Mike Rhodes: You don't ever quite know where you're going, but the process of taking that next step is what gets you towards the thing and you learn a lot along the way. The more stuff you give away, the more you're going to get people to buy your shit. That is the only constraint, isn't it? It's time to turn ideas into cool shit.
[Voiceover]: Welcome to ADD to cart, Australia's leading
Nathan Bush: e commerce podcast that Express delivers all
Mike Rhodes: you need to know in the fast moving world of online retail. Here's your.
[Voiceover]: What do you get when you cross a data geek, an AI innovator, an ex agency owner and a helicopter enthusiast? You get the marvelous Mike Rhodes, who just happens to be our guest today. Welcome back to ADD to cart. As always, my name is Bushy and I am joining you from the land of the terrible people here in Brisbane, Australia. I'm so excited to introduce you to to Mike Rhodes. He's one of my most favourite people to chat with because you never know what is going to come out of his mouth. He is a man who lives and breathes ideas. In fact, when he started up his new business after selling his agency, he literally just called his new business Mike Rhodes Ideas. That's how many ideas he has. This is a venture dedicated to helping businesses unlock the full potential of their data and their advertising campaigns. Mike is a former agency owner who many of us will know because he ran web savvy for 17 years. He's also a celebrated author. He's been named in the top 20 PPC influences and is an innovator in AI and automation. Let's not forget that he tinkers with helicopters and has a penchant for mountain biking. Did I mention he's an overachiever? I think I did. In this episode we dive into how Mike has created and uses scripts, data and AI to help businesses crack open the black box of Google Performance Max campaigns that spent years perfecting. And now he's using AI scripts to do it on scale really cheaply for so many e commerce businesses. It's a script that's causeways at Google hq. As Mike explains he heard that it was actually mentioned in their town hall. It's a script that's helped agencies win new clients and it's even caught the attention of organizations such as unicef. Today we explore this script as well as the future of search in the age of AI, how Mike's curiosity has driven his career choices to date and his golden rule building things that help as many people as possible. Now, before we get into today's episode. This is the part of the show where I normally plug the newsletter but I want to switch it up today. I want to invite you into the Add to Cart Campus community. It's a learning community with about 150 people in there at the moment. Our goal is to help e commerce professionals learn from each other and share great things. In there you will find our inspiration library filled with articles to keep you informed and inspired in your job. You will find our tech and services directory where we list services that we hand on heart, believe in and can recommend. And you'll have the opportunity to mix with some of the best in e commerce. It's free to join Head over to add to CART.com Aucampus love to see you in there. All right, let's get into this chat with Mike. It is a fascinating one. As always, a big thanks to our partners Shopify plus and Deliver in person for making this episode and the Add to Cart podcast possible. Here's Mike Rhodes.
Nathan Bush: Mike, welcome to ADD to Cart.
Mike Rhodes: Nathan, thanks for inviting me on, mate. Good to be here.
Nathan Bush: It was great. And twice in two weeks. I saw you at the E Commerce social last week in Melbourne. Thank you for coming along.
Mike Rhodes: Oh, that was pleasure. That was a great event. Congrats. Sold out 150 people. Great panel. We all had a great night. Free booze. Fantastic.
Nathan Bush: It was great. Thank you. Convert digital for the free booze. Love that. But no, it was awesome to see it. Such a great mix of people and people that I was like looking around. Oh, Mike, haven't seen you for ages. Brendan. I haven't seen you for ages. Like every. And I was like, I was kind of felt like I was ping ponging around the room all night, not being able to get into a great conversation. But that's the fun of them.
Mike Rhodes: You were the hostess with the mostest mate. You were doing well.
Nathan Bush: Do my best. All right, Mike, let's get into it. I'm going to start with your LinkedIn tagline because I always do my research and I always go to my guests LinkedIn page first. And your tagline is one of the best that I've seen. All right, I'm going to read it out for everyone listening. Dad, husband, thinker, Mountain Biker, Top 20, PPC, Influencer, Serial, Founder, speaker. That's a lot. Is that in order of importance?
Mike Rhodes: Yeah, I guess. Well, the first two, definitely.
Nathan Bush: Dad, husband.
[Voiceover]: Okay.
Mike Rhodes: Yeah, I sort of, I think I must have been thinking that when I wrote them. So let's go with yes.
Nathan Bush: Yes. Well, thinker is an interesting one because it leads me to your current venture. I don't know if you call it a venture or what you call. I'd love to hear it from you because it is actually called Mike Rhodes Ideas. That's the name. Like, that's where you're working right now, Mike Rhodes Ideas. And you've got an amazing backstory as an agency owner, an entrepreneur, author and Internet cafe owner, plus a love passion for helicopters. Now working on Micro Ideas. What is Microads Ideas?
Mike Rhodes: Yeah. If you can tell me by the end of this, I'd be really grateful. Help me explain what it is you're
Nathan Bush: going to give me. A thousand ideas.
Mike Rhodes: Well, the bit I loved from my last 17 years building web savvy as an agency was the conversations. Whether that was brainstorming with the team, whether that was sitting down with a client, but not just like, hey, this is what we've done. But like, what are you stuck with? What's the. I just love solving problems. I've always, always loved that. And I didn't want to be one of those guys who sells their business and starts a consulting firm. And like, I just, I never loved the word consultant. I, I mean, I do a bit of consulting, I'm on a couple of advisory boards, I mentor a couple of agencies. But it just feels kind of Nick gray and boring and stale. And I, I think I heard about it. I'm fairly sure I heard this on a podcast somewhere. And I just thought, that's genius. I'm stealing that and calling it an ideas company. And because it's the ideas bit that I love, I am not. My old team will tell you this. I am not an operational person. Like, I'm really good at starting shit. I'm really bad at the last 20%. So if I can walk into a room, stand around the whiteboard with one of these for a bit and solve problems and ask questions and chuck a whole bunch of stuff on the wall and then go right over to you guys to go implement that and operationalize it. Off you go. I'll be over here doing the same thing on that whiteboard next door. That's the bit that I've always loved the most. So it just sort of made sense to not over promise and under deliver by saying, I'm a consultant and I'm going to come in and do all this. I'm like, I am going to bring some ideas and that's it. Like, don't expect me to do a whole bunch of stuff after that.
Nathan Bush: How do people respond when you Go. I'm here for the ideas. I'm not here to implement stuff.
Mike Rhodes: Well, if I was any good at marketing, we'd find out. But I don't really know because I haven't really pushed it super hard. It's been very much inbound to this point and that's kind of the way I like it. So, yes, I don't really know. Can't that question. I'm very bad at answering the question, like, what do you do?
Nathan Bush: Yeah, but that's kind of interesting in itself, right. When you can't. You don't have a hammer and a nail. So tell me though, what I am interested though is obviously with Web Savvy and we'd love. I'd love to unpack the journey with Web Savvy because that was your agency for 17 years, really leading the space in the search department here locally, but without the boundaries of web savvy. When you just go out there as the. I'm the ideas guy and I know you're playing around the AI space and the automation space as well as being really well known for search, how do you put barriers around the types of problems that you can solve?
Mike Rhodes: That's a really, really good question. Yeah, the power of positive constraints. Like, I talk to my kids about this. Like, if someone says to you, sing a song, like sing a country song about a guy that dies and his dog leaves him. It's like, oh, okay. Right now we've got like.
Nathan Bush: I'm not sure that narrows it down on country songs, though.
Mike Rhodes: Well, that is all country songs, isn't it? Yeah, but, but like, yeah, those constraints. So I suppose, yes, I've been known a bit for some Google Ads stuff. I love teaching, I love inspiring people. So it kind of made sense to go. There's this wonderful concept of the adjacent possible, which I pictured like this big scary house and you have no idea what's out the back, but all you can do is just open the door and you open the door and you walk into a room and then there are three other doors and that's your choice. Like you can pick a door and when you walk into that next room, oh, you learn a bit and there's some cool stuff there and then there's three other doors and then there's three other doors and three other doors and you don't ever quite know where you're going. But the process of taking that next step is what gets you towards the thing. And you learn a lot along the way, which is a bit like life, I guess, going super philosophical for a moment was like, when we look back, you can see how all the dots line up and you go. Makes bloody obvious sense. Of course that led to that. But when you're in it, you're like, I have no idea which way I'm going. What's next? Like, where, where am I heading to? But it's obvious in hindsight. And so the idea was to, okay, let's go the adjacent possible to Google Ads. I had a wonderful dev work with me for eight years. She went off and found her dream job couple of years ago and inevitably, as soon as that happens, shit starts breaking. So I had the time, I had the curiosity, I started learning to code again. I learned back in uni and as a kid I tinkered around a bit. I quite enjoy it. It's solving problems when you reframe it, it's just, it's a way to solve problems and turn your ideas into stuff. I was like, I really like this. And so I started doing that and learned a little bit of code. Put a post on LinkedIn which blew up. We'll probably come back and talk about that. But it was just like, oh, this is really good. And this is also where I see the future of Google Ads going, of agencies going. I feel obligated, maybe that's very egotistical, obligated to kind of share that belief and help the agencies that share that belief to like figure out what that future looks like and to head in that direction. And so it wasn't super conscious, but that's the constraint. It's sort of like you're going from ads towards this world of AI. How do we navigate that journey? And so I've been building little things and tinkering and sharing ideas along the way. And yeah, I don't mean I know nothing about so many types of businesses. Right. I'd love the business of business, but I know nothing about manufacturing. I know nothing about all kinds of businesses. This little corner of the world I've got some ideas about. So I, I stay in my lane.
Nathan Bush: My goodness, you've given me so many doors to unpack there in terms of where we can go in our conversation. But I so related to that because when you talked about the doors to open, I went through my own stuff last year with closing an agency and then I was like, well, what do I do now? And I was like, there are so many opportunities. Like we were talking about education, consulting, coaching, more content. Like there were so many different opportunities. And I said, all right, 2024 is going to be the year of fun. And the idea of just opening a few doors and seeing what's behind them. I call them boxes. I always have this picture of I've got all these boxes stacked up in the corner of my office here, and I can choose which ones I open and which ones I keep closed. Because as soon as you open a box, you're like, all right, you're in. Like, you've got to unpack that box now.
Mike Rhodes: Got to do something with it.
Nathan Bush: Got to do something with it. So I love your door analogy. Tell us about if we go back to the point where you transition from web savvy into this idea of starting to open the doors up and exploring different ideas, can you share what the moment was that led you from exiting the agency game and then having this opportunity to explore new ideas?
Mike Rhodes: I guess I was pretty much building the parachute on the way down, really. But I had, like I said, I'd shared this free script, I guess it was about a year previous, so just before ChatGPT came out, and that went bananas on LinkedIn. So I was sort of like, oh, okay, there's something here. And I'd always had a second business off to the side. It was never big enough to really focus on. The agency always kept winning out in terms of my time and attention. But this other business I had always taught other agencies how to do what we do, so how to run Google Ads properly. And that sort of morphed into some analytics and some data analysis and other bits.
Nathan Bush: You're being an agency teaching other agencies how to do what you do.
Mike Rhodes: Why not?
Nathan Bush: Yeah,
Mike Rhodes: okay, basically give it away. And because why did I do that? I think there are like digital agencies are a little bit above used car salesmen in the minds of an awful lot of small business owners. Because every small business owner has sadly been ripped off by an agency along the way at some point, maybe more than once. And that really pisses me off.
[Voiceover]: Deuce, mud, doo doo. Sorry, just doing some research. When who Gives a Crap became a household name in Australia, the team decided that it was time to take on the world with a business model that relies on D2C sales rather than traditional supermarkets. It wasn't going to be a paint by numbers exercise. That's why they upgraded to Shopify Plus. With Shopify plus, who Gives a Crap was able to take advantage of expansion stores into the us, UK and Europe with customized brand messaging, prices, currencies, checkouts, and yep, you guessed it, new words for poop with automated B2B capabilities. Front end customization with Shopify Flow and seamless integration with partners such as Klaviyo and Recharge. Who gives a crap are taking on the world. They've surpassed 1 million international orders and increased customer lifetime value by 20%. Check out shopify.com auplus and get in touch with the Aussie Shopify plus team to see how Shopify plus can help you take on the world.
Mike Rhodes: When I was starting out a long time ago, when the dinosaurs were around, there were a lot of quite big companies who shall remain nameless because my lawyers aren't good enough, because I'm allergic to lawyers who were ripping people off. And it, it just, it really pissed me off. And I think that was really one of the reasons that I ended up starting an agency because this guy one day said to me, mate, I really need your help. I know you keep saying, like, you can't help me, but I really need your help. And so I wanted to, in my own little way, say, like, here are some ways to do it. I think that's always been my mo. I just, if I learn something, I want to teach it. I have this, like, desperate need for, I don't know, affirmation or being useful. I just love being useful. And so if I learn something and I'm always learning new shit because I'm just insatiably curious, my MO is to then teach the stuff that I'm learning. If I think it's going to be useful to people, I don't want to sit on that and hoard it. I feel like I need to teach. And so it was natural after I sold to, well, I was supposed to sit around and do nothing for a bit, but that didn't last more than about three weeks.
Nathan Bush: How long were you around to do nothing for?
Mike Rhodes: Like, oh, I'm just going to solve this problem and do a bit of code and oh, then this and then AI is moving so fast, right? That sort of, having any kind of having that time to be able to go full into that has just been such a luxury. I get that I'm talking from a point of privilege here, but it's been so cool just to explore that and tinker and try new things. And I basically now spend my day solving problems and I just love that.
Nathan Bush: It's really interesting that you almost spin the conversation around those moments where you shared things as egotistical or, you know, wanting affirmation or whatever as a negative.
Mike Rhodes: But hold me, Nathan, hold me.
Nathan Bush: Turn into a therapy session. But it struck me from the outside we didn't have a lot to do with each other. In the web savvy days, I came along a lot of your stuff as you were building this in public and sharing your scripts so generously. And I just thought, who is this guy and why is he giving all this away for free? And it's really interesting stuff. It's not fluff, it's not, hey, reply to this LinkedIn thread with Rocket fuel to get my free thing in your inbox. It was genuine sharing and I want to show you how to do this. There's a script available over here. Here's the go use it go experiment. And it was done from a pure intention of go play with this. I'd love some feedback. I'd love to know how you're using it. Let's build this together. I'm going to be leading the charge, but here it is. Go play. And that was really refreshing for me.
Mike Rhodes: Thanks, man. Thank you. I'm sure there's a selfish angle there. I heard this line the other day on a podcast of a guy, Dan Harris, talking about the Dalai Lama with this phrase, wise selfishness. I love that. So it's like, I'm sure there is. Like, I'm marketer, right? Direct response marketer through and through for 20 years. So the more stuff you give away, the more you're going to get people to buy your shit. I mean, ultimately, you know, still pays the mortgage. So I, I still sell a paid version of that script. But yeah, I give the free one away. I give a whole bunch of other stuff away because it just feels like the right thing to do. And the LinkedIn algorithm, I don't really spend much time thinking about that, but I'm sure it helps. Yeah, the more I give away, the more it seems to do well.
Nathan Bush: It's doing phenomenally. So tell us about the first script that you put up on LinkedIn. That post that you said really took off and caught you by surprise. What was it and how did you kick it off?
Mike Rhodes: So we were chatting internally. So I've worked with a number of amazing people back at Web Savvy, Stacy and Calvin and many, many others who are too many to name. But we were talking about, like, how we would try and figure out, so backstory Google performance max. In the early days, we talked about it as like revenue max for Google, not for you. It spends money where it decides it wants to spend money across all of the different platforms within Google. And we kind of worked out fairly early on. Huh. If we look at some numbers in here, we can work out how much video was shown. And if you go through and make sense of all of these numbers over here, which is painful to do, but you can do it, we can work out how much was actually shown in terms of like shopping ads and then there's the rest. And then this amazing guy in Copenhagen saw the stuff I'd done and he reached out and we had a chat and he showed me this little trick that he'd figured out to work out. You could work out which bits would display and which bits were searched. So now we can chop PMAX into four chunks of traffic. And we were doing this manually to start with. And then I was learning enough code just to be able to start to automate that. And I've always been really good with spreadsheets. So turn it into a pretty chart so that you can, you know, have that insight much faster and you can visually see where your money is going. The bit where I knew this was going well is I've got a few mates inside of Google. I won't name names but they told me that so they have this like big sit down meeting every Friday. Thank God it's Friday meeting across the whole thing. Like Sundar sometimes does it in Mountain View. I've been in the room once. That was epic. I didn't get to go into that meeting, but I've like wandered around where the amphitheater is and where they have that. My name got mentioned twice in two of these Friday meetings in a positive way because something to do with this script because sort of like I think I have no idea what was said, they wouldn't tell me that bit but obviously along the lines of, oh bugger, someone's figured it out. Like this stuff that was hidden is now visible. And that script just went absolutely bananas. I mean like my average LinkedIn post, not that I really did much before then, probably got about five and a half impressions. This thing got a million impressions all told and it just went ballistic. And so it was really easy and obvious like after I'd sold and I had the time to build out a paid version of that that does way more stuff inside the spreadsheet because again, I'm a spreadsheet nerd and I like doing that with just insights into all these different areas and I just chucked it online. I was speaking at an event in Italy, so I launched it at that and it's just gone way better than expected ever since. It's been great.
Nathan Bush: That's amazing. And I'm not enough of a Google nerd. To be in the level of detail that you are. But when you were coming up with that script, when you noticed that you're able to split the impressions across those different ad types and kind of decipher the PMAX code, were you coming from a point of I'm doing this because I know how to do it, or I'm doing this because I know this is a major problem for advertisers. They need this information.
Mike Rhodes: I was doing it to like, how do we make our clients results better? Like, I wanted to know where it all really started was, okay, we're getting great Results, we're getting ROAS of 7 and we're spending a grand a day. What I really wanted to know was if we increase that budget to 1500 a day and then to 2 grand a day, what would happen to ROAS? And would the machine start to, would it just take all that extra money and start to waste it on display and video? That's really what I wanted to know. Or would it assign a big chunk of that to shopping and would that high roas continue? And so it was a way for us to monitor and improve our own experiments. And then it just grew from there. And we'd also being able to chart it and being able to see that by day, and you'd see this big spike where YouTube would suddenly be spending half your budget. It enabled you then to dive in and make some changes way, way earlier than you otherwise would to get that thing back on track, make some changes. There's not a million changes that you can make. Pmax is kind of a bit of a black box, but there's a lot more than many people think you can make. And so it was this early warning, canary in the coal mine kind of system, so the guys could do what they do so well.
Nathan Bush: And so you needed that baseline of these channels, whether it's YouTube video or otherwise. We actually don't want our money going in there because they have less ROI than say, a shopping campaign where we want more money going into.
Mike Rhodes: And we, we don't want to ignore PMAX and stick to shopping because smart shopping popped up for a while and then disappeared. And people sort of saw pmax as a replacement for smart shopping. Standard shopping is still very much alive, especially given Google's announcement last week of now the two are sort of on par and pmax doesn't steal all of the revenue. But the fierce, certainly back then a couple of years ago, was that the PMaxification of everything was going to continue. And we've Seen this with other things that Google has done where they really want to push a new thing. The old thing suddenly starts to wither and die a little bit. And so our fear was that old shopping campaigns would, would not get the impressions that we would be forced into pmax, which to Google's credit hasn't happened, at least not yet. But that was our fear. Like, okay, we're going to have to master this thing if we're going to do that. We need more data. So let's figure out a way to automate the getting of that data because doing it manually is just too slow. And that's really at the core of really all of my scripts. I'm not trying to, certainly not try to replace people or remove people, but or even to, to do stuff in the interface. I'm not trying to make automated changes to Google Ads campaigns because I've seen some of the crazy ways that people misuse scripts. But it's just automating, turning data into insight so that you can, you know, sorry, certain data into information so you can get to insight much, much faster. And you don't spend all of that time downloading stuff and cleaning data and reordering columns in Excel. It's just that stuff should be automated so that whenever you need to, you open up the sheet and bang, there's everything that you need beautifully presented that enables you to then have that insight, talk to the client, solve the problem, improve results, move on.
Nathan Bush: Amazing. So I'm going to play dummy, which I do very well here. Tell me we're talking a lot about scripts. This might be a foreign world for some people listening. Can you talk us through if I'm, say, a merchant and I'm seeing one of your scripts that go up on LinkedIn and you go, hey, look, look at what I can run. And it has this spreadsheet which spits out where your ads being spent and the likelihood of where an incremental spend will go and the results that it will get for you. How do I as a merchant actually use your script?
Mike Rhodes: Because it sounds really scary, right? I'm using words like script and JavaScript and it is the simplest thing in the world and it's a great way for someone that's sort of not ranked raw beginner, but sort of advanced beginner to start to open their eyes and go, oh my God, this is what's possible. Because once you get this first little bit, once you go through that door and into that room, you see these other doors and you're like, oh, I Can't wait to see what's behind that next door. So a script is really just a tiny little bit of code. It's written in this thing called JavaScript. It looks like gobbledygook. It's just a piece of code that you don't have to change, you do anything with. You copy it from my site, from all the other people that give away free scripts, and you paste it into a special area inside your Google Ads account and then it does stuff. And so yes, it could make changes to your account. None of mine do that. All mine do is just go grab the data from the Google computers and dump it into a spreadsheet and then make that data useful, turn it into useful information, turn it into pretty charts, alerts. Just make it useful. So again that that time to insight instead of wasting all of that time or staring at the Google ui, which is basically a whole lot of numbers, instead of doing that. Our brains are really good at spotting patterns and it's much easier to do that visually. So I take all of the data, turn it into pretty charts and go. There you go. It's much easier to spot the problem or find the anomaly or see the trend when you can see it visually.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, awesome. That's a really good explanation. Thank you for that. What kind of changes have you seen some clients or contacts even make off the back of that initial script?
Mike Rhodes: On the agency side, I've had people tell me just how many more clients they've won. They've literally shown them the spreadsheet during the sales process and said, we can tell all of this stuff about your performance max campaigns. And like, I mean, I get people emailing me on LinkedIn and I need to send you some money. This is winning me all these clients. I've had businesses just basically say thank you. Like now I've feel like I understand it. There's transparency. I mean really, I mean like, let me just name drop here for a moment just to satiate my ego massively. I'm really happy with like some of the names, some very, very big agencies, you know, the dentures of the world. But some of the businesses like we had the UN bought the other day.
Nathan Bush: The un?
Mike Rhodes: The un. Like a department of the un. But yeah, it blows my mind the
Nathan Bush: number of people email from the UN saying we love your script.
Mike Rhodes: I got an email saying the with a UN email address saying they bought. So I wrote to them and said like, please don't pay. I'd like to refund you because I quite like what you do. And yeah, unicef, Helly Hansen Body Shop, like some big brands have been using it. I'm like, really? They must have, like people way smarter than me doing this kind of shit internally. But it's just. That's been kind of unexpected and quite cool.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. Have you had. I know we mentioned that your name has been brought up by Google, but I can imagine that they're not super stoked that you're kind of lifting some of the veil on what's behind PMAX.
Mike Rhodes: I've had a lot of Googlers follow me on LinkedIn over the past year. I've spotted that trend, but I haven't spoken to anybody in there, so I really wouldn't know.
Nathan Bush: Okay, and after this first script that you developed and released so generously, what other scripts or automations have you come up with? What kind of doors have you gone through after that one?
Mike Rhodes: Well, a lot of that has come from. I mentioned Stacy before, my old head of SEM at Web Savvy, and Trent as well. Like, they, they're still in the trenches, they're still on the tools doing the stuff. So I will get messages from them saying, what about this? Could we do this? I'm like, yes, absolutely. Give me a couple of days. But I really wanted to build a community around it that hasn't worked exactly the way I thought. So when I sold it, Web Savvy, I shut down Agency Savvy. That was the thing I was doing all the teaching through just because they were too intertwined. The tech stack was messy, we had no documentation for anything. Usual stuff, you know. So just to shut all that down and start again clean was just such a mental relief. So I started a new community on Circle, which has been pretty cool. That's where I deliver all the paid scripts and stuff. And it isn't sort of like a super active, hundreds of people in there every day going, hey, how you going, gm and all that stuff. But there are some, some regulars in there that are sort of always in there and most of the ideas come from there or people saying, could you change the script to do this? I'm like, absolutely. If you're going to like that, then loads of other people are going to benefit from that. Actually, gosh, there's a thought I haven't had in a long time. I went to a Robert Kiyosaki conference my first weekend in Australia. 2001.
Nathan Bush: Rich dad, poor dad.
Mike Rhodes: Yeah, yeah, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. But Cash Flow Quadrant is the even better book. That was basically what started this whole business journey for me. Was Cash Quadrant and the E myth from Michael Gerber. And somebody got up and asked a question on the first day and he basically ripped him a new one for about 10 minutes about how selfish it was to ask that question. Not a question that was going to benefit everybody in the room. And he was an incredible educator. I learned so much from him and that has always stuck with me of like ask the question that's going to benefit everybody. So what's the feature? What's the thing that you can add to this that benefits everybody using it? Not this tiny, tiny narrow sliver of yes, I could build it, but it's really only going to help you. I want to build the thing that helps 90 plus percent. So that's kind of always been like a. I hadn't thought of that until now, but that's like a loop that plays in the background of is this going to help lots and lots of people?
Nathan Bush: I've got a feeling you're always having ideas. Micro adds ideas.
Mike Rhodes: That is the only constraint, isn't it? It's time to turn ideas into cool shit.
[Voiceover]: How was your last E Commerce delivery experience? Did your order arrive on time and undamaged or did it fail to fulfill expectations? If you are a high value brand, just think about the low value experiences in the last mile affecting your replacement reputation. Delivered in full on time or DYFOT if you're in a hurry is a metric that matters for retailers and customers.
Mike Rhodes: Why?
[Voiceover]: Because it shows where the deliveries are happening reliably and on time. Many Aussie retailers are settling for 70 to 80% DYFOT scores and dealing with a lot of unhappy customers. However, after partnering with deliver in person, experience driven brands like Samsonite, the Party People and July see a consistent 99.6% D score. Don't settle for less. Make your last mile experience the first thing that customers remember. Learn more@deliverinperson.com.
Nathan Bush: But I hear you on Community. I love that you're doing it that way. We've also got Circle, Community, FRT and Campus so it's going okay. But again it's a time constraint. But what we've got is we've got about 150 listeners in there and we'll throw things up. There's probably 20 posts a week kind of thing, but just enough that if people get stuck or they go what's like minded people? What do you think about this? Or any recommendations on this?
Mike Rhodes: It's nice just to have a central
Nathan Bush: place that people can ask those questions for the benefit of everyone.
Mike Rhodes: Because running a business is a lonely endeavor, often and scary. And just knowing that there are people going through the same shit as you is just. It's just a huge mental relief and someone that you can ask questions of. Because we tend to think, don't we, that I'm going through this. I'm the only person in the world going through this. But you forget that tens of thousands of people have been through the same thing before and will do again. But when you're in it, it feels so big and so scary. And having a community like that around you. Well done building that. That's cool.
Nathan Bush: That's cool. So you talked there about people wanting to throw money at you via your LinkedIn DMs. Have you worked out how you're going to commercialize this model?
Mike Rhodes: Well, yeah, Circle. So I sell the scripts through Circle. It took me about six months to actually build a website. You know, one day I'll take this seriously and it'll do really well. It's been a really fun journey. So it is commercial. I mean, that's my main form of income now.
Nathan Bush: How do you price scripts? I mean, because the value of scripts, when you talk about value, right, for an agency owner, is infinity, essentially. When you know that it can win your business, get your business through the door for the first time, or if
Mike Rhodes: your team are spending even an hour a week on this every week. And the way I've done my pricing, my pricing is just pay once. That's it. There's no subscription. There's no ongoing. I do all the support because if someone has a problem, I want to know about it. Because there's this old YC thing. If one person is asking that question, there are 10 people not asking the same question. So I want to know if something's broken or unclear or there's a great new idea for a new feature to build. So I've iterated. I'm just about to release version 80 next week. So it keeps changing, keeps getting better. Where the hell was I going with that? I have no idea. Pricing. Do you remember Basecamp?
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Mike Rhodes: Yeah. So they've just created this new Slack killer Campfire. They've taken the old Campfire sort of part of Basecamp and re released it. And he bought the domain for a lot ofmoney apparently once dot com. So his whole pricing model with Campfire is once you pay once you get the code, do whatever you like with it. So for $299 you can replace Slack. I'm pretty sure my old agency, now that there's two agencies and 50, 60, 70 people are probably paying 10 grand a year on slack. And how many businesses would be paying hundreds of thousands for 300 bucks? You can get rid of that Slack bill. And so seeing DHH and those guys, Jason Fried do that after I'd had the same idea, they didn't copy me. But just seeing that people that smart have gone the same way is really kind of reassuring. And I really like it. I did it because I hate paperwork and I don't want to be chasing bloody credit card dropouts. And what was that tool we used to stunning and dunning and all of that stuff? Like I hate that stuff. So I'm like, hey, once I'll do the support, I'll get you up and running and then we're good and you can have free upgrades for life. You never need to pay me anything again. And yeah, for an agency, 400 bucks is nothing like this. There's the single account version for 200 or an agency version for 400. It's nothing. And then I was like, I've got this new thing, agency owners, you can have that included. No, don't pay me anything extra because you've already paid me 400 bucks. That's fine. Have this new one and it just seems to work. Well, it should do, right? I think it should. I think that it's never price, it's value. Oh, do I want to tell that story? I won't mention names. When I was coming up and I was sort of like starting to be on stages in 2007, I remember sitting in the kitchen of people whose names I won't mention and they were berating me saying my stuff was too cheap. And they're like, this is the value you offer and this is the price. And I went yeah. And they said it should be the other way around. You'll learn. Hahaha. Young guy doesn't know what he's doing. And I went, if I ever do that, come around and kill me please. Because I hate what you are doing. You know that it's this much value and you're charging all of this for it. You know you're ripping people off. And they would have all these different ways of justifying it. We don't know who the 10% are that will actually go through the course and finish the program, but the ones that do, oh yes, they'll do really really well. And they ended up leaving the country for tax purposes.
Nathan Bush: You spend more time convincing people than you do building the thing.
Mike Rhodes: Yeah, yeah, and hiring lawyers to protect you and locking people into contracts and yeah, there's agencies that do that or people on stage that do. I hate that shit. It should be an absolute no brainer, way more value than you pay. You feel good after it, I feel good after it. Everyone's happy. Like that's the only way to do business. Right. I love it.
Nathan Bush: I love it. So tell us, Mike around. Obviously now that you've had time to unpack and I'm sure you've got a million ideas in the back of your head. You are on the forefront of search and AI and we know search is getting a bit of an AI upheaval. Some of it's coming through now, especially in the US where Google are doing their summaries and presenting much more information within the search results itself. Where do you see the future of search with the AI revolution? Say in the next 12 months? If we were having this conversation in 12 months, what does search look like?
Mike Rhodes: There's this great line from a Hemingway book, the Sun Also Rises and the character named Mike is asked how did you go bankrupt? And he says gradually. Then suddenly I think that's the impact of AI. I think it's slow, slow, slow, slow and then bang. And I think people are underestimating the impact of AI in a lot of areas massively, but also overestimating it in other areas. So I'm going to split this into two halves. I think from the E commerce side, 12 months from now it won't have changed massively. I don't think we're going to start trying to buy stuff through chatbots necessarily. Chatbots are not the end interface where this all goes. Amazon tried it for years with Alexa.
Nathan Bush: Right.
Mike Rhodes: Of like that was really what Alexa was for, to try and get people to buy more stuff. It just hasn't happened. Next year might finally be the year of voice, but it's going to be voice controlled AI agents and maybe Siri finally getting smart enough that we can actually use it or something like that. On the informational side of search, I think that does change quite a lot. You know we, we don't want 10 blue links, we want the answer, which is why so many of US are using ChatGPT, Claude perplexity, whatever it might be to get to the answer quicker. But I think on the, on the commercial side, for those high commercial intent queries that this audience is probably more interested in, I don't think that's changed massively in the next 12 months, but informational side will change and continue to change quite a Lot, I think.
Nathan Bush: So if Google is going to be presenting and summarizing, and not only Google, but all the chat tools that you mentioned there before, Claude. However, we find our information because we're already seeing that, you know, slow decline off Google as people use other tools to find their search, even meta, obviously, with their inbuilt AI and the rest. Everyone's kind of getting the search game now, or the information game, as you put it. From a retailer's perspective. If you were developing content today, where you would normally be developing content, to try and rank well in those 10 blue links like you talked about, what kind of content would you be focusing on?
Mike Rhodes: Yeah, I don't know how to do it. I've never been an SEO guy, but you definitely want to be thinking of, like, how can I allow these large language models to crawl my stuff so that when people are asking an informational query about this stuff, they find me? My daughter was making an acai bowl the other day and she's like, dad, this blender's rubbish. I want a new blender. Like, yes, madam.
Nathan Bush: All right, we've got to sell a script first.
Mike Rhodes: Well, first thing I do is go to ChatGPT and go like, tell me about blenders and like, which brands are good now if. And I had to really sort of like, probe it because there was one that she particularly wanted, and I had to sort of like prompt it to tell me more about that because it wasn't one of the ones that it immediately came back with. But that I think is, again, I'm not an SEO guy, so take this with a large pinch of salt. But having your information show up in those answers on something like ChatGPT, if more and more people are going to be using that and they really are running away with it, Claude, is wonderful, but it's used by a fraction of the people that use ChatGPT each day. You want these things to know about you. I mean, if we go really far out, and I don't know what that means, three, five years, really far out, there's going to be an awful lot of AIs talking to other AIs, and it's going to be APIs all the way down. And something needs to understand what it is that you do, what the products and services are there, what the point of difference is. All of that pricing, all of that will need to be transparent and programmatically found by some API crawled by some machine. And I suspect that very few businesses are really thinking deeply about that at this point. The big guys probably are. So we probably see a continuation of this. Google Ads used to be, Perry Marshall talks about this. It used to be an 8020 game. It moved to a 95. 5 game and it's moving towards that 99. 1. Which means that 1% of all of those advertisers are going to reap 99% of the rewards. Yeah, because in that programmatic world, I mean, everyone listening to this is already wearing more than enough hats. Like, you got 12 hats on, you're running around like a chook with its head off. And I've got to learn all this other stuff as well. Or I've got to find an SEO agency that also understands how to get crawled by this stuff as well as creating great content for humans. Now I've got to think about the machine, but like, I've got enough to do. Whereas the big guys with big teams and deep pockets should be thinking about this stuff and should have the resources to be able to provide that information.
Nathan Bush: Is that not movement towards the 99.1a result of more and more budgets being put towards PMAX? So it's almost like leveling the field for everyone because everyone's using the same technology rather than all having different strategies and little tactics and little 1 percenters to differentiate themselves. Is PMAX almost a leveler of the field?
Mike Rhodes: That's a really good question. I think if you think about like gtins in Merchant center, like, why would Google force everybody, like, oh, this product isn't going to show because it hasn't got a gtin or a barcode. I think that. So that they can understand, oh, look, we've got 30 merchants all selling the same thing. We understand the slight differences in price between those merchants and we can see the conversion rates. We can see which ones people prefer. I remember seeing some amazing research. I think it was Creolytics out of Europe, Andreas did around Amazon pricing and he showed that tiny differences in price on Amazon made a huge difference to the volume of sales, like, you know, being 5% cheaper than everybody else if it was that sort of commodity type thing. And I think that where Merchant center is going with GTINs and so on is kind of that race to the bottom, which is horrible to hear as a, as a retailer.
Nathan Bush: Right.
Mike Rhodes: But then we're into all the stuff that I know nothing about and can't talk sensibly about, like building a brand, building a community, building all of that stuff around so that people have a reason to buy it. I think Hayley at Sheet Society has done a marvelous job of this Ben at Frank Green, again, like building a movement, not just selling stuff. I know nothing about that. I can't talk sensibly about it, but I think that's a direction we're going. I also think this news from last week where shopping is going to see a bit of a resurgence now as a campaign type and the smart money, if it hasn't already, is probably going to not necessarily move away from pmax, but certainly run some more experiments and test shrink and PMAX and sort of move away from that black box a little bit. So yes, there is a shopping script coming
Nathan Bush: because I found that the Google announcement last week around the overhaul of Google Shopping really interesting in terms, especially around integrating content things like YouTube shorts into the Google Shopping feed. Whereas at the moment it's pretty much block, block, block price.
Mike Rhodes: Any video under three minutes will now be considered a short. That's a long short.
Nathan Bush: It's a long short. But to have all of that around and they had things like AI summaries in there. So if you're searching for a doona and it might serve up to say, hey, I can see you're in Sydney, Australia and it's March or whatever it is, the kind of dunas you might be looking for are this, this and this to kind of guide you in your search rather than just give you what you want. So it's going to be pretty amazing what shopping looks like in 12 months time.
Mike Rhodes: It is. They will ensure their revenue is as good as possible. Right. So keeping people on that monetizable space will be very important. Um, I don't know how much the, the UI of the shopping experience will change in the short term. I mean they've tried, you know, the mirrors that you look at and try stuff on and I remember trying one of those. God, it must have been at a Google event. 2018, 2019. So that technology's been around a while and hasn't stuck yet, but yeah. Oh, like it's gradually, then suddenly.
Nathan Bush: That's such a good way of looking at it. One last thing on the AI side before we move on. You mentioned Claude there as an underrated tool, especially compared to ChatGPT. This has come up in the Addycart campus community as well around people not understanding why Claude isn't so much more universally used. What are the big differences that you see that you see the benefits there.
Mike Rhodes: So as a pretend dev, it's wonderful. I just love the interface with, they call it artifacts, which is over on the right hand side. So you ask your question on the left and all the code pops up on the right. When I go back and try and use ChatGPT, when I get rate limited out of Claude, which happens just about every day, I find the interface so, so clunky. But ChatGPT can still, at this point, can still browse websites, which Claude won't do, and the voice. I've been using the iOS app on ChatGPT for 6, 8 months. Go for a walk, chat to it, have it talk back. There's a concept in programming called rubber ducking. So if you get stuck with a big problem, you talk to something. I have these weird, like 3D metallic things on my desk. It's like 3D printed model. I got a couple of them.
Nathan Bush: Can see you're holding up the screen. Oh, they're cool. Yeah.
Mike Rhodes: You just have this object, you have a thing, a rubber duck that you talk to. ChatGPT is the rubber duck that talks back. And so you can like, work out the issue, work out the problem by talking through it. So ChatGPT has that big, big benefit. What I'm doing for the rest of the day, when I jump off this is Claude had an announcement overnight about how you can now control a computer with Claude. It's only available in the API, so it's a geeky dev thing where you have to, like, program it. But there's a couple of things that I want to be able to do in Google Ads, essentially being able to download reports that Google doesn't let you automate. There is no easy way to do it. You have to go in and set up all of these downloads manually. I want to see if I can get Claude to set that up and say, just basically pointed at the thing and it will take screenshots of the computer, move the mouse, click on the stuff that you tell it to click on once. We can do that like gradually, then suddenly, right, you think about where this is going. If you're a remote worker, then 100% of the work you do, just about other than the odd phone call happens through this screen. Like you are pointing and clicking and moving the mouse and clicking on stuff and solving problems and moving information around. A lot of that is going to get disrupted gradually. Then suddenly.
Nathan Bush: Vietnamese villa now. And just that's it, I'm done. That is fascinating. Oh, so much there. But we can't. We've got to pull up stumps because you've got some scripts to write. But before we do, I want to ask you, Mike, Helicopters. We didn't even get to helicopters. You're a helicopter pilot, is that right?
Mike Rhodes: So I never actually got my full license because it's bloody expensive. But, yeah, I always wanted to fly since I was 6. I went and I learned to fly in Hawaii of all places, flying around the canyons at Kuwait, which is just epic. I worked for a helicopter company in the UK for a while. We had amazing, amazing client list. The Queen, you know, Princess Di.
Nathan Bush: Did you actually fly them, Bill Gates?
Mike Rhodes: No. No. So I was in flight ops. I was nowhere. You need like 5000 hours minimum to be flying these people around. But I was the one sort of organizing the flights and doing the flight plans and all those hundred little things, which is so similar to Google Ads in a way of like, you know, all the little things that need to be optimized and adjusted and need to be right because you screw up one of those hundred things and you've got Tom Cruise sitting there in the thing at the middle of the night going, why is no. No fuel in this helicopter? You know, like you could really mess up and quite.
Nathan Bush: I don't think he said that nicely.
Mike Rhodes: Yeah, no, he didn't. His three PAs were ripping me a new one, but I got through that. One of our pilots knew I wanted to fly. He introduced me to the guy that ran the Army Air Corps in England. I have to give a shout out to Major Ingram. I will never forget this man. He had 3,000 soldiers under his command. He spent an hour and a half with me, at the end of which he said, mike, there is a job in my army if you want it, but we both know it's not the right thing for you. And I went and sat in my car in the car park. It was raining in Middle Wallop in Hampshire and I bought my eyes out for half an hour because I knew I was never going to fly the fun ship. But he was dead right. He was an amazing, amazing guy to spend that time with me, to help me, me figure out for myself by asking me a whole bunch of questions that this is not the path you want to take. And I. We had Kerry Packer as a pilot. How fired. I remember Kerry Packer's pilot coming in. You come in and have his GR after flying KP around, and I'm like, I want to be the bloke sitting in the back of the helicopter. I want to be the guy sitting there drinking champagne. Not these guys that are basically posh taxi drivers. Nice. This isn't the career for me. And I pretty much left England after that. And business. Yeah. The love of Business was born. Maybe one day I'll do it again. I've got a mate in Sydney at the moment who's going through his commercial pilot training. Catching up with him in a few weeks, mountain biking. So I'll be asking him a whole bunch of questions. Maybe one day I'll get back into it as a hobby. It's a bloody expensive hobby, though. But it is fun. Paragliding is a much cheaper way to. Can I get my same kicks from flying?
Nathan Bush: So maybe by that time we'll have machines flying the helicopters for us.
Mike Rhodes: Yeah, yeah. I saw like an unmanned kind of drone that you sit in the other day, like, that's coming. That's basically already here. So it's like a helicopter with no pilot. So pilots get replaced too.
Nathan Bush: Mike, what's next for yourself for the next 12 months? Do you actually have a plan for the next 12 months, or are you just opening one door after the next?
Mike Rhodes: I've never been a planner. I will keep wandering through those doors. Lots of walks to school, lots of mountain biking, even started doing a bit of yoga. Jesus Christ, what's happening? And lots of solving problems. I'm just, you know, people will keep throwing problems at me and saying, is this solvable? Can you help? I'm like, let me get my whiteboard bent. Let me get back to you tomorrow and we'll see if we can solve that. I'm loving the advisory board stuff and the mentoring side of things, but, yeah, I don't. I don't want to be doing too much stuff. I like the ideas and the whiteboard bit better. I love it.
Nathan Bush: And, Mike, if people want to learn More, obviously your LinkedIn channel is a great way to stay in touch with what you're building in real time time. But then if people want to go on and buy or purchase your scripts, best way to do that.
Mike Rhodes: Yeah, it's really hard because I suck at marketing. Yeah. LinkedIn is a great way to find me. PMaxscript.com is where you can buy the main script or if there's your questions or problems you want to solve. Mikeroads.com Just reach out. I'm around.
Nathan Bush: Mike, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you so much. I'm so glad we got to have this conversation.
Mike Rhodes: Me too.
Nathan Bush: Thank you for joining us on Add to Car.
Mike Rhodes: My absolute pleasure. Thanks, Frankie.
[Voiceover]: I bet just like I did, you had so many questions in the back of your head that you were going, bushy, ask this. Bushy, ask this. I had a heap that I didn't even get to so Mike and I promise that we will catch up in the new year to really dive further into some of those ideas because I had so many notes that I didn't even get to. What a fascinating vibe. I love that my Mike has reached a stage in his career where he is still curious and genuinely trying to help as many people as possible. If you haven't already, I think you will surprise yourself by going and using that script. Even if you're not a script person, go try it. I think you'll surprise yourself. Here are the three biggest lessons that I took away from the chat Number one Ideas Over Execution Mike's approach to business is a really refreshing reminder that not everyone needs to be an operations guru. By focusing on what he loves, solving problems and generating ideas, Mike has built a model that lets him stay in his zone of genius while creating immense value. As I mentioned in that episode, it reminds me a lot of the book recommendation that we've had a few times now called Rocket Fuel. Where the best businesses work, where you have one vision, which is the ideas person matched with one operations person. Those two together are a great combination, but the first step is knowing which one you are. Number two Visibility in the black box Mike's pmax scripts are a masterclass in turning hidden data into actionable insights. After 17 years of running a Google agency, Mike is now revealing how Google spends ad dollars across shopping, video and display and is empowering businesses en masse to optimize their campaigns. It's a long stretch from the agency model. I think the lesson here is that no matter how much you know, things in E commerce never stop changing and it's so important to challenge what you know. Even if you are in a specialist area. Don't settle for a set and forget approach approach. Whether it's pmax or another platform, always be digging deeper into your data and experiment because I can guarantee you the platforms and the competitors that you're around aren't sitting still. Number three Hot Take on AI Gradually, then Suddenly Mike's take on AI's impact on search was fascinating. I was really ready for him to rip down search to say that it is all changing and change is upon us. But I love how he framed it. He said change is creeping in gradually with AI summaries, better shopping insights, smarter recommendations. But it will hit us all suddenly and search as we know it will be forever changed. Whether it's ensuring your content today is crawlable by large language models or preparing for API driven shopping, now is the time to start. Start planning for the AI revolution in e commerce. Because it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. Search changes forever. Before you go, we'd love to invite you to join our free e commerce learning platform, Add Descartes Campus. Meet other professionals and learn from e commerce experts to take your business and your e commerce career to the next level. Register to join campus@addtocart.com now. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with a friend or a colleague. Or even better, leave us a review on Spotify or Apple. It really makes a difference.
