 Mike check. Can y'all hear me? Awesome. How's everyone doing today? Are you all ready for the first session of WordCamp Phoenix? I need a little more excitement than that. There we go! So up first we have Dallin Harris. Dallin's the founder of the president of Skyhook Interactive, a Phoenix-based website design and development firm that builds high-performance websites for brands and the agencies that serve them. Dylan is active in the community and he speaks regularly on topics related to entrepreneurship and technology. He sits on the board of the Arizona Entrepreneurs Organization and the Arizona Interactive Marketing Association and is engaged in the local WordPress community. In 2012 he was named one of the top 25 or top 35 entrepreneurs aged 35 and under by the Arizona Republic. Can I get a big welcome to Dallin Harris? Thank you. Good morning everyone. I'm delighted to be with you. So like you said, my name is Dallin Harris. I'm with Skyhook Interactive. We're a website development firm here in town. And I want to talk to you today about five trends that will shape the web over the next five years. And you know, why should you listen to me? Why should I have any credibility? Basically my job every day is to talk to new customers who are coming in and ask what it is that they want on their website or what it is they're trying to accomplish in their business and having that conversation once or twice a day for the last 10 years. I've talked to over a thousand people and really have developed a sense. I take copious notes as I talk with these people and I've kind of developed a sense, I think, for what's coming and what people are asking for, which I think is a good indicator of the trends that we'll see in the near future. So my session is really geared more towards it's going to be less heavy on on the development and the actual design work of building sites and more on the big picture. What are the problems we're trying to solve? At Skyhook we talk about account managers and project managers and the sales team kind of being the people who prepare the work to be done, right? So if you're at a larger agency, you understand that dynamic. If you're a freelancer or if you're building sites yourself, maybe you wear that hat sometimes where you're trying to figure out what it is even should be built before you then scope and actually start building the work. So this talk is for you. And I want to say a quick word. I saw this shirt at Disneyland and I had to stop the guy and take a picture because it cracked me up. It says project managers, we the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. And it cracked me up and so I had to take a picture and in what I want to say to you all, those of you who are doing this work is you are doing important work. I think the internet is one of the most exciting inventions in all of human history. It is astounding what it does and you are literally brick by brick laying that foundation which will serve humanity for years to come. And as project managers, as account managers, when you're wearing that sales hat, you're helping customers figure out what to even buy and what it is that they need to solve their problem and it's a critically important role. So I just want to acknowledge all the hard work that's being done here and the important work that folks in this room are doing. I want to start with this, which you've probably seen before, this idea of the product adoption curve, which is when new things come into the market, they go through this kind of early adopter innovator stage, then they become a little more popular, they rise into the early majority, and then, you know, as time goes on and WordPress is, I guess it's tough to plot maybe where WordPress is on this, but I would say we're somewhere between early majority and late majority, maybe even getting close to laggards, like everyone knows what this is, and it's obvious that it's going to be a big thing. But, you know, big decisions come along like that, like WordPress, and I'll share with you guys back in 2008 when we were starting Skyhook. We were building websites, flat file, HTML files, customers couldn't edit them at all, that's just how it was done at the time, and this new thing came along, this new thing called WordPress, and we tried it on a few sites, and I think we all were kind of looking at each other like, yeah, this is going to be big, we want to bet on this. So we started learning how it all worked and and started developing sites. It was a little bit scary if those of you who were in the field back then remember, it was like, oh, but then they're not going to need us anymore, right? If we set this up for our customers, they're not going to need us anymore, which was a crazy thought, but that's that's what we thought. But we could tell it was going to be big, and we decided to make a bet and position ourselves around it, and in this case at least, paid off extremely handsomely, right? We were able to establish ourselves pretty early on as players in the WordPress space, develop some expertise around it, and we're able to kind of ride that wave. So there's big decisions like that that happen with WordPress. There's smaller trends that happen. I remember when child themes were first a thing or gravity forms, you know, it was like this new way to build to build forms or Yoast SEO plug-in. I mean, there's these and I could go on and on, mobile responsive. There's there's these waves that come along, and if you can get good at seeing them coming and invest in them and and be good at them, you can you can ride the wave and you can benefit. So I had found this quote that kind of captured it. You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf. This is a I hope you guys can appreciate kind of the bold topic that this is when I submitted this. I'm like, I'm gonna stand up and try to attempt to predict the future. Which is you know, ask yourself that, you know, what do you think is gonna come in the next five years? I don't know, but I do have some things that I feel pretty confident are very likely to happen, which I want to share with you and more importantly, I want to share with you how you can know what's coming in the future and how you can develop a process of paying attention to trends and picking up on these things early on so that you can profit and and grow in your career. It takes hard work to kind of try to be prescient and and tell what's coming down the pike and sometimes you get it wrong, but in my experience trends are super important in business. So hopefully we're on the same page there. And this is kind of the point I want to make there. Good website strategists work hard to identify trends so they can exploit them. Good website strategists work hard to identify trends so they can exploit them. In terms of things we're gonna hit today, I want to talk about this concept of risk. Risk is I'm gonna share some information, I think that has kind of changed my mind how I look at risk, how it's a good thing and how we can understand it and manage it and I think it's the foundation for being able to see trends coming. We're gonna talk about what common risks are that different customers have. I'm gonna share with you five of my favorite trends that I think are coming in website development. But again with this foundation, you can hopefully see others that are coming and and start to do the next point, which is how to identify trends yourself. And we'll have some discussion around that and and we'll be done. So let me let me hit this quote. So Peter Drucker said all profit is derived from risk. And when I first heard this, I don't think I fully understood what he was saying, but in time as I thought about it, I think it's it's one of the smartest things he ever said. So I don't know if you've ever asked yourself as a service provider, why do my customers hire me instead of doing it themselves? And the answer is because in their business, in their world, in all of the problems they're trying to solve, there are specific parts of that that they are not equipped to do because they haven't had experience around that and it would be risky for them to try to do it themselves. So I'm gonna I'm gonna tell you a story that hopefully illustrates this. Have a good friend. His name's Joe. He decided 10 years ago-ish to start a chair and table rental business here in the Phoenix area. It's called royalty rentals. And if you put yourself in Joe's shoes for a little bit, starting that business, there's a lot of things he's got to figure out. Where do I get tables? Where do I get chairs? Where do I get linens? How do I set up my warehouse so things can come in and out? How do I set up my accounting? How do I do marketing so that people will actually find my business? How do I build a website? How do I keep track of all this inventory? How do I hire employees? How do I do performance management and maybe have to fire some employees if it doesn't work out? All of these things for a first-time business owner represent individual risks which if they're not managed properly could mess the whole thing up, right? Like if he's just terrible at hiring people and he never figures out how to do that, the rest of the business can't be successful because of that problem. So business owners definitely have this. I would argue that even internally, inside of companies, people who are trying to get things done, they look at their whole job and there's little parts of it that they can't be successful if those pieces aren't executed properly and those represent risks to their ultimate success. So in Joe's case, he started looking at his website and his inventory tracking system and said, I could probably figure that out, but it would take me a really long time. I'm not a programmer. I'm not a user experience designer. I don't know anything about the web and how hosting works. So I'm just going to hire someone who can process this little bit of risk better than I can. I'm not asking them to take responsibility for my whole enterprise, but this little piece of it is better handled by someone who can handle that risk better. So that core concept, that little nugget to realize that your customers have, or internally, if you're working with an internal team, they have risks that they are not as well equipped to handle as you are. That forms the basis of need for you to be able to come in and provide a service, which then entitles you to a piece of the profit of that whole business, which is where profit comes from. So my contention here this morning is if we can get really good at understanding what our customer's risk actually is, what it is they're actually hiring us to do, that gives us the key that then unlocks our ability to predict the future because we can see the sorts of kinds of things that they're going to need. And when new things come along, we can kind of check that against, well I know customers are hiring us to solve this kind of risk and I can see how that would solve it and we can start to get good at quote unquote predicting the future. Do you follow me so far? Okay, so to kind of summarize that point, the best way to prepare for the future is to be laser focused on understanding your customer's risk. The best way to prepare for the future is to be laser focused on understanding your customer's risk. So as I mentioned I do this thing daily where I talk to potential customers and I'm trying to understand what their risk is and over a thousand of these kinds of conversations and I went back in preparation for this note and looked at a lot of my notes and tried to draw out patterns, I find that the risk that people are trying to solve or have processed for them when they hire a website developer falls into one of two categories. Either they are looking for a website that can be a spokesperson for their company or they're looking for a website that can be a service man for their company and let me kind of explain what I mean by that. If you're a company and you're hiring a spokesman or a spokeswoman you want them to be everywhere, you want them looking good, you want them to be persuasive, you want them to speak in a way that gets people excited about your business and paints you in a positive light, right? That's the job of a spokesman. A service man, you want them to show up without fail, do the job, provide pleasant customer service and and do that consistently every day, like that's that's the job of someone who's providing a service. And if you think about as I think about it, a website effectively does this. A website is a spokesperson for a brand that's out there 24-7 preaching the good word of whatever that particular business does, hopefully helping customers feel at ease and communicating what that brand does and just generally converting people to the services that business does. And it's also in some cases it's more like a service man. You think of applications and I'll get into some specific examples here but the website should just be there 24-7, providing the service, educating people and so I kind of break it into those two paradigms. Let me break that down just a little bit further. So a spokesman, I'll give you, well let me tell the story here. So we did, we were involved in an RFP for the Tempe Office of Tourism which we didn't actually end up winning, but to me they were the quintessential example of needing a spokesman. So you think of the city of Tempe, it's a town here for those who aren't local where the where Arizona State is, you think of the city of Tempe, what does the Office of Tourism need to do? They need to impress people who aren't from here to kind of highlight the vibe of Tempe and the amenities that are available and the hotels and the lake and the sporting events and you know why you should want to come and visit Tempe or do business in Tempe or host your event in Tempe. They're really just trying to paint the picture of this amazing town which those of us who are here know, we love Tempe. It's got this kind of like young college vibe and this energy about it. So their website needs to be a spokesman for Tempe and when you think of the job they're trying to get done with that the risk they have is well we don't really know how to build websites, we know Tempe but we don't really know how to build websites, we're not creative maybe, we are worried that if we did it ourselves maybe it would be slow or it would be hard for users to navigate like we could probably get Wix or something to do it ourselves and set it up but it's probably not going to be like the vibe we're trying to communicate and people might get the wrong idea about Tempe. So if you think about that they want results, they want a site that actually gets people excited about the city of Tempe there's a creative expression piece and you probably see this a lot with your clients, they're not artists, they're not artsy kind of people, they're afraid to put pen to paper and draw something or create something visually because what if people don't like it? I think we all understand that. This is a very common one, search rankings right? They need it to fare well in the search engines and you know even though my firm doesn't actually do this it's something people are constantly asking about I don't see that going away that they need to know that their new site is going to be found on Google and really what they're trying to build is an effective platform for marketing because the city of Tempe is going to be doing all kind you know for the next five years well next forever but the lifetime at this site they're going to be hosting events and they're going to be posting new hotels and highlighting sponsors and they need a website where all this stuff can live where they can drive their Instagram traffic where they can drive their paid search traffic and they need a they need kind of a hub from which to launch their marketing campaigns. So again I share all of this to say if we can really understand the risks that our customers are looking to us to solve for them we can start to get a good prediction of what's coming so I'll get to that. The service man analogy you know think of so my story here is another client we have it's a brand called Altus and these guys a really interesting model they've been coaches in track and field at the Olympic level for like 30 years they've coached something like 70 gold medal winners over the course of their career extremely high-end coaching these guys understand nutrition they understand physiology they understand physics they understand psychology and they're coaching these these athletes at the highest level but they're getting towards maybe the back end of their career and they're wanting to transmit all of this knowledge that they've learned from years of doing this to the rising generation of college and high school coaches about track and field so they've started this brand where they've captured their learning over like 150 modules of learning that they're trying to deliver online to these coaches who can pay a few hundred bucks and come and take one of these courses so if you think of that website it's it's got a spokesman component because they've got to sell these these new these courses to people who don't know them but really it's a service it's a service delivery website so they're worried about things like are we actually delivering good content is the video link working are people able to log in if they need to reset their password does that work because the last thing they want is you know hundreds of these customers calling and saying I can't access the videos or I can't get my password like they need the website to just provide all of that service flawlessly so they're thinking about things like user experience they want to be sure that when customers come onto the site it's just easy and intuitive and again that these customers don't have to call with their questions because it would overwhelm them and they're also thinking about okay what's down the road phase one we want to put this content out there but maybe down the road we want to have a community where these people can chat with each other maybe we want to have an event calendar if we want to host in-person events like their their phase one of this for them is just literally get the education out but they're also thinking like what's our product roadmap so again I highlight all of this to say understand the risk that your customers are hiring you to do and these guys they're they're brilliant people they coach at the olympic level I mean very very good at their craft but they don't understand websites and hosting and technology and and how to make a good user experience so that's why they would look to an outside firm both customers I want to highlight something that both kind of customer types have in common the first one is assembling the right team and that kind of goes good with the second one which is looking good to their boss or to their teammates this one kind of surprised me we had just finished a website for a local brand and I was talking with the marketing director to get her feedback on how she thought it went and she said you know I'm I'm so happy with the new website I feel like I finally have a voice on the executive team I thought that was an interesting why did she take it there but basically what had happened is the website project had gone so well and everyone internally thought it was so cool that they were like wow you know they gained respect they like it made her look good and I thought duh like that's that's something our customers are thinking about and they want to make sure when they pick a firm that they don't pick someone who's going to blow it because they're in some level putting their career on the line or at least you know their reputation I thought that was interesting time efficiency again we've kind of talked about this I have another client who actually could do a lot of this but it would just take him you know three to five times as long as it would take someone else so it's it makes more economic sense to outsource it and then increasingly and always speed you know they're they're taking a risk that you're going to build a fast website security that it's not going to get hacked because that's the thing unfortunately in 2019 and uptime those kinds of things so I hope I'm connecting the dots here you understand the customer's risk and you can start to see why some of the trends make more sense so back to that product adoption curve and trying to see what's coming down the pike and comparing it against what we know our customers are worried about obviously the you know there's some things that as I think of the next five years to me are obvious but I'll just state them we're going to go on to more interesting ones but speed I think until the web the internet is as fast as changing channels on a TV we're going to continue to need and see speed improvements so that's a big area for the next five years security there's more hackers and more malware and and and just more general ugliness out there than ever and WordPress is kind of the one downside because it's got such a big target on its back it's it's the one to hack if you're going to hack WordPress you can hack a lot of sites and so it's kind of this constant cat and mouse game but security has a bright future flawless user experience you know we go when we use Facebook and we use Instagram and we use Google these billion dollar products that are very carefully thought out and they have these amazing user experiences that creates a lot of pressure on those of us who are building more smaller business websites because users start to expect a flawless user experience I think that'll continue to to be the case mobile first obviously non-coder tools I've observed this before I think as programmers and I had identified to some extent as a programmer I studied computer science in college I think we're always in the business of like building ourselves out of a job like we make these new tools and now suddenly we're not needed anymore because the customers can just use the tools and they don't need to hire us so I see things like Gutenberg and you know even WordPress itself is a good example of this like there's less and less need for like hardcore programming and I see a trend towards tools that can do these kinds of things for people not to say programmers won't have a job we just have to dig deeper into more complex problems inclusive design which is kind of accessibility standards things like that taking into consideration people with disabilities that'll continue to be a trend and those are kind of the big obvious ones I want to talk about a couple that are maybe a little bit less obvious that are maybe more on the what is that the visionary like the I'm trying to hit like the up ramp the things that that I think will be big in the next three to five years the first one is brand and communication strategy for as long as I've been building websites I don't know if you guys hear this but from our customers it's oh I can provide the content you guys just do the design and it's like okay great you know the programmer and me is like okay whatever you you provide the content but first of all they're not very good at it it takes it forever and and at the end of the day their content doesn't really convert and and it's it's too esoteric that you know they know their world they're speaking their own language they're not talking to a broader audience like you I'm seeing nodding heads out there you guys I'll get this here's my observation the world is shrinking and what I mean by that is it's literally as easy to do business now with someone on the other side of the country as it is to do business with your next door neighbor it doesn't really matter where you're at geographically and consequently you are immediately now competing you know most of the businesses we do websites for are now competing at a national scale so it's not enough to just say I'm a lawyer here in Tempe you got to defend yourself a little more than that because it's easy for me to hire a lawyer pretty much anywhere maybe that's a bad example because there's bar associations and things but it's you got to be able to tell me why you're unique in in the whole world for for what you do because it's easy for me to do business anywhere in the world which consequently means your brand can't just be I'm the local guy who does this or girl who does this you've got to be different and that to me is good copywriting it's good brand strategy it's researching what makes you or your client unique and different and that's something that if they write the content themselves they're just not even gonna even gonna see so honestly if I'm if I'm trying to invest in a high converting website graphic design is important but content is more important it's got to have the right message that actually resonates with the target audience you guys have probably seen this amazon is like eating the world and little e-commerce folks are like getting beat up retailers everywhere getting beat up by this like monster but then you see brands like zappos or warby parker come along and they're actually making headway and the reason is they're like well amazon's great but they don't know shoes like we know shoes or they don't know eyewear like we do and that's an example of a brand story that's able to carve out and defend themselves against global competition but I see this happening even more over the next three or five years clients are realizing that they shouldn't be doing content themselves and and I think there's a bright future for for brand and communication strategy trend number two with a bright future continuous development you know again looking back there's this pattern of every five years we redo the whole website we spend a bunch of money and then we don't touch it for five years and by year four it's getting like cobwebs and stale everywhere and everyone's kind of embarrassed of the site and that's like yeah we really should do something about that until they finally get around to doing a big overhaul again I see us getting away from that large companies see their website as a continuous development effort and I think smaller companies are starting to see that too and at skyhook we've started a couple I think it was probably two or three years ago we started offering these and no one would buy them but now they're they're starting to buy them this idea of a we call it a performance management plan or a continuous development retainer where it's like hey we're going to take over your site and every six months we're going to come in we're going to talk to you we're going to look at your customers we're going to make some tweaks some updates maybe even some kind of significant changes to the site and you're going to be good for another six months and you're going to spend a smaller amount of money more frequently to make sure that your website's always up to date as opposed to this big insane overhaul process and and customers are starting to accept that sales pitch and even asking for it I had someone just last week come in and say I know I'm going to be doing all kinds of updates to this thing so let's just get you guys on retainer and and we can chip away at it so I think I think there's a bright future for continuous development trend number three personalization and sales enablement we're getting really good as marketers at tracking everything that's happening and being able to actually do things with that data so I see a bright future for things like hey someone came on our website and they clicked on these pages so we kind of know who they are and what they're interested in and maybe we're showing slightly different images or maybe slightly different copy to person I understand there's like big google implications to all this and I don't know how we're going to sort that out but the idea is personalizing the digital experience to the person based on what we know about them it could be stuff we know from our crm it could be stuff we know from our analytics or just from their literal behavior patterns while they're on the site so personalization I think has a bright future we have a client an ophthalmology group that's like super interested in this right now how can we you know someone came on our site they saw this ad how can we tailor and understand kind of their demographic and are they here for a lasik surgery or a cataract surgery and how do we show you know our studies show that the younger crowd is more interested in what their friends think the older crowd is more interested in having a reliable trusting doctor that they trust so how do we show just through the artwork we use and the messaging we use how do we kind of tailor based on who they are personalization has a bright future the to me the other edge or the other side of that coin is sales enablement which sounds something like this when someone actually does call into the business the call center or whoever's taking that call can look at the crm and say hmm I see you've been on our site I see you've looked at these in these pages and they can kind of have a sense of who this person is my business partner and I were on the call the other day with with another friend and and it was kind of funny how he was he was we were talking about this this potential customer and he's like well let me let me dig into them and he looked he's like okay they've been on my site they've downloaded this they've downloaded that and they have a lead score of 30 which means they're never going to buy from me like he just he knew all of that about this customer because he could tell what they had looked at and I thought that's cool enabling the sales team with insights that they've the marketing team's been able to come up with so bright future for that I don't know what trend we're on now number four I think structured data and web services you notice now there's a Chick-fil-A right by our office they eat there like three times a week and the app is so cool because I don't have to wait in the line I just order what I want and then I walk up and take it away from the counter and to me that's an example of a business starting to offer its service without a human interaction it's starting to offer it through like a through a digital interaction you can see other examples of this there's these new I forget even the name of them now but like Facebook has one and Google has one these visual search kind of it's like a Google home but with a with a home hub I think it's like you can actually see hey Google you know what what does this restaurant menu have and in order for that to work Google has to be able to go and read that what restaurants website understand that what it's seeing is a menu and pull the images and the text out of that and then display it so it's really not a human looking at that restaurants website it's a robot looking at that right what restaurants website and understanding because of the structured data or because of the services are available like how to present its information so I see us starting to go beyond just that human interaction with the website and understanding that machines are looking at our websites too and in some cases maybe even making the request I can see a future where you know hey hey Google just activate everyone's Google devices hey Google book me a haircutting appointment for Thursday at three and it's literally going to that service seeing if one's available the machines are working it all out and then it's responding back like okay yeah got it so that's a trend I see bright future this one's maybe not bright but users fight back right like you gotta be you gotta be careful doing anything on your on your website that makes things hard on the user you know they try to come out with ads and now users have ad blockers we try to put cookies to track everyone and now they have cookie blockers and GDPR you know we try to track their email and now gmail blocks email trackers like and spam filters and and coupon finders and these things like I think we have to understand that users have rights and that they're going to fight back against those kinds of things so I just I'm always nervous of any technology or idea that's like usurping the user's power because they they fight back um last one I want to hit and then we can talk about um I want to I want to leave time for your questions and comments on this as well um this is kind of a bonus number six trend in in website development over the next five years there are a lot more service providers like all of us there's a lot of web shops out there um and you this is actually a throwback to my talk two years ago but um we got to find a way to differentiate ourselves you can't just go in and say I'm I'm a website developer I build whatever for whoever um I see a trend towards uh firms that specialize and say we're experts at this particular industry or this particular type of client um I see customers hiring if they're choosing between two web firms that may come down to culture you know they both offer the same services but I just like these people better we click more and so I see us talking more about our particular style and our particular way of doing things um and and our point of view they just um some customers probably hear me speak and think I don't I don't agree with anything that guy said so I'm gonna hire someone else and that's fine you know I'm looking for the ones that see things my way so those are trends with a bright future um I want to pause there for just a second I have a little bit more I want to hit about um how you can identify trends yourself and how you can kind of develop this pattern of of seeing what's coming but before I do I do that I want to pause and ask any aha moments anything you would have said differently anything you feel like I totally missed any questions let's take maybe five or six minutes here and do that and then I'll and then I'll wrap up with the rest of the slides right up front here can we we've got a mic too so that we can yep I'm coming Austin D mine um that way the the folks who are watching the recording can hear what said thank you I was just curious how aggressive you are on GDPR and ADA compliance for existing customers who do not have that in place that's a good question um I believe in it I believe it's a trend um I believe uh it's being recorded there's a liability um question that I think the client has to answer right like are they going to get in trouble for not having it personally I would advocate for it absolutely and if we look at the analytics and see that something like 15 percent of website users have some kind of a disability I kind of think you're missing the boat if you don't address that um but it's a it's a sliding scale right like you can do the most obvious things um high contrast colors and font sizes and those kinds of things or you can get you know really extreme and follow the entire letter of the law uh I'm definitely advocating for it um more so on the ADA compliance I think than on the GDPR side honestly um however like in certain cases we're doing some work for a university client and it's like universities are being sued for not having these things in place so you guys got to do something about this um I'm trying to walk that balance of like responding to what customers need and what I think they have budget for and um and also you know if I come out with the $20,000 line item for that like a lot of them just aren't doing it sorry hold on one second I want to make sure uh the audio is captured thank you Austin that was excellent presentation I thank you I was wondering how you think that two big trends AI artificial intelligence and video will play out with WordPress great question um AI is cool I mean I haven't had a lot of opportunity to work on it personally I kind of feel like at least from what I've seen those are my my literal experience that's something that like the big companies and the big budgets that it takes to invest to do that right but I could see I don't think this is five years I think it's further down the road but you know we've we've heard tale of like the the website that optimizes itself right because it's just sitting there running split tests and trying different messaging I could see that happening um I could see definitely maybe earlier even than that I could see on we call it performance marketing right like we're tracking all this data on our customers we're trying to make sense of it machine learning AI turning it loose on those data sets and starting to do what they call I think identity resolution which is you know we see some loose patterns of how this person's behaving and where they came from and we kind of know their IP address can we figure out who they are and we're third-party data sources from Experian and others like I can see it's kind of scary but like we're all friends here right marketers it's like yeah I can I could see AI starting to figure out I know who that person is and I know what else they're shopping for and we can personalize that message so cool cool stuff uh I'm kind of like Elon Musk a little bit and like what did you say AI poses the greatest existential threat to humans I'm a little bit like let's let's be careful what we're doing with that um but yeah I think it's an undeniable part of what's coming probably I think it'd be more than five years before it really affects us but I'd be loved to be I'd love to be told I'm wrong if someone here knows more about that we're gonna do you mind Austin yeah we're gonna we're gonna wear Austin out this morning great presentation thank you uh you talked about which I totally agree with um you know defining our niche carving out you know differentiating ourselves as service providers which I've done kind of and so my question is that I've been coming up more and more that now what about conflicts of interest when I'm differentiating myself in such a niche that hey now my clients competitor is calling me and saying can you do the same thing for me you know and they're in the same industry same town or whatever so yeah I'm dealing with that a lot and not sure how to handle that uh I heard someone say once if an agency has two customers in a given niche it's a conflict of interest and if they have three or more it's a subspecialty expertise niche it's like it's like own it right it's I mean that's something the client has to accept like if I'm going to you you might be doing work for my competitors and there will be a certain I think group of the customers that aren't comfortable with that um but I would argue back like you know the stuff we're doing isn't it's not so strategic that like it'd be the end of the world if the same people were working on both things and I try to reassure clients like we have a walled guard and like the people who are doing that are not doing this like we have we're responsible with your information we're not gonna like go disclose it to your competitors but really you're not hiring us to like figure out your core business model anyway so it's not like there's basically I try to dismiss the threat because and I and I believe that it should be dismissed because or the concern because like what I'm bringing to the table because of my expertise in what you do is so valuable um if you're not comfortable with it let's let's talk about how we can maybe mitigate that but it's more important to have the expertise then you're going to go bring someone else in that knows nothing about any of this um that's my two cents on it uh okay I want to hit my last few slides and then with the time that's remaining we can chat more uh and I'm going to be in the in the room next door to answer questions as long as you'd like becoming a trend master how to see these things coming uh the first thing is to have some direct research literally just ask your customers about their DFS their desired future state um when you're in there doing a sales conversation anyway just look around hey what else are you guys working on you know what else are you trying to solve where else is what are the other pain points you know mr or mrs marketing manager that you're worrying about I find that just literally while you're already in the room asking some bigger picture questions I just want to get aligned I want to if I'm going to be making website recommendations too I want to understand uh the rest of the things that you're worried about so I can maybe help you with those too like just that little change right there will help you see a lot more I think where the trends are going um read a lot uh I have a feed lease that I've literally I don't know does anyone use feedly anymore I still use feedly where I've got all my all my feeds that I watch and I'm just kind of just just trying to understand and see you know just just reading a lot of of current blog posts I think helps you start to pattern match um narrow your field it's really hard to be an expert if you say I need to know about everything but when you can you can zero in on a particular niche or a particular demographic um or a particular type of service I think it's easier to wrap your head around it collaborate with your architects so I love to bring to our our architects which is our lead designer our lead programmer um hey here's this problem the client's trying to solve how would you guys solve this and they're kind of plugged into what's technically possible and they can they can help me see like well if your client's dealing with that here's the types of solutions uh that we think can fix that uh interview and network I view other people as a time machine because if I were to go and try to learn all this stuff it would take me months and I might get it wrong but when I can sit down with someone else who has a little bit different experience and just interview them or just ask them about things they save me all that research time I think it's super those white things like word camp are great uh because you can you can save so much time by just learning from others um I can't quite see my notes here but uh do actual research so I see a lot of marketing firms getting into this where they'll literally send out a survey hey you know we're we're in the healthcare space and we're interviewing uh doctors and and off practice managers on what it is they're worried about and it's kind of low fidelity but it's like just send out a survey offer a $50 gift card get a hundred responses back and and that that research can actually start to add to your intellect intellectual property as a firm uh which can be really powerful um and then I would say lastly write and publish for your own good I think we all have this guilt that we're walking around with that we don't write to our blog more because we know we should and we know our customers want to hear it um but what I found is that even if no one ever read it just the act of sitting down to blog or to write or to prepare a talk like this it's like it forces you to pull your thoughts together and form an opinion uh which is hugely I mean it's one of the main reasons I do it to get up here and speak forces me to like I know I'm gonna be questioned on some of this stuff I better have a good good solid opinion on it it's been really helpful so um I want to end kind of where I began with just commending you um it's it's a fast-changing business it's not for the faint of heart you know I think my business has probably been reinvented four or five times in the 12 years we've been doing it um but you really are building that internet brick by brick and I just I want to commend you and encourage you to keep going I mean this is cool stuff it's the stuff that our kids and our grandkids years from now will look back and see that we'd like actually helped to start this thing that's made the world so much better you have a very important job and I commend you for being here for being open to learning and for for the hard work you're putting into this so the last thing I want to say is that predicting the future is important and possible through vigilant continuous attention and effort um predicting the future is important and possible through vigilant continuous attention and effort so that's it let's go get it my name is Dallin uh reach out to me with uh any questions you have I'd be happy to share any of the resources that I've talked about today and uh we're always hiring and looking for good people to to work with at Skyhook so I'd love to talk with you about that as well thank you very much so I I think we're done right do we have time for okay one maybe two questions and then the rest we'll take uh down to the what's the room called the happiness bar happiness bar can you all hear me yeah um so you're gonna be down there for like five minutes at the happiness bar I'll take I'll be there as long as you guys need this is Allie really quick question google plus is going away for 19 pretty quick here and I'm wondering what that's gonna do I do a ton of research but it's not google's not saying what they're replacing that with or what it's gonna do to that listing so my customers are asking me hey you know we can't get under why is Adams concrete coming up first sure you know I said well because the name concrete is in the website sure so you're not I have to build another site for that but they're wondering what that's gonna do to their listing because of that do you know anything about I literally have no idea google my business someone said is cool you guys I super enjoyed this if we can go down to the happiness bar I'd love to keep chatting as long as you'd like thank you