Slobodan Manić: Measure up, measure up.

Simon Rumble: What's the day?

Jim Gianoglio: Hey. Hey, Simon.

Simon Rumble: Hello, Jam. I. I thought I would just change a variable in your name and see if, see if people liked them all. I don't know.

Jim Gianoglio: Jam.

Simon Rumble: Jam. I don't know if it works. Jim is better. Jim's definitely better.

Jim Gianoglio: I do have a friend who calls me Jim Jam. Oh, so it kind of fits.

Simon Rumble: Kind of like Tim Tam, which is an Australian cookie fact.

Jim Gianoglio: I didn't know that. Yeah. Is it a good cookie? It's delicious.

Simon Rumble: It's wonderful. Yeah, they sell them in Trader Joe's as like Australian chocolate sandwiches.

Jim Gianoglio: Okay, so it's not like the marmalite. What is it? Marmalade or what's that, that paste that everyone.

Slobodan Manić: Marmite?

Simon Rumble: Well, yeah, those very. We're talking polarizing condiments here. One is, well, I love marmite myself. I love Vegemite. I love any kind of these off yeast spreads. Maybe one day, Jim, I'll send you a jar and we can do a taste test. My son loves it. My daughter hates it, by the way. Fun fact, that's an interesting little abtsd with my kids, how to get them to enjoy that. But wait, what are we talking about today?

Jim Gianoglio: You know what? I'm trying to figure out how to segue this to my intro, but there's no segue, so I'm just going to jump into it. So, Simon, Yes. You have a bachelor's in psychology, right?

Simon Rumble: I do.

Jim Gianoglio: And that actually probably does come in pretty handy into what you do now.

Simon Rumble: It does, frequently, actually. The, in fact, the statistics part of it in particular. It's very handy.

Jim Gianoglio: Yeah. You know, my undergrad is in graphic design and commercial art, which is really handy for data analytics, you know, and, and here we are in the world of, of marketing data and analytics, and it's a winding road that we've taken to get here. And you know, I wonder about the next 10 to 20 years, especially as rapidly as things are changing with AI. And so I'm curious about how to think about career progression, especially for people who are maybe early to mid career trying to decide where to focus.

Simon Rumble: Yeah. And to help us, you started writing obituaries, right? That was your career evolution. So you went from graphic design to obituary writing.

Jim Gianoglio: I did do that. I did do that.

Simon Rumble: A long winding road.

Jim Gianoglio: I also sold vacuum cleaners door to door, but that's another story.

Simon Rumble: Oh, I bet that sucks. Yeah.

Jim Gianoglio: So talking about the world of career progression for data and analytics and marketing, kind of this realm I want to explore, perhaps delve into these Questions. AI didn't write that, by the way. I threw that in myself just to be counter. So to delve into these questions, we have someone who's gone through similar progressions and transitions in his own career. Sonny Manic. A marketing and optimization enthusiast, he spent more than 15 years helping businesses grow through better user experiences. He's been a UI developer, a WordPress developer, chief technical officer for Search Engine Journal and Alpha Brand Media. A website optimization consultant with Instacart, he recently co founded Web Performance Tools, a company dedicated to simplifying workflows for digital professionals through innovative tools like Cohesio for optimizing ad campaigns and podpacer for enhancing podcast production efficiency. And he has his own podcast, which I'm an avid listener to. No Hacks Podcast. It's a show that helps marketers and developers understand what makes great user experiences. Welcome to the show, Sonny.

Slobodan Manić: Thank you. No one has ever introduced me like that. This, this was impeccable. This was beautiful.

Simon Rumble: That's what we. Every time before.

Slobodan Manić: That's why you pay him.

Simon Rumble: Yeah. Before I was a co host, I was a guest on the show and I said the exact same thing. And that's how I found out he wrote obituaries. So when we die, he's going to write your life story and publish it.

Jim Gianoglio: It's a skill that, that always, you know, it's evergreen.

Simon Rumble: It is.

Jim Gianoglio: If I ever need to go back into obituary writing, you know.

Slobodan Manić: Yeah, analytics, you still got it.

Simon Rumble: Look, accounting and obituary writing. Right, because nothing's written but death and taxes. Those are the two.

Jim Gianoglio: Well, there you go. Yeah, death and taxes. That I got both, both skills there. So, so today our, our theme for this episode, like I mentioned before, it's about kind of career evolution and how marketers and analysts can think about growing and changing as their career progresses. But before we dive into that, Sonny, give us a little bit of intro about you, how you got to where you're at. Yeah, the, you know, the, the elevator pitch for, for your.

Slobodan Manić: I think how I got here was by not being able to settle. I, I, I think that there's no better way to describe it. I, I always have. As you get older, it's less, but always chasing that. What's going to be next? I need to do something else. I need to find again. It's not everyone. You know, in the Middle Ages, that was the Renaissance, man. Now they call it ADHD or whatever. Like, I think those concepts are very similar, but it's just not being able to not, maybe not even not be Able. Not being willing to settle for one thing, and as I wrote in, in the notes for this episode, is the thrill of learning something new is something that will never get old for me. And I, I'm ready to just completely drop whatever I know in one area just to go and find something else and not just touch it and play with it a little bit. I want to really learn and master a skill and then move on like the aliens in the Independence Day and then move to the next planet and the next planet until there's no more planets. And you're writing an obituary for me? Yes.

Simon Rumble: Yeah, well, Jim wouldn't exist in either. That'd be, that'd be horrible. But no, perhaps. I mean it's problem solving, right? And I think that is we, we, we frame it in different ways, but that is fundamentally what it is. This is knack for seeing something that it has that needs some attention, that you think maybe you can bring a slight, slight, slight worldview to it. So, but wait, so how, how did, what did you start with? What was the.

Slobodan Manić: What I started with, it's a funny story. I, I moved to the US for. This was mid 2000, so I moved to the US for like six months.

Simon Rumble: Okay.

Slobodan Manić: And my parents and most of the people back home in Serbia didn't even have email or use email daily back then. So I set up a WordPress website on WordPress.com which is self hosted version. Like there's nothing, there's no, there's no hosting company or anything. I set up to post updates like I'm alive, everything's fine, don't worry about me. So it was just easier for them to find an old computer, just type in the URL, see the update. I know it wasn't that long ago, but yes, it's sounds like it's 50 years ago or whatever. Sounds like Tom Hanks in Castaway sending bottles with messages or whatever. But it wasn't really like that. So that's how I started playing with digital stuff and setting up that website and then, hey, maybe this could be different. Maybe I can try to change this. You change colors first and then you realize, oh, I need to go to like GoDaddy or HostGator or HostGator or whatever hosting company and host it there if I want to install plugins and whatnot. And then one thing led to another and here I am, I guess always tweaking. I guess problem solving really is the best way to describe this optimization mindset, whatever you want to call it, if you're not Happy with the way things are. You have two options. Just be quiet about it and just be okay with that or try to do something about it. Simple as that.

Jim Gianoglio: Yeah. So you got bitten by WordPress, the WordPress bug pretty early on?

Slobodan Manić: Oh, very early. 2.4 was the first version I worked with. Yes. With the blue admin, the old ugly blue ad.

Jim Gianoglio: Oh yeah. Wow. And so 2.4, what's it up to now?

Slobodan Manić: Is it version I don't even, I think six point something or seven? It's really, it's complete. It's a different product. Like this was before. Custom post types.

Jim Gianoglio: Oh man.

Slobodan Manić: That I started.

Jim Gianoglio: Yeah. And you spent a lot of time kind of going all in on WordPress development. Probably still do, right?

Slobodan Manić: Less so now, but yes, I did. I went to all kinds of conferences. And also WordPress is just the perfect ecosystem where, especially back then where there wasn't all those page builder plugins like third party page builder, where there's different flavors of WordPress, it was just WordPress and the same for everyone. You were able to explore that universe almost fully. If you want to learn how plugins and hooks work, if you want to learn how all those different things that power WordPress work, you were able to just look at the source code. Hey, this is how they wrote it. It moves through this, then goes there, then information sends this, you send to this another file and you were able to really, almost fully understand how WordPress work. And for me, that was such a rewarding experience. I was in that space for at least seven to eight years, like really hardcore into WordPress. And I think it helped me develop that mindset even further. Because when you're trying to optimize and figure something out, if you can't, it's not very well. Your confidence takes a hit. Basically, WordPress was written in such way that just read at those, you can look at those files, you download it, you can read the files, you can see exactly what's happening. It's code like you wrote it, but better in some ways, especially then. So I think, yeah, I spent quite a lot of time in WordPress ecosystem.

Jim Gianoglio: See, I spent a little bit of time looking at the PHP files and trying to make edits and then crashing my site and thinking like, okay, this isn't for me.

Slobodan Manić: That's how you learn. Yeah, that's how you learn. I mean now with AI, ChatGPT, all of those ChatGPT cloud, they're so good at understanding WordPress because all the documentation and all the code is online. I mean, if you take something like Cursor. We'll talk about using AI to build products later. I think just say, hey, I want you to write this for me. And I want the file to do this and this and this, or a plugin. It's easy. Like, it's super easy.

Jim Gianoglio: Yeah. Cursor has been a game changer for me. It's just so much of an easier coding environment. Yeah. It's just amazing, but real quick for.

Simon Rumble: Those folks who are so. I started building websites a long, long time ago, but I've been out of the website building game for a long time at this point. What is Cursor?

Slobodan Manić: It's a code editor. It's an ide, basically. Not just a code editor, where it's an extension of the Visual Studio code thing. I think it's a wrapper around that because it completely ports your settings from Visual Studio code. It talks to LLMs, it talks to Claude, it talks to ChatGPT. Whichever model you choose. And then you have CHAT within the code, you can select some code and say, why the hell doesn't this work? And it will be able to look at the other files and tell you what the problem is. It's not always right. So you do need to have some skills. But if you have some skills, basically, if you're a senior developer and treat it as your junior developer, oh, my God, you're going to be so much faster. It's going to be so good.

Jim Gianoglio: Yeah. And for Luddites like me who are like, okay, with code, you can say, hey, I'm trying to write a function that does this thing, like in plain English. Right. And then it'll say, oh, here you go. And it's like, here's the function, here's the class, here's everything you need. And like you said, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But, like, it's a great starting point for something.

Slobodan Manić: Usually it's almost there. Like it's never completely off. Yeah.

Simon Rumble: Wait, so I know. Okay, we're talking a lot about web development. How did you then progress from web dev to the marketing? The CRO world.

Slobodan Manić: Yes. So CRO is three steps further.

Simon Rumble: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a logical conclusion for a lot of folks, but. A lot of folks, yes. It's a different group that often will come to that. Right. It's not necessarily the way they did originally.

Slobodan Manić: I've had a very transformative experience. So one of my web dev clients were people who owned Search Engine Journal, the biggest SEO publication today. Even then, they were not the Biggest back then, but they were pretty big. One of the first SEO dedicated blog.

Jim Gianoglio: I used to read it every day.

Slobodan Manić: Yeah, most people were. I mean, they're even bigger now than they were before. I guess people consume news in a different way, or at least you do. So basically one of my contracts I had this was. It wasn't upwork, it was Odesk is the way it was called back then was for people from Search Engine Journal. And they hired me as a WordPress developer for some other projects that they had. Then they added me. They let me work on SEJ website, which is how everybody calls it. I used to call it. It's not Search Engine, it's scj, obviously. And you know, I keep getting better and better and that in the end I was CTO at Search Engine. And I still don't believe that happened. I was just a solo web developer from Serbia who never did web development before. And like four years later, five years later, this life is not supposed to work that way, but sometimes it does.

Jim Gianoglio: What do they say? Luck favors the prepared, right?

Slobodan Manić: Luck favors the ones who try a lot of times, I guess. Yeah. And prepared. Yes. You will be prepared at some point.

Jim Gianoglio: Yes, yes, exactly.

Slobodan Manić: But one big one. And I was still developer, I was still a developer for the first few years there. But when we had one of the partner calls, weekly partner calls, and I was, you know, you're a cocky web developer and all the marketing people are bad and everyone says, like SEO people, that that was the time when there was black hat. Google wasn't this smart as it. As smart as now. And you know, in the web dev space, the saying was, SEO people are all hacky. And they, they, you know, they just tried to hack Google. And I was just trying, playing that joke on the other three people on the call. All SEO people, by the way. And I just say that in silence. Okay, wrong crowd. But then one of them says, how do you think we feel about web developers? And I'm like, oh, there's another side. Like in Lost, the TV show, when they find the others. That was my moment. Like that the others episode when other people show up on the island and you realize, wow, there's more to life than the things you've been used to. So, yeah, that was one of the most important meetings I've had in my career so far. And this was almost 15 years ago now.

Jim Gianoglio: Yeah, like trying to see it from the other person's point of view and having empathy towards what they're trying to achieve and what they're working towards is so important. I play a similar role and have played a similar role trying to bridge the gap between the marketing team and the analytics and data team. And it's hard when they speak different languages, they have different acronyms, they're kind of. It's hard to see it from both sides, but person that can bridge any gap between like two departments is always going to be very, very valuable.

Slobodan Manić: One of the most valuable people on the team. Absolutely, yes. If you can, if you, if you can be the way I say it from my perspective, you can be to the marketing people, you can be the smartest web developer they have to the web developers. You can be the smartest marketer they have not, not the world. But it's easy to talk to you and they understand you and you understand them both those islands will want to hang out with you and work with you and your career becomes super easy at that point.

Jim Gianoglio: Absolutely. So were there any specific key moments where you shifted into one role more than the other? Like from developer to SEO or technical marketing or from marketing to CRO? Was there like a shift that you made that conscious decision? Was it just.

Slobodan Manić: It was a. No, it was more of a mindset shift. But that meeting was that shift for me. And I started thinking, okay, it's not just about building the website and saying, my code is flawless. Deal with it. It's about what does it do after you ship it, basically. And what. I was never SEO in the traditional sense, technical SEO, I did a lot of that. But SEO, I'm not going to say I ever did that. No, absolutely not. But just looking at your product, which is the website in this case, from a different standpoint, it's not just, this is fast, there's no bugs, I killed it. It's more about how do people and Google and whatever else interact with your product. And that's when you realize, this is what CRO is, what I do now. It's not about building a page. It's about building something that users will be able to interact with. So looking empathy, I guess is the word, looking at what the other side is doing with the product you have, I think is the most important thing you can do.

Jim Gianoglio: Right. And curiosity, right? Like, it's easy to get into the mindset of, I built this thing, I built this website. My, you know, I'm all done now. It's off my plate. But like to have that curiosity to say, huh, I wonder how people are using this? And maybe that's like, oh, there's this thing called Google Analytics. I can install on the site to see what people are doing on the page. Which was kind of my. That's how I got hooked on going from SEO to data analytics, was, oh, Google Analytics is free. Let's put this code on the site and see what happens. So, yeah, definitely having that curiosity.

Slobodan Manić: I think if you don't have curiosity in 2025, you're going to be left behind at some point, if not already whatever you're doing.

Simon Rumble: Although. So this is more of a tangent than anything. Just thinking back to that developer story. The funny thing was when I was working on the. Working on the analytics side, similar to Jim, when we were talking about using Google Analytics, well, one of the things my devs would often say to me is, you know, the website would be a lot faster if you just removed this tag manager that you got here. And that was always one of those things where I was just like, okay, that's not happening. I appreciate that, but that is a sacred cow. With all of that noted, though, it did serve as a catalyst moment similar to your story of I wonder, though I don't want to remove it, but I wonder how I can meet them halfway on this. Maybe there is something we do need to talk about in terms of the tech debt that we have here. And there was this whole sort of, well, everything's asynchronous. I'm like, yeah, but if it's full of bloat, it doesn't matter. It's still going to take forever to load. And it did start some interesting conversations about, oh, well, maybe we can make this thing faster. Maybe there are ways to do this. And it was a moment of coming together rather than divergence. But for whatever reason, we do seem to all. I don't know if it's still true today, but we seem to rally or, you know, sort of get into our own little tribes and it's hard often to break out of those tribes, to go across to these other disciplines because we have our own sort of rightly or wrongly, demonization of alternative approaches, of alternative solutions. Because we've only had those negative experiences, not the scenarios where we can come together and hold hands. Is that.

Slobodan Manić: And not only negative, but staying in a tribe is comfortable.

Simon Rumble: It is. It's safe.

Slobodan Manić: It's safe. Exactly. Yep.

Jim Gianoglio: You go to the conference, the analytics conference, and they're all bitching and moaning about the marketing. They don't get us. Yeah, we're right and they're wrong and it's not helpful.

Simon Rumble: Nice.

Slobodan Manić: CRO has the same thing with hippos. Like the highest paid person, that's always the bad person, but that person always knows more than you do. If you're a CRO person and you're just going around their back and saying this guy doesn't get my efforts and my knowledge and my uniqueness or whatever, you're the problem. If you are going around and saying the other side is the problem, you're probably at least equal part of that problem.

Simon Rumble: So did you study stats at any point to take on the CRO challenge?

Slobodan Manić: Just online courses. I did the CSL mini degree for zero, but I didn't study like university level study of statistics. No, never.

Simon Rumble: So one of the interesting things I think about just CRO and AB testing and over time has always just been this inherent challenge of someone coming to the table, like look, this thing is significant, we should make all these changes. And then you wait and you wait and you're like, no, it's actually not significant. There's a regression to the mean over time and these are somewhat, I wouldn't say super elevated statistical constructs, but like the idea of power calculations and just understanding sample size and these kind of things require a little bit of background. Is that something that you found yourself coming to in the role? Like you sort of like trial by error? Like trial and error.

Slobodan Manić: I mean trial by error also. And this is what most I'm going to say good CROs will tell you. Don't trust what the tool. If the tool is green and says this is statistically significant, maybe check and make sure. Yeah, use a proper calculator. You don't need to know everything about statistics. But there are calculators, there are ways to, I mean what's 99 times 7560? I don't know, but if I pull a calculator, I'll tell you. So you can use a calculator to see if you test if your results are statistically significant. If you just go into a tool and say, hey, this seems to be kind of greenish, so maybe it's significant and it's winning. So my boss will like me. And if you knowingly use that information to look good, you're a hack. And you know you're a hack. That's the worst part.

Simon Rumble: Well, I think what's hard though is is any, any field that is new and novel will inherently attract a lot of folks to it who are somewhat cowboyish, myself included. Right. Like I, I would include myself in this, in that over time I had to remember my background that I'd learned in stats. And go, wait, wait, wait, wait, I'm being fed these stories. People want to hear these stories. And you know, we talk a lot of in the analytics industry, especially about being people pleasers. And I think there's this inherent fear that that's a very easy path to go down, especially with CRO, is like, I just want to see people smile and happy with the work that I'm doing. And over time, then you optimize the chance to always have good outcomes or to.

Slobodan Manić: Also in CRO, lying with numbers and statistics is so easy if you want to do it. Like, you can always find something that makes you look good, but you shouldn't do that. Like, they will figure it out eventually when they see that the money's not coming in. And like, do you want to be there when they figured it out and they're mad? Like, maybe just be honest. The thing we tried didn't work. I think this is why it didn't work. Let's try this other thing. It's super easy to lie with statistics, as you know better than I do.

Jim Gianoglio: Lies, damned lies and statistics.

Slobodan Manić: There you go. There you go. Yes. Yeah.

Simon Rumble: What is your. If you. I'm just fully putting on the swap. If you had a. Do you have a hot take on the nature of the CRO industry at this moment in time? Like, is. Is there a. Jim and I talk a lot. Well, we've talked a decent amount about the balance between sort of AI driven personalization and CRO. In a world where you go, well, we even need Sierra in the future, that's a pretty hot take because if you can, you know, personalize experience to every individual, you don't need to test.

Slobodan Manić: So if you. I don't think it's a hot take because it's my take. It's a smart. No, AI will not be able to fully do CRO anytime soon because AI means using old data that works somewhere else to try to optimize something today, which is a different project, a different website. So I had a guest on my podcast recently, Manuel lacrea, who said best practices are always out of date and AI can only do best practices when it's optimizing your website. So if you just, you know, go full AutoPilot and let AI optimize your website, there will be mistakes and you will not be aware of them. And when you are aware of them, it will be too late. Maybe at some point we'll be able to fully, completely optimize every pixel on a website. We're not even close to that. So that's my take and I don't think it's worth trying because it's not going to work, not yet with the models we have right now. That is not what they're built to do.

Simon Rumble: Yeah, well, it's an interesting one in the. Because I, I hear you on that. Broadly, as the discipline sort of continues down the path it's on. It's more the, I don't know, the balance of just like, what if everything just goes like so hyper personalized and there's no singular feed experience. We always talk about like SEO to a re here. Like there's no rankings because every single person has their own unique feed based on their own preferences and interests and all these things. And you're like, yeah, gosh, I guess like Amazon's a pretty website to think about CRO for because everything is so personalized. You can think about like the blocks of content, but like not necessarily the content that's within them. So I don't know, is that a concern or you just, that's just a unique, like, unique problem for them versus like before Sierra World.

Slobodan Manić: Yeah, I don't think it's a concern. I, I think there are so many brands and companies that are not and will never be at that level that they can pull it off. They don't, they will never have the data. So unless you are like buying someone else's data and making decisions based on that data to apply to your website and your company, which sounds like a mistake to me, unless you're doing that, you will not be able to fully automate CRO and optimization. And I don't think we should even try because CRO is ab testing is like the hottest thing from people outside of CRO when they think about CRO. Like, when can we test something? That's what every client will ask you when you start working with them. When can we test it? CRO is about boring research. 80% or more and only then you get to test something. And I don't think these tools that give you AI to just fix things, their research is not your research and not based on your data.

Simon Rumble: When you're thinking about successful moments in CRO, are you. I am often concerned this is a psychology problem. It's like in the world of psychology, there's the replication problem. That is a very, very big thing right now with a lot of these classic studies that you look at and be like, oh, like the marshmallow study with kids and like delayed gratification, not a real thing. And you're like, what do you mean I can't replicate it? It doesn't replicate the same way it did in that lab setting. And I look at some CR tests that I've seen and go, is that going to be a truth forever? Is this just like a. Could I replicate that study if I tried to do it again? And well, this is the problem. If you can't replicate it, was it true in the first place or was it just like, you know, it was at that one moment in time and therefore it was well optimized for the month of January, but it is no longer an optimized website for February.

Slobodan Manić: So there. Yeah, this is the hot take. Yeah, I don't think it is because it's mine again.

Simon Rumble: Sure.

Slobodan Manić: There's so many tools that sell you databases of tests. You can get access to like 10,000, 20,000 test results and then based on that, you don't have to test. This worked 65% of the time. This worked. And you know, just applied. How many of those are pre mobile first? How many of those are pre pandemic? How many of those are different country? Like, who are we kidding here? If you're basing your decisions today on, on historical data that happened at some point that you don't know if it was measured correctly, and you guys know this better than I do, why this is important, would you be willing to trust your business or your client's business to do something like that? I would not. I would never dare to do something like it. Ever.

Jim Gianoglio: Yeah, there are too many nuances for each individual business to say, well, they tried this over here and it worked for them. Let me try it. Like, it can have the complete opposite effect. So like the whole like best practices are not. Maybe it's a good starting point to think about what you might be testing, but you can't just take it wholesale and say, that's what I'm going to do.

Simon Rumble: Yeah, well, it's an interesting one though because like you, I don't know, you probably hear those Shopify ads where they're like, we've got the best checkout. And from an analogs point of view, the analogs devs look at that and be like, no, you do not. You have the worst from an analytics implementation perspective. But it's neither here nor there. Their whole thing is predicated on we are going to limit the degrees of control that you will have within our ecosystem because we know that this is the core optimized experience. I think there's something to be said for universal experiences across multiple different websites. If I like, I know how this checkout system works. It's very easy for me as a user, having gone through it multiple times on these other websites. But do you think that is a sort of a fundamentally bad approach then from Shopify sort of enforcing that on everyone, or is there like just a certain maybe scale or tier that it doesn't make sense to test when you're like just selling cookies to, you know, e commerce cookie sale, like, not like actual cookie.

Slobodan Manić: So when you say fundamentally bad. Yeah, bad for home, for the, the.

Simon Rumble: The individual brand, that would be considering how do I better optimize my experience? But yeah, on aggregate, it works out for Shopify.

Slobodan Manić: Both those are true. I think, I think I had a similar experience. Well, not I had, but when I was living in Sweden, when Klarna became a big thing and you know, buy now, pay later. It's a Swedish company that really first started in Sweden.

Simon Rumble: Sure.

Slobodan Manić: When I was living there when that checkout showed up and they did integrations with WooCommerce at Shopify probably as well. Every website up until then was a different experience. When you're buying and here you have something that, first of all, it knows me like it remembers it has a cookie on me. So every website that I go to, the website doesn't know who I am, but the widget knows who I am. It's the same experience everywhere. I know where to click. Exactly. I know where to fill the data if I need to. And for the end user, the familiarity and then just being able to do the checkout faster without any doubts or without anything that you need to add to it definitely helps with the conversions for the individual brand. Like, what if Klarna decides, I don't want to work with you anymore, and now people expect something different and you don't have it anymore. Same thing with Shopify. What if Shopify decides, hey, for this group of websites, let's mess with them, let's mess up their checkout.

Simon Rumble: Right.

Slobodan Manić: What happens then?

Simon Rumble: I often wonder, how is Shopify testing this on an ongoing basis? Because in theory it would suggest that there's a subset of websites that are always going to be testing that. They'll do some testing within terms of how their checkout experience is going to work.

Slobodan Manić: Yeah.

Simon Rumble: Which is.

Slobodan Manić: So I don't like everything being the same. No, that's never a good thing. But if it works for anyone, it works for Shopify. So I'm not worried about them.

Simon Rumble: Yeah, well, I mean, not to catastrophize, but it's sort of Like a. As we gradually ab. Test our ways toward the most homogeneous Internet possible. Because ultimately we find like, yeah, this is the optimal experience over time. And you're just like, okay, I don't know if that is a good or a bad thing, but it's a horrible thing. But on the flip side, you look at Amazon, you have a one click checkout, probably the greatest CRO test of all time, that they figured out how to best optimize the buying infrastructure on their website. But again, that's the power of Amazon, not the power of the individual brand. So it's. Yeah, all kinds of complicated.

Slobodan Manić: Exactly.

Simon Rumble: I'm definitely going down the road. Yeah.

Slobodan Manić: Would you rather live in a country like North Korea where everyone has the same haircut, dresses the same, it looks the same, or in a country that gives you some individual rights to where you can be whoever you want to be? Like, that's, that's Shopify checkout versus whatever other experience. But it's easier to manage people in North Korea, you know what I'm saying?

Simon Rumble: Sure, sure.

Jim Gianoglio: Manage.

Simon Rumble: Yes.

Jim Gianoglio: So this is the part where I get to play my, my role as podcast host to pull Simon back out of the.

Simon Rumble: Oh, I thought you're gonna say now we're doing the geopolitical moment where we go on the spot about our ratings of various dictators around the world, right? No, no.

Slobodan Manić: Oh, you have that.

Simon Rumble: Oh, God.

Jim Gianoglio: So. So pulling us a little bit back on track. You know, you've, you've gone through a lot of iterations. Web dev, technical marketing, CRO, and. And recently you kind of made the leap into founder, co founder of, of wrt. Did I say that right?

Slobodan Manić: Wpt. Yeah, wpt.

Jim Gianoglio: I was one letter off. And so I'm curious to get your thoughts. You know, I talked to a lot of people still in the analytics world, and with all of the layoffs happening and mergers between consultancies and things going crazy, a lot of people are thinking about, you know, starting their own consultancy. And I'm wondering from your perspective, what was the thing that made you take the leap?

Slobodan Manić: Middle age crisis, like midlife crisis? What. I don't know what to call it, but basically I was going through some things, nothing dramatic and serious, but. And I read a book, and this will sound cheesy, but it's a book where one chapter is about you go to meet the maker and they show you what your life could have been if you tried harder, if you really went for what you cared about. And that kind of resonated with me because I always thought about maybe I should. I want to build a SaaS, but my skills are WordPress and that doesn't translate to modern SaaS development. I want to do this, but I can't do it. For whatever reason, for years and years I've been putting it off and I read that and it kind of got me thinking. I either need to accept that this will never happen and never think about it again, or I need to give it all I have, which is what I'm doing now, basically with a broken sleep pattern and whatnot. If you want something, it's okay to stop wanting and not try, but you need to be aware of, hey, I gave up and that's fine. For me, this was, this was a time where, and especially with AI that makes things easier and that, that skills gaps are just smaller and smaller, whatever you want to do. I just thought this was a time where I should try. I had a great co founder who has great business building experience. So that was, that was, I mean, he asked me, do you want to start a company? And that was my sign. Like, if I don't do this now, I need to stop thinking about this and just focus on other things in life and be employee until, until I get my obituary. So.

Simon Rumble: Well, so what, what does web performance tools do then?

Slobodan Manić: What we do, it's an umbrella company for SaaS businesses. Essentially. We find something that could be done better and faster in a more efficient way and we build a tool for it. So can I, I don't want to plug the products, but can I mention what they do? Just to give?

Simon Rumble: Yeah, no, I think the, the context is important.

Slobodan Manić: Okay, so the, the first product we had was, I mean, you know, I have a podcast and I had a stretch last year where I, I did 17 episodes in 34 days.

Simon Rumble: Good Lord.

Slobodan Manić: That was insane. That, that was full episodes. That was completely app. While I had a full time job and another client on the side. It was completely insane.

Simon Rumble: Jim and I have done like three in the past two weeks and we're both like, oh my God, too much.

Slobodan Manić: Work, you can't do the pace. I know I wasn't planning to do that. I just offered to partner with two conferences and interview their speakers. They asked me to, I said yes. It all happened to be at around the same time. It was, it was not easy. I took a two or three month break after I was done with that because I just needed to summer off of everything. But what I did then is, you know, everyone chat GPT, everyone uses chatgpt. I just checked. Hey, can you help me use Cloudflare workers to build me a tool that's going to help me prepare an interview outline? Like, I don't want to research my guest and know what they do. I just want to have a tool that will scrape the data somehow. Or I feed the data, feed it the data. This is my outline template. I just want you to give me the most basic outline that I can. Just show up and pretend that I did my research. That was the only way. So I did that. Turned out to be super easy because ChatGPT even then could write the Cloudflare worker code that you just deploy to Cloudflare. You have a. A webpage, a random URL where you go to a field of data and it gives you the outline. So I realized, wait a minute, if I did this, not even writing a line of code in a few hours, why not try to make a product? And this is where Pod Pacer, which is the podcast planning tool and interview prep tool, whatever you want to call it, this is where it was born. And then after that, it was just. It was a need I had essentially, that I realized there's no tool that does this. Every. Every tool for podcasters, as you probably know, you get pitches all the time, is, we'll help you promote, we'll do the social clips, we do the videos, we do the editing. No one puts you in that chair prepared. Like, there's no tool that focusing, focuses on that part of podcast or experience. And I struggled with that. This is where most of my time went because I wanted to be ready for the guest. So that's one I realized this is something that no one does and where I need help and why not build it? The second one was I was working for a. Before this, I was working for an e commerce agency that does a lot of PPC and a lot of meta ads for their clients. I audited that, and I realized that most of the ads don't make sense with the landing pages. Like, what the ad says, there's a discount that says 30%. The landing page will say 15 because someone updated it. The campaign is over on the website, the ad is still running, whatever. And I realized, yeah, there's so many ways that you can use even AI to optimize your ads. You can use AI or whatever to optimize your landing page. But who is checking that? Like, who's making sure those two are in sync? So that's the other tool. That's Cohesio. It's a cohesiveness platform for ads that Looks at your ads and looks at your landing pages in a very detailed way and gives you a full report of cohesiveness score between the two. So, end of the plug. Basically I realized that this is something that if I don't build this, it's going to keep not existing and maybe I'm skilled enough to try to build it. That was it. And this is what people like you said in analytics who want to start a product or an agent. Yes, you can trust me, you can do it. If you can spend a weekend talking to ChatGPT and have deep existential questions like why do you always get it wrong? Why don't you listen to me? And stuff like that. You'll walk out of that weekend with something that resembles a product. You don't know where to host it. Ask Chat GPT. You don't know what Cloudflare is. Ask ChatGPT. You don't know which stack to use. Ask ChatGPT. And you will get there. You will age horribly in that weekend, but you will get there. It's possible.

Simon Rumble: Very interesting.

Jim Gianoglio: Yeah, I've been, I've, I've been wanting to somehow sequester myself for like an entire weekend or even a week and just non stop go on a deep dive into all of the, you know, ChatGPT and Replit and, and all the different tools to really understand them better and how to use them better. Because I think right now my, my use of them is still fairly surface level, but it's like, how do I get the time to spend to really learn these new tools? I mean, at some point you just have to focus and do it or else you're going to get left behind, I think.

Slobodan Manić: But, but you can, you can do one day, you can do half a day, you can start there and then when you see, okay, I'm really building something, the second half of that day becomes available because whatever plan you had, you're building a product, now you're building a company and then the next day becomes available. Like it's easy when you get some traction. The thing where people, where I think people are stopping is I don't see the traction. This is too confusing. This is not for me. I'm done. Start small like I did with the first spot PACER iteration. I wanted to have a Cloudflare worker that takes some input and talks to OpenAI API and gives me something back that is easy for anyone. Anyone can build something like that using ChatGPT. Don't worry about the database, don't worry about hosting it. Like Cloudflare worker is literally a page on the Internet. Not literally, but works as a page on the Internet. So start small, find it a super small problem you have that you want to fix. You want to build a tool for and just talk to ChatGPT until it says, enough already. Just go, go away and. Or whatever. I think it's that easy.

Simon Rumble: Well, Jim, just thinking about that out loud, like, because, I mean, I had similar thoughts of like, I want to subquest myself and whatever. The reality is life gets in the way. What I found for me at least. And perhaps this is what you solve for. But the idea is if you're going in aimless or directionless of just like, I'm trying to learn this thing, I'm trying to tinker and you don't have an actual output that you want to aim toward. I think that is where I see a lot of people struggle with this. And it sounds like you went into this with like a. I actually have a vision for what I want to do. Not just like a. I want to see what is possible. Is that a fair framing?

Slobodan Manić: 100%. What I used to say is scratch your own itch. Yes. But if you don't have an itch, go roll in the mud. Like, do whatever it takes to get an itch. Like get infection effective. Just find an itch. Find an itch and then scratch the itch. Because scratching and it. The how to build is super easy with. With LLMs. Yes. But you don't just go in. I'm going to learn something this weekend that. That is never going to work. Have a problem to solve, even if it's a stupid problem, if it's. If it's some most basic web app. Just try that first.

Jim Gianoglio: Yeah. So you've been working here now on these tools and on WPT for about a year, right?

Slobodan Manić: About a year. I would say a bit less than a year, maybe. I think it was April or May last year.

Jim Gianoglio: Okay, so where do you see the next phase? The next year? Two years, three years? Are you trying to grow the next thing?

Slobodan Manić: We want to have a lot of web apps that make people's lives easier. Yes. So we don't want to stop with two. Of course, bringing them to market, selling them and growing them, that's one thing. But as you build a product, as it gets a life of its own, you can hire people for it. You can hire. I can sort of step back and work on the next product and the next product. Why stop doing this? It's fun. That's the way I see it.

Jim Gianoglio: Exactly. And how. I'm curious how you think about going from sort of a solo founder or co founder of this company to growing a team. This is something that's very much in my mind as I'm trying to grow my business. What does that look like for you? How do you think about that moving forward?

Slobodan Manić: Yeah, this is, I mean, you can do a lot as a solo founder as well. It's super easy to do it as a solo founder. I had a co founder to start with, so it wasn't a solo founder situation at all. It doesn't fully apply, but I always built smallish things on my own. I think solo founder is just someone who, like I told you, wants to dedicate a weekend to trying to see if they can build something that they think or know there's a market for. But going from that to hiring a team at some point, your time that you spend on things where it's not necessary for you to do them, but you don't even, you don't know how to automate or you haven't had the time to automate is better spent elsewhere. And at that point it's better to bring someone in who's going to at least keep you organized, if nothing else, and help you with the focus shifts all the time. If I have to go from developer mode to how do I sell this mode to how do I write this cold email mode, those shifts, that's very taxing. That gets you tired really quickly. Trying not to wear too many hats at once is why I think people should hire early if they, if they can afford it. Right.

Jim Gianoglio: And are you looking for like EAs, like offshore?

Slobodan Manić: Well, yeah, that, that's, that's one thing also. And developers. Yes, yes. Those are the two main things because yeah, ea, Absolutely. I've never had someone have a password for my Google inbox for Gmail until now. And so much better. Life is easier, significantly easier when you have someone and, but also find someone that. But you know, it takes a lot of training. It takes trial and error. But if you have a person you can trust that, you know, if it needs to be done, it's more likely to be done if I give it to this person than if I try to do it. That, that's when life becomes better.

Jim Gianoglio: Yeah, sorry, I used an acronym and I didn't expect. So EA Executive Assistant for anyone wondering.

Simon Rumble: I think that's a common acronym.

Jim Gianoglio: I think so.

Slobodan Manić: But EA Sports.

Simon Rumble: Yeah, exactly.

Slobodan Manić: There's other things.

Simon Rumble: Yeah. Just looking at the two tools right now as you think about the future here. I look at Dharmesh Shah and I think the agent ecosystem he's building is interesting. Is that sort of what you're thinking or are you going more fully? I don't know. These are somewhat point solutions. Right. These are not designed to be sort of big comprehensive SaaS solutions. But, like, are you looking at this as like agents that you'd be building in the future, or are you looking.

Slobodan Manić: No, I'd rather not go that route because agents could be parts of the tool. I don't think any. Well, we don't know. Maybe in five years a company will just sell agents. Not maybe. I'm pretty sure they will. But what I want to do here, especially with podpacer, which is a. We launched that cohesio we're launching very soon. It's more mature. We want to make this the only place you log in when you're doing a podcast. Like this is the only. All of your guest information is there. You're emailing your guests from this platform. So we want to make this. When someone thinks about, I need to prepare for a podcast interview, not the editing tools that I don't dare to take on descript, basically, and no one should in this world, but to prepare and manage a podcast, I want this to be the best tool available. Yeah. And there's. There's other phases that we will take.

Simon Rumble: On, like podscribe at some point where you're like, you know, we want it to be the back end, but also like the. The front end. Because when you think about sourcing guests and the con, like, I don't know, as you well know, like, it's not just the prep for it, but it's also then, oh, gosh, now I gotta write the synopsis on the website and I gotta pick the image and I gotta make sure, like, the links are there and all the, like, it's just, it's all this sort of the way.

Slobodan Manić: We think about it is. And this is. My podcast was hosted with one of those services that give you. They take your RSS feed and they create a website for you automatically. And it looks cool. But then I realized that in Google Search Console, that Google wasn't even crawling my website because of how slow the server was. And that's an opportunity, I think. If we have all this information preparing the interviews, all the information about the guest and the other ones have only the RSS feed, who's going to have a better guest profile written automatically? Who's going to have a better episode page written Automatically. So I think that's. That would be the next step for podpacer website hosting. And I mean like a proper, fast, well written website that has all the information that you may want to have on a website.

Jim Gianoglio: Interesting. Excellent.

Simon Rumble: Any consideration of a measurement tool, anything in the measurement space, just because it's one of those areas that's really hard to think about tooling around right now.

Slobodan Manić: That's a good question. Well, I don't know. I haven't thought about that at all. You don't mean in podcasting, you mean.

Simon Rumble: Just in general, broadly speaking, as you think about sort of the divergent lens with which you're operating, where you use AI to create a somewhat simple solution, but then you sort of extrapolate on it. There are all these sort of measurement scenarios that we're talking about these days and are coalescing data from multiple different places and so forth.

Slobodan Manić: If I had to. If I had to think about. And again, no idea what I'm talking about here.

Simon Rumble: Yeah.

Slobodan Manić: If I had to come up with something, it would be how do I get some data that others don't have? How do I get the users to give me the data? So maybe something that's kind of like a survey or something like that, but collected in a different way. I'm a fan of zero party data, so you'll probably go there.

Simon Rumble: Okay. Interesting. Yeah.

Jim Gianoglio: Well, we've reached that time. Simon, we're at the end.

Simon Rumble: Yeah.

Jim Gianoglio: And you know, one thing that we like to do, I think we haven't done it in a couple episodes, but today we're going to bring it back. The incremental insight. That's something that we ask our guests to come with a. Some article or a podcast or some. Some piece of advice that they can share with our audience that is actionable and that they can take and say it. I learned this from the Measureup podcast. Sonny, do you have an incremental insight?

Slobodan Manić: Yeah. So I mentioned the book earlier. I guess I have to say what the book is. The book is Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins. As. As. Oh, yeah, I know there's people. There are people who are like, not big fans of Goggins. What I like about him is that all of the crazy things he does, he doesn't say, go and do this. He just says, this works for me. And this goes back to best practices. This works for me. I'm not saying this crazy stupid. Like he just has a need to run 200km every week. Most people don't. And most people should not be trying that, but you should try to find what that thing is for you that will get you to feel the most alive. So that book is definitely, I mean, I, I know a few people who also say it was a life changing book. So I would definitely say that is the book. There's a, there's a podcast I was listening episode I listened to recently this weekend. And again, I never thought I would recommend anything by Hormozy, but Lila Hormozy was on the School of Greatness and that was such a raw and amazing interview where I just think the facade we see may not be what, what's actually driving the business. Because I didn't like the facade at all for both of them. It was a very, very actionable about starting a business, growing a business, being serious about your business and questioning yourself whether you're doing the right thing. So I think that episode was absolutely amazing and I've recommended it to a few people already.

Jim Gianoglio: Fantastic. We'll include links in the show notes for those looking for those resources. Sign it.

Simon Rumble: Yeah, we. Absolutely. Well, and you know when you're meandering across life and you find yourself trying all these different things, but you maybe aren't that fulfilled, you're going through that midlife crisis, maybe there's a, an opportunity to start something new and realize now is the era of the solopreneur. The solopreneur. I can't say that word. Anyway, it's time to measure up.