Transparently, I have been a bit judgemental about some AI tools and refered to my own AI-fatigue at times. Cue the great connector, Adam Weeks, with an introduction to Founder and CEO, Zach Hendershot. Zach is the CEO of Miruni… a tool that brings agency client requests to an AI interface, automating many of the common changes that clients ask for.

The platform takes the client request, executes the request via AI, and holds the result for approval. As quickly as we have seen AI progress over the last few months, this endeavor is exciting for agencies bogged down in client maintenance items.

About Zach:

Zach Hendershot is the founder and CEO of Miruni, a tool built to streamline how WordPress professionals manage website change requests by using AI to automate the resolution of those requests instantly. He has over 20 years of hands-on experience in building digital products and a background leading both enterprise teams and digital agencies. Today, he’s focused on using AI to reduce the manual work agencies face every day. Based in Denver, he’s also a longtime cyclist, husband, dad. In between those things he is always looking for his next adventure.

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Read Along with an Unedited Version of the Transcript

 All right. Hey folks. Welcome back to another Manana No Mas! Podcast. We haven’t interviewed a live person in a long time, and today I think it’s over the top. I’m thrilled to bring you a guest that I met, uh, through Adam Weeks. His name is. Zach Hendershot, he is, uh, running a company, founding a company called Mai.

We’re gonna have a great conversation about how AI can help your agency kind of speed things up and become more efficient managing customers’ websites. But before that, I’d like Zach to take a moment to introduce himself and maybe finish the conversation we started before we hit record. Zach say a little something to the folks.

Awesome. Thanks for having me, Kurt. I, I, uh, really appreciate it. Yeah, I, uh, I’m Zach Hendershot. I’m a, you know, I, I have a pretty diverse background. I’m an engineer by trade. I, uh, have, have run product organizations at various fortune and 500 companies, and I’ve had various entrepreneurial journeys, including starting many agencies, uh, in, in the past as well.

And so, you know, I’ve been in the. The WordPress CMS sort of custom software space for, uh, I don’t even wanna list how many years, probably 20, 25 years at this point. Um, and so I, I, I am passionate about technology. I love talking about technology, which is why I’m excited to talk to you, Kurt. But I also just love, um, you know, solving problems with technology.

And I think ai, uh, as a, as a key word. Is, is a really powerful tool to solve hard problems with technology. So that’s, that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing in Maroon, which we’ll talk about at some point. Um, but I also love to ride bikes. I love to hike. I love to be out, out, uh, in the world as a counter to my.

Screen time. I like to work with my hands and be out in the sun and, you know, sort of stretch my legs as it were. And that’s where the biking and the other outdoor pursuits that I do, uh, yeah, get me excited and re-energize me. So that’s the other part of my, uh, personality that

is, it is just uncanny to me how many people are in our space and have similar passions.

Uh, there’ll be times, you know, a, as a solopreneur, running a team all over the world. I’ll be sitting in front of the computer, in front of the screen and I’ll think, what, what am I doing? Like, I’m not productive. I’m not, something’s not plugged in. Right? And, and every now and then I need to exercise that physical part of me.

I gotta, I gotta run to the gym. I gotta go out and do 20 miles on the road bike, maybe seven or eight miles on the mountain bike. I gotta do something physical. And then once I do that physical activity, it seems like I can come home, take a shower, and then knock out three days worth of work in an evening.

You know? Yeah. It, it’s, it’s so unique. How many of us in the same space have this kind of same internal workings? For, for,

for me, I, I, I resonate deeply with that. For me. Being out on a bike or on a hike takes me out of my head. I, I’m often just like, overanalyzing a decision or a business thing or like, you know, some, some like strategy or, or whatever.

And often it just helps to like force yourself because you’re so focused on breathing or whatever on a, on a long, long ride or something. Force you to like, take a step back and just sort of look at it from a different angle right. When you come back and sort of settle back into the computer or whatever.

So I, I find it a deeply. Sort of like powerful tool, frankly. Like, I know it’s a release and sort of, you know, de-stress or whatever, but it’s a tool to think better and differently and clearer about a problem that’s in front of you. So I, I leverage as much as I can and it just gets me away from the screen and, you know, uh, sort of decompress a little bit too, which doesn’t hurt either.

Well, without giving away your home address, you are in a pretty, uh, fortunate spot to be doing these things. I mean, you, you’re out in Denver, Colorado. Dude, I just, you know, I, I think about, I got married in Evergreen, Colorado. Oh, okay. Um, so, so golden. I remember going to Golden Boulder. I, Walker Loop Ranch Trail used to be one of my favorite places over the other side of Boulder, and the Flat Irons, the bicycling there was insane.

Uh, yeah. Had the, what, the peak to peak. I used to do training rides up to, uh, Fort Collins and back when I lived in Westminster. I mean, you, you just live in an amazing spot for that kind of activity. I mean, it’s just a phenomenal location.

I, I, I am very fortunate. I’ve been here 17 years and, and frankly, I grew up in Ohio, um, where biking was not so much of a cultural thing as it is here.

Uh, you know, and so when I moved here, I was not a biker. I was not a runner. Um, but something about the culture here just forces you into. Doing that. You know, I just sort of fell into it ’cause everybody I knew was doing it. I was like, oh, I’ll go out with you and ride bikes. And then it turns into sort of a, a lifelong passion.

Yeah, I mean we, um, I do a little bit of all of it. I do mountain biking and gravel cycling and, and road biking to an extent. And we’re fortunate enough to have, you know, great trails like, like the one that you mentioned and many others in the golden area and, and close to, close to downtown, let alone all the deep mountain.

Trails and stuff. Yeah. But we have hundreds of miles of paved trails as well. Uh, so I can stay out of traffic. Um, even on a road bike and stuff. Right. You guys got

that Platte River Trail?

Yeah. Platte River Trail. I’m on. I’m not, again, not giving my home address, but I’m not far at all from, uh, from that trail and, uh, the Cherry Creek Trail.

And Sand Creek. I mean, there, there’s looping in all directions, so I, I sometimes I, I, I do longer distances. Sometimes I can, I can put together about a hundred miles from my, from my door. Um, without, with very, very minimal on street writing.

Yeah, man, that is so nice. When I used to live in southern California, we used to hit the Santa Ana River Trail and that would be, you know, a 75 mile round trip for me to go from home down to the beach and back.

Yeah. Um, and it was just like great mind space. Like, just great. To get that reset. I always, I always called it, you know, get that reset going. Um, oddly enough, my son is actually in Bailey, Colorado right now, volunteering at a camp. So, uh, he is now getting to his introduction to the Wonderful Wilderness of Colorado.

Yeah. Uh, he’d been there when he was really, really young, but now he’s 17 and he kind of gets to experience it hands on by himself. Exploring parks and streams and rivers and all that stuff. And I know he is just having a blast.

But, um, once get, uh, a little bit out of Denver, you get a lot of really incredible wilderness in a lot of ways.

It’s a, it’s a pretty unique space to be able to go, you know, big city stuff and then hour away you’re deep into the woods in the streams and everything else. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a great combination.

Yeah. Now let’s, let’s jump off the, the bicycle thing. ’cause people that came here that want to hear about, you know, tech and business and startup and all that cool stuff, they’ll be like, what’s Kurt doing?

This is not ESPN. Um, let, let me be just upfront with you. And I was think I was very clear with you upfront, like I was suffering. Uh, you know, just, just AI overload, right? And, and so I would say, okay, well this is, everybody’s got a piece of ai. And then you say to yourself, well, well, what’s worse? You know, AI burnout or like AI ignorance, right?

Because there’s some people that go, I don’t even care about it. It’s a fad, you know? Well, the internet was a fad years ago too, right? So. We have to keep things in perspective. And I work really, really hard at this perspective thing. I end up reviewing a lot of AI products for different shows that I’m a part of and things like that.

And when Adam said, Hey, you gotta meet Zach. He’s doing this ai, I. You know, kind of, uh, agency tool. Now, I’m not gonna lie, I kind of rolled my eyes a little bit and I said, well, I’ll meet with the guy. Let’s, let’s, and then we met and you said, here’s a demo of the tool. Here’s what it does, this is how it works.

Uh, and my eyes started to open and I was like, alright, this, this to me is cool. Um, I think AI works on so many different levels. Like I can remember. As a newbie to AI Write Blogger came out, I think it was called Write Blogger, and I fell in love with the tool because I didn’t have to become a prompt engineer to make it work like it was pre prompted.

Write a post about this, make an outline about that, give me a transcript of this video, and it would do it. You know? And I didn’t have to make the prompts. It did it. But then as I got more acclimated to how AI works, I thought, why am I paying right blogger for this service? I can leverage these AI tools and get the results I need on my own.

Yep. When I look at your tool, and thank you for the, the access to, let me take a look at it. I don’t get that weird sensation. I get a sensation that you built, um, maybe I’m putting words in your mouth, but you built a platform that is like self-sustaining. Like I feel like it’s, it’s there, right? It does what c clients need it to do.

They’re gonna say, change this, change that. I wish this background were gray. And then you set up the system so that a lot of these can happen or become almost like. Support tickets in a way. And so I don’t wanna put words in your mouth. I’d like you to kind of explain what you’ve built, what its advantages are, and then maybe we’ll do a little q and a and kind of work through to help the, the listeners understand what we’re talking about.

Yeah, no, and, and I appreciate your words around it too because, um, I, I want to address the AI overload a little bit. I mean, it exists, it’s there, and I roll my eyes too when I hear about another, uh, AI tool. But, but I think, you know, the approach that we’ve taken is. And, and this is my sort of philosophy on AI in general.

You know, AI is an enabler and accelerant to the human, not a replacement of the human, right. And, and so I think a lot of tools, not all tools certainly, but many of the AI tools are trying to be like, how do we eliminate the human? How do we replace, how do we, you know, go zero to a hundred, you know, and fully automate everything.

And I think. There’s challenges there. I think we all hear them in the media and, and you know, there’s definitely great benefits as well. And I, I very much believe it’s in the middle, and that’s a little bit of what we’re trying to build as a tool that meets you in the middle, accelerates what you do and makes you better at, at your job.

I, IE in agency building and managing websites but doesn’t replace you, it just makes you better. Um, and so to, to, to get into a little bit of what we’re doing, right? So. We built a tool that leverages ai that that, that allows you to automate the edit requests you get from your customers. So quite simply.

You install the WordPress plugin plugin as it exists today. The end user, the, the, the stakeholder, the owner of the website who your customer or client gets a little widget to basically point at the part of the website directly on their site that they want changed and describe the change. Whether it’s your example of changing the background to gray, or fixing a spelling mistake or adding a new block of content, or, you know, creating a, a, a new card, uh, on your sort of carousel, whatever those things are that the end user, the owner of the site wants done, that goes into our system and we use AI to basically generate, uh, uh, hopefully a very precise and accurate, uh, uh, auto automatically generated edit.

To implement that change that the web admin can very quickly review with a pre-generated preview of what it would look like, and then click approve. So the idea is that. There’s a few layers. One, we’re reducing all of the back and forth, the emails and slack messages and clarify this and clarify that. So hopefully with our capture tool paired with our AI engine that implements the request, we can eliminate a ton of the back and forth and just overhead of communicating with clients, making it really accurate, provide a really great experience for your customers.

Um, and then two. Remove a lot of the manual, boring, frankly, low complexity work that you kinda have to do today. You have to go in, click the nine times to find the little button in your page, builder, edit the text, preview it, publish it, like all that, like that’s stuff that you shouldn’t be doing as a human with the existence of ai.

It just requires this sort of deep integration into the platform and the capture tools and all the stuff that we built to. To make it possible to do it, but you shouldn’t be doing that. And that’s what we’re trying to do, is really take that manual effort out of your day and let you focus on the strategy work, right?

Building the right web experience, doing the high value, sort of working with clients hand in hand and finding new clients and building and growing your business. Those are the things we’re trying to get you back, uh, focused on, on a day to day basis.

Yeah. Now I want to do like, uh, like a usage scenario, right?

So. I know that some people in the agency space are going to hear you and I having this conversation, and they’re gonna say, why on God’s Green Earth would I want to give them a point and click tool to tell me what to do next? Like some clients are crazy and they just wanna reinvent how the internet works for the sake of reinventing how the internet works.

Sure. And so when you are dealing with, when you’re talking to an agency that says, that’s my. That’s my conflict. My conflict is I don’t wanna give people this feeling that there’s these unlimited changes available, but you and I both know that there are unlimited changes available. Right? So it’s like, it’s like, all right, so how do you have this conversation in a way where you’re like, you’re still providing a value to your client and it’s up to you to figure out how you’re gonna monetize that value.

Yeah. You know, and that’s been our approach at this point, is. Give tools to make it really easy to capture the intention of your customers and clients. I mean, if you’re any agency, right, like you’re gonna get a hundred requests regardless of how you do it. Make that easy and make it easy to implement and click a one button to implement the thing if it’s the right thing to do.

But get outta your way. If it’s not the right thing to do, just be the tool to capture it and ignore it or have the, you know, have a communication with the client to say, Hey. Like this, this request that you sent doesn’t make sense for these reasons, you know, and, and, and continue that human relationship.

We’re, we’re, we’re maintaining this sort of human in the loop or, or parent in the room, uh, methodology, right? Because what we don’t want to do is just, you know, bend to the whim, uh, every whim that your customer or client would have, because we know being in the space for as long as we have, like a lot of those requests are just.

The, the wrong request, you’re asking the wrong thing. But a lot of them are things that just legitimately need to be done. So our mission is to get outta the way, make it easy to just get the things done that makes sense to get done. There’s a lot of just, you know, low level like day-to-day, just updates and enhancements and refinements and fixes and whatever that we can automate.

Uh, and we think it’s a large percentage. And then the other percentage. Have a human relationship and at least know better what the request is with the capture. You know, with the screenshot describing the change, we capture a bunch of metadata about, you know, the web browser in, use the, the device in use JavaScript logs.

I. Um, that are going on while they’re recording their edit request. Um, network traffic, stuff like that. Those are all valuable data points to help you have a more meaningful data-driven conversation around what the, what the client wants. But we don’t wanna force you to do anything. We just wanna give you tools to make what you do better and faster.

Now I’m gonna take it probably five steps further. Mm-hmm. And. At some point, is this tool going to come up with its own tasks? Like, like, um, like recommending to the owner, right? Instead of the owner saying, change this, change this call to action. Do think, do you think there’s a, a room in, in the ecosphere for, um, Hey, we noticed your web traffic went down.

Maybe we should try changing your call to action. What do you think of this change? And then it submits it, and then you say, approve or disprove. Like, that would be kind of like crazy, you know, uh, what, what, what’s that movie where they’re trapped in space? How and how says I can’t do that. Yeah, totally.

No.

Um, I, I think you’re, I think you’re spying on our roadmap a little bit here. Yeah, no, exactly. So. The way that we think about what we’re trying to do is right now we’re getting really good at automating edit requests that come in from our clients. That’s, and, and we talk about it generally turning insights into action.

So today’s insight is. Edit request from your client. Uh, the action is, you know, implement the edit request and make it easy one, but one button click to implement the, you know, spelling update or the color change or whatever. It’s in the future. What we built and what will evolve into is a platform that can turn any number of insights into any number of actions.

So your example is, is, uh, is a good one, or the thing that you’re alluding to, which is. You know, we could, uh, uncover, uh, patterns or behaviors or changes in the site, whether it’s traffic or whether it’s, um, you know, content optimization. Based on other data we can collect, we can automatically prepare and update to implement the insight that we uncover ourselves or that you feed into us from other external systems, right?

Whether it’s a, you know, a SEO optimization tool that identifies 48 things to increase your SEO score. Um. We can implement automatically a large number of those, if not all of those, you know, updating meta tags, updating title tags, you know, matching the OG link description with the title and the page content that’s summarized.

Like all those things are things that we can effectively do. It’s just we need to continue to expand the support of different input and output systems. But yeah, we, we very much see this as a way of turning a number of different insights into the action directly inside of the CMS system. And, and certainly, you know, directly into, into WordPress.

Specifically,

so at the risk of setting the expectation high, mm-hmm. For a solopreneur type agency, managing let, let’s just make it modest, 18, 23, 25 sites, let’s say they’re managing 25 sites, putting this in place is almost like having a junior developer kind of help them side by side.

Yeah, that’s, that’s a great description.

The way, the way that we think about it is, um, you know, you can do, you can do two to three times more work than you could in a given workday, and you can do whatever you, you can, you can leverage that however you want, whether that’s, you know, you have a maintenance contract with, you know, those 10 to 15 clients and you wanna.

You know, you continue to provide that same level of value. You charge them the same amount of money to maintain and manage their site, but you do it faster, more effectively with higher accuracy, and you’re gonna keep the customers. You know, you’re gonna keep them longer, you’re gonna keep them happier, and you’re gonna have better margin just speaking from a pure business perspective, right?

Or you wanna provide a much, uh, a much more competitively priced set of maintenance and management services in the competitive landscape that you’re focused on. And, and, you know, a tool like Maroone can help you do more with less and do that in a much more cost effective way than maybe your competitors could.

Um, so that’s another way to look at it. Um, at the end of the day. You know, we think on average, and this is across all the averages that we’ve collected, we think every, we call these smart edits. We think every smart edit saves you anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes on average. Some of them may be a few hours of time savings ’cause there’s lots of complex work happening.

Sometimes there’s spelling mistake, right? Um, that we can implement in a few seconds. Might take you, you know, a few minutes to implement, but across, across the board, you know, and if you do 50 to a hundred, if you’re a smaller agency, edit request a month, that time savings starts to add up. And the cost savings, just in terms of your manpower, right?

Like your, your, your time spent going and doing these things starts to add up. And so we just want to give. Agencies, the flexibility to, you know, be more cost effective and efficient, and ultimately deliver better service. And then how you, how you leverage that in your business and help it grow is, is ultimately up to you to put this into.

Consumable, um, you know, digestible, kind of like money talks. This reminds me so much of a section of training I used to do in the power sports field, and I realized this is a tangent far, far and away from working on WordPress websites. But when I would train power sports dealerships on how to be more effective, more productive, more profitable, I would say you need to find ways to distract your technicians less.

And they were like, what do you mean? I’m like, you’re always interrupting your technicians while they’re working. Does anyone know what the average, you know, distraction costs and it costs 15 minutes of productivity, right? So the average distraction is 15 minutes of productivity. And you say that’s not a big deal.

Well, it is when that person’s physical actions generate your. Revenue. And so I said, let’s do some math. If you interrupt ’em 10 times a day, how many minutes is that? Well, that’s 150 minutes. That’s two and a half hours. That’s 12.5 hours a week. That’s 625 hours a year. I said, now multiply that times your, you know, times your hourly shop rate.

And at the time we used a hundred is the number, nowadays it’s more like 170, right? But at a hundred dollars, that was $62,500. And then you say, well, the average. The average repair order in a service department is 50% parts and 50% labor. So then you say it costs you 63 grand in labor, but it also costs you 63,000 in parts revenue.

So now you’re looking at like $125,000 a year that those distractions were costing you as a business. And so if we were to take that from the power sports conversation over to. The internet conversation as running an agency. Each one of those distractions, even if you’re gaining revenue from the client, each one of those distractions is keeping you from generating revenue in another way.

Yeah, I think there’s a really direct analogy to draw between those two. I like that. I like that description because I think I. Anybody who’s run an agency understands the, the context switching cost, right? Is the way I, the, the terminology I would use in an agency where, you know, think about the example of the, the solopreneur 15 to 20 websites that they manage.

Each of those websites are different. They have different structures. Maybe they’re using different page builders, maybe they, you know, have a different sort of navigation structure. Certainly different look and feel. Um, each time you get an edit request for site a. Uh, you have to kind of relearn where is that content stored?

How is it, how is it structured? Where is this, but, uh, button defined, where is this text that’s deep in the footer, you know, created, like, you have to relearn that, click around, find it, update it, and then you get a request for site B and you kind of have to like, reorient yourself. The context shifting of like going from site to site and sometimes platform to platform and stuff starts to become very onerous, very, very, you know, high order, uh, levels of of work.

And that’s, that’s lost time in your business. And, and it’s hard to quantify that time too because you know you gotta do it today, you. You gotta like figure out where that button is. But that takes 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. You do that a few times a week and then yeah, you’re up to those numbers very quickly that you started to spout off from the, uh, from the power sports world.

Like it’s a really interesting space and our time is extremely valuable, um, especially when it can be spent, especially a small and medium sized business. Finding new work, building your business, finding new revenue streams, like doing stuff that is more meaningful, quote unquote in your business. Not that servicing your clients is not meaningful, but it’s stuff that can now with tools like maroone be automated.

Um, so spend that time doing the thing that, you know, ultimately really matters to your business.

In a very transparent, personal way, what, what you just described happened to me just today. Just today. Mm-hmm. I signed into a client’s website and, and they were having some problems with the, the way the membership integrates with WooCommerce and blah blah, and I, and they were, we were talking about it on a Zoom call and I said, it would just be easier to have me do it.

Just let me do it for you. I’ll set it up. And they said, oh, Kurt, that’s a great idea. So today was the day I signed in. And I’m, I’m moving around and the WooCommerce settings are giving, like I get this weird header on the page and it looks, and it doesn’t look like the way I set it up for ’em before. And I, and I got distracted 25 minutes into trying to figure out what went wrong and woo, uh, ’cause Woo to me is another creature.

So, uh, by the time I figure out, you know, what I said, what has happened, so I went to the customizer and I didn’t see the options and the customizer I was used to seeing and I said, wait a minute. They changed the theme. So that was so the most basic of things. Right. But I’m, I’m, I’m distracted on 20 other channels and so I, I, I go into themes and sure enough, they activated a different theme and they tried to duplicate the, the dark theme settings I put into cadence for them.

Cadence Pro gave a ton of options in the customizer, and now they’re in the 2023 or 2024 theme, and I’m like. What is happening. That’s why the header’s all jacked up. You’re on the wrong theme and so, so now I’m like, alright, how much of this do I need to fix before I can actually do the work? That they asked me to, to execute for them.

And then of course I jump on this call with you and find out all I had to do was let Maroone take care of it for me. Yeah,

exactly. No, I mean that’s, that’s a situation I talk to lots of agencies every week just in, in the course of, of what we’re building here. And, uh, that, that story is, is, is not unique.

Uh, I hear so many stories of. You know, they changed something, or another person on my team changed this. I had no idea. So I had to figure out what was going on first, and then I could go and implement the request. You know, like it’s just layers and layers of this. And WordPress in particular, as, as I think we all know is, is a, is a very, um, very complex ecosystem.

There’s lots of layers of interaction that happens between page builders and plugins and, you know, different types of content and custom content and all like, weaves together into a complex tapestry of, of, uh. Of Interestingness. And so, you know, that that’s the other benefit is like strip some of that away, you know, and, and you know, you don’t have to worry about the, the machines can worry about that complexity and you can focus on does that look right?

Is that implementing what they wanted? And then move on with your life, you know? Yeah,

I, I, you know, the more and more that I talk to you, the more and more I’m, I’m completely bought into the whole idea of it, which I think is what people need to do. To be quite honest, Zach, and I’m not making this as a sales episode, this wasn’t, you know, it’s not the intention of the podcast, but it’s, again, I’m the guy that just wrote an article last week that was like, AI fatigue versus AI ignorance, which is worse, right?

Um. So I’m coming from this, this very much split perspective, and I know I’m a hypocrite. I know it because I use AI almost every day. My, myself, I just really have a panic attack when a customer calls me and says, Hey, I just had chat, GPT. Write me a plugin. What do you think? I’m like, uh, I don’t, yeah. You know, so, so there’s.

There’s boundaries to me right there. There’s these boundaries, and I think we have to be really smart with what we do. Uh, later today I’m gonna be on a separate podcast and we’re gonna be re reviewing all kinds of AI tools in the lead magnet space. And at the end, like I try so hard, not to be so blunt, but it’s like, if you already have a, a Canvas subscription, why would you wanna sign up for something like this?

Like, like Canvas does all this stuff and it’s ubiquitous. Everybody has that. Um, you’re in a unique space. I don’t, I don’t know of anything else that’s doing what you’re doing.

Yeah. You know, um, I, I don’t either, and I would love to be told, uh, there’s somebody else trying to do what we’re doing. Um, just, you know, so I have awareness and, and we can collaborate perhaps, but the, um, I.

You know, I, I think a lot of that comes from our, our, my, well, our collective in, in, in the maroon world. But, but certainly my point of view that, you know, if you integrate ai, if you give AI sort of the ability to automate things inside of systems, it’s going to, it’s gonna solve more problems more effectively and faster.

Then, and, and I call this sort of like the bottom up AI approach versus the top down AI approach. A lot of people are taking this top down AI approach. How do we put AI on top of systems and push content into them, right? Content creation, creating new websites from scratch. You know, page builders are doing a lot of AI work around, you know, let’s automate the creation of brand new pages.

Um, lots of that is valuable. Some of it is not valuable. Um, but I think the, the organizations and the, and the products that are trying to. Start from the bottom up and automate things inside of systems be where they have known context. They are, you know, plugged into the places that, you know, you’re already clicking around and, you know, existing in, on a day-to-day basis.

If you can automate that stuff, one, I think you get higher accuracy, um, and better results at the end of the day. And two, you’re not trying to overreach, trying to do more than it’s really good at. We’re trying to do a really targeted, very specific set of work. That hopefully with does it with high accuracy and high quality and, and then get outta your way instead of just trying to own every part of the tool chain, which I think a lot of the, the current AI tools are trying to do, you know, some more successfully than others.

But, but I think that’s sort of a, a part of our philosophy.

Well, looking at all the stuff that you have on your plate and how you have to manage all that, it’s no wonder you ride bicycles.

Yeah, that’s, uh, it’s, it’s a nice, uh, it’s a nice distraction,

I would say. Nice. Nice. Well, uh, dude, I, I can’t tell you how happy I am that you decided to come on the show.

Uh, I think I told you when we first met, I don’t schedule these shows to be produced every week, every two weeks, or even every month. I just wait till someone of. Absolute quality shows up and says, Hey, I’d be interested in being on the show. So I’m thrilled that you came, um, in the, so they, are they coming on next, then, who

you’re

talking about?

No, no, no. It’s, it’s you. It’s you. Uh, you know, in the vein of honoring your time, what, what is the best way for, well, let, let’s cover this first. Who is your, who’s your avatar? Who do you want to reach out to, to use this tool?

So the, the way that we talk about that generally is, you know, the midsize and the large agencies are the real sweet spot.

They spend thousands of hours doing these manual updates, have large teams, lots of, lots of, you know, lots of portfolio websites, lots of work to happen. So I think there’s a huge story there. Um, that’s our kind of target avatar, ICP, whatever you wanna call it. Um, however, the small, uh, the small agency and the freelancer also have lots to gain, uh, in a slightly different way.

They don’t have the volume and thousands of requests a month, but they also have higher, uh, proportional sort of context shifting as we talked about earlier. So those are kind of our targets agencies. If you’re building a website for other companies, small, medium sized businesses, um, we’re, we’re a great fit for you, I think, because we can solve a lot of the, the, you know, manual labor pain points that you spend on a day-to-day basis.

Perfect. And then the follow through to that question then would of course be, you know, how do these avatars perfect fit clients that, that we’re describing, how do they get in touch with you or, or, uh, get a test drive of, of Maroone and see if it’s for them?

Yeah. Um, I, I’m, I’m a very accessible, uh, uh, founder and CEO of this business, so you can reach out to me.

I’m Zach, ZAC h@mai.io. M-I-R-U-N i.io. Uh, you can also visit maroone.io. Um, learn more about what we’re doing. We have some videos up there. We have, I think pr a pretty good description of what we do and how we work. Um, and you can, you can sign up for an account there and get a free trial. Um, and you can find me on LinkedIn, just Zach Hendershot you find me.

You’ll, you’ll find the CEO at Maroone tagline and, uh, and hunt me down. I’m happy to answer questions. Happy to jump on a call, do demos, anything, just to help people understand how we can help.

Yeah, I know that you did that demo with me on the screen share and it was an eye-opener for me ’cause it wasn’t what I mm-hmm.

My brain had, you know, forced a different image in my head. And then when you ran through it, I was like, oh, that’s, that’s like a no-brainer. And it’s like, I don’t mean to say it like a no-brainer, like you designed something silly, you made it, you made it accessible, you made it workable for the average person, which is a pretty remarkable feat.

I appreciate that, I appreciate that, that note as well. You know, not to harp on this too much, but that’s very much our philosophy on this. How do we make it accessible, right? There’s a lot of, a lot of great tools out there, but we’re just trying to like, make it really easy to use, especially for non-technical end users.

Your customers often, you know, we know the key to success is to make it dead simple. Not that they’re not smart, but they just, uh, many of them just don’t know how to use technology, and so we’re trying to bridge the gap basically. So that’s been a lot of what we’re trying to do. Make it dead simple. And make it deceptively simple.

There’s a lot of complexity going on behind the scenes to make it work the way it works, but we try really hard to make it easy to use.

Yeah. Uh, my, my next project is a, is a startup website for a tow truck company. I don’t expect him to know how the internet works. I expect him to know how to, you know, hook up a Dodge 1500 and put it on his ramp truck.

Um,

yeah, exactly. And, and you shouldn’t expect them to figure out how to navigate WordPress or articulate their request in detailed like. WP posts and content blocks, like get out of that way. Let them speak plain English. Yeah. And, uh, and uh, and, and do what they need to do.

Well, Zach, absolute pleasure. Uh, thanks for coming on man.

I really appreciate sharing you with our people. Totally. And uh, folks, give Zach a shout. Have a good one. Thanks for having me. Take care.