Podcast

Dhaval:
Hey, Andrew, thank you for joining the call. I would love to hear from you on what your product is, like who does it serve, and what are the things that it solves for?

Andrew:
Well, Bertha.Ai solves a multitude of problems. In WordPress, for instance, we have web developers dealing with clients that really just can’t get write together own content because they’re not concentrating on what they should say on a website. They’re concentrating on what they should say to their direct clients. They’re speaking to every day on the phone or in day-to-day meetings, sales meetings, networking, that type of thing. So WordPress has a content gathering issue with Bertha.ai, when you are developing a website, the developer and all the client can use Bertha.ai to create interesting content around what the services, the particular website client provides. It can also help them write blog posts relevant to their particular industry. It can basically help you get the right words out there at the right time and much, much faster. So you’re going to increase your productivity as a web developer and also if you’re a client building your own website, you are going to be able to increase your productivity and get more ideas about what people actually want you to talk about within your services. So that’s what Bertha.ai is all about really.

Dhaval:
Wonderful. Is that a content management system or is that a plugin for WordPress?

Andrew:
So Bertha.ai is a plugin for WordPress, which is an application layer built on OpenAI, which everybody’s hearing about the moment, probably one of the best viral campaigns out there with GPTchat. With Bertha.ai, we’ve got a number of modules in there that help you get your unique proposition together. You can write a full on about page. As of this week, which is January, 11th of January, so coming soon is GPTChat to Bertha.ai as well. And as of by the end of January, we’ll have a Google extension out there as well. So you’ll be able to use Bertha.ai everywhere. And the whole point of being able to use it everywhere is that not every website is built using WordPress. So you’ll be able to use it in Shopify, Wix, those kind of proprietary website building tools.

Dhaval:
Wonderful. So you just answered my question that you are expanding for being a word, from being a WordPress only product to more of a open access for all types of content management systems.

Andrew:
Yeah, using it everywhere. So when, if you’re in your Shopify site, you’ll be able to just invoke Bertha .ai and write fantastic product descriptions or enhance your product descriptions. You’ll also be able to get page content that is relevant to your users. So you’ll, you’ll ask one line question and Bertha.ai will be able to give you the answer to that question. And then you can copy and paste that, edit that to make it more human-like if you like. And then you can post that in your Shopify website or your Wix website or Squarespace, whatever you’re using.

Dhaval:
That’s wonderful idea.Tell us a little bit about where you are in your journey. When did you start first? How many customers you have? If you can share revenue. What is the split between developers versus end clients? From a business point of view, tell us or give us a few clarity on where you are in your journey.

Andrew:
Where we are is we’re nearly a year down the line or just over a year down the line. Actually, we launched in September 2021. So, just the MVP version, and we launched that for basic WordPress plugin. So we’re a year down the line. So we’re way down the line. We’ve made the plugin faster, more accessible, easier to install. Getting the customer journey right is very important when you are building a plugin that’s got a lot of things in it. There’s also a learning curve as well. So we produced in just under a month, we produced 54 learning videos which are on our YouTube channel, which take you through every single module. With the hype around GPT-3, obviously lots and lots of people, you’ve got a million users in under three weeks, I think on GPT-3. So people are understanding how to use AI, how to ask the right questions, and obviously with images, image generation as well. So Bertha AI put image generation in there about a month ago. And that’s flying. People are really kind of intrigued about how they can create unique images for their blog posts, from CVD products to computer products to any kind of product for florist, interior design, kitchen design. You can really get some great imagery there. If you want a modern kitchen design designer or a modern interior design, just ask Bertha create an image and it’ll produce that image of a beautiful laid out sitting room or a house with chandeliers or whatever you like. So the point is that we came from the WordPress design or website design business. So we understand how people want to build websites. It’s kind of a generic way to do that. And with the developments that we’ve had, we’ve got something like around 10,000 registered users. Some of them are website owners. In fact, I had a Zoom call with a guy today who’s a website owner. They’re not a developer or anything. And he wanted to use Bertha AI to better describe his products to his wider market. In fact, most of the meetings I’ve had with Bertha AI I love doing one on ones with our clients. And they’ve been with people that aren’t web developers. They’re the website owners. And that’s the people that we really like to target. Because as I said, website owners have a real problem getting content together and writing blog posts. So Bertha helps you with all that content. But revenue terms, we’re okay. We’re fine. It’s in profit. It’s running itself. It’s quite nice, we’re able to expand. Development team based in UK is upon part of the development team as well. And the majority of the team are based in Kolkata in India. And they do a great job.

Dhaval:
So then quick question. You mentioned something very interesting. There are a couple things you mentioned. I want to glean them out. One is the customer journey. The audience for this podcast are people who are product creators and they’re specifically interested in either adding AI to their existing product or they want to create an AI product. With what you just described about customer journey, what was that experience like for you? Like, understand the customer journey for your website owners. And how did you productize that? If you can share a little bit about that.

Andrew:
Well, it’s still happening. with the WordPress plugin, we are lucky it’s on the repository and you can install that directly from your WordPress dashboard. With the extension, that’s going to be a harder task making sure that customer journey is OK to actually install it in a Chrome extension. We’re talking about millions of users that maybe don’t know how to install a crime extension from scratch because it’s not going to be on the Chrome extension store for a while. It’s just going to be downloaded. Once you have an account within Bertha, you’ll be able to download the Chrome extension and install that. So we’re building education around that about how to install a Chrome extension and maybe make it not so difficult for people to understand that it’s quite easy. It takes about 30 seconds to install the Bertha extension. So it’s about education, but it’s also about what we want as a customer journey. There are so many extensions out there. There’s so many plugins. There’s so many SaaS products out there that involve a learning curve. And what we’ve learned is that people don’t actually want to learn. So what we have to do is almost automate that process .

Dhaval: I’m one of them.

Andrew:
Yeah, exactly. You don”t actually want to learn how to drive a car or drive a new car, let’s say. So if you’ve got a new car and it’s great, but the indicator arm is on the other side, you forget, don’t you? You put your windscreen wipers on. So, There’s a learning curve around everything if I really simplify it. But at the end of the day, it’s up to us as product developers to make sure the customer journey is as seamless as possible to immediate use. And that’s where we’re having difficulty. And we’ve had difficulty, but we’re getting better and better by that every single day.

Dhaval:
Now, you were a website agency website development or marketing agency, and that’s how you identified this content problem that your customers were having. And that’s how you ended up with this idea . Am I getting your entrepreneurial journey right?

Andrew: I mean it was my co-founder Vito Peleg who has a collaboration tool with wordPress as well, and with websites now is a whole, where people can leave feedback actually on the website. And he said, well, wouldn’t it be nice to have some AI generate text automatically so the customer doesn’t have to worry about what text to put in a particular place in a website? So we developed it for that purpose initially and then thought, well, you know what? We can make this work with every single page builder out there. Gutenberg, the classic editor for WordPress. And that was a learning curve as well. I come from a thing called Divi theme community, which is by elegant themes. So my first task was to make it work with Divi theme. And I’ve also got something like 16 plugins out there that work with the Divi theme. So we know that theme pretty well and how to make things work on the front end. And the nice thing about using page builders, most of them are front end. The user interface is front end. So what we’ve done is we’ve made Bertha integrate with every single page builder that people use so that when they’re building their sections together, they can actually put the text in the same time as they’re building their sections. So that was the key to us to make it user-friendly. Page builder friendly. Certainly Gutenberg friendly with WordPress, because the way that Gutenberg is progressing and systems out there like the kadence system for WordPress. It makes it easy for people to use blocks now because kadence is really the lion of where blocks are going. So we had to make sure that it works with every single theme out there, every single page builder as well. And there’s some page builders that have just come out recently that we’re still working on, but it works. One of the most helpful people out there was a company called Visual Composer who helped us integrate Bertha into their system. And that then led us to realize what we were doing wrong with other systems that were built on React and other technologies other than just the normal page builders. So that helped us a lot. And, Yoast.com as well. They helped us integrate it into the Yoast plugin for SEO as well. So there’s some good teamwork out there. And I think that’s what product makers need to realizes is that the way that they can really help their products progress is to get involved in partnerships or relationships with successful products out there and make sure that you keep that conversation going. That then leads to them once your product works seamlessly with their product that makes them help you promote it as well. So that’s a good tip.

Dhaval:
Wonderful You just gave a golden nugget here. One thing I eased out from this is that Most of the people who want to start out as a product creator, they end up choosing something that they already worked in. For instance, in your case, you chose something that you already had experienced in and you found gaps and you were able to solve that problem by creating partnerships with other people. So it’s a lesson for the audience, if you are starting out, look closer, look close at your home. Where are you? Like where in your work, in your current work. There is an opportunity where you can use AI. And that’s the starting point, like you did. Now big question for you is it seems like you were able to successfully bootstrap this and you have revenue and you have users, 10,000 users. That’s a success story. Did I get that right? Or did you raise capital or did you use your agency money to build a product? Help us understand, how did you financially drive this forward?

Andrew:
We’ve bootstrapped from the very beginning. One of the things that’s prevalent in our industry or the plugin industry is to do a lifetime deal. So once we had the product at a stage where we knew that it was a flyer or we knew that it was gonna go along, we did a couple of lifetime deals. So that was kind of self-funding. Our lifetime members really invested in us as well. If you think about it, it was a good lifetime. It’s a great lifetime deal. And we’re always trying to improve it. We don’t do lifetime deals now. So that gave us traction.

Dhaval:
Now where this Your agency clients who signed up for your lifetime deal or did you go out and did some marketing campaigns?

Andrew:
We did some marketing campaigns and just said, This is where we’re at. We’re pretty well known in the Facebook groups where I get on podcasts. So for instance, the time now is three o’clock in the morning. I don’t mind when I’m going to talk to people on a podcast because I’m based in the UK. Bertha is an American company. We registered in the US. But the point is that you’ve got to get out there and say, let me talk about this product. Let me talk about the benefits of using AI, even though there are some negatives to it because of People are saying there’s repetitive text. But again, once you educate yourself as a human, how to use generative text within AI, then you’re going to produce great content and you’re going to be a leader in getting really informing, educating, and entertaining your customers. And that’s the whole point about generative AI. But what we wanted to do was totally bootstrap. I was very lucky. I had a business called Elegantmarketplace.com. I sold that to in motion host and that gave me some financial backing as well. So I didn’t really have to worry about income for a little while. So that meant that I could concentrate with my team and I on developing Bertha. But I’ve still got my web agency in in the UK and I service around 500 clients on hosting and maintaining websites. And we pick up the odd website here and there. But Bertha AI is really pretty much my full-time job these days.

Dhaval:
What would you recommend for someone who is starting out and has interest in creating a product, an AI product on top of GPT-3 or any of the future versions? Would you say that’s like a solid strategy to put a user interface on top of GPT-3 or would you recommend building your own models and having that own core machine learning? What is the trade off there? If you can speak to that please.

Andrew:
Well, the trade off, I mean, is you can do some fine tuning. We’ve done some fine tuning on our prompts. I mean, the whole point about Bertha AI was. It was developed specifically for website owners. So the prompts come from our life experiences within developing WordPress sites and writing and copywriting with WordPress websites. So we did a fair amount of fine tuning, which can be get expensive. But we also knew what we wanted to get out of Open AI. So we’ve been playing with it since May 21, and we didn’t develop stuff or we didn’t launch anything until September 21. So We had a real good session, a few months of learning how to write prompts that worked properly and developing prompts and producing new items like ask Me Anything. We’ve got a module within Bertha AI. Now, which is effectively chat GPT, where you can ask Bertha anything. You can ask it to write a song. Write a bit of code. The code may not be right, so you should always double check. But write a 500 word article on SEO, for instance, or product development or whatever you may want to do. Now we are adding GPT-3 chats. That’s got even better. So we’re keeping the asking Me Anything module. We’re keeping the long form. We’re keeping all the other modules that we’ve got. And also OpenAI helps you write in currently we’re baked in 27 languages within Bertha AI as well. So when you are thinking about producing a product, make sure that you internationalize it. That’s one of the keys. Make sure that you’ve got a global audience rather than a local audience. There are plug-in developers out there product developers out there that really niche down. There are people out there that are selling to enterprise only with their extensions or with their product solutions. But if you want to be able to get out there to the masses, one, cost it properly. Make sure you understand your costs completely. And two, price it correctly so that you understand where your profit margins are going to be so that you can continue to make a difference to people’s lives. Really, that’s the key. It doesn’t matter what you develop, whether it’s an AI product or whether it’s a theming solution or helping people meditate properly or be more spiritual or less spiritual or whatever you like. You can use your intelligence. Let’s go away from AI at the moment. The human intelligence is you just do your own research or what are people using and why are people using it? And if you want to use AI to help you build it, that’s fine. Let’s not forget the mRNA vaccine wouldn’t have been produced in a year without the power of AI. So there’s plenty you can do. You can go into healthcare, you can go into well-being, you can go into fitness. AI will help you build a product around anything. Which is great.

Dhaval:
Andrew, I have two last questions and we’ll wrap from here. So one is you’re obviously not in your early 20s. You’re not a single guy or a single gal who has a lot of time and a lot of energy, right. How do you keep your energy and your fire stoked as an entrepreneur?

Andrew:
Okay. I get asked that question a lot. I don’t really have an answer, apart from if you love what you do, What you do will love you back. So if you love what you do, what you do will love you back. I am an open source advocate. I’m a community advocate. I love what goes on in the community of certainly around WordPress, in the community of AI. I’m an anti keyboard warrior guy. I can’t stand keyboard warriors. My goal in life is to calm people down, basically, make sure that we’ve got the facilities to be helpful. Bertha AI is essentially, So it’s nice to be able to let people know that they can use it free completely forever. There’s no restrictions on use currently. So I just try, I just know that what I’m doing in my life and in my business. I know that I’m doing it for profit, but I’m also doing it from an altruistic sense of what’s right. And that’s been learned over a period of years. It’s not easy to get to give away things or get to give away your time. As I say, one of the most rewarding aspects of my as an entrepreneur is actually helping other people. I have a coaching business and many times I look at people that are in trouble with their business or anything, and they’ve come to me and I charge an hourly rate for that and, You know, I just don’t charge. I just go, okay, you can have that one on me. Because, and it’s not because I feel sorry from it, it’s just because I feel I just want to give them an opportunity to come back. And, conversely, what then happens is when they do become successful, because they do, they come back and they pay me my hourly rate on a weekly basis. So, there’s give and take in this . So basically wake up in the morning wanting to give rather than take. And I think that’s the best entrepreneur that you can have. Because in the end things will come back to to you.

Dhaval:
That’s beautifully you said, I love your quote as well. One last question and we’ll wrap. What is the future of Bertha? Where do you see it going?

Andrew:
The future of Bertha is going to continue to be an application layer. We may very away from Open AI. What Open AI have done with GPT chat is almost a kick in the shins to the people who have built application layers on top of Open AI. They gave us a bit of a chance, but if you think about where open AI is going to go, they’re going to probably get another massive investment from Microsoft. They’re going to get another massive investment from anybody else. So our job as Bertha is to make sure that we exploit in the best possible terms of that word. We exploit what Open AI are doing, what other people are investing within Open AI and make sure that our application layer is as proficient and efficient as possible and brings new things. So one of the new things that we are doing is obviously bringing So I’m not going to go too much into it, but something that will really help the podcast industry, which is a billion dollar industry out there. So we’re developing things that will help people really make sure that their podcasts are transcribed properly, got the right SRT fields files, and with video transcription as well. So all that kind of stuff moving down the line. So making Bertha AI from an extension and a plugin, a WordPress plugin. Let’s not forget there are millions of WordPress websites out there that need good content or need their content looked at. So we’re just going to continue to promote the benefits of Bertha AI to website owners. We’re also going to promote it to podcasters, to people like you that are taking your time out to interview people like me and making sure that you benefit as much as you can from using AI and hopefully you benefit from using Bertha AI. We’ll keep innovating as much as we can rather than following. That’s the key.

Dhaval: That’s exciting, Andrew. I can’t wait to hear all about what you’re working on when you come back again on this podcast a few months from now and hear about all your success. Thank you so much for your time.

Andrew: Thanks For having me