Podcast Appearance: “All Hands on Tech” — Kelford Labs Weekly

Last month, I was invited to guest on Digital Nova Scotia’s podcast “All Hands on Tech”.

We talk about our work at Kelford Inc., how to focus your business on your best customers, why it’s important to avoid “average,” and how to stand out in a sea of AI-generated “slop.”

The official show notes:

“In this episode of All Hands on Tech, hosts Eilish and Greg explore the dynamic world of tech marketing with Joel Kelly, co-founder of Kelford Inc. They discuss how the rapidly evolving landscape is reshaping the way businesses communicate their value to customers. Joel brings a wealth of knowledge to the table, offering strategies for overcoming one of the most significant challenges in the industry: delivering the right message to the right audience in an impactful way. The conversation is rich with practical advice, touching on everything from the nuances of content creation and market positioning to the growing influence of AI in shaping marketing strategies. 

Throughout the episode, Joel emphasizes the importance of staying consistent and differentiating your brand in a crowded marketplace. He also explores the potential of AI as a tool for enhancing marketing efforts, while cautioning against losing the human touch that makes communication genuine and effective.This episode is a must-listen for anyone involved in tech marketing or looking to refine their approach in a world where AI and automation are becoming the norm. Joel's insights provide a roadmap for entrepreneurs and marketers alike, helping them to not only navigate but thrive in this new digital era!”

You can listen to the episode here.

Or you can watch it on YouTube here:

A clarification: I attribute the term “slop” to Simon Willison, who popularized it, but did not coin it. You can learn more about the term here.

Transcript:

Eilish: Hey, welcome back to All Hands on Tech, I'm Eilish.

Greg: And I'm half a foot short of legally being a giant, but you can call me Greg.

And today, we're welcoming one half of the duo behind Kelford Inc. into the studio.

Eilish: That we certainly are.

Co-founders Joel Kelly and Leah Sanford began their business back in 2017, and since that time, the pair has specialized in helping hands-on entrepreneurs and founders navigate those complex marketing challenges, all while ensuring that the right message reaches the right people.

Greg: Now, on top of learning about how they manage to do all of that, we'll also touch on how they advise businesses to stay unique in a world increasingly generated by AI.

Eilish: So joining us now for an all-new episode of All Hands on Tech is Joel Kelly. Joel, thanks so much for being here with us.

Joel: Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here!

Greg: Oh, we're excited to have you.

And before we do jump into all of the things that you guys do, and offer, and just kind of learn about your story, first we want to learn a little bit about you.

Joel: Alright.

Eilish: Okay, you good for some icebreakers?

Joel: Let's do it.

Eilish: Let's do it. Kick us off here, Greg.

Greg: So let's start with, what is your favorite app?

Joel: My favorite app, ooh. I mean, by usage, it's definitely Overcast, the podcast app I use.

Eilish: No pressure!

Joel: I'm obsessed with podcasts, and that is the app that I depend on for all of that.

Eilish: Okay, okay. I was expecting like TikTok, but no, that one's much better.

Greg: I like that it's different and unexpected, so yeah.

Joel: My podcast usage is probably, like, that says a lot about me, if you could go through every podcast I listen to and how much time I spend there, so it's probably, yeah, it's the app that if it left my phone, I would be most lost, probably, without.

Eilish: Okay, good to know. I mean, now, of course, it's not one of the questions, but I do have to ask, like, what are you listening to? Is there a specific genre that you like? Are you all over the board?

Joel: All over the board. I would say I am the type of person who likes to hear people talking, kind of, at all times, so if I'm not actively engaged in something else, I'm probably listening to a podcast. So, from tech, comedy, AI, science, to news, everything across the board.

Eilish: All hands on deck, digital notification.

Joel: Absolutely. It's number one every two weeks!

Greg: You like listening to people talk, but my problem is that I like to talk too much!

Eilish: So you guys will get along well, is what I'm hearing. Okay, switching from that, if we go to light mode or dark mode, which are you choosing?

Joel: I'm one of those people who it's, like, time of day.

My phone automatically, I have it switching into light mode at 5 a.m. and it switches into dark mode at 5 p.m. That's how I like to live my life on my phone, is that it should know what time of day it is and what is appropriate at that time.

Eilish: All right, expecting just a little bit out of your tech, I like that.

Greg: Yeah. So when it comes to meetings, would you choose an in-person meeting or would you prefer a virtual?

Joel: Oh, man. I mean, I say that's a, I was about to say that's a hard question.

It's not a hard question. It's a hard question to say my answer to, which is virtual, hands down, every time.

I enjoy, like, we're in here in person, this is fun, but virtual, I think, I think I thrive with a distance between me and other people!

Hosts: [Laughter]

Joel: I don't know if that's just, you know, that might be my anxiety or just I'm more comfortable around computers than people.

Eilish: Listen, I feel like in this day and age especially, a lot of folks kind of feel that way.

If we can find a silver lining to, you know, what the pandemic kind of showed us, it's that we have the ability to connect that way and for some folks, that is absolutely the way to do it.

Joel: I think for a lot of people, what had been holding them back was the expectation that everything is in person. And having a bit of that remove has really, I think, unleashed a lot of people's kind of talent and abilities.

Eilish: And to each their own. Comfort levels change for everybody, so to each their own.

Joel: Absolutely.

Eilish: Okay. Would you rather have the latest smartphone, but it has a very slow internet connection or are you okay with an outdated phone, but it has like lightning fast internet speeds?

Joel: Yeah. Wow! I was about to say, you know, you were, you were saying latest phones, like, “of course I want latest phone! I want whatever the new thing is!” And I now realize my phone's a couple of years old because I have the 13 mini, the iPhone and they, they don't make the mini phones anymore.

Eilish: You still have a mini?! Wow!

Joel: I know they don't make them anymore, so I've been holding onto it until I'm forced to upgrade. But I would say, yeah, it needs to have fast internet. I would, I would live with an older phone for fast internet.

Eilish: Yeah. I held onto my iPhone 8 plus. I bought that. It was, well, I got it actually when I first started dating my fiance and we had been, and I got rid of it just this last Black Friday.

So that would have been six and a half years.

Joel: Wow!

Eilish: And I mean it, like it still works, so I didn't have an issue. Right? Like it, it was a little slow. The only reason I got rid of it is because I think it was 64 gigs, so I was like, every day I was like having to choose between like, all right, that, that photo of the cat can't stay.

Joel: Yeah. I'm of the opinion, pay for more storage, pay for, you know, your iCloud storage. You should never be in a position where you have to delete photos.

Greg: Yeah. I will say, you know, it's funny, I've kept some of my old phones. I don't know what there's, I'm probably never going to turn it on, but I held my iPhone, it was like a four or something the other day and I was like, this is so great.

It's so small in my hand.

It made me feel like a giant.

Joel: Right?!

Greg: And then I've gone to like bigger phones where holding that, I'm like, yeah, this is nice when I'm using the screen, then like holding it or, you know, like your thumb gets, this sounds so bad, but like, you know, your thumb gets tired from stretching across and like I have big hands, but.

Eilish: The best thing that iPhone did I think is that, and I think I, for my size, you know, I'm five nine as a woman, that's a little tall, I guess, not really, but, I think I have kind of small hands and the best thing that they did was when I got the 8+, it felt ginormous.

And so when they did that trick that if you like tap the bottom of the screen or actually it still had a home button. So if you tap the home button, it dropped the screen to like half size.

So you could reach up into that top corner. Oh, it was a little step, it was a virtual steps.

Joel: It's called Reachability, which is a great name for that.

Greg: Yeah. Yeah!

Joel: I still, even on, I don't know.

It's like even on the mini, sometimes that top left corner is just out of reach.

Eilish: So you can swipe down, you know, you got a T-Rex arm cause you're out laying on it. You just, you know, yeah!

Greg: The smaller phone hurts less when you're laying in bed and it falls on your face inevitably!

Eilish: And we have all been there. We. Have. All. Been. There!

Joel: Though the flat sides that have sharp edges now that have to be watched out for.

Greg: Dangerous.

Eilish: Yeah. Yeah. Very much so. Do you know what though? Actually speaking of this, this is totally off topic, but I just have to say, my cousin who's very much into like it and tech and that sort of thing, he has been like team Android forever. He'll never have an iPhone.

He has a flip phone that reminds me of a Motorola Razr. Do you remember those?

Joel: I do.

Greg: Oh yeah.

Eilish: Well, we've got, we've got Neil behind the scenes here just hooting and hollering.

Joel: Is it possible that what he has is in fact the new Motorola Razr, which I think there is one?

Eilish: So it opens up into like a full flat screen. So I don't know.

Greg: So I had the Samsung flip. I loved it for a year. And then every time I closed my phone, it shut it off and it would just stop working.

So like foldable tech has a ways to go.

Joel: I'm intrigued by the concept.

Eilish: Yes.

Greg: There was nothing better than being done with a phone call and doing the clamshell close! And feeling like I was just like a, a “Business Dad” in the ‘90s and then “all right, see you later.” Click.

And you just like hang up the phone that way.

Joel: Yeah. Kind of like attempting to hit the end call button with as much force as possible…

Eilish: Just not as satisfying, not near as satisfying!

Joel: Yeah!

Greg: Yeah!

Eilish: Especially if you're like trying to end this call early and the person on the other end just doesn't get it, you know, but that click, they knew.

Joel: So all you can do now is end it slightly before they're expecting it. That's the new move. You got to be hovering over the end call button. Once they start saying "goodb--", you're out.

Eilish: My father has this trick. He's very like anti-tech. He actually only just got his very first iPhone. He had a flip phone. It was a rugby something that you could throw across the floor.

Anyway, his favorite thing to do is to say like midway through a conversation, if he's just done, he'll say, “Do you know what the worst thing about being on the phone is?”

And then the first time I went, “What??”

Click.

He hung up on me.

Joel: That's pretty good!

Eilish: So now he does it all the time.

Joel: That's pretty good.

Eilish: Yeah. He thinks he's pretty funny. Yeah. Okay. Well, enough about my family and their like or dislike for tech. Speaking of, my phone just fell on the floor. That's fun! Let's learn a little bit about Kelford Inc.

So how exactly did you guys even get your start with this?

Joel: In 2017, it was time for me to start my own business.

It had always been that, I'm not going to say, like dream is a stretch, but it was always in the back of my mind that eventually I'm going to start my own kind of operation.

The original concept for it back then was we were going to kind of help raise the institutional knowledge within organizations to be able to do more of their marketing themselves.

Not necessarily work less with outside agencies or partners, but not have all of their thinking reside in someone else's office.

So we wanted to kind of raise the floor of that. The ability for marketing teams and organizations to understand the basics of positioning, to understand the basics of strategy and be able to kind of control it and keep some of that institutional knowledge around.

And then that was in May of 2017.

By July, my wife, Leah Sanford, decided it was time for her to make a move as well. So she came on and we became kind of like the co-founders of the business.

And then over the years, we have just been this relentless pursuit of focus. Every marketing company often starts the same way, which is doing whatever people will pay you for.

And then over time, you can keep doing that, or you can decide, what am I truly, arguably, credibly the best in the world at?

And it is a constant pursuit of that thing.

So we have narrowed and narrowed and narrowed and narrowed until we do marketing positioning and marketing message design for hands-on entrepreneurs.

And that kind of sums up everything that we do right now.

Greg: That's awesome. So if you could expand a little bit on what your offerings are and how do you help them? Can you give us a bit more?

Joel: I think maybe the easiest thing to do is give a hypothetical client would approach us. Let's say maybe this is a solo founder of a consultancy, or maybe this is the entrepreneur behind a deep tech or ocean sciences business.

For us, it's very important that they're working with the entrepreneur.

And that entrepreneur has to be what we call hands-on, which is actually interested in being part of the marketing process versus looking for someone to outsource it to or is going to delegate it all the way.

So we work with that entrepreneur. They come to us often with the challenge, as stated by them, is “We don't know what to say!” We're at trade shows, and people ask us about our product. And we're saying words, but you can see the life drain from their eyes.

Or our website. People say, “O, I was on your website” and they cringe and go “oh, no! What did you read?”

Or they start making excuses immediately. You hear it all the time. You're talking to somebody. You ask about their marketing, you know, immediately it's excuse. Excuse after excuse after excuse.

So that's often people come to us, you know, in the position of ‘we just don't know what we're supposed to be saying to communicate the value behind this innovation, behind this invention or behind the expertise that they've accumulated over decades in their career.’

So we work with them first to define their marketing position. There are many definitions of that.

For us, it is, you know, who is your ideal customer? What do they say they need in their words?

So the example for us is they say they don't know what to say versus, you know, they're not saying I need a marketing position in marketing message design.

What they say is I don't know what to say.

Then the, you know, so that's who, then what, then how, which is how are you uniquely able to solve that problem for this particular client? Then when do they need you?

What happened in their life? What happened in their day? What happened in their business that made this need arise?

Bob Mesta wrote a book called Demand Side Sales, where he talks about the “struggling moment.”

Like, you don't create demand. Having an event in someone's life creates or uncovers that demand.

And then finally, where do they go? So when they realize they have a problem, it has arisen in their life or their business, where are they going to look for solutions?

That, those, the who, what, how, when, and where forms your marketing position.

So we help you articulate that, which is a lot of, you know, it's a very collaborative, inquisitive process where we dig out all the information to get that.

Once you have that, though, you can't just go to somebody and say, “This is my business buy my thing!”

You know, you'll see ads all the time or you'll read copy and go, they just read the brief to me. Like, that's not actually the ad yet, you have to get to, “but why should I care?”

And then we help them develop literally doing the copywriting for, this is what you say that will reinforce this marketing position. This is what you should put on your trade show banner or what your sales folks should be prepared to say at the trade show or the conference. This is the opening intro copy to your website.

So you know it's communicating and speaking directly to that ideal customer instead of kind of broadcasting it to the world and not really resonating with anyone.

And then, so that's, you know, part one is the position. Part two is that marketing message design. And then part three is the support, and the help, and the mental models and frameworks for them to keep moving forward.

We have a saying, we were talking about it before we started recording today, that I often say that “marketing rarely fails, it usually just stops.”

Our job is to keep it from stopping. If you keep going, you have the opportunity to improve. If you stop and give up, then you'll always be in that state. So we provide our clients with the support, the coaching, the counsel they need to just keep going.

Eilish: Without, you know, kind of giving off any names of course, unless you want to, who are you like looking for? Who are your clients? You mentioned, and maybe this was just because you were giving that hypothetical, but you mentioned, you know, like the trade shows, the banners, that sort of thing. Are you more so for like the physical marketing side or are you doing more digital?

What does the landscape kind of look like for you guys?

Joel: Yeah, for us, it really, really depends on who the ideal customer is and then where they go when they need that support.

So we're often working with, you know, a lot of this is because we're working with innovative businesses, there's a lot of confidential stuff.

So instead of talking about like a specific client, we'll say, you know, we're working with someone in ocean sciences, they've got a novel invention that they would like to sell into the ocean exploration industry.

So when they're working with us, trade shows are a huge part of their business, but also their website is critical for them because that's where people go for credibility and for vetting.

And then of course we'll work with, you know, a solopreneur who is, you know, maybe an IT consultant. That is actually a recent example of an IT consultant who came to us to do his launch on social media. “I have this expertise, I've been doing this for 20 years. What do I say when I announce this business on LinkedIn that is going to get people to understand that I can help them?”

So that's what we help them with.

You know, we like to say that, you know, we help entrepreneurs change the world by helping them communicate in a way that the world understands.

And you know, so often they're so focused on their technology, their interests, their experience that it can often be hard to communicate that to someone who doesn't have all that background and context.

Eilish: Well, I mean, I can even say for myself, you know, coming into the tech sector, I come from a journalism background, so you know, tech wasn't really something that I was, you know, super well versed in.

And I definitely find that there are times that I'm going through a website and I read the entire thing and I think, so what do they do?! Like what am I supposed to be talking about here?

Like it's so, I can definitely understand that just, it's a knowledge that, you know, maybe the customer has or the business has and they're experts, like you say, in their field.

And so to bring it down to a level that is, you know, understandable for the average person is huge.

Joel: It's the hard part, but it's the fun part!

That's like the creative challenge of the work we do is exactly that, of kind of coming in, looking at, you know, we are, our clients occasionally call our bluff on this, but like give us everything to read. Like we want to know everything.

And we had one client give us 500 pages of background, and we were pretty sure we're the only people to have ever read a page of all that information they'd been collecting!, but we went through everything because, you know, that's the insight, you know, typically lies in the customer's mind, but there's always a gem.

There's always, you know, like I often say, like there's marketing gold in what you already have, if you're willing to kind of look for it and uncover it. And then the creative fun of it all is like, but what are the words?!

What is going to click into someone else's brain at a distance to communicate this value?

Eilish: You mentioned that your team consists of yourself and your wife, Leah. So do you guys each have, you know, specific roles that you take on within, within the company?

Joel: Yeah! When it comes to like client counsel, that's, that's the biggest overlap. You know, we're on, we're on the calls together. We're doing the, the interviews, the, the intakes where we're working on the creative side together.

Where it kind of splits is, you know, what I think a lot of people forget is that the part of business that's doing the thing that you do for your clients is a much tinier fraction of running a business than I think a lot of people who haven't been entrepreneurs are aware of.

So that when it the working directly with clients, that's the thing that we share. But then when it's just, you know, thinking about the business or the operation of the business, that's where it divides.

And we have kind of a very classic structure of I'm focused on the future and Leah's focused on today.

So I'm focused on the future, the clients that we intend to take on in the months to come, the thinking of what are actually the frameworks and the mental models that we're going to use to, to walk these clients through? What is the writing for the newsletter? You know, how is that going to get done? That, that all is under my purview.

And then the day-to-day, you know, client relationships are often with Leah, but also the day-to-day finances and operations of the businesses is under mostly Leah's purview.

So for us, we're a two person business, but we often joke, it's like we're really a one person business. We just each take half of that person.

Eilish: [Laughs] That’s a good way to do it!

Joel: So we get to lean in so fully into the parts that we like and are best at, which often feels like we're really just doing one person's job, but we've just split it up into the good parts for, for each of us.

Eilish: Nice! That's a good balance. I love that.

Greg: So, you know, with that said, and, and sort of splitting that, it probably gives you a lot more time to, you know, actually, you know, enjoy what you're doing.

It gets into our next question, you know, all around your message: having business owners that you work with actually enjoy the marketing process and ultimately love the product that they're putting out.

So, you know, you've seen shows like "Mad Men" and different things where they sort of dramatize that. And you come from an agency background, I come from an agency background. So we've experienced all sorts of the fun aspects of client sort of relationships. So how do you ensure that that's something that's, that's happening? You know, that they're really enjoying it when it can be challenging.

Joel: Yeah, that's, that's really interesting. It's like so much of that, yeah, the "Mad Men" agency is like, what, what can you layer on top of this drudgery that you hate doing that makes it slightly better?

You know, so the, the real move, it's like, how can you just remove the drudgery? How can you make the work you're doing not be so painful? And the work we're doing with our clients, and that we expect them to do when we're not there anymore, how can you make that just be less of a pain?

You know, I had this novel insight a few years ago that people don't like doing the stuff they don't like doing and they're unlikely to do much of it or more than they have to.

And marketing is one of those things, you got to do a lot of it and you have to do it consistently, which means habitually. Which means better to start the habit, get it part of your just daily routine.

And the best way, you know, it's very hard to bully yourself into a habit. It's much easier to kind of tempt yourself into it by making it more fun, by creating a context wherein it's likely to happen versus this constant, you know, fooling ourselves into thinking we can just will ourselves to do things we don't like.

So if marketing is, is meant to be a habit, if we expect our clients to stick to it long term, then we build in, you know, we call it Joyful Structure and Structured Joy.

Joyful Structure is building like scaffolding for yourself, like a routine, do this at this time for this amount of time, do these tiny little incremental tasks until you're just used to it and doing it all the time to build toward that.

That's like Joyful Structure.

Make it fun, but make it structured.

And then the other side is Structured Joy, which is build in rewards for yourself, celebrations.

There's a thing in change science about the long middle.

I believe it's Ayelet Fishbach talks about this in her book that, you know, the real challenge is that we have tons of energy at the beginning of something and then we've got like the last mile energy of I'm really going to do it.

It's the long middle that really kills you.

Eilish: You have to struggle through. Yeah.

Joel: So putting in milestones or celebrations and keeping it going, you know, in the middle of a campaign you're working on, or in the middle of a project getting ready for a trade show; that's when your discipline slips and when you start slacking off, when you start ignoring important signals.

So we keep that fun. We keep that motivating and we give our clients as many tools and resources as we have just to keep them going.

Eilish: Yeah. I feel like I need to like take that philosophy home with me when it's like ‘clean the house Eilish!’ Like I'm there like on the couch, like scrolling and I need to like stop trying to bully myself into getting up and doing my chores.

Joel: I think it's in Katy Milkman's book, How To Change.

She breaks into two categories and I don't know if this is her original researcher or someone else's, but that there are sophisticates and naifs. And naifs are the people who think willpower exists and who think they can bully themselves into doing things and they get like nothing done.

And then there's sophisticates who have recognized willpower is not a thing.

Eilish: Yeah.

Joel: It is context. It is circumstance.

So lots of people who are able to get lots of stuff done, they probably just have easier circumstances to do that. Or they have made their circumstances easier for them to do it.

You know, if you want to go for a run, put your shoes out the day before, is like the most basic advice you're given. Just do that for everything, including your marketing and you're more likely to get stuff done.

But I think there's, you know, there's matyr syndrome and that we all, you know, something's only important if it was difficult, which is, you know, I think something people need to get over.

Eilish: Absolutely. Just completely untrue. I think anyway.

Before we switch gears over into your work with AI, because I definitely want to talk about that as well, but I want to talk quickly about your newsletter because you have a daily option and a weekly option.

I mean, even just the idea of, you know, I have taken over since I started DNS, I've taken over our weekly newsletter and you know, it's a good amount of work to put in. And ours, you know, highlights jobs and those things are kind of already set in stone and some events and of course our members in the news.

But yours is, you know, like it looks to be that you write a good amount for each newsletter, each edition of it.

So talk to me a little bit about A) why you're doing that, because I would imagine it takes some time out of what sounds like an already busy schedule.

So tell me about, you know, why the importance of having that for you.

Joel: Yeah! I'm somewhere around 470 issues so far over the last couple of years and I will, I believe Friday or maybe Monday will be the 300th daily.

So those are weekdays. So I don't, I don't publish on, on the weekends.

Greg: You gotta give yourself a little break!

Joel: You know, you gotta have time for, for more ideas. But yeah, they are 100% organically written, AI doesn't write them. That's not to say that I don't use AI to assist me with that and we'll get into like different ways for that. But those are my hands typing and my brain doing the thinking to create those.

But this is something Jonathan Stark of Ditching Hourly, a podcast and a newsletter, he talked about the idea that if, if you give yourself the commitment to do this regularly, the ideas will come.

Part of the challenge and I bet part of the challenge of the newsletter being weekly is do you have to work on it every day or do you work on it a.

Eilish: No I'll typically like Thursday I kind of get my bearings with it and then polish it for Friday because it goes out Monday morning.

Joel: I would bet if you had to get something out every day you would find that easier. Part of the problem is that you have several days where you're not thinking about it at all.

Eilish: Yeah.

Joel: And then you have to do that whole context shift into now it's newsletter time and that's got, you know, potentially hours of build up before you're really into it.

Eilish: Yep.

Joel: And then you're done.

Eilish: And then I'm done.

Joel: And then you wait several more days.

Eilish: Yes. Start the process over again! Yeah.

Joel: So just, it's just having a habit makes it easier. And then having a routine is even better because that's just, you know, natural things you're doing all the time. And then like the, final level is making it a ritual. Which I forget who said this, but “rituals are just habits with soul.” And I like that. You turn it into a ritual.

This is important. This is my work. This is important to me and your brain registers that and comes up with ideas and it's working on it even when you're not doing the typing.

So it's easier to write a daily than to write a weekly.

And honestly, like part of this is I started the newsletter because I was just bothering my brother with these very long emails I was sending him of, you know, here's this idea that I've been thinking about, does this make any sense?

And he's the one who's like, just publish this.

Greg: He's just replying all caps, STOP!

Joel: I mean, it was, it was slightly nicer than that. But I mean the message was the same, which is maybe other people might want to read these. He was right. Luckily other people did want to read it as well.

But the, the urge to write has never been the problem for me. It is, actually, like you say, finding the time to do the writing. But because we've kind of divided the business into where each of us, you know, work best, that's just part of my work.

There, there's no excuse to not have it done.

That's, that's my work. That's my marketing. That's, that's my thinking as well.

Eilish: Like you said, marketing doesn't really fail. It just stops.

Joel: So if you can keep it from stopping, it will eventually work.

Greg: And you probably see a ton of that with, and I remember with clients seeing that with blogs. We need a blog on our website! We need a blog on our website! Yes.

But I think your blog post was a year and a half ago.

Joel: Was 18 months ago!

Greg: So like, is it really that important? Because as soon as you stop posting those blog posts and you're not doing that regularly, then the whole prominence of it and its effectiveness is a marketing tool, just, gone.

Eilish: Gone.

Joel: And at a certain point it's literally detracting from it because someone goes to your blog and goes, well, they don't care about this.

Eilish: Oh gosh, yeah.

Joel: What else do they not care about? And, and that is just a signal that that's, you know, not necessarily helpful. I don't think it's, you know, it's not the end of the world to slip on your blog for a bit. But if you can keep that from happening, it's definitely worth the effort.

Eilish: I mean, if you have the consistent readership or anybody who's coming back to check if it's not there, what are they coming for?

Greg: And for all our SEO folks out there who are probably listening to this and saying, absolutely not. You have to have a consistent blog. Don't leave it up there. We hear you guys! That definitely plays a major role in terms of quality traffic to your website as well.

Eilish: Okay. Let's switch gears.

Joel: Okay.

Greg: So, you know, talking about your experience with AI, you mentioned a little bit, you build AI assistants.

I think that is fantastic. I would love to have an AI assistant, even if it could just be a way to remind me of maybe the three or four places where I may have put my keys in wallet every morning. You know, that would change my life a little bit!

But what does that mean and what are you building and how are you using it?

Joel: Well, yeah, I'll start with just fun stuff!

So, when we talk about building AI assistants, there exists a massive spectrum of sophistication with that. And I am probably middle to, to lower end of sophistication, but have been able to build really useful things.

So, sometime last year, Federico Viticci of MacStories.net, a website just about Apple news and tech, he figured out that you could use Apple shortcuts, the built-in app on any Mac, any iPhone, any iPad has the shortcuts app, which allows you to do little automations, basic what you see is what you get programming, that you could use that to communicate with ChatGPT via the API.

Once you're doing that, you're in a position where you could talk to say your home pod, which connects to Siri, which connects, which I shouldn't say out loud, not to set off anyone's phones, but connects to the Apple assistant, which means via voice, you can talk to GPT via your home pod.

And once you can do that, the idea is, well, how could I be using this?

So I had lots of different things, you know, lots of different ideas. Over time I rebuilt the whole shortcut with my own design to work with Open AI's Assistants API, which gives you the ability to have persistent threads across time. So you can be talking to the assistant one day and then talk to it again another day and it remembers what you've been talking about.

What I use it now mostly is every morning, that's how I get, I probably shouldn't say this cause this is not the most informed a person could be, but I get most of my news via that assistant.

I say, Hey, trigger word for the assistant, “run program” because I'm a Star Trek nerd. And it gives me the daily weather, the hourly, and then upcoming weekly weather, a bunch of headlines from RSS feeds that I have given it.

And then gives me the Atlantic storm watch updates, which are important to have and it does all this in an incredibly profanity filled kind of ridiculous expressions because I did a bunch of prompt design to turn it into a character.

That's how I get my news. I could not play it on this podcast, but that's like the simplest kind of most playful end.

And then still on the personal side, I was just doing this the other day with Claude, which is now available in Canada from Anthropic, using their Projects, which are similar to Custom GPTs from Open AI.

I uploaded all of the movies that I've rated from Letterboxd, the app where you can rate movies. I rated like 900 movies of my ratings for them, uploaded that as a json file, and then asked it a bunch of questions about my movie habits.

Like “describe me as a movie viewer.” Like, how do we solve the problem of what do I watch tonight?

Eilish: Oh my God!

Joel: Shouldn't AI be able to solve this? The answer is yes, it can!

It created a whole flow chart: are you feeling nostalgic? Yes, no. If so, which decade? Or do you want like psychological? How full is your brain? Do you want something that's like ‘a think’?

Greg: Buzzfeed's calling. They have their new quiz!

Joel: This is the thing though. It gets even crazier!

I was like, okay, this is a giant, you know, workflow diagram. What am I going to do with this? I'm talking to AI. I just typed in, “create a web app in the style of a quiz for me to run through this.”

And then a couple of seconds later—and then many iterations as it breaks and you have to fix it and all the problems with having AI do anything—now I can click through a little Buzzfeed style quiz that picks the type of movie that I should watch.

Greg: Can I, can I click through that? Can I subscribe?

Eilish: Yeah. Like really though!

Greg: Do you know how much time gets wasted in our household trying to pick content?!

Eilish: Half the time at the end of the night, we just watch something we've watched 16 times before.

Greg: And if I can make it sound like, you know, Jarvis from Iron Man or like a version of Alfred from Batman so that I could feel super cool, you know..

Joel: That is all possible!

Yeah. Doing deepfake voices of existing IP gets you into dubious legal territory, but not to say it's not very possible.

But I think that gets into the idea of like, a lot of us jump immediately to what, how is AI going to be useful and therefore how is it useful for my work? It's like the best, easiest way to think, how is it useful just to you as a toy?

Most technology start off as toys and then they, we find the enterprise uses. It's a little premature to go right to what's the enterprise use. Like do people have fun using this stuff?

But having like, it's like helping me decide what movie to watch, what it depends on is having the data though.

And that is like such a crucial component to getting any value out of AI is what unique data do you have that no one else has?

No one else has my exact viewing history and my exact preferences on movies. Therefore it's able to give me a tailored solution that actually works.

If you just go to a generic movie recommender bot, you're going to get generic kind of average results, which will be disappointing.

Which is kind of like the thesis on AI generally is if you don't have unique data that is absolutely exclusive to you, your life, your experience, your work, your brain, you're just getting what everyone else is getting, and you're going to get the same results as everyone else too.

Eilish: Yeah. So don't bother wasting your time. Just go to the recommendation websites and yeah.

Joel: And then it's flip a coin or spin a wheel and you'll just get the average result of everyone else.

Yeah.

Eilish: Hmm. Okay. So you mentioned about the fun side of it, of course. Let's talk about that work side and enterprise side. Because a lot of folks are using it, again, I mentioned my journalism background and you and I talked about this when we talked about having you on the podcast, just the idea of using AI in that, you know, life of mine, very much against it.

In this life, it's, you know, it's a lot of folks are turning to it for sure.

And I know in your newsletter, you wrote about this recently actually about how, how businesses, entrepreneurs, what have you can utilize, you know the app without getting lost in, you call it the slop.

Joel: Well, yeah, I should say that that term is from Simon Willison, the developer who has got a lot of amazing thinking.

[Note: Simon Willison popularized but did not coin the term. More information here]

He actually just did a keynote at an AI conference, maybe this week, or last week, that was fascinating. So I recommend looking him up. But he coined the term “slop” and the original use of the term means unreviewed and unwanted AI content.

So the stuff that if you are, you know, you Googled for a product review and the top result is something that is just AI generated, that clearly no one read, that is the true definition of slop.

I'm expanding it a bit to mean, okay, someone wanted it as in, you know, someone produced it, they put the time into it. Someone reviewed it. They did a bit of editing. But what they did is they turned up kind of the scale knob of content way too far. And that I think is a lot of what now I'm kind of considering slop.

I think the danger is, is thinking, okay, this thing can produce infinite copy almost instantaneously. Therefore, I should be doing that! When I think the real answer is like, no, no, no, everyone else is going to be doing that. Therefore you got to do something else, you know. Unless you're going to be the best at producing mass AI generated content at scale, which do you have an advantage there?

You know, like, are you? I hear from a lot of people who are talking about using it. They're not even paying for like the pro version.

Like, you know, they're even using the worst version of it thinking that that's going to get them, you know, some advantage.

Eilish: Like just because it's turning so quickly.

Joel: Yeah. But everyone else had the same bright idea.

The real thing is, you know, avoiding what I call business camouflage, which is doing what you see your competitors doing.

That is, that's the opposite of marketing. Marketing is deciding, how can I stand out? How can I be the most noticeably credible thing in a sea of sameness?

So that for me is like using AI to identify what is everyone else doing?

What is AI's, you know, first idea? It should tell you, well, there’s no point in writing this. It's already, it has the tokens already. This exists already.

If it writes something really bad on a topic you're interested in, that's a great sign that you're in maybe new territory, that you can actually add value here.

Greg: So, yeah. Well, it's an interesting thing that you bring up.

We were just, a few of our team members were at a Collision Conference in Toronto a few weeks ago, and every second talk had to do with impact of AI. And, you know, it became a bit of a sort of like a running joke where someone would come on stage and like, I'm going to talk about AI. But it's just, there's so many aspects of it that you can't cover it all in one talk or five talks or even 10 talks.

But one of the ones that I found the most interesting was around venture capitalists talking about, you know, companies who are looking to pitch them and saying, “Well, we use AI in our business and we're like the Uber, we're kind of like an Uber with this and AI and something.”

And they said, “We're going to just stop. We just want everyone in this room to listen. If you're saying you are the Uber of this and you've just added AI to it, get out. This is not where you're going to find success.”

You know, AI is a tool. But like you said, it's how you use it, you know, leaning into it as a way to enhance something versus, you know, sort of being defined by it is such a big difference in terms of how you're going to find success.

Joel: Totally. Especially with a tool that barely works, you know, at best it barely works.

To stake your whole future or your whole content strategy or your whole anything on a tool that is, you know, sand shifting beneath you. We don't know what this stuff is going to cost a year from now. Now that they're all getting sued, now that they have to license content and actually pay for it.

You know, the same folks at MacStories today just released an open letter to the US Congress and the European Union asking for it to be regulated that they can't just scrape the open web.

What if they actually succeed?

All of these models, their business model is predicated on them being able to harvest everything that's already on the internet.

Were that to change, then all of our uses change as well.

So yeah, for me it's always been about noticing what everyone else is doing and having the instinctive kind of gut reaction of, well, someone else is already doing that.

Versus I think what can often be the natural reaction, which I think often comes from a place of fear is, well, then I have to be doing it that way because everyone else is.

Eilish: Got to keep up. Got to keep up in this world of that constant rat race. You got to. Yeah.

Joel: The problem with that is like there are kind of two different scenarios. Like there are the scenario where the average gets you good results and scenarios where the average gets you bad results.

The example I often use, if you get off a plane and you don't know where baggage is, you don't actually have to know. Just follow everyone else. Because everyone individually is going to get there eventually. As a group, the average result is getting your bag. So that's pretty good.

In marketing, however, if you look at the average result, it's actually failure in a shockingly small number of years.

So if you do what everyone else is doing, even though the market overall is going up, if you were to pluck out any individual, they're more likely to have a bad result than a positive one.

So following the average in marketing, following, well, the industry is trending in this way or every ad, you know, every jewelry ad or fashion, it has to look the same. It's like, no, it doesn't. They just do.

However, you know, what we see is like, well, there's always another business. There's always, you know, another restaurant. There's always another company doing this. Like that's because you're not noticing all the ones that aren't here anymore. The ones that stick around are the ones who stand out.

Greg: Absolutely. It makes me think of like movie posters. All these movie posters. I'm such a big nerd when it comes to like Star Wars or anything like that. Everyone's kind of like built up into this triangular sort of stacked.

Joel: So you know this movie is kind of Star Wars-y.

Greg: Yeah. So like, you know, everyone's kind of stacked into, into the middle of the poster and done this way. And then you look at all these other movies that start to use this design trend and you know, whatever. Can't you just come up with something just a little different? I'm tired of everyone being stacked in a pyramid and I want to try something.

Joel: Yeah. Sometimes that helps when we're like, we're trying to, we're trying to communicate to this customer group that our movie is kind of like the other movies they watch. Which yes has some advantages, but over time becomes, so you're just like that other movie. Like you're not actually anything on your own.

Eilish: Yeah. There's nothing new to the plot. There's nothing.

Joel: Which is telling on yourself a little bit.

Greg: You know, we've worked in Star Trek. We worked in Star Wars. All kinds of, you know, we had a little shout out to Iron Man. I feel like we're going to have some, maybe some challenges with some of the intellectual property.

Joel: Shout out to famously litigious organizations.

Greg: This is great. I love this!

Eilish: Well, listen, that's, that's actually it for our questions all this time. I feel like has flown by, but we'll, we'll open the floor up to you if there's anything exciting coming down the line that you want to chat about.

Joel: Sure! I'm, I'm working on a course right now called Organic Content in an AI World, which is all about how entrepreneurs, business owners, marketers can create marketing content that helps them stand out, leverage AI tools as helpful because we, we didn't get a chance to talk about it, but I use a lot of these tools.

I don't want to say I'm like an evangelist for it, for all the caveats already made. However, I'm using all these tools all the time, especially all my plug for NotebookLM from Google.

It's currently free, which means they'll probably cancel it as Google does with products, but for the short time Google is offering this product, it's incredibly useful to be able to review documents and go through kind of a mass amounts using kind of the power of AI.

But yeah, the course I'm working on, if you want to know how to stand out in an increasingly AI generated world, that's something to look out for.

I'll be talking more about that on my newsletter, which you can find at, if you go to KelfordInc.com, there is a link to the newsletter in the top right. And I hope you enjoy it!

Greg: Perfect. And we’ll be sure to share that on our channels as well. We know a ton of our members are always asking, you know, for ways to get involved with AI, but you know, might be a little bit nervous in terms of dipping their toe in the water.

So yeah, I would love to share this with, with all of our members when we get this out here.

So if you're listening to this now, maybe we're getting close to this course being live.

Eilish: Awesome. Thanks so much for your time, Joel! We really appreciate it.

Joel: Thank you so much. This was a blast.

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