Google. And maybe like you're saying, one would convert better, but it would vary across industries or, you know, now people, I don't know, maybe people search in Facebook. They're like, I'm just going to search in Facebook. And then I don't even know the product in there, but you would end up with some different type of user that would convert better for different stuff. So that makes sense. Okay, very cool.
Speaker1: Yeah. Before, as you said, you'd have Bing and Google, but it was mainly a monopoly because Google used to own most of the market share. And basically, if you're doing Google right, you're doing everything right. There was no distinction. But these days, the market is quite fragmented. So everyone has their own share. And the interesting thing is that there is no strategy that fits all. You cannot just optimize for AI. There is not such a thing. You have to optimize for every single LLM separately, because each one of them has their own diet. So if you check, for example, let's say Grok. Grok gets a lot of its information from X or Twitter.
Speaker1: If you use ChatGPT, they rely on Bing a lot. If you use Google, it relies on its own search result, plus YouTube is very important. So even if it gets brand mentions on YouTube, then it has extra weight. And then each one of them gets fresh content from Reddit, etc. So it's a different game. And this is why you need to track different LLMs in order to optimize for them, because they're quite different. And from a few case studies that I checked, like a few major searches, there was like a 50 overlap but 50 was completely different for the same brand across different engines so it's something that people should keep in mind
Speaker0: Interesting yeah let's talk about some of the specific strategies that may work for different llms or just in general so maybe that's a good place to start like the 50 that's sort of common and, i and a lot of listeners and viewers we knew, and know seo pretty well and things you know things shift some industries like the websites are still pretty important but i mean as much as i don't even want to do it i still look at the uh, like the ai overviews or like whatever shortcut i could take i mean i'm lazy like everybody else so so yeah what's what are some of the top things in that 50 that's common across all llms yeah so.
Speaker1: One One thing I have to say beforehand is that, especially these days in the LLM scene, things tend to change really, really fast. So whatever we're discussing now, maybe it might be irrelevant by next week or next month. And that's why I'm a big fan of actually testing things out and not just doing whatever you're listening. So test, measure, iterate, this is my model. But right now, as I said, a few things really stand out. One is the freshness of content. So basically, there is what I call like a surge velocity. So if something is really trending or picking up, it has a different weight. So if you have things trending on Twitter or on YouTube that are getting like
Speaker1: a lot of engagement or Facebook, they do add up. Off-site is really, really important, especially on the UGC side. So whatever, like Reddit or this kind of user-generated content, they have a lot of value. So people should try to optimize for this. Reddit is hot these days and the LLMs take it into account. I'm not sure if it's going to be the same a month from now. That's why I'm saying you should test it. But usually the idea, I think it will stay the same. So things off-site, because a lot of people focus on technical on-site, LLMs, or TXT, I'm not even sure if they work or if they make any difference, but they should try to get their
Speaker1: brand out there in a consistent way. So whatever the LLMs can find on your website, it should match with what they can find on various YouTube interviews or wherever on YouTube with your Trustpilot, G2 review. So everything should be consistent so the AI can form a proper idea of your brand. As I said, each LLM has their own preferences, like Grok goes on Twitter and ChatGPT, like a mix of Reddit, Bing, etc. But at the end of the day, you need to keep in mind the core concepts and then test based on those and measure obviously
Speaker0: Right and that totally makes sense from i'm mostly in the google ecosystem and i use gemini typically because it's just included with whatever i'm paying google, and yeah i see so much reddit and then like some forum information for, i tend to look at obscure things so there's not a ton of information so it tends to be pretty low quality because it's just a couple jerk-offs in reddit that don't actually know what they're talking about um, but all this makes sense now i i think, one cool way as you were you know mentioning this i was like oh like we could just watch, maybe what you're doing to promote your stuff because you know you're doing
Speaker0: this you're implementing what you know so you're doing interviews you're on youtube you're doing some other stuff so yes, is there anyone that you're watching or brands that you're looking at and you're like oh it seems like they're kind of on the on the front edge yeah um and i'll leave it open go.
Speaker1: Ahead yeah yeah yeah yeah so The best way to do it, or at least in my opinion, and the way we've been doing it is first, the basics. So you need to provide value. You need to have a strong message, a consistent brand. You need to be found in as many channels as possible. But the second thing we're doing is on ZeroRank, we are tracking our competitors, especially the ones that rank better than us. And on ZeroRank, you can see a breakdown of their mentions, their citations, their overall visibility or share of voice. Which are not like a single snapshot of how they rank, but across the niche or the topic, spread out many different search or prompts, what is their average visibility?
Speaker1: We track the sentiment on ZeroRank. So if people are talking positively or negatively about the brand, and once we see brands that are doing better than us, we try to see, okay, where are they being mentioned? And ZeroRank tracks all of those. So it's this Reddit thread, for example, it's this article on Forbes, and there is this forum. So obviously, we try to replicate and improve onto the strategy. Because if you see people posting on a Reddit thread, it doesn't mean you need to post on that exact Reddit thread, but maybe you can create a new one that is similar and is the same concept and try to provide better information, provide more value.
Speaker1: And repeat and repeat and repeat. So if your competitor is getting on a lot of podcasts, then you learn, okay, this is important. Maybe I should do something similar. Or if you see them being showcased on entrepreneur.com or big news outlets, you should try to do something similar. So that's why having tools or researching what other people are doing, it's so much better. Because you don't have to reinvent the wheel. You see what's working. You try to understand and improve onto that strategy.
Speaker0: And the funny part, it's pretty much kind of the same stuff. Like when you step away and you ignore the rankings, Get PR mentions, go promote your brand, get other people to mention you. Other things will happen. People will see it. Maybe you'll get some backlinks along the way. But at the end of the day, it's just good PR and getting out there. Do you have anything to add on that?
Speaker1: Now, I believe PR will be more and more important these days because with AI, okay, there is the yellow light visibility part, but there is also the part where people are using AI to produce a lot of noise. And noise, I mean. Thousands of products, a lot of quality, a lot of content, a lot of information. So people now, they need some kind of filter to understand the real stuff or the bullshit. And basically, being out there, especially with your face, creating a brand that people can kind of see you and associate to it, it will give people a big advantage because there is so much noise, people don't have the time to just read everything and review everything.
Speaker1: But if they see an authority figure that they trust and they see someone else being associated with them, then obviously that social proof of authority is also getting transferred. So that's why I believe PR and building a personal brand will be very helpful.
Speaker0: A few years ago, I started to hear about Reddit marketing. And I think the listeners, and you and I know, marketers can ruin everything. So something starts working a little bit, and then we will try to scale it and then exploit it as much as possible. So people were doing Reddit marketing, and they'd pick up a subreddit, and then they would own it for an old kind of out-of-date one that no one was watching. They'd become admin, or they would find old users and then have their own messages and essentially do, in air quotes, Reddit marketing. but it was lightly a form of spam. And this has been around since the internet. So when I got started,
Speaker0: we were building whatever, link pyramids and link wheels. And as you're doing it, it didn't seem too bad. But then when I stepped back, I was like, what was I even doing? So I'm curious, have you been running across sort of exploitation, spam kind of activities in different areas? And is it pretty sophisticated? I mean, all this stuff is moving so fast, but I'll leave it open there. And just what have you seen on the ground?
Speaker1: Yeah, I mean, I've definitely seen a lot of advanced stuff happening on Reddit, spanning, mass production, owning subreddits, etc. It works. A lot of the stuff, it works. But you need to look at this, especially if you have a brand, you need to look at this at the long-term period. Because this works short-term, but we know that all the LLMs and Google, they're pretty smart. So at some point, they're going to crack down on this, and you don't want to be associated with such methods if you value your brand. This will work. We don't do them because we believe that the core principles should be the same.
Speaker1: You need to provide value. So even if you're posting on Reddit, you need to add some extra value. You cannot have just your AI agent Hermes just go post the same stuff that it has rehashed on the internet. Or you can use it to get an idea, but you need to add something on your own. You need to add some numbers, some data. You need to add value at the end of the chain. Because otherwise, you're doing what everyone else is doing. And if you do what everyone else is doing, you're getting the same results, which are basically mediocrity. So I believe that this work, but it's not a long term thing. And we've seen it everywhere.
Speaker1: Always Google caught up with those.
Speaker0: So another layer of this question a lot of you know folks they may have their own brand but they hire an agency to do the work, and is there a way you could suggest for someone to tell if the agency is doing high quality work or maybe they're outsourcing it to someone else who is doing this stuff there's many layers of this kind of nonsense so yeah any tips um.
Speaker1: Yeah, at least the way I'll do it is, and I'm coming back to zero end, but this is what we use, is that you can track every single mention from an LLM. So if you ask an LLM question and you see a certain brand being mentioned, and if it's yours, it will show you exactly the sources that it read and took into account to come up with that answer. So in this case, you just look at the Reddit threads that they replied or whatever, or YouTube or whatever they did comments. And then it's fairly easy to understand like if they're spamming it or if they're providing real value. And if they're spamming it, yeah, I'll go and tell them
Speaker1: like, listen, this is not in line with what we're trying to do and we should try to change that because it is always short term.
Speaker0: Got it. Yeah. And I think, I mean, it's still, I still get email questions every now and then where someone's like, all right, I found this, you know, fill in the blank, get rich quick scheme that obviously, even if it works now it's only going to be like six months or something like that things are changing it seems like they're you know the companies are adapting a little bit more quickly but it's it's hard to say i mean maybe it's just certain areas but, but yeah there's always someone interested in the short term and they're like oh it's okay i'll sacrifice the short term just to get some cash in my pocket
Speaker0: now but yeah definitely short-term thinking.
Speaker1: Yeah i mean i i I gave that answer because I'm always thinking in the lines that you have a brand. And if you have a brand, you don't want to ruin it. But if someone wants to stay always on the edge and run, I don't know, affiliate offers without any brand that just wants to play the game of cat and mouse, they can definitely play that. And a lot of times, if they're good, they're going to win at that. But this is not good if you're building something long-term, if you're doing short-term stuff and crash and burn, then it could work.
Speaker0: Yep. And I, I discourage it too. I mean, I think, you know, some of the people that I hear from, if they just would have taken a shorter, um, or sorry, if they would have taken a long-term view, just like you're saying, and just a, a slow, uh, progression, they would have done much better. Anyway, so we can move on from that. So any other things that we haven't mentioned so far around, you know, doing well and ranking and, you know, getting conversions, whatever they might be for you as it relates to LLM visibility or otherwise?
Speaker1: In terms of ranking, I said you need to try, test, and measure. But something that a lot of people seem to skip is the tracking part. And I want to cover that shortly because a lot of people say, okay, but how do you know where is it coming from and if it's converted or not? And we've tried a lot of things. We've tried kind of tracking script, post-op, Google analytics, like trying to like even pull data together with cloud and custom dashboards. But the easiest solution, and the thing that worked best for us, it's really simple and stupid if you think about it, but we did an onboarding questionnaire for new users and we try to get them on a call and offer some
Speaker1: free credits if they get on a call and we just ask them. And it's really, really interesting the amount of information and gold you can find like by talking to these users, you understand how they found you and their whole like story. And there is no tool that will be able to track that. But once you know that, you can try to optimize for these paths, if you can see consistent patterns. Like, okay, a lot of people are finding me on Xforum, then they're watching this YouTube interview, and then maybe reading a review site, then they're coming to my brand, basically. So if you get a lot of these, then you can start to understand the full picture.
Speaker1: And then you have more freedom to optimize where it counts.
Speaker0: I assume you have great information from those interviews for all your copywriting. Is that accurate? You could take their own words and use them for future sales.
Speaker1: Exactly. And you can see also their questions and worries. So what convinced them to sign up, if there was something that seemed a bit weird. And basically people, if you ask them and listen to them. They can be pretty open and talk for quite a while. So we asked them, okay, so when you went on the website, did this seem trustworthy? Was there anything that you were thinking, should I sign up? Should I not sign up? And yeah, we've improved a lot of things on our funnel just by talking to people. For example, on one product, we had a really old payment processor, not Stripe, and it worked for years.
Speaker1: And then we never noticed because we got so used to it, but the interface was so old and like these old HTML forms. And I heard from quite a few people that, hey man, like when I go to the checkout page, it looks like a virus page or something. I'm afraid to put my credit card on it. So boom, you know, but we never thought of that because we got so used to it through all these years. So yeah, you can find a lot of good information by talking to your customers about everything, not only where they came from and how they converted, but even after they sign up on the lifecycle on the SaaS, what their problems are, et cetera.
Speaker1: Like it's one of the most important things when you're running SaaS business or any kind of business.
Speaker0: For XeroRank, who's the ideal customer? What market are you looking to work with?
Speaker1: There are quite a few ICPs for XeroRank. So it's the agencies for sure that they help people manage their rankings and optimize them. There are the entrepreneurs that they own brands. So everyone that is owning a SaaS product, an e-commerce product, product, maybe the guy, the local guy that has like, you know, the flower shop that wants to get more bookings or the guy that is renting their Airbnb. So basically anyone that is getting customers from SEO and the LLMs automatically, they can use zero rent on first track and then improve how they get, you know, shown in these results and increase the number of customers are getting.
Speaker1: So yeah, it's very broad.
Speaker0: Got it and then and it's similar to i mean it's essentially like the same idea as like keyword rankings it's just translated to the new format so anyone who's managing marketing in some capacity okay so, you provide tips on how to rank so, can you talk a little bit about that i'm thinking like hey for whatever reason i'm thinking chat gpt is most important for my specific industry. So, you know, what happens? I see the ranking, there's competitors, like what kind of information and tips would I get from ZeroRank?
Speaker1: Yes. The cool thing about ZeroRank is that we try to make it simpler so you don't have to just look at the data and try to think of it yourself, but it analyzes all the data and gives you actionable insights. And the cool thing is that ZeroRank is like feeding on its own data. So if we see, let's say, certain customers doing certain changes, and we track a positive result, then we edit part of the strategy. So the more data we have, the better the suggestion we get, and it's an ever-evolving thing. It's not static. So as new things come up, the engine automatically picks them up and it shows them suggestions for your use case.
Speaker1: If you log in, you'll see a list of steps that says, okay, you need to get on these Reddit threads. You need to create this kind of content for YouTube. You need to get as many PR articles as you can. You need to maybe get on G2 or on Trustpilot. It gives all the suggestions, and the suggestions are always improving because the more data we have, the better the suggestion comes. So you just need to basically follow what it's saying, and most times it's going to help you automatically.
Speaker0: And i mentioned before you know this is sort of the next step from like keyword tracking and you know rank tracking kind of stuff, and i'm sure even though i haven't looked that the incumbent companies like whatever hrefs some rush like fill in the blank there's so many different companies that provide this kind of marketing data, like what keeps, zero rank sort of ahead or what's the differentiation that makes ZeroRank better than competitors?
Speaker1: Yes, it's a very good question. So the first thing is that Samaraj and Ahrefs and all these companies, they were SEO tools. They weren't born as AI LLM visibility tools. So they were retrofitted to become an AI LLM visibility tool. And you know that when you're not doing something like first and trying to make it work backwards, it never works quite well. And the second thing is, being a small team, we move very fast and we find all these little things that for bigger companies to take a long time to add or to research. And one example, we notice that the way that they get data is by using the API of these
Speaker1: Of this AI LLM's engines. And from our experience, what it showed, it didn't match with what we're seeing, basically, ourselves. So we found a new way to get data without using the API, which matches much better what we noticed ourselves in terms of ranking and visibility, etc. So I would say, first, we are an AI-first tool, not an SEO tool retrofitted to become an AI tool. We have a very unique way how we get our data and everyone that can sign up they will be able to see that it will match with what they see on their own like chat gbt subscription or plexis or whatever they're using and third we are a very small and lean team so there are no bureaucracies we
Speaker1: see something that works we move right away one customer asked us for a feature that we see that's interesting we implement it the next day so we are very fast to move and i think this is the way how companies should be in this era because it's not about bigger companies anymore. It's not about headcount. It's about finding trends, moving really fast, having a handful of very talented people. And that's it. You don't need quantity anymore. AI has really helped with that. So if you have good talent, that's all we need. You don't need a lot of people.
Speaker0: Good answer. I didn't tell you I was going to ask that, but I think you explained it well. So yeah, it totally makes sense. The other part with tools that have been around a long time, like the ones we mentioned, there's a lot of bloat there's so many features it can be a little bit overwhelming to like get to the data that you want to get to and i mean it's just something that happens with older software just in general.
Speaker1: So and this sorry i was gonna add this is one of the things that we we noticed also when we went zero rank we were like eager to overdo it so we're providing all this data and all these insights etc and we saw that people you know we're having trouble navigating around because not everyone is an SEO expert or an AI visibility expert. So that's why we added chat copilot. So basically now you can just talk it in natural language. If it were your agency, say like, hey, I have this site, I want to improve my rankings, have a look, and then it should give you suggestions. So what should I do? So it's more like an ongoing conversation instead of you having to dig through dashboards, et cetera.
Speaker0: Got it. How big is the team right now?
Speaker1: Right now, it's me and the CTO, which are the co-founders, and three more people. So it's five of us.
Speaker0: Okay. And just curious of the roles and how it's laid out.
Speaker1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we have one CMO, one strategy guy, and another developer. And that's it.
Speaker0: Cool. And then I know you're going to be able to hook people up with, I believe, a discount code. So we'll get to that in a second. But I'm curious, where do you see ZeroRank going, say, the next 6, 12, 18 months? Obviously, things move fast, but I'm curious, the roadmap that you guys are envisioning.
Speaker1: Yes. So in terms of product, we are seeing consistent growth month over month. So I think that will continue to happen. First, because we are doing a good job of the product. And second, I think this is a market that is always expanding. There is always more and more and more demand for this kind of services. So I think it's natural that we're going to grow along with With the whole industry. And in terms of features, we have a few things that we want to build, which are not major. We're just releasing our mobile app, which will make it super easy, because the whole idea is we have this co-pilot, and now you have it on your
Speaker1: phone, so it can send notifications like, hey, I noticed that your rankings for this dropped. Maybe we should do something and give you some actionable insights. So we're trying to make it the easiest possible. And the second thing is we want to have our roadmap flexible to what our users ask. Because we believe that talking to your users daily and making them happy should be the number one priority. So if we notice certain patterns repeating, like all these users want a certain thing that we don't have it, this is our advantage. We can build it right away. There is no bureaucracy, no board of directors. We just go ahead and build it.
Speaker1: And I've asked the whole company to take turns at being at customer support, just so we have a very good, you know, we have our ear on the ground, so we know exactly what people are liking, what they're not liking, and everyone should know that. And this is the best way to iterate fast, because if you are a big company, then it's very hard for the message to go from customer support to the manager, then to the product team. But now everyone, we're all on the same page. If we hear a lot of people complaining about something, it's very clear, there is no one to be convinced, we just go ahead and build it.
Speaker0: So a flat structure is pretty nice yeah like you said it gets rid of all the the slowdowns and it reduces the inefficiencies there's always you know some waste in the system but there's there's way less in a, tight yeah team like that so awesome cool if people want to learn more where could they find you where could they find out more about zero rank.
Speaker1: Yes. So for me, the best way to get in touch is through my LinkedIn. I'm not big on social media, so LinkedIn is the best way to get in touch. For ZeroRank, the website is zerorank.ai. And as you mentioned, for people listening to this podcast, they can get the first month for $1 using the coupon code DAGZERORANK, like all attached. And we'll post it probably, yeah, on the comments or somewhere in the description.
Speaker0: Cool. Awesome. Thanks a lot for that. Yeah, and I'll put the links in the description so people can get to all the stuff that you mentioned really easily. Awesome, man. It was good catching up and I appreciate you being on the show.
Speaker1: Doug, thank you very much. This was a very, very interesting interview. So thank you for that.
