In this masterclass on modern SEO and marketing leadership, Stephan Bajaio shares why solving the right problem beats chasing rankings—and how a surprise encounter with Adam Neumann led to an unforgettable rocket-ship ride through hypergrowth and hard lessons at WeWork.
https://page2pod.com - What if your best SEO strategy has nothing to do with Google rankings? In this episode, Jon and Joe dive deep with Stephan Bajaio—CEO of VibeLogic and CMO at Turno—about why the future of SEO and marketing hinges on solving the right problems, breaking down silos, and leading with empathy.
Stephan brings hard-earned wisdom from scaling Conductor's SEO team and his eye-opening time at WeWork. He challenges the old way of marketing, advocating for SEO as a center of excellence and a tool for understanding people—not just traffic. From startup philosophy to AI content chaos, this episode redefines what it means to build with purpose in the modern marketing landscape.
🔍 In This Episode
• Why SEO data should live outside the SEO channel
• Stephan’s mantra: "If you're not helping people, you're just selling stuff"
• How real authorship defends against AI content sprawl
• Why most brands beat themselves—not their competitors
• Lessons from scaling at Conductor and navigating WeWork
• How intention > tactics in modern marketing strategy
• The future of SEO in a world driven by AI
• Why a flipped org chart might be your most powerful growth tool
• Building products vs. services: Stephan’s next move with VibeLogic
• Center of excellence vs. marketing channels—what wins long-term?
This episode offers a blueprint for modern leaders looking to scale smarter, build teams with meaning, and fall in love with the right problems.
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đź’¬ Comment:
What’s one marketing silo you’ve seen hold back real progress? Drop your experience in the comments!
đź”— Mentioned Links & Resources
• VibeLogic – Stephan Bajaio's SEO consultancy and platform.
• StephanBajaio.com – Stephan's personal website.
• LinkedIn – Stephan's LinkedIn profile.
• Will Reynolds – Founder of Seer Interactive, noted for his SEO transparency philosophy.
• Lily Ray – SEO expert known for her work on E-E-A-T (Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
• Rand Fishkin – Founder of Moz and author of Lost and Founder, often referenced for his critiques of venture capital.
• Lost and Founder – Book by Rand Fishkin about startups and the realities of VC-backed growth.
• Hook Agency – Run by Tim Brown, focused on niche marketing for the roofing industry.
• John Doerr – Known for OKR methodology; quote referenced: “Not everything that matters can be measured, and not everything you measure matters.”
[00:00:00] Jon: What if your best SEO strategy isn't about search at all, but about solving the right problem before you even launch a campaign? Stephan Bajaio is the CEO and Co-founder of VibeLogic, and he is also serving as CMO at Turno, but you might know him from his day as a conductor where he scaled a global SEO team and later joined WeWork during its rocket Ship phase.
Now he's trying to rewire how we think about marketing altogether, less about tactics, more about intention. This episode isn't just about rankings or keywords. It's about building modern marketing teams in a landscape where silos, politics and misaligned incentives often kill good ideas. Before they start, we talk about why Stefan believes SEO data belongs outside the SEO channel, how real authorship might be the best and last defense against AI content sprawl, and why most brands are beating themselves, not their competitors.
The real story here is what it means to build. Whether that's a team, a startup, or a set of values, and how to protect it from the gravity of growth at all costs. Stefan's launching a new venture [00:01:00] without venture capital on purpose. He's betting that moving slower might actually get him and his clients where they need to go faster.
It's a conversation about scaling smarter, leading with empathy, and why falling in love with a problem might just be your biggest competitive advantage. Here we go.
Welcome to episode 85 of the page two podcast. As always, I'm joined by my partner in Crime Moving Traffic Media, Joe DaVita, and today we have Stefan Ba. Gio, did I get that right? Jao? It's all good. Biao. I was close. I was close. You're not the first nor the last that's gonna make that mistake. Don't worry.
I've lived with it all my life. Well, at least I didn't mess up the Steven. Right? One of the two is always gonna get screwed up, so it doesn't really matter. In Grand Steven thing, welcome to the show. It's been a long time since we've had a chance to sit down and dig into tactics and whatnot. I know we reconnected a short time ago.[00:02:00]
You were going through some transition on what your next steps were gonna look like, and I found it amazing that you were constantly asking me like, how can I help you? When you know, most people would be like, Hey, can you help me in this situation? And so I. Just doing the research for this podcast and knowing you as well, that's something that you're known for.
If you're not helping people, you're just selling stuff is one of your common things that you say, I'd love to learn a little bit more about. Was there a specific experience that sort of crystallized that mantra for you, or is that just how you've always been? What sort of drives that focus on helping people?
Thanks for having me, John. Joe,
[00:02:38] Stephan: really appreciate it. It's a good question. Actually. It was funny. I was prepping for the podcast as I tend to, and I was thinking through, okay, questions around catchphrases, things that I have a lot of catchphrases, right? And I'd love to tell you that there's one moment in business that I'm like, aha.
I didn't birth that. I think I've just adopted the phrase, right? It was a term we came up with a conductor that really resonated [00:03:00] in terms of, I didn't feel like, it's funny, I was meeting all these people, I was meeting all these SEOs especially, but I lemme back up one. I think I've always wanted to be helpful.
I think I've always wondered why people aren't more helpful. It probably even ties to my politics or my worldviews or my, I'm not selfless, let's be honest. Everyone's gonna try and come on here or whatever and try and put their best face on and say ego doesn't play a factor or any of those things. But I've realized in life, I think that ego and is not your best friend, it's not helping you.
It probably isn't going to get you far and frankly, it's probably gonna put you in an adverse situation. Most people come across trying to take a selfless approach and trying to find more meaning in what you do. There's nothing wrong in that. Even if you don't save the world or children every day, right, you can still find meaning and value in the things you do on a daily basis.
And I feel like the human condition really. Wants that ultimately. So as you think about it and as was in marketing and seeing this evolve with SEOs, talking to all these [00:04:00] amazing SEOs and all these insanely huge brands that Conductor gave me the capability to, to speak with and the SEOs, and ultimately I would end up talking to the CMOs, but the SEOs themselves, you could see they had true desire to better their organizations.
But they weren't necessarily given the opportunity to do so. I also would see, I was in SaaS for a long time and before conductor and in many different roles in account management and so forth. And I saw a lot of just selling for the sake of selling versus actually trying to solve. And I realized the best salespeople were the ones who could actually really understand the problem people were having and try to actually help them.
And sometimes that meant not going with them. Now that seems counterintuitive. There are so many times in my career that I have dissuaded someone from going with me that has ultimately ended up with me with more business, whether it was from them later on in a different position, whether it was them telling someone else about me and therefore coming back to [00:05:00] us and doing business with us.
Like it will, I hate to be like kumbaya cheesy about it, but like the karma will come back, right? And so you've gotta try and ultimately help people. And as a marketer, I think, sorry to let me off the leash and go on the diatribe. John, it's your fault, Joe. Feel free to over the top on this stuff. But as a marketer, I think we have a lot of opportunity to do good and it doesn't have to be at odds with our brand.
Like our brand should be trying to help in whatever it is, whether you're selling blue widgets insurance or, or I don't know, any, anything in between for that matter. You should be trying to help people with their problem and if you don't understand their problem, you're probably not marketing correctly anyway.
What's the heart of what we do? I don't think it's that evolutionary. I just think it's a nice concise phrase to set the table for the way people should be acting.
[00:05:47] Jon: I, I was curious about it because I think historically, right, like SEOs have been, so once they find something that works, they like hold onto it.
Don't share what it is because they don't [00:06:00] want it exploited or something like that. And you have seen this shift maybe in the last year or so, where it is all about sharing. And I think people are starting to realize that more and more, like when you share, you get tenfold back because people appreciate that and it is so rare.
And I just love that you were ahead of that curve.
[00:06:17] Stephan: I, I wouldn't give me too much credit on that, but I would say it reminds me of a conversation I had with a really good friend of mine who I've known for two decades now in this industry, will Reynolds. And I want remember saying to him, this was probably at least 15 years ago, I said, will, I don't get it?
He said, what do you mean? I'm like, I just don't understand how you can get on a stage and give everything away. What about what you need to make you guys unique and keep you guys moving forward as an agency at seer? And he said something really profound to me that I has really stuck with me to this day, and I'll share it with you guys.
Because sharing, right? He said, and if you're not following will, you absolutely should. You're missing out. It's, he's a genius. I'm just a really all around good person. But he said, [00:07:00] staff, I don't need me. Keeping this stuff to myself doesn't actually do me any benefit. 'cause it doesn't make me grow if I'm not constantly looking for the next thing and trying to push my boundaries.
And I'm sitting on one thing that I think is my secret sauce and I don't share it. One, I don't actually end up growing because I stayed in my thing and they also said another thing, which to be honest, it's very true and he's actually said it from stages before where he's literally outlined every step in a process.
Most of the people on the other side of this screen, I hate to tell y'all are gonna be too lazy and or too confused and or too busy to actually fulfill anything we tell you. So even if we had the answers to the algorithm wouldn't matter. It's the
[00:07:39] Joe: job security
[00:07:40] Stephan: for SEO firms like we are, listen, I used to call it Stefan's employment opportunities, right?
So. The reality is like we could give you the answers to the algo. I've said this to many A CMO of Fortune 500 companies, but that's not actually the problem we're solving. Half the time we're solving the problem of if I had all the answers, which I don't, but if I did [00:08:00] have all the answers, you still wouldn't be in a position to actually fulfill 'em.
So you either need to outsource that fulfillment to us to allow us to do it for you, or we need to start looking at the internal composition of your team's processes and priorities to ensure. We're actually forgive the French getting shit done right again, like you could, there is no a hundred percent accuracy in this game.
There's only a game of smart ideas that hopefully have some logic and some vibe. See the plug view them that that will help guide you in the right direction. But the reality I tell most companies is. Your biggest competitor is not another website, it's probably yourself. They're the ones beat each other up.
Right? They beat themselves by not actually able to execute or prioritize the things they need to.
[00:08:43] Joe: You spent a lot, spend a lot of time at Conductor and you've got, you got to see a lot of, I, I guess I wanna, I know you could answer this a million ways, but I, if you could try to answer with the big brands that you got to interact with you, there's gotta be hundreds.
Hundreds where you've got to see how those teams [00:09:00] were built. Yep. More successful. Some were not. Conductor is a really powerful tool, but you gotta know how to use it. And of course. And I'm just curious, did you, there was something that you saw in some team that while this team is doing it right, where there's.
Probably a 90% not doing it the best they could. That 10% of those teams that you got to interact with that were doing it right. What do you think stood out with those organizations?
[00:09:24] Stephan: Okay, so I think that's an incredibly interesting question. And you're right, there's about a thousand ways I can answer it.
My a DD brain is gonna go in about 17 different directions, and I've only had one cup of coffee this morning for me too. I'm my number one. Yeah. So in all fairness, and you probably have jet lag, Joe, but I'm gonna, I'm just gonna put it like this. It's something I had to remind myself actually recently in building Vibe, logic, and thinking about why, first of all, what is the website to the company, number one, right?
Is it foundational? Could the company exist without the website? Lending Tree cannot exist without a website. Doesn't exist, not a thing. Right? Books into it doesn't exist without [00:10:00] a website, right? We could argue they put pop-up, TurboTax puts pop-up places and stuff, not as much as their competitors in certain physical locations.
But the reality is, as a business that really. Dependent upon their website. So you're gonna see that one, companies that are more dependent upon their website, e-commerce is a great example of this, right? Are going to have a higher maturity in SEO to begin with, okay? They're going to have had to rely and understand on that to begin with.
Secondarily, they're gonna have probably better attribution models in place, right? Because they've been judging and having to judge things to validate the existence of these teams much more because they're core to their essence. Right versus a B2B where the sales cycle might be six months. Sure, the product might be a million dollars or more, but that process has to go from online to offline to potentially, and then depending upon what your CRMs look like and how well things are connected and how well you can tie back the actual MQL to SQL to [00:11:00] actual close, and then that whole process of how valuable was that in the grand scheme of things and tying that all back and reporting it much more difficult.
So depending on first, the beast you're dealing with will definitely play a factor in that. Then I'd also say it's, you have to consider where in the organization SEO is put. Is it deemed a marketing function? Okay. If it's deemed a marketing function, it will get creative much easier. It usually does. It usually gets content much easier.
It's a lot easier to get. Usually people will write for you. It will be harder to get dev to work for you, right? You'll be often, depending on the size of the coming, you'll be a ticket and wait type situation. So again, great ideas, wonderful things, can't get it published. I believe the term in French is your fuck.
But that's the reality, right? Like you're fucked, right? It doesn't matter. You have a great piece of content, it's gonna rank number one, but you can't even get it live on the site. Wonderful. We got a bridge built 80% of the way. Tell me how many cars get across, right? So that's the, and by the way, we're measuring by cars.
That is part of [00:12:00] the problem of being in the marketing side of it. Then you have the dev side, right? Which is, okay, I'm in it. I'm considered an IT function. I can always get my dev work done. But dev work done without a concept or. Understanding of what the terms are, the topics, the intent, the emotional resonance, whether or not we're really solving the problem, the nuances of that.
No offense to the dev team. It's not their strong suit. And even if you are a crazy, good, empathetic marker, you are stuck in probably the wrong place to get that done right. So that is another thing, and I say wrong with a caveat that there really is no right place because then you have product that kind of sits in this weird thing depending on what kind of company it is, right?
Product is this. Amalgamous thing. That's, it's driven by user need. It's driven by what we provide the client. That's great. But then you're, you might have a marketing department and you're begging them for actual creative, and then you have a dev department that you're closer to oftentimes in product, but you're still begging for time and [00:13:00] resources and focus.
So I know I didn't give you all a very rosy vision of what it is to be an SEO, but I can almost guarantee through this screen. There are a lot of head nods going like this because y'all have experienced what it feels like to be tied to one of those horses and pulled.
[00:13:19] Jon: It's not fun. Yeah. We actually had a great episode with Sean Stallman, I think it was episode 80, and we worked together at Razorfish.
And even within Razorfish there was this tug and pull of where SEO should be located right within the organization and the results of the campaigns, the ability to sell it in was highly different depending on where it sat in the organization. Do you have an opinion on. In the age of AI where it should sit in an organization?
Is it the same as you've seen it successful in the past, or could you see it being maybe better positioned in tech, for example, moving forward? Look at John. Look
[00:13:58] Stephan: what John just did. [00:14:00] FYI or what he just, he, no, but he also just pulled a grenade and he dropped that AI one right in the middle and watch Joe.
It's gonna blow up, right? And the point is, do I go for it? Do I get into the AI thing right now or do I hold until the next direct AI question comes? So
[00:14:14] Jon: I'm very curious about, I'm very curious about conductor and rework too, so we can jump around. You'd,
[00:14:19] Stephan: but, okay, so I'm not gonna jump on the AI grenade right now, but I am gonna say, okay, where does SEO sit?
Where should it sit? Ideally, SEO should be a center of excellence and it should be treated as a center of excellence. It should be a center that's funded in its own right, but not simply for the organic channel. So I know that seems controversial, but like here's a thought process behind it. If you've ever heard me speak, you know I have said this ad nauseum, which is the worst thing that ever happened to SEO data, is it got stuck in the SEO channel.
SEO data is actually intelligence and audience intelligence. The problem is that because a channel gives it to you, you believe you should only react to it as a channel, which is faulty in your logic. If you really understand what a [00:15:00] consumer needs and wants, because another catchphrase and no one lies to their search bar, right?
People will put into a search bar more honesty than they will tell their therapist, their rabbi, you name it, right? Their spouse, they. There is a lot of honesty there. Now, for those who are unaware, that doesn't mean Google is literally saying, John searched this at 3:00 AM I don't wanna know what John searches at 3:00 AM.
But I'm saying, and neither is Google for that matter, but they are gonna chunk that together, understand search volume, and then they're going to start understanding what to serve for it. Right? And the more you as an organization can start to understand that, the more you can make a difference, sometimes the answer should be ranking, sometimes the answer should be something else.
Sometimes it should be partnership, sometimes it should be advertising, sometimes it should be. So it, it is a multi-channel approach. The problem with marketing right now is that marketing has been bifurcated into these small fricking silos of, of execution, which I will tell you. Jumping into the AI future is flawed.
The actual execution portion of marketing [00:16:00] is going to go the way of the Dodo. You will not be valued for your ability to put a Display Act live, nor for being able to actually write a title tag. You will be valued for understanding when, where, and how to actually execute these things. AI will come in and do some of the more, I wanna say, boring automated processes and mechanisms that we can trust without giving it too much autonomy.
'cause we see how much hallucination and autonomy still exists. And again, if you really want to get into the AI conversation, which I. Not fully go into, but I will do this. I will say right now, marketers, what are, we're the se We're in January 16th, 2025. Whenever anyone's watching this, so mark, this one. We are still in a world of slow SVGA loading of image.
Okay. People who are sitting here telling me they're gonna build the next Shutterstock based on the technology at hand in AI are. Flawed [00:17:00] and not understanding what's coming. This is not something you can build a long-term business on right now. People that are doing that, God bless you. I think it's more of a gold rush than it is a robber baron slash oil conglomerate that will last for the next a hundred years.
I think people will scoop up whatever they can, whenever they can, but again, we're in such early days of this tech and the usage of this tech that it's all gonna shift out from under you. And the reality is, it's like trying to build something on top of Google. We know the algo changes, we know the LLMs change.
They don't announce it to you. They just give you a new model. Just like they give us a new algo and say, oh yeah, we've updated a core. And you're like, okay, now I gotta figure it all out again. Building entire businesses on that is, I think, very dangerous and flawed. I think you can use it as tools, but I wouldn't input your entire structure economy and modeling on top of it.
It's too dangerous. So there's, I know I hit about a thousand things there, but. That's pretty much
[00:17:55] Joe: the, uh, the future is for us to figure out. I think John and I have said this a [00:18:00] hundred times in the last three months. This seems like the most exciting time to be working in SEO in a very long time. And you're starting an SEO mostly in SEO business.
You're year into it. Are you going to structure things a little bit different than the other agencies that you have experienced with in the past? How will you look at this one differently than the others?
[00:18:23] Stephan: It's funny. For a really long time, since 2012, if you go back and look at, like Me Speaking Anywhere, you'll see that I was always saying that I believe.
SEO was not about making yourself la it was more about understanding everything else that was out there, and then making multi-channel decisions on how to actually approach that, which is what I talked about before. So our approach to search is a little more in that vein. Sure, we want to help you try and rank your pages, but the reality is.
The first thing we're doing in trying to help an organization is understand what problem they're trying to solve. So again, if you're not helping people, you're just selling stuff, right? So one, does your current page even do [00:19:00] that? Does it speak that language? Does it even use the terms, right? I know we have a client in a space and they're like, they provide karate classes and one of their pages is for kids, and it just says children, and the title tag just says children, and it doesn't even say children's karate class or kids' karate class on the page.
Okay? We don't need to reinvent the wheel there, right? Like you already offer a great service, but right now you're not even listing the terms on the page for relevancy sake. So that's one, right? We can get those easily off the table and help them, and that's very low lift for them or for us. In terms of that.
The next would be, okay, we need to describe it and explain why would you take. Your child took karate classes, right? What are the things that actually the child gets out of it? What do you as a parent? 'cause the parent is probably the one making that decision. There are not many kids signing themselves up.
You need to take that into account and start building that out. And so conceptually, when we think about what we need to do, there's obviously the traditional SEO stuff, then there's the. Challenging the business? Are you really supporting what you [00:20:00] say you are? Are you the experts, the eat that you think you are?
Can we expose eat? Because I think eat honestly in this day and age, and sorry Lily, I know I'm gonna butcher eat and Lily Ray is like eat expert, right? But I love her. She's a friend of mine and she's amazing. And if you're not following hurt, that's another one on your list to follow. Lily will tell you all of the aspects of E, but I'm just gonna talk about it from the authorship perspective of if you've got amazing people authoring content in a world of, and by the way, in a world of is like telltale sign that's been written by ai, which should not be deemed as negative, but it's starting to get that connotation right now.
So what's interesting about this is like in a world of ai, we have a lot of, how else can I put this Bullshit content. It's regurgitated off of everything it's consumed before it's got falsehoods in it. And frankly, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy because it will actually end up being the reference, the false reference made by the AI later on, or I should say the LLM.
So what we need to look at is the fact that like true [00:21:00] authorship matters now and. People behind search, like people willing to put themselves, I think you're gonna see a little more real ID to authorship moving forward, and so we're very much talking to clients about doing that sort of thing. Then to continue on, Joe, I think being able to look at things from a, a great piece of content written inspired by SEO doesn't equal one that ranks for SEO necessarily.
Sometimes the best piece of content may never rank, but it may be your number one newsletter consumed piece of content. It might be the best email you sent out. It might be the best, highest performing direct piece of traffic on your blog that people see highlighted and click on and consume. You would assume that Google could figure that out.
You know what? Maybe you just wrote something great that Google can't figure out between all of the options it has for that topic and in the meantime, you having something related to that topic that's related to the audience that comes to your website or has intention on your website and maps really well together like they mesh together.
That's [00:22:00] a good thing. That's not a bad thing. And the problem is we've gotten into this game of someone fooled online marketers and told them, because everything is in bits and bytes, we should be able to measure it all. And that is the flaw that has distracted marketers in this space forever. That doesn't mean ROI doesn't matter.
It doesn't mean you shouldn't be focused on performance, but it does mean that it knowing when to stop, when to consider, to continue all of these aspects, right? I find most organizations don't know those things and so they like, they either cut their nose to spite their face and they say performance only, or they go.
We just figure it out. Neither of those approaches I think are correct. And so we are here to take the vibe, sorry, to plug ourselves the vibe, which is the creative, artistic kind of side of search, the art and the science, right? And the logic, which is very much the technical, the things that need to be there, the structure, the foundation.
We take these two things together and try to marry them as well as we can in their messaging, in their [00:23:00] approach, in their multi-channel. And that's how we try to differentiate ourselves. So it's not a new concept. I've been talking about it. It would be named spy back in the day. Search presence intelligence.
Now we're talking about as digital landscape, but it's also frankly what happens to influence all the LLMs now. Let's be honest. SEO is a crutch for the LOM. They have all this data at their advantage, but it's being shown day by day that a lot of that is dependent on what's actually highly ranking. If Google's done a good job to a degree of taking all the content on the web and prioritizing it in regards to keywords, why would the LLMs ignore that in the decision making of what they actually serve?
It'd be stupid. Right? Right. So they don't, so we're having an impact on them, but nobody wants to call that out.
[00:23:46] Jon: Yeah. Yeah. So chat GBT with references being, and then re grounds it based on some mathematics on top. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, it makes sense. Like why reinvent the wheel of something so complex already?
If you have some of that [00:24:00] data accessible to you, it's just a smart way to approach it. See, I did jump on the A grenade. Sorry. But we're still top. No,
[00:24:05] Stephan: it's all good. I don't mind. I just guide me or else I'll fly off into outer state.
[00:24:10] Jon: Let's pull it back. Oh, go ahead Joe.
[00:24:12] Joe: I was just, I wanna, I would love to hear, I hear, I heard you say something.
There's this book that John and I read and we like coach our teams on it. John, doer, you probably heard of him. Me. Not everything that matters can be measured. Not everything that you measure. Can that does, does it really matter? So that is a philosophy John, I take to our business too. Sounds like you're saying something similar, but as you start, so you know, you're starting something fresh, are you gonna, are you gonna, is it gonna look a lot different than the other agencies that have been around for a while?
Can you see a year or two out? What does it look like underneath you?
[00:24:47] Stephan: Okay. That's a great question. The reality is, Trevor, my business partner and I didn't get into this business to build a massive SEO agency. That's not our intent. [00:25:00] SEO, like you said, is shifting the concept of what people call SEO. I'm tired of the SEO is dead conversa.
I was tired about that 10 years ago. So it's like the conversation about SEO being dead is dead right, and like it should just be put away. We have actually decided that we're going to be building technology that right now we use for ourselves, but we have the intention on building some SAS tools. I'm still surprised that, that the world is made up of so many tools and yet not all of 'em do.
Some of the things I think are just like obvious and need to happen. And that's not a knock on conductor. It's not a knock on anyone in our industry. It's only to say that a lot of stuff is dictated by the loudest voice in the room by the most amount of money by the investors, which is also why Trevor and I don't feel like going and getting funding.
I'm saying that now. That might change in the future, but Rand's point. Rand Fishkin. Again, people should know Godfather of SEO in that regard. But Rand talks about in Lost in Founder and I think he has valuable points around, and there's later an [00:26:00] article he writes that gets more deep into it. 'cause I think he's out of his tea's and Cs, and not his Ts and Cs, but his non-competes and he NDAs at that point really gets into what happened at Moz.
And the idea that investors can come in and make a lot of these decisions from, uh, I hate to say it, a more callous and money driven approach, right? A selling stuff approach and not a helping people approach because they're looking for returns faster. Right. And that's not really something I want to have own our business.
I really want us to be able to have the freedom, much like Rand talks about. I'd rather a business grow slower, but be able to have more control over it. And that's not just from a oh equity and all. It's different conversation, but like from an actual doing the right thing and doing what's right for the business, building the right kind of tools, recognizing not everything's gonna work all the time, not feeling beholden to others, that at every minute you have to justify.
Sometimes it's more about movement than it is about justification, and you will hit the right spot, but you're not gonna do it by [00:27:00] sitting there trying to justify every action. I've been in meetings where you're sitting there trying to justify all the actions rather than taking them, and that's just a bunch of pontification and not actual motion.
So I like to say this one also, marketing is a verb. Take action if you're not actually marketing. What are you doing? When it comes to what we wanna do, we definitely have some product ideas and things we're building MVPs for along the way, funded by our clients and used for our clients with the intention of growing those things and under understanding.
Can I tell you exactly what it's gonna be? No. And I don't need to, not offense to you guys, I'm just saying I don't need to, I don't need to know that. I have to be okay with the ambiguity of it. There's something that one of the founders of Ways said, and actually it's funny. I tagged him in LinkedIn and he actually responded afterwards 'cause of a quote of his, which I kind of love, Yuri, I forgot his last name.
He says, fall in love with a problem. Not the solution. So I think I'm trying to make sure I've got that problem, like crystal clear as to [00:28:00] what I wanna solve for and really get that like we've honed in and locked in in order to decide like what problem are we really trying to solve, right? I think there's a lot of ways to solve a lot of things for a lot of people, but it doesn't necessarily crystallize itself right away.
And I think a lot of people are gonna say, we wanna build this so that it does this. That's not falling in love with the problem. It's really getting to know a problem, understanding a problem. His company, what weighs a data company at the end of the day, but his problem was falling in love with the idea of like, how do I solve the problem of traffic?
People are pissed off and they wanna get from place to place in the most effective way possible, right? It's simple in, in concept, in, in reality it's very difficult to solve for and it ends up becoming a data company, but in, but the real of it is, it's a problem he wanted to solve and if that was his true norm, everything else, the solutions to them, you don't fall in love with you just.
If they can be flings, but ultimately you move forward on a path with intention. And I think that's what we're trying to figure [00:29:00] out exactly what is our intention? And I'm okay to say it's ambiguous, right? Because anyone not willing to tell you that is probably lying to you. Unless they really do from the day they graduate schools there.
I'm gonna be a lawyer and I'm gonna do this, and this is what we do and that's the rest of my life. Or I'm gonna be a doctor and I'm gonna solve this. And this is what the reality is. Life's more of a jungle gym than it is a ladder. And people need to recognize that. You might not know where the next rung or ring comes from and that's okay.
[00:29:25] Joe: So you'll offer, you'll, you'll build some products, you'll still offer some service. And I'm curious, you know, John and I have worked together for 15 years and uh, when we started the partnership, I thought we were so similar. This wasn't gonna work out. And the longer we work. With each other. The more I realize we have strengths and weaknesses and we play off each other for you and Trevor, have you started to figure that out yet?
What you'll focus on, what focus on it
[00:29:52] Stephan: existed? It existed. It existed before we even met, so it's so funny. We met during the pandemic and luckily Tim Brown, who's a a, a great [00:30:00] guy owns hook advertising or hook media in the Minneapolis area who actually is the epitome of niche. By the way. He's, we might get into the whole idea of mental health marketing.
Now we're looking at that and he's the inspiration behind trying some of that, which is he niched into roofing, right? He became this amazing like, anyway, I'm going off on a tangent, but he's this great guy. You should definitely check him out in terms of like examples and exemplification of how you can move into a niche and become the marketing person in general, the digital marketer within a field.
Phenomenal, real. He's the one on stage is playing the Will Reynolds Rand Fishkin, Lily Ray of that industry. Right on those stages for roofers. So he has built this and he's built an entire company around that concept. And that's good. That's okay. Like people thinking they need to be everything to everyone he's recognized.
Take a lane and own it. And he's done such a great job. But anyway, he introduced me during the pandemic to a guy in a meeting of many squares Hollywood squares if you're older like me, or a [00:31:00] Zoom meeting as you learn to understand it, the rest of the world since the pandemic. And Trevor was one of those boxes.
And we connected and we talked a lot about the idea that search was a lot more than just search itself. And search data mattered more. And that started us into having a conversation at which point I'd become the CMO at, I would become the CMO at turn when I left Conductor. And in, in doing so, I brought him on to help me with AI and ideas of AI generated content before.
That was a bad thing. A lot of cool things we did and as we worked together. It was very clear to me. It's funny, I had this concept of vibe, logic, right? The art and the science of SEO. I'd always talk about the art and the science of SEO. There were two sides to it Now, Trevor. Is he will never, he's very humble.
He's never going to, the only thing he's gonna tell you is that he's been around longer than Google in the SEO space, which is true. But what I'll tell the rest of the world about him is he's two point shy of Mensa. He, he is class classically trained in minute butcher this, but it's like, and [00:32:00] precision engineering like he has documented and he's got seven 13 pending patents to his name.
He is graduated high school at 12. He started working in the working field at 15. Or 16. He is then went to university later at night. He is a, from the UK living in Minneapolis, he is an incredible, logical individual. He actually calls himself a robot sometimes. It's funny, he won't emote in the same way I do.
He's not me at all. We're complete opposites, but we're very similar. We have very similar struggles. We again, like Joe John, you thinking you're so similar. It might not work or whatever. Like same. He and I definitely have have some similarities, but I am very much vibe, right? I'm the guy who is here to get people excited, to think about the topics differently, to hopefully see around corners, right?
That's one of my navy superpowers. I'm very much [00:33:00] about trying to understand the world in a different way, and that's more creative. That's more, he'll look at a deck, at a slide deck and be like, that's good. I'll be like, that's horrible. And then I'll go and move some stuff around and he'll be like, oh, I never even would've thought that, but yeah, I can see it now.
Right. We see the world differently, but we very much recognize the things that each of us need to do. He's A CTO. I'm not the CTO. I can come up with killer, crazy mad scientists and I do features and functionalities. What things should do. How do you build a keyword classifier, right? What are the ways you tie intent into it?
How do you do some of the similarities in LA libraries in order he figures out the how and getting all that structured and building it out and working on how to make it more effective, faster. All of these things, prioritization. He's got that right. Our finances right now, no, CFO, that's Trevor. Trevor is much more of the logic.
Does it mean I don't look at our burn down and check all the stuff and go through all that? Of course I do. Am I gonna be more of our sales and marketing [00:34:00] side? Absolutely. Is he a good marketer? Sure he is. He also knows where my strong suits are and where I should be focused. And is it that I'm in love with sales?
No, I'm not. Am I in love with doing all our marketing or doing a majority of our marketing? No, I'm not. I feel like these are strong suits that we can lean on each other for and over time as we evolve and grow, I will get someone whose true passion is marketing us constantly or selling us constantly and gets dopamine off of that.
I want to give people opportunities to create dopamine and really good situations in their lives. So as much as I wanna enrich myself, my family, grow something meaningful, I want to be able to make sure that the people who work with us, not for us, but with us, actually gain what they're looking for.
Experience some meaning, right? You trade your time and your talent for treasure, but in reality you should be trading it for more than that and because you can get that anywhere. I hate to tell you that you a paycheck [00:35:00] is the same dollars, whether it comes from John's company or my company or Joe and John's company or my company, it's the same.
The color of it, what, assuming you're paying in dollar in US dollars, the color of those bills are still green, right? How you ultimately gain them and what more you were given in that process, that's gonna last you probably longer than those dollars will. So it's important to think that way as an organization and to build a structure and culture that actually, you know, empowers and helps and does more than just selling.
Yeah, I think, I think
[00:35:29] Jon: we've found some of those nuances about each other as we've worked together over the more closely over the last seven years of moving traffic media. So it's interesting that you're seeing those same dynamics play out on your side. Well, so let's not forget I had the luxury. I had the
luxury
[00:35:45] Stephan: at
[00:35:45] Jon: conductor,
[00:35:45] Stephan: right?
Which was, it's funny to say, oh, I don't want VCs and peas. I'll tell you, it's a hell of a lot easier than walk in over your back and looking at burn down, being worried you're gonna have what it takes to fill everyone's paychecks and all that stuff, right? So it's a different [00:36:00] world when it's your money on the line.
And that's not to say, oh yeah, let's be kill with other people's money. It's just to say there's probably not as much of it, and so you're always going to be really careful about the way it's spent. But when you think about, about how you build that out, right? I've had the luxury of starting an SEO group, right?
A, a professional service from two people to 65 globally in about four years. That luxury also allowed me to see team dynamics, get things right, get things wrong, hire, fire, grow. Build solutions, um, and understand, frankly, a lot about myself as to, I always used to call it the right hand, left hand. I don't know if you guys do this sort of thing, maybe you do in your org.
I call it the right hand, left hand. I need to have a right hand and a left hand. And that doesn't mean, oh, Stefan needs a bunch of assistance. No, I need someone who's gonna compliment me and keep telling me I'm a wonderful person now who's gonna compliment me and, and do the things I don't do well. Right?
And one first, first thing you need to do as a leader, self-reflection. [00:37:00] If you're not self-reflecting, you don't know where those spots are, and they're blind spots, guess what a blind spot does. It gets you into an accident. So. You need to recognize what are the things you are not good at now the world has taught you.
If you're not good at something, get better at it. Push forward. You know what? That's a law of diminishing returns. In many cases. I am never going to be a touch type crazy. It's never gonna happen. I could try the amount of time it will take me to untrain my fingers from hunting P, which do it fairly quickly now, by the way.
But to actually become that or to be an accountant, I will never be an accountant. That is not a skill of mine. It just doesn't come naturally to me. Getting on a podcast and talking, as you all can tell, not difficult, comes very natural to me. So recognizing where and when, but there are people out there who literally get dopamine off of counting every single being that's counted in a certain way.
Gives them a little bit of dopamine. Why would I try and become that rather than finding a person who does that? Now, that isn't just by role, it should be by trait. So when I look at traits of people, like I'm great at getting things [00:38:00] started, I'm not great at finishing them. It is a definite Achilles heel for me.
Right? So where are my finishers? Who finishes well? Who takes something mid-flight and can carry that ball across the finish line no matter what. No matter the headwinds, no matter the obstacles, no matter the distractions, right? I've had those people. That's my left hand. My right hand might be someone who is far more diplomatic, maybe to some degree political something.
I am not as much as I should be. Yes, I can try and round some edges. Yes, I can try to get better at those things, and I do. But how much time I'm gonna spend on that versus having someone who plays that role super well can come in and take those situations on. I'm not the answer to everything. My job is to basically come in.
Especially as a CEO or as a leader in general, and find people far better at me, far better than me for situations, much like jobs said, right? I don't hire smart people to tell them what to do. I smile hard. I hire smart people for them to tell me what to do. I [00:39:00] very much believe that. And so it's finding those right people that compliment.
So left hand, right hand, always look for a left hand, right hand. So for me that's, I don't know if you guys do something similar, but I actually try to map people that way so I can see who's the left hand and right hand of each of these managers, directors, and think through that. By the way, if you're doing this org chart, hats off to my old co-founder or regional co-founder of, of conductor, Seth Bis Menick.
All org charts are flipped. They're upside down. They're not upside down. They actually should be that way. But most companies put the. CEO at the top, and then the executive team, and then the teams that report to them and whatever. Conceptually, that's actually wrong. If you're doing it the right way, it's the other way around.
The CEO is here to support the executive team. The executive team is here to support the directors. The directors are here to support the managers. The managers are here to support the individual contributors. That is the way it should be built. That is the way we should be thinking about ourselves. That is the way you build something that's more than just revenue generating organization, but one that actually [00:40:00] allows for substantial meaningful impact in people's lives and ultimately people that wanna stick around with you for the ride, no matter where it goes, whether it goes through COVID and it gets tough, or whether you're high on the hog during the days of the two thousands and before the bubble bursts and an intern gets billed out at $300 an hour.
That was me. But so I
[00:40:19] Jon: think, I think Joe and I have, I think. When we started the agency, we probably had that traditional org chart. And as the business has grown and we've had to figure out what our roles take on, I wouldn't say that we've intentionally flipped it, but I think we've tried to organize the team that way, unintentionally.
Not really thinking about the org chart flipped in that way, but I love the concept of it. And
[00:40:44] Stephan: yeah, when you did it, I thought it was brilliant. I was like, this is, it's a visual embodiment of what you're trying to say you do, but then instead of it just being visual, judge it that way. If you're gonna judge me as A-C-M-O-I, I'm not a CMO, huh?
Judge me as. As [00:41:00] A-C-E-O-I want, it's not my job to lamb bash the CMO and the, which, by the way is the same reason why CMOs change every two and a half years. Right? It, it's not usually a warm and cuddly, friendly, supportive CEO that is setting that up, right? It's a, we're the results all the time, every day bashing you until you cram the M QLS out of them in order to go over to the CRO and be like, the numbers are not where they need to be and crush.
Hold on a second. What have you, as the CEO done in order to make the CRO more effective? How many sales calls have you jumped on when it was the CMO? How many actual. Webinars did you jump on to help make that happen? How much have you been supportive and made the, how much did you get them, the headcount they needed and actually, rather than the other way around?
Right. That's not to say you don't care about the numbers, but it's only to say, you know what? You could either be supporting this or you could be judging it. And if all your job to do is judge it, then I don't know. I'm sure someone else could come in and do a better job judging. What's your real job
[00:41:58] Jon: as a CEO?
I think, I think [00:42:00] for me personally, the best part of that approach has been forcing me to let go of a little bit of control and trust the team more. I think Joe is fantastic at delegating and doing that. Naturally. For me it was maybe less, but for us. But John, you
[00:42:15] Stephan: founded it, right? You founded it,
[00:42:17] Jon: yeah.
Right, but Joe and I together. Yeah.
[00:42:19] Stephan: Both of you guys, right. When you build something with your own, it's different. Right? If you were an exec that was put into a position like you were a CEO, brought in. You don't have the same head trash and the same aspect of what you had to do with your own physical hands.
How you had to get in and build the processes yourself, the sleepless nights, the hours missed with family, the all that stuff, right? That's all in there. No matter how much you wanna speak to a therapist about it, it's still in there. So when you wanna let go, it is really a lot of catharsis you have to go through in order to be like, alright, it's trustful time.
Right. And that's hard if you've ever fallen and hit the hit your head on the ground because someone didn't catch you. [00:43:00] And I guarantee you there's times you've trusted and you've seen you probably shouldn't have. And man, if I had just done it myself, right, right. But it's recognizing that as a leader, I think that's huge.
Frankly gives you the ability to step the business up to another level for what it's worth. I'm just saying that, yeah. That's what makes it harder for people like us who start it from the beginning versus somebody who comes in and adopts someone else's stuff, can use half their time saying, oh, they didn't do it right.
And then go try and make it better in the time they're given to do that. Right. We're in a
[00:43:29] Jon: different world. It's not a perfect transition, but maybe a little bit. Let's talk about WeWork a little bit. So you had to have felt, you had to have felt some of that, I don't know if control is the right word, but you're giving up.
Like a huge part of your life in that experience in some ways, right? Just take us through what you can share of that experience, like how it came to be like all that. I'm so curious about it. I watched the Hulu documentary, but
[00:43:55] Joe: I'm sure there's more.
[00:43:56] Jon: I still haven't believe
[00:43:57] Stephan: not, I haven't watched two episodes a week [00:44:00] crash, but it bothered me and so I was just like, I'm not watching.
But it's funny. I like to say I got my five seconds of fame on the Hulu doc, which by the way, I didn't even know I was in it until a bunch of my friends would joke around. I order Stefano would be on it and next thing you know, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. I'm getting texts with picture of me on a stage without Newman.
And I'm like, okay. Yeah. Why? Because Adam wasn't on a hundred stages and I was one of the ones he was on, and I just happened to be moderating between Seth, our founder, essentially, and Adam, who by the way, both knew each other in college and that's how this whole connection ends up becoming. I'll give you the quick one of it.
Basically one day we're at two Park Avenue. That's where our office were conductor. They still are different floor Now Seth goes out to cash a check or deposit a check actually, and which he rarely does, and he's walking through the lobby and six foot five Israeli guy. He knows Adam Newman with long hair.
So walking in and it's, Hey, set. Hey Adam, how are you? And oh, what are you doing here? Ah, I'm looking at space in the building [00:45:00] and I'm going to go and find some place for us. Oh, your office is here. Come show me. Show me. So all of a sudden, Seth's going back upstairs with Adam. I don't even know who WeWork is at this point.
By the way, this is pretty early days. Rick is deemed a billion dollar company, but I just, it's not on my radar. So it's not like I'm living in New York City. I know when WeWork was everywhere and I what I mean everywhere. By the way, if you're not in New York, you probably, or San Francisco. You probably didn't feel this.
Think Starbucks, every fricking corner, WeWork. It was like crazy, right? But anyways, so next thing you know, there's this really tall Israeli guy hanging over, Mike. Desk because I guess Seth was showing him around the office and he is, this is what the story that was told to me. I know this is sound self-aggrandizing, so forgive me for the pat on my own back.
But he says, dig me to your smartest marketer. And so he like takes him over to me. I don't know why, but ultimately he does. And so Adam starts talking to me and I don't, again, I don't even know who WeWork is, let alone, this is like a billion dollar CEO, but it doesn't matter the guy's talking. So we're talking and he's showing me [00:46:00] this app that essentially allows people in the building to, to find other people in the building who have services they could use.
So it's like a, and so I'm like talking to 'em about the app and then I start getting into what is your website do and how does that reflect that? And if this is a unique value proposition of what you're offering, how is that being shown to the rest of the world before they get a lease with WeWork? And the next thing I know is, okay, you're gonna come, you're gonna peach us.
I'm like, okay, and next week. And I'm like thinking shit isn't, or like Thanksgiving. And so we basically have essentially four days to put a pitch together for WeWork. This is the one and only time I slept in the office. I ended up, because I lived at the time in Stanford, Connecticut and I, there was no way I could get home and then back for an 8:00 AM meeting.
And by the time I was done with the deck, frankly the night before, welcome to Agency World slash like SaaS World. It was like four in the morning and you can't even in New York get a hotel on at four in the morning, believe it or not, at least not no hotel you wanna stay at. So I like grabbed the beanbag chair, threw it on the [00:47:00] ground, put my feet up on my chair, slept under the light of an exit sign.
By the way, if you're in a big corporate office, lights don't ever really fully go off. So it is a pretty weird, creaky, strange thing when there are about 200, 300 computers. Somehow running in the space, but I fell asleep. Went through that, picked up Seth. We went, we pitched. Very interesting. Adam is a, how do I explain this?
Okay. Y'all need to understand this. There are a few people in your life you will cross paths with. I could just safely say this, whose energy is something you can physically feel like It is a crazy I, my dad once worked with Steve Jobs like in passing. I'm gonna assume it's like that, but there was just something about him that I can say, no offense to any of the humans I've ever met in my life, my family, anyone else, I have never experienced that type of energy.
Before, so much so that you walk away from that meeting with a high, a vibration that you then feel for two days afterwards. It's very strange. It's almost if you had a pure, this is the [00:48:00] way I can equate it. I'm just thinking about it now. Have you ever had a near death experience or anything where you were like, oh my God, I could have, I had an accident.
Something really bad could have happened, and that kind of stays with you for a while? Now that's more traumatic than what we're talking about. He's not the effect of the car crash. But that concept of something staying with you and reverberating for a while and you still feeling it hours and days later is how it felt to meet Adam.
There's something about him, it's just different. He's living, functioning on a different frequency. It's not that he's smarter, it's not that he's more beautiful. It's not, it's, I can't put my finger on it, but it's something insane and it resonates. And so when he, this guy's telling you I wanna change the world.
No cult like, you believe it. You believe he really wants to do it. So no matter what, I really didn't like that Theranos or whatever happened around the same time. So there were like these considerations of people who actively were trying to get one over on their investors versus I don't think that really was Adam.
I don't, I think he had his yet true intentions. Do I think he got caught up in [00:49:00] the situation? Potentially, but. I actually feel like he really believed what he was doing, and all hundreds, thousands of us came along for the ride. Like we really wanted to do what was being talked about. We really wanted to influence.
Now, were there a thousand states made along the way? Absolutely. When we joined WeWork, they were first when they became our client, they were probably 1,500 people. By the time, a year and a half or so later, we joined their company. They were already at 6,000 people by the time. Or maybe 5,000. By the time we left, we exited before the implosion with the S one and all that.
We were ready in discussions to leave. They were 13,500 people. Okay, that is this. It's literally straight up. So what you would have happen, which is probably why, in all fairness, a lot of their stuff didn't end up working because you literally, I don't think it's possible to scale that number of human beings within that period of time, even if you have endless resources, which they did.
Everyone in the room is a VP of [00:50:00] something from the biggest companies you've heard of, from PayPal, from eBay, from Amazon. Great, but nobody knows how this works. Nobody is the tribal knowledge leader who can transfer that. So everyone's bringing their best intentions to the room, but they're all meaning each other in almost every meeting we're in.
Right? And so there's a lot of how it was done in another company being brought into the room, but building that all into one scientific model that can be replicated on a constant basis. Work moving forward. That's really hard to do. I think we had the best intentions on having conductor be a part of WeWork in the grand scheme of things, and we played a role in a lot of interesting things that frankly we never would've gotten our hands to touch on.
Like we weren't just talking about optimizing websites, we were literally talking about what could the future office build out on a, on an actual website look like? How could we make that experience you go through with a sales rep in a physical space happen? In a digital space and how could we make that more seamless, a process and what could that look like?
Build the future and then get to it. That was the [00:51:00] approach, right? Give us the vision and then we'll work towards that vision. So there was a lot of really amazing and interesting things that I would not trade that for the world. Yes, there were insane parties unlike anything you've ever seen in your life.
I have photos, but like the reality is looking at that situation, in the end, it ended up being good for us. Conductor came out the better on the other side, which is really due to Seth and his business acumen and genius that set us up for a better future and a better valuation in the future, a better ownership, all of these types of things.
But in the grand scheme of things, I would not have traded that experience. I think living inside of that amazing rocket ship for the time and being, yes, did I miss out on an insane payout and all that stuff? Of course, but is it something I'm gonna harbor Ill will towards? Adam or anyone else about? No, I'm not.
I think I'm a, like I said, I think I can take what I learned from that situation and I now know far more than I did going in, so I'm better off for it. My bank book might not be as good, [00:52:00] but you know what? My brain is. So recognize not everything, not all value is built in your
[00:52:04] Jon: bank book. Yeah. I was gonna ask, like from that experience is, has that skewed your perception of taking funding?
You were talking about that earlier. Is that one of, I think there was
[00:52:15] Stephan: few already going into it, to be honest, I think we went through, I don't know how many rounds we went through. Seth was responsible for all of them. So I get zero credit on, I was more fly on the wall in that experience, but, but I was in certain rooms and I got to have some experiences.
So I definitely learned some stuff along the way when it came to that. But I, I really see it as, I, I think what it really taught me is the problem needed to be better defined in New York. Okay. So you can't do everything for everyone. I think Seth, I think Adam went and bought a lot of companies with intention.
But they weren't, even, ourselves, weren't locked into a definitive future of what they want us to do with those companies. They had Meetup, for example, right? Meetup was a company they bought, but it wasn't well constructed into the plan for the future. So again, I think there [00:53:00] were a lot of good intentions, but I think falling in love with the problem and then making sure that problem isn't 17 different problems, is it too, and by the way, if you're a founder like me and these guys, it is natural to see all problems as whack-a-mole and to try and deal with as many of them as possible and to do it yourself, hopefully selflessly, but to do it yourself, right?
That's one of my major learnings now that I'm, I can say the one thing I can say for sure in starting Vibe Logic about a year ago is I've realized when it's worth just bringing in someone else to figure it out. I can sit here and I can do legal stuff. I can, I've done hundreds of contracts, okay? But if I'm sitting there trying to redline and go back and forth.
At some point, even a high price lawyer is worth, it's more than the time and the head space it's taking for me to focus on it. I need to be able to hand that off to someone and move on. There are other things. This is not the problem I fell in love with, right? So it may get me closer to it, but this is not, now that [00:54:00] sounds like a luxury.
You'd be surprised how much if you invest yourself in making sure that experts and people, contractors, others are stepping in to take on certain things. You'll give yourself the space and the grace to focus on where you should be and that, and if you don't know where you should be. That's part of the problem too.
That's part of the problem too.
[00:54:17] Jon: It's, it's interesting, like if you, going back to your concept of focusing on the problem first and then figuring out the solution. If you're dead focused on the problem, ideally you're not finding solutions that create new problems. You know what I mean?
[00:54:32] Stephan: Right? Yeah. Right.
Or you listen. And that's not to say you need to be myopic. And the only problem, let's put this in true contra in, let's put this in actual foreign function. Do we agree keyword discovery is a problem? Would you say keyword discovery is a problem? Have you, okay, so keyword discovery is a problem. Part of keyword discovery being a problem is, is potentially the data sources are skewed, right?
MSV is not fully trustworthy. There are multiple sources. There's a lack of context when you're looking at keywords, right? You're not looking them in [00:55:00] the contextualization of how they're being interpreted as a group by. Google, for example, right? Which is someone you're trying to influence. So there's a lot of factors there.
Then there's also like context, right? There's no context to these keywords. When they get given to you, a broad match of keywords you might get out of SEMrush, we'll just give you a broad match of keywords, but beyond that, you don't. Yeah, you might get transactional navigational and whatever, which. We can argue whether or not those are accurate or not, right?
But you'll have these kind of sets to them. Now, the problem might be how do we do keyword research? But the first problem within that set might be keyword research without clustering and or categorization is meaningless. Yeah, I agree. Okay. So that's the first thing I'm falling in love with. How do I define category?
What are categories? What are they? Now, how many times have you sat in front of a massive spreadsheet, right? And you start deleting things because you wanna make the keywords that are erroneous. You wanna get them out of there, right? Except all that work [00:56:00] disappears later when you do another download in those words, come back in another sheet and you're like, oh, what was that?
Right? That's part of the problem, right? That's recognizing. So when you now start thinking about the solution, you're like, okay, so I need a model that's gonna take my negatives and store those somewhere. Then how many of those words are related to local? Or have a geographic modifier to them. Cool. I'm not dealing in locals.
Move those away. But what do you need to know first, you need an index of the naming conventions of all the locations, or you just have to sit there and go, Chicago's a city. Los Angeles is a city. New York is a city. NYC is an abbreviation for a city. We've all done this, right? We all have felt that pain.
We know what traffic feels like we should solve for that. So these are things that we're like building tools and things to not only help ourselves, but then recognize, hey, if we build a better mousetrap, why wouldn't we sell that at a low cost to many SEOs and or companies? Look at someone like Screaming Frog.
[00:57:00] Screaming Frog is bought by everyone. Used by everyone. And does it stop anyone from going in Spotify or one of the other bigger? No, of course not, because it's price point is low and it's a trusted source by everyone. Now, do you go and complain to your screaming frog? Salesperson, or do you talk to your rep or your account manager?
No, you don't because that's not what the business is. They built a good solution that does what it should do, and they iterate on it and they provide it to people. That's a good thing. I'm not saying we wanna be point solutions like that all the time. What was interesting about conductors I did not use for our professional services.
Much of our engineering team I built separately. I took kids literally who were, and I shouldn't say kids, but people would taught themselves Python and a group of them who literally were interns at one point and just loved the concept of Python and whatever, and they started learning search and then they wanted to take disparate.
They wanted to solve problems. I had my problems with the client's, problems that might not get solved in the [00:58:00] platform or that I needed to do for a sales process that I couldn't go and take guys who are women who are working on our engineering team and creating some of the coolest features and stuff.
I can't get them off those sprints. What for the potential of, I might create some No, that would be ridiculous. I had to build my own little dev team to support it. So that's also why I think you need dev within most SEO groups. That's why I think like you absolutely should give yourself, like I said, the space and grace to put in place things that can help you.
And if they end up being great and they really help you, then at that point turn 'em around and sell 'em if you can. Which by the way, in your own company, if that's like enterprise company listening to me, great. You build an AI solution that recognizes some stuff, bring that to the rest of the org, right?
You have an intent modeler, bring that to the rest of the org. See how you might apply that to the content team and how they create content, the brand team and their brand messaging. The, you can find again, center of excellence, less a channel. Channels will get replaced and or cut from budgets and or [00:59:00] outsourced, and I'm saying this in agency and or many things versus Center of Excellences can say, Hey, you know what?
Moving traffic is amazing at performance marketing and we're having a performance marketing problem with our campaigns, this and this. I think we should bring them into ABOs. No, no plug just saying it. So those guys, center of excellence can do that. Channel a little bit harder. They have to justify their existence.
And then your existence, AKA, your agency on top of that, very difficult to do versus center of excellence says, we're trying to serve everyone. We're trying to provide value to everyone. We're not gonna be able to serve every campaign, everything, every little nuance. Twitter had one SEO when I went there, can you believe that?
This is before the Elon days. One SEO worked at Twitter one. Does that make sense to you? That's crazy. Yeah. So the fact is you don't have armies of SEOs at companies. It just doesn't exist. It should, but it doesn't. And what they're charged with taking on sites with hundreds of thousands of pages. It's one person, two people at best.
That's it. Doesn't matter what [01:00:00] product you hand them, that's, that's an overwhelming odds type situation. We should recognize that and recognize that like search is more than a channel. It's an understanding of humanity. If you can use that, the advantage of your business, you'll figure out what products to create better than your competitors.
You'll figure out how to, what people actually give a crap about, and you'll serve their needs better. You'll even, by the way, this is the biggest mistake most companies make. They only look at search from a, from a acquisition funnel perspective, it's not a funnel, it's an hourglass. And all the sand goes to the bottom.
If you're, unless you're WeatherTech and you're selling one product one time to people, right? If you wanna repeat customer base, you have to treat them post-acquisition. And unfortunately, people don't invest any money in the post acquisition. They just assume that by virtue of being a customer and having spent, they'll spend again.
That is a flawed logic. Your customer is your competitor's prospect. And if you don't treat them that way, they'll be their pro. They'll be their con, their customer soon. I'm not in the business of borrowing [01:01:00] dollars. I like to keep them. So if you have a business that doesn't wanna lose in the grand scheme of things, make sure you don't have a leaky bucket.
On your customer side. Sorry, I just, I know I got a lot in my head. I live in a box. The most people I interact with frequently are a 5-year-old. And my wife, she doesn't like me talking about marketing and my five year-old doesn't get it yet, but she is getting them. So if anyone's booking to hire a really sharp 5-year-old, turning sick.
I got you.
[01:01:26] Jon: Oh
[01:01:26] Stephan: my
[01:01:26] Jon: God, this has been awesome. Come back to North Stanford, man. We'll go out, we'll get you outta the house
[01:01:30] Stephan: anytime you want. Just put pants on. But yeah, people coax me across the Wood river. I end up in New York City sometimes and, but in the meantime, I'm in my box. I'm happy here. I finally have an office in six years.
It doesn't have a bed in it, so kudos to not backing up into a bed. I'd say if you can give yourself that space and that grace again of having a room that doesn't include a bed in it, your psyche will come a little better. Plus you can get a bunch of cool lights and no one will give you too much crap for it.
So yeah. Thank you all for having
[01:01:58] Jon: me today. I really appreciate it. [01:02:00] Absolutely. Listen, we like to wrap the show with a forward looking question. So if you had to imagine 12 months from now. You go to google.com, you type in something that you're interested in. What do you expect that experience to be 12 months from now?
It's funny. It's harder to figure
[01:02:18] Stephan: out the 12 months than it is, I think the five years, but because I just don't know how far we'll get in the 12, it just, it feels like I know where we're going, but I don't think I know how fast we get there. That's the one I think whatever we see is gonna have more visuals.
I think the idea of this ai AI mode, right, if this really is where they're gonna focus, which again, I'm not so sure, I think we're chasing chat GPT at this point, and even chat. GPT is not a visual, there's not a lot of visual component to it. Humans are visual by nature. It's the reason why YouTube is like number two.
I think we're treating these scrolling mechanisms and these dopamine machines as, as these addiction products that we're willing to go through, but [01:03:00] we don't treat search that way. I wouldn't be surprised if video finds its way much more prominently. Not this like tab and whatever, not just this section, but more integration.
I forgot which, do you all remember which search engine this was? Where you could hover over the result and they give you a preview screen of where you were about to go? Who was it? Was it ask? It might've been ask. I think it was Ask. I think it was AskJeeves, right? Yeah. It was Ask Gs that turned into ask.com.
Right. But I think like less of that and more of a preview where you're about to go something more visual. I think this whole text thing, text heavy, everything. People don't like to read. They have lost, we have lost literacy. I hate to say it. I try to write an address on a letter the other day and I'm like, my God, my Your hands.
Yeah, your hands starts cramping. Yeah. Hard girl write better than I do. Right? And then I said, do I need to, like how many times have I actually had to write anything? With my hands, like typing, but, or thumbs. I just feel like [01:04:00] universal search is going to become more of what search is. Okay. You. These elements of universal we're seeing are gonna be far more integrated and less section section.
So I think schema is super important. I think structured data is super important. I think sending the right signals is super important. I think recognizing that your content needs to be chunked and sectioned in ways that that interpretation engines, that's what we'll call them, can consume that content and then decide what to do with it.
Whether it's giving you a paragraph or making a list of comparatives for you to buy from or whatever they're gonna do. We just need to start thinking of it as pieces. Content isn't a page any longer. It's chunks. It's sections, it's signals, and some people were already thinking of it that way before, but I think we need to think about that far more in the way we create things.
Because you currently don't have a great measurement mechanism to figure out where all this stuff is gonna end up coming from, right? You currently can't [01:05:00] tell the other one kicked this part over or that part over, or this link or that one. The measurements are not there. Same as voice search back in the day, right?
But don't go too far on voice search. So again, don't, I would say this isn't a shiny object. AI is serious, but let's not also jump the shark. Just start thinking about your content a little bit differently and make sure it's as structured as you can make it. That's the only quote, unquote, future proving you should be doing.
And in the meantime, expect visuals to play more of a factor. They just, they are. In the rest of the world. We just haven't caught up. From a search perspective,
[01:05:34] Jon: I think, I think you probably will nail this, this prediction, I don't know if you saw the recent news that Baidu rolled out. So if you do a search in Baidu, they will actually create a dynamic video that summarizes the search results like on the fly.
It's incredible.
[01:05:51] Stephan: We're supposed to be leaving. John, you'll get me your concept of like all we're doing from an AI perspective is worrying about how to show people stuff, not what we show them. The [01:06:00] reality is the website should be dynamic and deal with the individual uniquely depending on who they are.
If you have all this data about me, why would you serve me the same stuff that John get? We have two different needs in two different things and whatever you know about me and can use, while that will be scary at first, people will start to see it as really useful and time saving over time. So the sites that are actually gonna take AI and make that more of like, how can I solve your problems, are gonna be the ones that ultimately I think end up winning in this game.
I think more of them are too concerned about how they get found via AI and see that as a channel. Again, it's that channel versus that dynamism of why can't we use this technology to make what we give the consumer better? All these companies have a lot of wisdom in them. They need to start. Much back to that will Reynolds thing.
They need to stop sharing their wisdom in order to be more helpful.
[01:06:49] Jon: Well, Stefan, this has been amazing. Thank you. Always fun to talk with you. I
[01:06:54] Stephan: love it. Great. And you guys should not have let me off the leash as much as you did. Shame on both of you, Joe. Didn't know any better, John, you [01:07:00] should have, well,
[01:07:00] Jon: we'll
[01:07:00] Stephan: have you
[01:07:00] Jon: back and you can only talk about ai.
Okay, that's fine. That I'll wear dog collar. Very good. This zapper, before we leave, let everyone know where they can
[01:07:09] Stephan: find you and we'll wrap things up. Absolutely. So obviously on the agency side, VIBE logic.com, when it comes to my Motus Z round operandi of getting in touch, LinkedIn is the way to go. It's Stefan Baja, S-T-E-P-H-A-N-B-A-J-A-I-O on LinkedIn.
More than happy to connect And yeah, there's a random personal website about me out there in case you wanna hear more of my crazy muses along the way. That's,
[01:07:35] Jon: we'll, we'll add all those links to the, to the show notes as well. Sweet. Thank you for the opportunity. I really appreciate it. Absolutely. If you enjoyed the show, please remember to rate, subscribe, and review and we'll see you next time.
Bye-bye.