Well, I had friends over yesterday. Oh, I love friends sometimes. I had friends over yesterday and he's a very accomplished guy. He's a partner at one of big accounting firms. So like one of the biggest in the world actually. Very successful guy. Had lunch. One flopped on the couch and he's sitting there on his phone.
And he's pretty intensely on his phone. You have to kind of ask if someone is, if I'm a guest at someone's house, I don't know if I like focus in on my phone for 20 minutes straight. Yeah, that's a long time. So not just like checking. No, he like flopped on the couch and just stared at his phone.
I don't say excuse me for a minute. No, no, I don't care. This is no friend. I walk over to him like, hey, everything good. Is it like work stuff crazy? And he turned to me and he said, I love TikTok so much. Oh, I'm not even kidding. I'm not even kidding. He didn't know. He didn't know. We used to call this going when it was just YouTube. I call this going in the y-hole.
It's just time vanishes. And he's like, it's so good. And you understand, again, I will repeat. He's a partner at a global accounting firm. Probably in his 40s is my guess. Got a family. He's got kids. Yeah, yeah. Beautiful family. And he loves TikTok so much, which leads me to a question for you, Paul. I'm a small business. I'm a freelancer and I built a good career. Do I still need a website? I'm glad you asked.
All right. So I'm Paul Ford. I'm Rich Ziyadi. This is Ziyadi Ford advisors. And okay. So do you still let me define? So what here's a little sugar. I'm in a sugar. I want a website used to be a website used to be like, I need someone to find my business when they search for a business in Google. The world is a global directory. So when someone says like New York City dog walker, my dog walking business needs to come up. Yeah. I need my restaurant to include three out of date PDFs.
I need to include the servers. Yeah. Roving. Perfect. Perfect. You see that. My website needs three out of date PDFs and some flash files. Yeah. Because God knows the last thing anybody wants to know is where is the restaurant? And what does it serve? Yeah. So I think like, first of all, the answer to the short answer is yes, you should always have a website. Okay.
So what I want to do is you should actually understand what a website is in 2023 and you should plan accordingly. Oh, so website used to be roving rovers and it would be roving rovers.com. And I should I should click this button and send them an email or call them. Right. That's not what websites are for anymore. You could look up an address and a phone number. Google is going to pretty much.
So I'm going to go to the end to the flow there and you say, I got this. Don't worry about it. See what I got it. Exactly. I'm going to take you over to maps. I like when you go to maps and like you can't find where the website is. It's just like one link that says website. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, or people and what people do is there on Instagram or there on Facebook and you're supposed to have your business there as well, etc.
And you can just build your business here. In fact, there are there are platforms that are really designed for different types of businesses. If you're a design freelancer, there's excellent platforms that showcase your portfolio. I mean, there's places like Upwork that will actually complete the transaction for you. You can get paid through them. So there's intermediaries, which is, you know, that's part of the free market of the web.
A pretty well known startup called bento box that is for restaurants and it takes care. You check the boxes and you get, you know, link to Rezi and link to door dash and etc. Um, yeah. So why am I bothering because it is absolutely in your best interest to have exactly one place on the internet that you fully control.
Oh, okay. How about I do? It's called link tree. Yes. So this is actually fascinating. Right. So if you're in if you follow anything and you look at YouTube videos of people like, you know, fixing toy cars or playing with synths or selling. In my entry. Here's my check out my link in bio. So this is a crazy aspect of our future that we live in, which is that instead of allowing people to use the rich hypertext capabilities of the web.
You let them have one link, but they'll see the problem is if you let people hide links and like do normal link things. Yeah. In unstructured user generated contacts without a lot of moderation, they'll just put in scammy links. They'll go, someone will come in and be like, check out these hot ladies dancing. Yeah.
And here's the link to learn more and it's like, what's your credit card again? And it's just so. So you have this situation where like you can't allow too much linking and they don't want to and they don't. And then messy and then link tree is what is link tree? So when I hit link tree, it's like five links that I control. And so it's like I'm a YouTuber and I I promote.
I talk about food. I'm talking about spice. I'm just in the spice where you can go to my you can go to my homepage. You can go to my LinkedIn profile because I have a spice business. You can check out my spice store and it's like those five or six links and then link tree is a really basic product is like five links, but it functions as a kind of de facto homepage for you pointing to all of the other platforms. It's a list of links.
It also if you look at the features matrix on it, it does things that influencers find very useful, which include some analytics or linking to tools that allow for digital aid downloads and like managing that stuff.
So link tree is a big business. It's actually a very big company. It's like a couple billion dollars, right? Yeah, it's a big company. Yeah, so I know what a billion dollars is anymore in startup world. I feel like that's a word that people say and like is link tree can can link tree go on eBay and sell itself for a billion dollars. Who knows what people like to make the sound.
It's a little bit more than that because it's less look. No, this is an important point. I think that the reason we like unicorns is that it actually takes a little more human effort to say like it's so say million, but your lips together. It's like it's actually like an extra calorie gets burned. And if you say billion, you don't have to say you can just say, but it's a big company. And humans are so lazy and dull with it that it's easier for them to just say it's worth a billion dollars.
So also it's worth reminding everyone, which we will do every so often on this podcast unicorns aren't real. They actually don't exist. There are no horses with horns coming out of their heads. No, and if you saw one, it would be a genetic freak and you need to shoot it immediately because clearly it's coming for you. Right? Like if I see a horse with a horn, I'm freaking out.
Okay, so let me be a business owner. I have a physical therapy storefront in Brooklyn, New York. Okay. And I somebody said, where's your website? And I was like, gosh, I got to go get a website. And then.
And then I went on go daddy and I feel dirty and I shawared for an hour afterwards like, what do I need a website? You do don't build don't build anything. If you are a truly a small business, right? Like what we should talk about the website we build for our product because that's a whole nother world, right?
Yeah, so what is what is the function of a website? Well, when somebody types in the function of a website, I would argue in 2023 is to validate that your business really exists and really has really does what it says it does on social media. It's a little bit of control that you're asserting on the internet. So when someone types in rich c.i.d pencil store because you sell pencils in Brooklyn. Yeah.
And they're bespoke. Some of them are fur covered. It's pretty cool. It's a whole thing. You're in Williamsburg selling your pencils. Sustainable wood. Exactly. When somebody types in rich c.i.d pencil store, the about page on pencils are us comes up and the address is there. And they go, you know what? Because I was going to buy 500 pencils for the Christmas party giveaway. Well, let's face it. The days of like coding up and hiring an engineer and a designer to make my physical therapy website.
Unless you know why you need to do that. Unless you know like that there is a return for you on doing it. You don't do that. You spend $20 a month. You use a template. And you can change the template a little bit. Where do I spend this $20 a month? I would frankly just point people to square space. There are others. It's like just use a big.
There's wicks.com. Yeah, just use a square space. A big commodity website publisher. Yeah. And their templates are pretty polished nowadays. Yeah. You should not spend more than let's say $1,500 getting everything together. Right. Take cell phone pictures. You probably need somebody who can use a little Photoshop.
You can find this kind of worked out. Canva to for like cleaning up photos and making social media stuff. And then what does it have? It has links to all your platforms. It's maybe you're not an influencer. So you don't have link tree. This is just like it's your business. Now HVAC shop in upstate New York.
And now it shows up in a healthier and make sure that you're filling out all the little forms that they give you for like titles and descriptions and all that stuff. Because if you behave well, then all the search engines will find you. And when Google Maps when somebody clicks and they find you on Google Maps. It pops up the website. And it'll put the picture that you have at the top of the website in Google Maps and the ratings and so on and so forth. And then they can go to people can find your Instagram and they can find your stuff. Now think about that is this worth $2,000 in the world.
And because you would get let's say a hundred new leads over a couple years. That's a no brainer. I mean, unless it's like a real like low. Like unless you really have enough dog walking business and it's only you. Yeah, maybe you don't need one because you're not need one. You'll never going to close that $2,000. Yeah. But if you're the HVAC business. Yeah. And in fact business 50 mile radius. I can't get the word out any other way.
But here's a tricky thing. Yeah, because who's looking at the yellow pages, right? Right. Right. You're people are on their phone typing HVAC and like looking at what has HVAC Troy New York. Exactly. Yeah. Except that this is this is the twisted thing. If the if there is if go look at your competition because the HVAC company where you go and it's like a website from 2002. And it just has like the logo and five links and the work. Yeah.
That's still actually a pretty reliable HVAC company because they're like, well, they just don't update their website. Yeah. And even for 20 years. Yeah. And it's just like it's all the times new room and italic bold. Right. Like that whole thing still works. So fine. The problem is and say you're like, why don't you update that because they still got lots of calls. The problem is if there's another HVAC company with like a square space.
They just looks a little better and they show a picture of like Johnny. Johnny the HVAC guy. The van in the van. The van pulling up the reality is you and me. We're calling Johnny. Yeah. Because it's like, ah, he looks fine. Yeah. That's right. So it's it's okay. So get the website. It's worth noting sites like square space sites like wicks. You can get the domain name right there.
And you should be paying for it. You should be paying for it like out of the checking account. It should not be a major thing. Exactly. It should be it should cost about as much as like, I don't know, like get you know, like any other service for your office like coffee. Yeah. I I I'm wondering how many of our listeners.
I think our audience is interesting. It goes beyond technologists. And I think this is for them. Well, they boring advice, but it's good advice because they get asked all the time. What should I do? Just tell people to listen to this podcast. Now let's take one minute and just talk about our case. Okay. So we're a software startup. We're the sponsor, which you know, we're the co-founders.
That's where noting that we aren't not a square space norwicks are sponsors of any of this. No, these are just easy good tools to use. We are a board.com right. So we've built this software tool for managing information. Yes. Okay. So we had to build a website at a board.com. Yeah. Okay.
So we bought it. We talked about this on previous podcasts. We bought the domain name. It was expensive, not expensive, not like bananas expensive, but it was definitely expensive. And okay. So we buy a board.com. And now we have a website. And the website has been through multiple iterations.
It has modules. It's built custom in WordPress. And we have spent again, like not a shocking amount of money if you're in this business, but like, let's say more than 10X what you would pay as the HVAC company. For sure. For sure. Right. And so it has, let me tell you some of the things it has. It has modules that break up the page into individual pieces that I can, and I can sort of edit at the data level. I can go in. It has all these little pieces that I can true up.
It has cracking tracking custom art. Yeah. It as people come into it and then sign up for the product. We're able to measure that. We have analytics. Much. Yeah. Much more bespoke. Working back and a lot of SEO. We really, and it matters much less that we're on Google maps. Yeah. No one cares where we are. What's the difference between these two worlds? Why would we spend all that money in time?
Significant amounts much, much more to get a website that's not it's not much longer, not much bigger than a good HVAC website. Yeah. I think the service that we sell is truly like our potential customer base is the earth. Yes. Whereas the HVAC business in Troy New York, the customer base is Columbia County or wherever, you know, wherever they are located.
The radius of reach there is just much, much, much narrower. We actually only exist on the web. We only we have no storefront. We have a business address, but it's not like we're hosted people. We're building the thing. You know, I asked recently in our newsletter. I'm like, Hey, yeah, there's a aspect of the product that people just aren't using very much. I just went to the news and I was like, tell me why you're not using this. I'm curious. We got great responses. Yeah. It was great.
10 or 15 people wrote these like long explanations. Yeah. Very helpful. And what I realized is we have to be when you're doing a product like this. And I saw this pattern and very few people said it explicitly, but essentially like, Hey, before I invite other people to collaborate with me on this, I don't know if I trust you yet.
That is what I heard. I don't really trust you. You seem like good guys. You know, you used to run an agency. Like I used to read your blog back in the day. Yeah. But let me be clear. I'm giving you my data. And I'm not going to bring my good friends in until I really know that I can trust you without the website.
If I'm just putting stuff on Instagram, yeah, if I'm just putting stuff on LinkedIn, whatever, if I don't have this anchor that shows people that this is like thoroughly thought through. Yes, here's the terms. It's about terms of service and the policy. Privacy policy. That's right. I mean, you know, a lot of times the HVAC will have a will have a refund policy on the site. Yeah, sometimes. Yeah.
But for us, it's key. Like it pretty much is how we introduce you and get you to calm down and trust us. No one, no one will believe us. Yeah, they should give us their data. Even with the website, yeah, necessarily, but without the website, there's no chair. Yeah, I think we're a completely different. Yeah, animal.
But what we're focused on in building it to is understanding how people come in, what they learn from it, what they look at, are they interested in this or that or the other. And then how does that convert to people maybe eventually giving us money, but today signing up for the product. Yeah, I mean, it's all forms of lead gen, right? Like even the HVAC, some HVAC site or like if you're doing, you know, you need to pull put in.
They see you as a lead. A lot of times that little chat bubble pop up is like, hey, you're looking to swim this summer. Like, hit us up and you want to talk to us. And so we're dealing with that on a much more granular level because the product is there. A big part of our future too is SEO is writing blog posts and newsletters and saying like, absolutely advertising against them and saying like, hey, if you're curious about this, come on in.
That's right. So different structures. I think what gets really confusing when people get asked for website advice is that there are two fundamental realities. There's an actually frankly what's what's wild right is like they're both basically in the context of larger social media and other platform.
Yeah. So reality one is kind of you are an endpoint when you go out and you promote yourself. Like you need some place to just sort of point to so that people believe you're real and are willing to pick up the phone and call you and then you should also do your Instagram and your other stuff.
The other part is more the other are our situation is more dynamic, which is like we're going to spend money to promote aspects of this website. We SEO to catch us. We want we're going to live inside of this bigger ecosystem. And so we actually need like a big solid foundation that we so we can go do all those wacky things you have to do in order to promote and market a business in 2023 24. Yeah. So, okay. So go build if you don't have a website. This is what I call meat and potatoes.
Personal website. What do you think? I had one for a very long time. I used to write on it. Like your website. I have trained. I still keep the domain because it's a good domain. It's hard to let go of domains. And I use it for my email, the domain. But I mean, to me, when you ask about a personal website, I think about a blog. Yeah. I mean, if you are if you are ready to like talk to the world, here's the worst thing. Let me give you anti advice.
I think you're going to want to do it. And then you write three articles. And then nothing happens for four months. Don't bother. Don't feel the pressure. It's a sense of perpetual failure. If you're really going to go out there and say your piece, you've picked a cause or you're an advocate for something or you're a consultant or a therapist or, you know, a mindfulness expert or something.
And you're going to constantly talk to the world. It's a great thing to do. There are other platforms for that too. That'll just stand up. But even here, I would argue. At that point, you're a business. You should have your own space. I agree with that. In WordPress is a great solve.
Yeah, exactly. I would say anything where like your expression is also your resume. Right. Like it's good. Yes. If you've crossed that line, if you think you're going to do it, but you're not sure, be sure you're going to do it. Because you're going to put all this work in and then you're going to feel like you're failing. You know who solves this is the academics. Like academics know they have to keep their CV updated.
Right. And so a lot of a lot of like academic websites are essentially digital CVs. Like here's my curriculum. Hey, here's my papers and so on. Yeah. That's the model to follow. Here's my publishing. Here's everything I do. If you have any questions about me, go here first. Right. And then you can reach out. So I think like that's the model.
But yeah, own your own voice. Keep your own site. At some point, I definitely want to make the like take my old website and just kind of list on my writing. I started using our product aboard for that. And it's good for it. It is. And so that's a great way to evolve your site. Yep. That's that's, you know, because the days of me being a 20 something blogger over, but like here, here I am. And I've done a bunch of stuff. And it's nice to have a place to look at.
There we go. We solved it. We solved the web sites for everybody. We mentioned aboard.com a few times. Check out a board. It's a really great way to collect, organize and collaborate on things you collect on the web or ideas you put down. Check it out. A board.com. It's almost like this is the board podcast. It's a crazy world. Maybe we should do that.
We'll have to talk about that. Alright, Ziyadi Ford on Twitter and to our ex or whatever the hell it's called this week. Hello, it's the Adi Ford. We're glad to hear from you. We love you. And we'll talk to you soon. Bye. Bye.