AI in MSP Marketing

Hey, Stephen, we got to figure out an intro to the podcast. That works. Hello, everybody. Thank you for listening to another episode of the Note Fluff MSP Markham podcast. I'm your host, Tahir Haumad. I'm a co-host here. Stephen Maddor, if we're staying consistent. Yeah. You shouldn't have said it. We're doing it. I keep doing it. Perfect. Yeah, good news is I have to leave here in 15 minutes. So this will be a short one. But we're covering a single topic today. And it's probably a topic we're going to cover more. And I'm sorry, but it's just true. And that's our thoughts on AI and MSP marketing. I've been extremely reluctant and reluctant and cautious to be another vendor that is cramming AI down the throats of MSPs. I've just been in an MSP for long enough that I've just got jaded. Because every time anything new happens, every vendor just goes to MSP and goes, sell this for me. And I got so sick of it because I was the business development person. I'm selling the thing that makes us money. And then the owner would be like, hey, we're going to do this, we're going to do this. And I'm just like, I hear you, but we have to integrate that into our communication plan, we have to integrate that into our marketing and what we're doing. And like, that's not just creating some blog posts and some social posts. It's a full strategy. Yeah, like it was this constant reshaping of how we were communicating to our clients in the world. And there's so much of that in the MSP space that I was like, I don't want to be the guy that's like, all right, MSPs, here's another thing you need to do. And I saw all the other vendors doing it. I'm like, I'm just not about it. Because I wasn't and the reason I wasn't about it wasn't just because I don't want to give more ideas and things to MSPs. It's because I wasn't convinced. Yeah. Like, of course, AI is helpful. Maybe you'll never heard on the podcast, but like we talk about a lot. But at the end of the day, it was really good chat pots. Yeah. So it was constrained essentially just the copy, copy creation, working with it to come with ideas, that sort of thing. But outside of that, I feel like we felt pretty similar to the end. But Joe wasn't ready to bring to market for MSP camp. Exactly. And constraint is the best way to put it. It's like, yeah, it's really good for content ideation. And I always thought we even created a campaign where it's like, you're the greatest researcher in the world. Like, this is this is who you are. And I look back on that. I'm just like, man, that's the extent of AI that it was just like, this is who you are. AI. Now, help me with this problem. It's like, yeah, that was helpful. Writing copy was helpful. Ideas was helpful. And but then I kept saying like people saying they get a sell AI and then like, I always watch their stuff. And it's like, this is the prompts you should give your clients. I'm like, nobody is really going to pay for that. I mean, I know there's a lot of AI hype, but it just wasn't helpful enough. It wasn't practical for an ROI perspective enough. And now it is. I feel like I have been read billed. And I blame Mark, who's a client and a good friend and listen to his podcast. And I blame Doug from Garden State Computer. Those are two people I blame for being read pilled. I feel like I am Neo and I was sat down a month ago. And I was giving the option for the read pill to see how far the rabbit hole goes or the blue pill to continue life without AI. And I took the read pill and the reason I took it is I was, you know, we were both seeing what Mark was doing. Like this is incredible. It was like five or six months ago that we started seeing what he was doing. He's building an incredible system. Shout out to Mark and Doug. They're both doing something. Yeah, shout out to Craig little things. And then Doug sat me down about a month ago and showed me a CRM he had built. And I was like, what do you mean you built this? And he's like, yeah, I vibe coded this entire thing and it was insane. And I was like, do you know code? He's like, I don't know code at all. That was the moment that I just, my mind exploded. Because AI has officially shifted from a really good chat bot to a creator to agents to getting things done to real ROI, real practical business applications. And as I was going through that process, I was downloading cloud and then I needed download cloud code. And that made me turn developer mode on on my laptop. Oh, my God. That's on sketchy. Doing that, I downloaded a cloud code work. It's doing work on my laptop. And I'm like, one, this is amazing. My mind's blown. But two, is this secure? Am I worried? But also I'm going to use it either way. But am I using it properly? Is there anything else I can get out of this? What was my first thought? I'm the target market now back to our podcast last week. I am the target market of most MSPs now. My first thought was I need to call my MSP. That was my first thought. Double tech is doing okay with this, but they're behind. If I show them what I'm doing today, their mind would be blown. And that's a problem. That is a problem. This is the single most important technology I think to ever be created and to ever exist ever. It probably is how internet felt back in 2000. Obviously I wasn't there, but the.com bubble. This is probably what that felt like. Hopefully it's not a bubble, but anyway. So we have to, as MSPs understand that if we can throw out a lot of things that we've been focusing on, obviously not the core things, cybersecurity, supporting clients, making their vision reality with vision true with technology, this is the one that we have to learn at a deep level. We have to use in our own business at a deep level. And we have to be able to sell to our clients and prospects because you will print money in this new age. You will print money. Why do I know that we're going to go over some specific things that we've built in the last two weeks? Just to give you some context as to what's possible today, and then we're going to get into more why you should do this for your business and how to sell it. Okay. Anything on that, Stephen? No, Jeff, and I may have a lot of things to add on later on, but I feel like for now the best thing to do. And we're keeping it into 15 minutes. I had to remember that. Let's start with the examples that I'll cover more later on. Well, it might be a little more than 20 minutes. Let's see. I mean, so where cloud code is today? We talk about AI AI. Excuse me. There's a million AI tools. I'm going to talk about cloud code. That's the other problem. When selling and talking about AI, everyone talks about, hey, they say AI. Yeah, there's a new tool every week. Yeah, I was like, so you got you're talking about chat, because up until like, you know, a year ago, I was like, okay, so you're just talking about like chatting with chat to be T. Anytime someone talks about like, this is the prompt you should use, I'm almost like, okay, so you're like level one of AI. There's like levels to it now. And the higher level you go, the more ROI there is. So here's a couple examples of specific things I built in the last two weeks. The camp conquests training card game that Stephen and I created. I got a quote for 10 grand to get an MVP of it, not even the final game. 10,000 dollars. And it would have taken 500 hours, which I think is actually reasonable. Like, I think that's true. If you want to build a playable training card game, there's so many mechanics and training card. This happens, but then this happens like, it's extremely, extremely complex. I built the full camp conquest as an online playable game, all the illustrations, all the game mechanics, adjust the game mechanics, multiplayer, adding friends, messaging them, unlocking packs. You can go in and buy packs, five packs for $10. It is a playable game today. I'm not ready to go live with the X. There's still a couple of bugs I'm working out. I'm going to have an expansion deck ready, but like, wow, that's possible today. We built a podcast automation. This podcast right now that we're filming as soon as it gets published. My AI is going to find the podcast. It's going to transcribe the whole podcast. It's going to do the keyword research. So what's the best keyword for the title and the rest of the podcast? It's going to write the podcast in sections. It's going to add the glossary. It's going to go after that specific keyword. It's going to include specific quotes from Stephen. It's going to include specific quotes from me and put when we made that quote and why it's important. It is going to put everything in bullet points or numbered lists. And then at the bottom, it's going to link to the podcast so they can listen right on the blog or go straight to the podcast and subscribe. And then at the bottom, it's a CTA for MSP camp. All of that is completely automated. And I trained it on my voice, trained on other blogs we've done, trained it on our website. So it sounds like me. Yes. I don't want to check that too. I was like, just make it sure like you don't want it to be the usual M dashes everywhere. This and this. Like it did actually like I mean, pulling the transcript and actually pulling in the tone, which like we're doing the work now in the podcast. So otherwise like how many additional hours of we've already provided the value now we're doing kind of the busy work to get this post stuff in the blog. It's prime for automation. It's prime for automation because again, we're actually talking about it. We're studying before this podcast like we're doing all of the work. We're recording and then what it stays on audio and YouTube. Okay. Cool. Now we can repurpose in all these different ways without it taking man hours, which is what it was doing before, which means we didn't do it. Yeah. And it was cutting into other things that we can be doing that are higher value. That is true ROI. We're going to see on that. We are going to get more leads from MSP camp because of this process. And it is completely automated now. Location pages have always been a challenge. If anybody wants to see that, they can go to MSP-camp.com, go to the blog section. All the latest ones are this automation. Now, you might say, "Oh, that's AI Slop." That's not going to rank. The reason it's not AI Slop is because I'm training it on the so much. I'm training it on actually what we're talking about right now. That's the only, that's what that's what it's going to be written on. I'm training on other blogs that I've written so they know my style. I'm training on on our brand. I'm training all of that input to make sure the output is human, to make sure input output is me. And it's an incredible blog. Go read any of them. We built location pages are always challenging. We talk about location pages a lot. They are challenging because you have to design a page, right? And we have a high level of, what's the term for it? Standard. When it comes to web design. Absolutely. We have in just switching the title of the page in the calling it a day. Yeah. We have a high level of standard when it comes to web design. It all roads lead to the website. Location page is better. Location. Yeah. Excellent. So I built a location page automation that we built one template for location page. It goes in, finds the best keyword for the page. Does the research on that specific location? Links internally to all the relevant pages. Adds the schema for SEO. And then changes the copy and the whole page to be hyper-specific to that location. And it adds it as a draft to my website. So now I have 120 location pages on the site and I'm publishing five a week. Now when I say publishing five a week, now all the human has to do is go in there, change an image. Could have automated that, but I was like, I do have a team. This is going to take the time from four hours per page to 20 minutes. I do want a human looking at it, making the final touches, improving things, making sure layouts are fine, and they click publish. So now 80% of the hassle, the stuff that's honestly not even the most valuable stuff is done. The human can focus on the most important stuff. Barification and then yeah, that thing live. Think about this. 120 location pages, four hours per page, 408 hours. I have just saved with a single automation. Now to be clear, it probably took me about 15 hours to get this thing where it needs to be. AI is not plug and play. I think that's a fallacy people believe that they can just ask the prompt and it spits out this automation. That was going to be my main point of the thing. We're just like, especially with cloud code and that kind of thing, it's still not a magic box where you say, create me this thing and it creates it. I think the reason why we weren't committed so far is that people were trying to get ahead of the whole AI curve vendors were trying to do it. So they were just training it as a magic box, putting that first product out. As we figured out, even from Camp Conquest, when you were showing me the initial versions, which was just very basic. Now where it has all these other pieces implemented, it really is the time you put into it. I know it's different in the sense of it still takes like 15 hours. That's the amount of time it needs and there's going to need to be more hours there. But when you think about it and the trade off there, we were seeing like 500 hours to 15. I know which one I'm picking every time. Exactly. So it's that front and work to make sure we can implement so much. That's real ROI. I'm building an website app for Alex just actually finished it right before this podcast. That's why we're running a little late. This used to take us 20 hours. We get the questionnaire from the client. We do the interview with the client. We have our best practices for the site that we need to implement for each site. We get it to the copyrighter. We get it to the SEO team. We do the research. We do the competitor analysis. It's such a massive process. So I trained it on every single thing we do during that phase, which usually takes 20 to 25 hours. Now it goes to exactly how we do it. Exactly. It uses all these APIs like semi-reson everything to pull all the correct data. Now it gives us the perfect website plan. It perfectly matches the client voice. Perfectly does the keyword research. Perfectly lays out the SEO strategy. I mean, my mind was so an AI search strategy was so blown. Now here's the beautiful thing. Now we take that. Now the humans on the team review it. They edit it. They verify. They start building. What was 25 hours now is five hours. Of the highest values. That's the most important thing, Steven, of the highest value thing. Making sure the strategy on point, making sure the nuances in there like polishing an output. This is not AI Slop. This is saving insane amount of time. It gets us about 70% of the way there. And then now our team gets to truly improve it, polish it and rock. That's why AI is not actually going to replace jobs. It's going to make us do so much more, be more profitable, and probably be deflationary across the board. But that's a whole other conversation. So this is going to help us as a company, make significantly more money, do significantly more. If I could reach out to all tech and they can do this for me instead of me as the CEO, spending literally hundreds and hundreds of hours doing this, what name your price? Name your price. If I can just say this is my challenge. I need someone to automate for this, automate this for me. And I know this is a higher ROI activity because it's something I'm currently doing right now. I'm getting an R1 and it can be automated to 80% name your price. And that's why this becomes so important. We are past the stage of chatbot AI. If somebody's still giving you prompts, they're level one. We need to have levels. And now when you can integrate Cloud Code with N8 and these massive automations that can be created, again, it takes a lot of time to do this even with AI. But when it's done right, the level of ROI it will hit is insane. And that's why this is so important for us as MSPs to truly know it, truly understand it, and truly be able to implement it. When it's really improving. You can name your price. I was going to say, dude, like for me, because I'm usually very like, I still am very AI-skept tool. And Cloud is the first one which I've actually enjoyed using in the sense where it's like, with the other chatbot ones, Jim and I chat to PT, you just felt like it had selective amnesia. Sometimes I would remember the tone and the other four. Sometimes I remember things. Other times for getting in. Cloud, I haven't touched Cloud as much. Code as much time has been running that piece. But even just with the chat, you can create projects, give it a master list of how responses should work in that project. You can go to the master file and put in, don't use M-dashes. Don't do this. Make sure your tone. You can ask it to not be a kiss ass like all the other. chatbot, which is a big improvement for me when I'm trying to get content ideas. I don't want to be told, like, oh, great idea. I want to have something that pushes back and then gets my creative brain going rather than just validating everything I say. I would definitely say give Cloud a chance if you haven't yet. And it's funny because I think people say, oh, yeah, I was going to make a stomach. My brain has been exploding lately. The new ideas I'm coming up with, the critical think that's required to work with AI. I'm actually getting smarter using it because it's like, it's again, it's a tool. It is not doing everything for me. It is like doing things really terribly. Like the first round of anything, second round of anything, third round of anything, fourth round of anything, fifth round of anything, horrible. They're bad outputs. But it takes the creator to use the tool to get it to where it's extremely impressive. And that's where we're at today. You can get the tool to create almost anything. It's just what it takes for you to architect that thing. Yes, I'm definitely not silly. Be prepared for it to make dumb mistakes as all of these tools do. But the ways to work through those mistakes are much more actionable than it has been with other tools that I've used in the AI. And here's the thing. I tried watching a bunch of YouTube videos on it so many YouTube videos. And I just, I could not, it was not helpful. So finally, I just pulled out Cloud Code and I started talking to it. How do we do this? Is this feasible? And then it just taught me how to use it. Never in my life, if I had such an aha moment, I don't, I don't use a single external source anymore for learning AI, not a single one. Because it's going to tell me the path. Now, to be clear, the path that gives you is not the optimal path. That's a key detail that we have. Like seriously, it way over engineered this website plan on round one. I spent five hours going to its plan. I slept on it that night, literally in the middle of night. I'm staring at the ceiling. I'm like, we can cut out the whole 50% of what it's trying to get me to. I could probably save half the time because all that stuff doesn't need to be automated. And so the first plan it usually gives you is not the optimal plan. But either way, it'll walk you through as you help it decide the right plan and how to do it. So that's just a key detail. Like I tried watching you, I tried all this stuff. The best way to learn it at least cloud code specifically is just ask it to talk to you. That helps. I mean, it's so easy to get burned out on all the new ideas and tools and things they are and all the YouTube videos, like it's better just like I'm using this tool in our case, cloud and cloud code. We're going to learn it inside and out and then improve with it as it improves. Yeah. I think it's working well. So, my. Oh my gosh, working well. Such an interestingly great. I mean, I'm just like, I'm sorry, I'm red-pilled. Everything sounds different. I'm looking at everything differently. Like literally, I have an auto-respondent on my email that says like, I'm out of office for April working on AI. I mean, I don't think it's like exactly says that. But it's like pretty close to that because I am going through every of the most challenging components of our business and fixing them. And again, that's the opportunity. If I'm the target market, that's what I'm trying to do in my business. If somebody can unlock that for me, while I can continue working on the other things I want to work on. I don't want to work on these automations. But I want the outcome that those automations give me. Yes. And to work through the friction so that it's not occurring for your team. Yep. Your employees. And in fact, If I was an MSP today and I was really good at this, this is what I would do. This is actually what I would do. This is not like, this is what you should do. This is what I would do. I would say, get your first automation free. What does it take if you're really good at it to create an automation for a client? Four to six hours? Maybe. When they see that thing working and what it's doing for them, they are going to sign whatever agreement you put in front of them. If they're a good business owner, right? If they're not good business owner, you don't want them to climb anyway. That's what I would do. That would be the offer I would have as, get your first automation free. What is the pain point you want solved? One, that gets you in front of the door for the call right away. You guys decide on the project. You do it for them. You show them how you do it. You literally show them exactly how to do it because again, I know how to do it, but it takes me eight hours either way. You could show them exactly how it's done. You could teach them how to do it. They're going to hire you to do it. Now the big question, big concern is, wow, well, how do I do that? I've probably spent 200 hours using Cloud Code over the last month. I could go into any business today and do this for them. I could go into any business today and solve problems for them. I'm not going to. I'm a marketing agency. But it's not that big of a lift. If you have somebody dedicated to this and they're somewhat smart, you'll be fine. Or hire someone specifically for it and just, within a quarter, they'll be ready to make you a lot of money. All right, cool. Last thing before we wrap up is because of this, because of the excitement, because of we have a couple of key members doing some absolutely insane stuff with AI. Even I are launching a third fireside chat. The third meeting in the market. It's finally happening. Shout out Tony. Tony's been pushing us for four for like six months now. The third fireside chat is going to be AI show and tell. So what this is, it's a little different than the other formats. One format, we cover really some specific tactic or strategy. We go in deeper on it. The other one was a Q&A. This one is we are doing all AI show and tell. We're going to be showing what we're doing. We have some members doing some absolutely insane stuff with marketing sales, account management operations. This is going to be the only one where we allow operation talk. And we're just going to show off what we have done and how we've done it. That's it. And we're going to talk about it. And that conversation, that talking is where a lot of the match is going to happen for you to implement your business and then help offer to clients. So I'm really excited about this one. I don't think this is going to be one where there's 20, 30 people there because I don't think there's a lot of people using AI to this level yet, but I think in the next few months, it's going to happen. So to get to that, just go to the calendar on MSP camp. We are currently working on making it where people can just add these things to their calendar. I know that's crazy that we don't. It's the function there. It's broken. I don't know. We're trying to fix it. We should have it fixed within a week. But it's there. You can't add that single one to your calendar. I'm saying like adding the series to the calendar. Anyway, that's where you find it. That's where you join it. Add it to your calendar. Please join if you have any level of interest in making more money. And we'll see you there. Anything else, Stephen? I think that's a great send off. What's our time on this? How do we? How can we do it? I don't know. Let me see. 22 minutes. I'm thinking. 23 minutes. Oh, thank you. I'm nailed it. That's crazy. All right. I'll appreciate you. There will be a lot coming on what we're doing. A lot of these things that I'm doing are for MSP camp or APEC sites because I just want to test the waters. Make sure it's going well. So far, we're already seeing an increase in SEO and AI search literally in the last couple of weeks. So anyway. Seems to be working. Once it's like prime time, we'll be teaching you how to do it. We're not hoarding all the information. We're definitely going to share it. Exactly. So thank you all so much for listening. Thank you so much for listening to podcast. Thanks for listening to us. Thanks for all the time. Remember, if not, either way, we appreciate you. And we will see you on the next one. See you next time. Peace. Peace. That was cool myself. Yeah. Blame the zone. Bye, everybody. [MUSIC PLAYING]