How AI-Driven Tools Are Simplifying Complex Processes for Digital Marketers

Hey, hi everyone. Welcome to your show E-Coffee with the Experts. This is your host, Ranmay here. And today we have Hans, the co founder of Adaptify with us. Hey, Hans, how is it going?

All right, I’m doing great. How are you?

All good, yeah. Great. So Hans, before we start, let’s get to know the human behind the mic. Talk us through your journey a bit and also about Adaptify, your tool, and how you got into SEO, digital marketing space. And also a bit about the features, the core competency, what Adaptify has to offer, and then we take it off from there.

Cool. Sounds good. Let me give you a quick intro myself. So I’m Hans, co founder of Adaptify SEO. What we do is we offer SEO services to marketing agencies. We’re SaaS, we’re software, so we’re fully self-serve. And we started about two years ago when AI became something that was accessible, when ChatGPT released their APIs and things like this. I have a background in software design. So I’ve worked, and before that, I worked in many marketing agencies. And my co founder, Dominic, he has a background in data engineering. He used to work at Airbus. And we just couldn’t stop talking about. So the thing that I always say is, do you remember the crypto wave? I didn’t really like it. It was quite big in London, where you came from. So the hype was really high, but utility was very low. I don’t think you’ve, for example, bought, purchased a meal with Bitcoin. You know what I mean? The utility isn’t there. But then with AI, the utility, the hype was immense, maybe even bigger. But the utility wasn’t low. Everyone was using it. Most people use it almost every day in some form. They use large language models.

And both me and my co founder were like, we couldn’t stop talking about it. We were just like, this is like a game changer. And so we literally stopped working what we were working on before and just started going, we’re going to figure out how to apply AI in business and just figure out a way to make life much easier. And we did a bunch of stuff. We built a travel advisor thing. So it scraped Google and created content of signing holidays and so editorial content. And also we built a customer support platform. I think I said, a chatbot that can help you and a help desk. But neither were solving problems that were business problems. And we ended up working with marketing agencies and they were like, okay, we do a whole bunch of stuff. But this one thing that is just really tough because Google’s algorithm is super competitive and keep changing all the time is this SEO thing. So cool, we’ll do SEO first and then we’ll go after the PPC and there’s a lot of stuff. Two years later, we’ve done one % of the SEO. I’m going to stay in SEO for a while.

So that’s a quick intro.

Lovely, lovely. And with extensive background in product design, how did you merge that experience into SEO automation at Adaptify?

Yeah, so that’s a great question. One thing that I find looking at existing SEO tools, a lot of tools are very complex. You might notice, too. You click on another tool, let’s not name any names, but they have a thousand different screens, long lists, super advanced data. And that’s fine if you’re a super big company and you have lots of time. Our customers, marketing agencies, typically don’t have a lot of time. They’re very busy. So my philosophy and our company’s philosophy is to make things super simple. And doing things simple is harder. But you can see this, feature phones at the time had a lot more buttons than the iPhone did when it came out. Making simple is actually more work. But that’s one thing, for example, having a software that’s just crazy simple to use is something that I really passionate about. It just shouldn’t think about where the button is. You should just get stuff done. So that’s one thing that I really took into it up to find. Most of the customers say the same. They find it easy to They have SEO automation space, the SaaS space, and the SEO software.

Nitch is actually very crowded. So I’ll not be wrong if I say, I’ve tried to keep it simple to then niche down to scale up a thing versus going full bang on with a lot of features, modules, and all of that. It’s the right strategy in a way to target the sweet spot there, wherein a lot of tools, again, without taking names, they offer so much, but it’s You have to go to level two, level three, level four, level five to even realize that the feature is there. It gets complex that way. And I relate to that. Like I said, I see automation space is quite crowded. So what is the biggest hurdle in scaling Adaptify? And how did you overcome those challenges?

Yeah, so the biggest thing is actually because we really started with large language models from the ground up. So the tool that we built, the software The tool that we built, the software we built, was literally not possible two years ago. So the tools we’re competing with are often older than two years and have a very different philosophy. So for me, my main challenge, where does this company go one year from now, two years from now? We don’t know how the future looks because we just started learning how currently you see a lot of AI in the context of autocomplete. You say, write me an email about X, and I write an email or create 10 questions in this and that answers it. But a lot of time in day to day time, in a marketing What you see is spend on making decisions. I call it almost a force creativity. You have to be like, All right, what’s the primary goal of the site? Let’s come up with five more ways we can rank this customer site. But you have 40 customers. You have to think of that every day, time in, day out, day in.

These features that made Adaptify really competitive is because that decision making is built into our platform. So for me, it’s like, I don’t know where the future goes, but the future goes more towards this, which is the software you can trust. And that’s not really what the software was before. Software. Software used to just be give you like, here’s some data, go make the decision yourself. And we helped the decision making a lot.

And then do you get a lot of feature requests from your clients? I mean, coming from SaaS background, I can vouch for this.

Yeah. So yes and no. I was expecting a lot of feature requests. And oh, can you guys build this and that? For example, integrations. We found actually most of the feature requests are more about better reporting and understanding, sending the right metrics to customers. That’s where we’ve put a lot of work in. And most of the features come straight away from customers. Because that tool is so simple, people don’t ask us for more buttons, which I think is, I feel really happy about the Because the moment your tool needs to have 95 buttons to please your audience, it’s just too much buttons. So people don’t… I’m not asking for sub-filters or mini-features. They’re much more about even simpling it down more, which is, Hey, can you give me the big numbers so I can share it with agent, my end customer, stuff like this.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And having a simple DIY platform makes your life simpler as a product owner. I’m not even from a business owner perspective, but as a product owner, it simplifies a lot of stuff.

Yes or no, simple doesn’t mean the tech is simple.

No, I’m not mean that way. Yeah, the usability of the product from an end user perspective. For example, you deal with marketing agencies who know what it’s all about, right? Then using the product, if that is simple, then it makes your life easier as well. And sales cycle also, I feel, is easier if your product is simple to understand.

Yeah, the simpler… Actually, this is one lesson that we shared with the best customers. If agencies have complex pricing, then it’s much harder for a customer to convert. If you have a silver platinum, silver, gold, platinum packages. They do convert better. And we found the same in our tool, which is like we have five steps to get our website fully up and running. These five steps are just a tick box. And we found the moment we launched a tick box, almost everyone just wanted to get all of them done. And it increased success and it made it fairly affordable, fast as scale. We didn’t have to train everyone up. And agencies don’t have to train up the staff, which is really important. So you’re spot on there. It’s a nice insight.

With the product, like we spoke about earlier, you’ll get a lot of fine feedbacks or let’s say, feature requests. But let’s say, even if those are not really product level change, but let’s say you got a lot of feedback there. So how do you integrate into your product development roadmap?

So you mean customers suggest feature and- Yeah, can be very small things as well.

For example, you’re presenting that information, but the way you’re presenting it, some clients might want a different format or let’s say the different way of presenting that particular information. And then, yeah, probably under some other tab, let’s say.

So we’ve had customers request something. For example, the keyword reporting you guys have, can you please add the cluster titles to it? And that ticket came in at the beginning of my day because most of our customers are in the United States. And I’m based in London, in the UK. So there’s a time zone difference. We actually have staff in Asia in quite a lot in the US and some in Europe. So we have 24 hour coverage. So when a customer request something, even late at night, that ended up happening at the beginning of my day. I just ended up building it and pushing it because it was something I was already working on. So the customer was like, Oh, can I have this feature? And then at the end of the day, and then he woke up and we said, Sure, it’s there, with a little loom video showing where to find it. So we can sometimes ship stuff, literally in hours, especially if it’s something that just makes sense. Our rule is if two separate people that don’t know each other request a feature, we build it. Because if one person suggests it, we save it, we write it down, we have a backlog for ideas.

And if two separate people do it, we prioritize it really highly. And if it’s easy to do, we just build it. Because they’re typically right. If they ask for something, they’re probably right.

Yeah, I have quite a few agency folks. If they are asking for it, it might be something which is probably required or is a genuine ask It’s not for their convenience, really. And then I know a lot of product owners, we should do these best practices or let’s say take suggestions for their clients, even if they don’t have any for that matter, just to better that product and see How they, let’s say, their product life cycle for the next six months, they have scope to add a few more tasks to it or modifications or changes. Then they take those feedbacks from their existing client to then ensure, just to understand the nerve of the market at that particular point.

Oh, I have a great example. So this is a small feature because smaller features are easier to show as an example. So we have, we do content and backlinks and strategy. And We had this thing, multiple customers request, Can I please edit the slug? So domain name. Com/blog/10-things-you-want-to-learn-about-ex, something like that. Can we change the slug in Adaptify? And as a feature? Then we were like, Oh, we should probably build this, Editable Slugs. And then we realized why the people wanted to edit. No one is, oh, tomorrow is a great day. The sun is shining. Let’s go edit slugs. You know what I mean? No one is excited about this. So we asked all the customers that requested this, why? And they said, In one instance, for example, we already have this title. So when we publish it, it will overwrite an existing title or add to it, which is not good. We were like, so you don’t want eligible slugs. You just want us to check if the slug already exists and then a better one. We wrote the feature that way, which is a very AI-powered thing because you just first do a little data analysis, but then you send it back to ChatGPT and say, hey, create a better slug because this one already exists.

Another customer was like, oh, for some keywords, when the keyword is super long. The slug is too long. I’m like, okay, we can also just ask AI, is the slug too long? And if it’s too long, just rewrite it to a shorter one. So we have six or seven separate people requesting editable slugs, where actually they needed smarter, smarter like article titles, article URLs. We still don’t have editable slugs. We have now just, they just work. People don’t request any changes on this anymore. So where you take a request, but then you have to figure out why is it requested. I love doing these little smart things and making our tool less frustrating. And again, we killed a button because that could have been a button, right? Or edit this log or print this log. And now AI has triple-checked it based on feature requests. But that was not something I came up with on my own. That was something we had to, as a team, with customers, have a back and forth around.

Absolutely. And finally, Hans, looking back on your journey, what advice would you give to someone or our listeners today who’s trying or continuing launching their own tech startup?

I have loads and I love a hot take as well. There’s a few. I think one that I think really matters is get really good at something. So we started with a slightly different like customer support. And we realized we would never be able to be the best at this. And then, this was two years ago or even longer. And then the moment we fell into the SEO, we were like, we want to be the best at this. We want to be like 10X better than anyone else. That gives you a competitive advantage, even if you want to do that, you go further. So if you’re building any software, don’t build, oh, it’s a Trello, but 10 % easier. It has to be like 10 times better. And there’s often a niche where you can be 10 times better. And that’s the thing we focus on. So for us, we know marketing agencies, a lot of them hate doing most of the SEO bits. So we were like, we’re going to be 10 times better than anything else out there. That’s what I think got us to where we are right now.

And then across all these years, Hans, you must have dealt with a lot of clients and a lot of success stories there. What is your favorite client story?

Favorite client story? Let me think of one. This one I don’t have on top of my head. Oh, this is a fun one. When we launched Adaptify, about two years ago, we had a demo with a customer and the customer said, I love your tool, but it’s quite new and you’re too cheap. You weren’t super cheap. It was 300 a month or something. It wasn’t 29 a month or something. And I was just like, that’s such strange feedback. It was just like, there’s no way that all the things you’re promising works for that amount of money. And it did. At the time, it did. Then with another customer that had the same thing, it was just like, yeah, You’re showing me a great product, but no one has done it for this amount of money. I don’t trust it. I’ll try it, but I just don’t trust it. And then they tried it, loved it. And then we realized we actually had to increase our prices because you can offer a much better service if you increase your prices. And then when we changed that, that first customer came back. He was like, Finally, you’re charging what was as expected.

And for an agency, the prices we charged were between 4X to 10X cheaper than the competitive quality we’re at. So we’re still super cheap. But I thought it was Hilarious. Just the customer literally went like, you were too cheap. And it didn’t pay at the time because we were too cheap. I think that’s hilarious. But it makes sense. For example, with a car or a phone. I have an iPhone, you might have a similar phone. If there’s a $100 phone, you wouldn’t buy one. You want to have the best. It’s not actually that crazy, but I love that. I love that interaction. There’s still a customer that we’re quite close with.

Loly. This is one of the unique ones that I’ve heard from my guests. This is I’m in psychology. From a marketing perspective, it shows a different side of it. How as a consumer of any product or service, how do you feel about resonating with any particular product or service that you are going to be using? The psychology of having such a good product which is exactly matching your needs, but your pricing expectation of that product is a bit higher to what you’re getting it at and you lose the trust there. The That is so much of human psychology there in this particular use case which you just mentioned.

Yeah, and also this simple stuff. At a certain price point, you can’t make a 25 API calls or have AI check itself because it doubles the cost. We are at a price point where we can call AI a whole bunch of times and increase the quality with it. And that’s a much better, I think it’s a much better place to be. Same with a phone or with a car. You want to be at a price point where you can use high quality materials, stuff like that. So it was actually really good feedback. That’s also another one for SaaS. Being at a price point that’s appropriate is actually a really nice place to be in.

Absolutely. Absolutely. We’re the answer. This has been a brilliant conversation. And thank you so much for taking out time to do this with us. And for our audiences, if they want to reach out to you, how do they do that?

They can go to the website, adaptify. AI, and we have really cool… You’ve tried it as well. We have a little self-serve demo, which gives you in 30 seconds It’s a little flavor. You can see how the philosophy a little bit, you’ll probably… If you watch this, if you go to it, up to federal AI. We do offer also a seven-day trial. You can use everything, including the backlink building feature, which is insane to have that on a free trial. But we’re quite confident about our services. We know we convert because we know our tool’s amazing. Yeah, that’s us.

That’s a good one there. Lovely. Thank you so much, Hans. Really appreciate it.

It was a pleasure.

It was really nice talking with Sure. Cheers.