Mike Rhodes from Mike Rhodes Ideas | Checkout

[Voiceover]: Welcome to the checkout. We catch up with previous add to cut guests and ask them five quick questions to get to know them better and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get through your Friday. Here's your host, Bushy.

Speaker B: Today's checkout features Mike Rhodes, founder of Mike Rhodes Ideas. What an awesome name. Microads Ideas is a business that's revolutionizing how we understand and optimize Google Ads using Mike's script that he's built from the ground on up. But it's not limited there. Mike Rhodes Ideas can go anywhere. And that's what's fascinating about this conversation. From building scripts that reveal what performance Max campaigns are really doing to staying on the cutting edge of AI, Mike is all about solving problems with creativity and a touch of code. From tech that he can't live without to his biggest challenges today. That this quick fire sesh gives you a fascinating glimpse into the mind of a true curious innovator.

Nathan Bush: Mike, thank you so much for joining us on the checkout. We had a brilliant conversation in our main episode around Mike Rhodes Ideas, which is your current venture, which is just fascinates me. You are building scripts using AI to help people make the most of PMAX and to optimize that. But I've got a feeling that this is just the start and that who knows where these scripts are going. So absolutely fascinating chat, one we've never had before. So thank you for that. But we're here to learn a little bit more about you today. So I've got five quick questions.

Mike Rhodes: Okay.

Nathan Bush: Number one, what is the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?

Mike Rhodes: I bought a weighted vest the other day to wear walking around the hills. Yeah, it has the unfortunate side effect of looking like I'm wearing a suicide vest when people duck back into their car and get the phone out looking at me, I'm getting a little worried that I'm going to get stuck. So that would be up there. I've got this 3D printed. I bought these like 15 years ago, two of them, and they have somehow survived all of the rental moves. They're just, I don't know, I, I fit. They're my little version of a fidget toy.

Nathan Bush: Idea masters. Don't lose them or you might lose your ideas. Oh, no. Weighted vest is hilarious. It's like, I can just imagine like the neighbors is like, have you seen Mike? He's, you know, he's just left his agency and he just walks around at home with a whiteboard marker and now he's wearing this vest around what is happening with Mike?

Mike Rhodes: Why is he going to blow up today?

Nathan Bush: All right, number two, which retailer has most inspired you recently?

Mike Rhodes: A couple of old clients, actually. I'm going to say Hayley from Sheet Society and Ben from Frank Green. I just think the mission driven the way they go about business. Happy teams, great businesses growing, awesome. Love what they do.

Nathan Bush: And I know Hayley and Andy fairly well and just genuine, like, yeah, yeah.

Mike Rhodes: Salt the earth, just absolutely lovely. Like vulnerable, open. Yeah. Has gone through it and back again, like being a mum in business and then Andy coming in and helping run the business. Just. Yeah, absolutely. Love them as people and love the business that they built. And so many of their team are just epic humans as well. Kate Howard, M. Sophie. They're just. They just attract great people.

Nathan Bush: I'd love to be a fly on the wall when you and Hayley are having conversations around solving problems, because you both are so curious people and like, not looking at the world through, oh, well, everyone else is doing this, we've got to do this. It's like, I can imagine some of the ideas you guys come up with together, so lovely. Examples, number three, name a piece of tech that you or your business couldn't live without.

Mike Rhodes: I couldn't live without large language models at this point. Claude helps me code every day. I have this geeky coding platform called Cursor, which is absolutely phenomenal. It's basically autocomplete for code. So you have the idea, you think it. You start typing the first couple of characters and it goes, oh, you mean this? And it used to be a word or a line, now it's 10 or 15 lines at a time and you just press the tab key and it's done. And you're like, that's what I was thinking. It's phenomenal. It's amazing.

Nathan Bush: So do you think AI is helping more people become developers or is it taking development away as a skill?

Mike Rhodes: It won't take it away. It's just. Yeah. Let's wander down this rabbit hole briefly, then. It is definitely bringing a lot of people up. It's turning idiots like me into pretended developers. It is generating a lot of code. But a proper developer, a senior dev, will tell you that that's just 20% of the job. Like, understanding which problems to solve is as big a part. Being able to architect the whole thing, being able to build a software business or build a software as something that continues to work and maintain that is very different from just being a code monkey and writing a few lines of code. So I'm a code monkey in training, but I'm definitely not a senior dev yet.

Nathan Bush: Beautiful. That's a good differentiation. I love it. I wouldn't call you a code monkey. Be kind to yourself. All right, number four. Can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?

Mike Rhodes: Ethan Mollick wrote a book. It's over here somewhere. CO Intelligence, I'm fairly certain is the title. That is one of the best AI books I've read over the past year. Probably six months old. Still very, very relevant. Great substack or great email as well that he writes. Makes it super, super accessible. I think he's a professor at Wharton. I might have got that wrong. But he just makes it really accessible. Great examples. I think that is a book that everybody should read.

Nathan Bush: Awesome. Great example. I am getting straight onto that. I'll be ordering. I've actually got a list that I'm ready to order.

Mike Rhodes: I have this rule. I've had it for years and years. Whenever anybody recommends a book, I buy it there and then on Amazon, just buy it. I had the same thing with my team. I said, you have an unlimited Amazon budget. If there's a book you want, go buy it. So we had a beautiful library in the office. Thousand books. I probably brought half of them home with me when I go out. Yeah, it's just I don't read them all. I certainly don't read them all.

Nathan Bush: Straight away isn't buying them, it's reading

Mike Rhodes: them that is the tricky part. But I have this belief that when the time is right, I will dip into the right book. Or you'll pick it up and you'll read those two chapters that matter. I'm trying to buy more fiction now as well and read more fiction, but yeah, that is a cracking book on AI. There's a bunch, but that's a really good one.

Nathan Bush: All right, thank you. Last question I've got for you, Mike. What is your biggest challenge today?

Mike Rhodes: This morning? Getting my 10 year old to remember to flush the bloody toilet. Why do that? I don't get it. She is amazing. She asked amazing questions. Cannot remember to flush the toilet or turn the lights off.

Nathan Bush: I just.

Mike Rhodes: I'm gonna just get the whole house fitted out with bloody lights that switch off when no one's in the room for five minutes. I swear to God. Time. I suppose that's what everybody says at that question. Isn't it like time to implement all of the ideas that are floating around. They're very first world problems. I'm very blessed.

Nathan Bush: But I can Imagine with no lack of ideas. Do you have like a notebook that you carry around with? How do you take note of your ideas that you can't take action on straight away?

Mike Rhodes: Yeah, I've got a notebook that goes with me everywhere. But I've been using the ChatGPT voice app more and more. So I'll talk through ideas. Actually, yeah, you remind a walk last week, like, okay, I've got these seven things. I want to brainstorm this and bounce back and forth. Help me decide which one to do first. Ask me like having AI prompt you instead of you prompting the AI, having it prompt you. I wrote a sales letter for a workshop year and a half ago, so this is probably GPT 3.5, I guess. And I said you're, you know, you're an expert copywriter, blah blah blah, all the stuff we know how to do. Ask me all the questions you need to be able to write this sales letter. And it starts asking one at a time after I've answered, then ask me the next question. So bang, bang, bang for half an hour, went through 14 questions, got to the end, I went right, okay, you've got everything. Yep. So then it wrote the sales page, well, while we're here and you've got all of that context loaded up in your memory type thing, give me some Facebook hook ideas, give me the YouTube script, write the LinkedIn post, write the questions for the application process to the workshop. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Everything was done in less than an hour. It was just awesome.

Nathan Bush: And then you fired your team and got rid of the agency. I see how all this plays out. Mike, thank you so much for joining us on the checkout. Such an amazing story and I just can't wait to see where these scripts and where your door opening adventure goes to from here.

Mike Rhodes: Thanks Bushy. Absolute pleasure to be here.

Speaker B: To hear more from Mike, head back to our main episode where we cover so much more in that conversation around how Mike is cracking the Google Ads black box with his AI driven scripts that he's developed from the ground on up that's even caught the attention of Google hq. He gives us his bold prediction predictions for AI in E commerce and ways focusing on ideas, not operations to unlock potential. Trust me, this is a conversation that you will not want to miss. It's a point in time that we'll look back on and go, remember when it was all about to change. Thanks for listening and until next time, keep adding to cartoon.