UX for AI

EP. 90 - Democratizing SEO and UX for Small Businesses w/ John Rush

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In this insightful episode, Behrad engages with entrepreneur John Rush, a visionary who's revolutionizing the SEO and UX landscape. The conversation centers on Rush's innovative approach to making sophisticated SEO tools accessible to small businesses at a fraction of traditional agency costs.

Rush shares his journey of creating SEO Bot, an AI-powered tool that performs SEO tasks for only $100 per month, compared to traditional agencies charging $3,000+ monthly. This stark price difference reveals an industry truth: many expensive "human-led" SEO services are already heavily AI-driven, but without the transparency Rush advocates for.

The discussion highlights Rush's philosophy on democratizing startup opportunities. His mission extends beyond mere tool creation—he aims to level the playing field for local businesses competing against franchises, schools against large institutions, and entrepreneurs outside traditional tech hubs. By making enterprise-level SEO accessible for "pocket money," Rush envisions a future where innovation isn't limited to Silicon Valley elites.

A significant portion of the conversation explores Rush's exceptional approach to UX design. With a master's degree in UX, Rush explains how his design philosophy for SEO Bot creates an interface so intuitive that even non-technical users like "a 50-year-old flower shop owner" can successfully implement SEO strategies. Rush believes remarkable UX design serves as its own marketing—products that surprise and delight users generate organic sharing and discussion.

The podcast also reveals Rush's ambitious roadmap for SEO Bot, which includes expanding capabilities to build tools and directories automatically, optimize existing web pages, and function as a complete SEO department. A parallel tool called PR Agent will handle external content distribution across social media and blogs, helping businesses appear in LLM-based searches like those from Grok and other AI search engines.

Rush offers valuable insights about Google's evolving approach to AI-generated content, explaining that Google doesn't penalize AI content per se, but rather low-value content regardless of its source. He describes how Google now relies heavily on user behavior signals to determine content quality, giving all content—human or AI-created—a chance to prove its value.

Throughout the conversation, Rush emerges as both a technical innovator and a philosophical thinker about technology's role in society. His vision goes beyond profit to encompass "a more even distribution of wealth" through democratized access to powerful marketing tools.

For listeners interested in AI, SEO, entrepreneurship, or UX design, this episode provides concrete examples of how AI tools can empower small businesses when combined with thoughtful, human-centered design. Rush's SEO Bot exemplifies a new generation of AI tools that don't just automate tasks but make previously exclusive professional services accessible to entirely new segments of society.

You can find John Rush here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnrushx/

Interested in joining the podcast? DM Behrad on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/behradmirafshar/

This podcast is made by Bonanza Studios, Germany’s Premier Digital Design Studio:
https://www.bonanza-studios.com/

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Welcome to UX For AI. So what happened? I was having a signed contract with the SEO agency. Kickoff call was Tuesday 3 p.m. or 4 p.m. I bumped into SEO bot, your ex and SEO bot, da da da in the morning, went down that rabbit hole. Then I discovered index rusher. Then I did.

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Discovered the domain booster service that they also offer. Yeah. So here's the thing. Total, I would be paying to your services. It's about 100 euro per month. Right. So I'm the 99 dollars tier. And then the guy was asking 3000 per month. Right. Look at it. Realistically. Ask myself how much of human involved in their process and how much of AI involved in their process. So I asked him.

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And how much of AI involved. Most likely 95% AI 5% human. So and he promised me three months turnaround. Right. And I think the turnaround was easy because we put this robot blocker robot text thingy in our website a year ago. So our key large traffic ourselves. So stupid stuff. Don't ask me why happened. Anyways.

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So I look at it and I realized that. Look, if I want to give something a shot that there are two options. Both of them are using AI. One of them claiming and very transparent about it. One of them is not. I got to give this one try. So in within two hours, I got SEO bot running index rusher listing bot and then just cancel the call until until then. Frankly. Hey, this is the situation. I got to give this setup a try for three months.

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See how it goes. And then get back to you. Yeah, that's it. That's interesting story because I think there will be more and more of this moving forward is just basically as you say. Whoever who sells that as a service is pretty much just wrapping the same thing and sells that into many customers. As if that was done by humans. But in fact.

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There might be some human there, but again about the costs, like, what do you pay extra for that? It's interesting. It's interesting. I think that the future is basically going to be like services like mine will end up evolving into the enterprise tier where it actually does the same thing. But it brings human in the loop.

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And then it's transparent for you. Like, you know that now there's human in the loop, but you know exactly how much human either like what exactly the human does. So there is no this kind of pretending that it's all human or or hiding behind.

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And in that case, would you be paying like three K? Probably no. Probably you will be paying like five hundred dollars for that instead of hundred dollars, right? Because that's a fair price because most likely that would be the fair price for the other guy too. But since he kind of pretends that that's all human, then he has to charge more because he's selling one by one. And then in that business, they care about the size of the business, the size of the business.

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The size of the ticket rather than the quantity, so that they try to sell few but expensive. So I think that's the future. So you try the tool on a chip mode full AI. And if that looks positive, you upgrade and you get some human and then there will be like a slider for how much human you want.

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Like you can have a little bit of human, human will be reviewing the headlines, for example, and then that adds you that doubles your your bill. For example, it's still like it's 100 200. It's still very affordable.

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And that the next level is where humans are also looking at the outline of the article and the next level human actually reads the whole article and the next level human helps with the research, right?

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So you can have those levels. And the good thing here is that when you're when everything is transformed and you know exactly why you pay what you pay on what exactly is done by the human, it will be a win win for all.

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Like, you know what you what you get. And also from the other side, the humans will also have a better life because they don't have to lie. They don't have to pretend because you know the agency world now is a very difficult place to be.

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So if you want to make a lot of money, you have to pretend and sell AI as human and make a lot of money.

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If you don't pretend that people say, well, then it's AI, then why would they pay you a lot? So it's kind of dilemma.

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Right.

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I think transparency pricing is going to be a very big challenge in the agency world.

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Why are you charging me? How much of AI are you using in your tech stack? Right. And how much of human inputs are basically being being part of the operation?

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And I love the way you sort of like broke down the pricing of potential agencies that be transparent about how much of human are involved in which part of the process and what they are bringing to the table.

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Yeah, yeah, exactly. And make it verifiable and easy to see and verify that it's actually happening.

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And I think then everybody wins because also for for a lot of the projects, that's an interesting thing.

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Like a lot of the projects that run on non-competitive space, you don't need to involve a lot of humans because the space is not competitive.

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And you can actually win almost purely by using AI. But in some spaces, it's the opposite.

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Even the humans won't bring you the traffic. In most cases, you need not just humans, but the best humans who have to work a lot.

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And that's that kind of makes the whole market quite expensive. And I see a lot of small players like schools, kindergartens, sport schools, like all these little places where they have no competition because they have local SEO.

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Like there is no competition. If they produce any content repeatedly, like 10 articles a month, they will just win their local traffic easily.

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But when they go to the market, they get the same offers as as big companies in a competitive space because the producers of the content, they don't care.

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And then the end of the story here is that these players, these small players, don't use these services at all. They're not participating in the game at all.

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And and that's kind of the part that inspires me the most. So I see, to be honest, like if you look at all my tools, I see it like the main angle is helping the smaller players who otherwise couldn't afford the expensive service.

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Let them afford it, like make it so cheap for them, affordable. Also, be transparent on what's the outcome.

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Like, I'm always transparent saying that SEO bot, it can't even win traffic for itself because SEO space is crazy competitive.

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There's nothing more competitive than SEO space because imagine the best SEO people are competing, right? So I don't even play that game, but I win traffic for my directories and other tools which are less competitive because because it's possible with AI.

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And there is not. And I think that's kind of cool because like the bigger vision on top of all the tools I do, my bigger vision is that I want this whole startup game to be available for smaller players all over the world.

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Because right now it's mostly available for Silicon Valley and New York and London, like the rich places of the people with network people who can raise money, etc. And that I'm coming from that world myself, and and now I see that there's so many people all over the world who could also participate, but they don't have the money that they don't have the access, but they have the passion.

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They have the time and everything. And now when when SEO traffic cost $100 a month that everybody in the world can afford it right. You don't have to be rich like any person in any country can afford it from their pocket money.

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And they don't need to move to Silicon Valley and raise money and everything. So that's kind of my my big vision here is to democratize startups and tech businesses and basically not just startups, but also like school or local businesses.

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Same thing here. If you have a local business, it's so difficult to run because you have this franchise businesses running next to you, owned by huge traded companies. And you're running small pizza place or small school and and it's really hard because you both compete for the same audience.

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And same thing here. I think if they have access to these tools, they suddenly can get almost the same output in the marketing for like $300 compared to their franchise competitors.

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And now we have more local players winning in local areas, which is good because it's better competition because franchise and all the big players, they kill competition and they just monopolize the thing.

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And then the the value or the quality stops growing. And when you have a large small players, more innovation, more creativity and and it's just more distribution of wealth.

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Yeah. So my final goal is to improve the distribution of wealth. I want that to be distributed more evenly around the world.

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What I will say you are being a role model already. I think I think any young person that want to get into the entrepreneurship world, they just need to go to your website and look at all the apps that you have developed.

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So I haven't introduced you to the audience, but I think where should I begin? So just briefly, I let me just go through some of these apps that John has developed.

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Easily publish a project online, very niche products of where I will say I think Mars X is the one that is a bit more like, you know, general no code code plus AI.

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Build SaaS applications easy. A lot of directory websites that basically pack in apps related to category like all top AI tools.

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You got MVP vizards, my god, it at least goes and on and on. Open source software directory. My favorite is by far what you have developed is SEO pod.

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I think is one of is you know, I'm a UX guy. I like to look at new ideas. I think the way that you design the SEO pod, I like to write a big article around it because it's something it's they're totally different experience from what I've seen, what I've designed the past 15 years of my career.

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I think you can iron out the onboarding and all this stuff but the the the foundation of the experience is very fresh. I haven't seen it anywhere else. Yeah, you know, I'm a huge fan of UX and you know I studied UX in school have master's on on that master degree so.

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So I, I'm not new. That was my passion from the beginning, I would say that from the first project I worked in. I think the biggest attention, I always given was to UX so it was more than marketing more than the team funding, like the UX was the thing I would think the most like whenever I'm.

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Sitting board or laying in the bed or waiting for a train or whatever. I think about UX, really, like, whenever I'm free, UX is kind of my topic in my head whenever I work I work and do the things I have to do, but you access something there that fills the void, all the time.

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And I tried a lot of things in UX and I always tried to do things that nobody else does but in a good way. For example, in 2012, I was building an app, and I was one of the first, if not the first who launched the app that had stories, and so it had all the things that we have now wheels and stores like this

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experience where, where user doesn't have to act, where it's where static content turns into cinematic content because the UX is alive it's not static it's kind of moving and changing and swiping etc.

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And it was really really hard because now when you do something for the first time, everybody thinks it's strange, like everybody else does it differently. And if some users don't like it because some users, some people are are like that, but the cool thing about UX is that whenever you, you invent something

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really cool, and you find those users who love it, then their opinion becomes so strong that everybody else loves it too because most people don't have an opinion, right, so they need this guidance from somebody, somebody has to get excited about thing, and then, and then they're also excited and they're

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waiting for that exciting person. And that's what happened I remember when we launched that app.

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There were people writing articles about the app, and just about that. So basically, like whenever I work on a product. I always say that if people don't tweet or write article about this product.

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Just because of UX, like regardless of the utility just because of UX, then the job wasn't done well. And because, and in this case it was like that like like there were articles where it didn't even mention what exactly the tool does, or the app, it was just about this interesting

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thing, and then it spreads in that vacuum and then eventually it goes out so I've done it all the time and but I did it in a B2C space where, where it's common to invent cool things in UX, and often the UX is the driver.

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If you look at most famous apps, their UX was the key why they became popular like Claphouse, Instagram, Snapchat. It was one UX innovation that kind of made them big right but then when I entered B2B space, I was kind of shocked.

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How boring the UX was there, like everything looked the same as it looked in 20 years ago. Like, like, literally nothing has changed. Even the opposite like things changing in the opposite way like they removed the shadows and when you remove the shadows, like, you remove the depth, and it's impossible to understand what's what's closer to you was farther like they made it look cleaner.

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And, but UX was pretty much absent it. There was nothing that was making you feel like it's something like you want to share just screenshot of it.

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And I thought like I have to be the guy I have to be the guy who who looks at B2B space as a place for UX innovation too. And then, like with SAO bot when we started, I thought like we just, we can't just be the utility that does the job like all the other tools.

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We have to invent the UX that will inspire people to build agents. So my goal was this. It was beyond SAO and the content, I want to build something that will be so cool that people want to build agents, and I want to build more agents, and the whole agent thing becomes inspiring.

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And I think it worked out that way. I think a lot of people get inspired by by that because if you're saying that the agent or something is groundbreaking is going to change the world but it looks like a boring thing.

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Then, the message is not connected. It's something has to look cool. If you say it's cool.

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That's the thing that Elon Musk does really well, like when he launches electric car. He made it look cool and like the cyber track and cyber track looks so cool that it's easy to listen his stories about the future of cars, looking at cyber track.

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Well, in fact, the way it looks doesn't matter, right? But it actually matters like the perception changes and when he says that in the future this car will drive itself and imagine you take the regular BMW and you say this car will drive itself.

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And then you take several truck and you say this car will drive itself.

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It's easier to believe that the cyber track will do it rather than BMW. Well, in reality, it's not about the look. It's just about the software there.

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But the perception changes and people get inspired. So I think UX has to inspire people.

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And that's super important. And I hope a lot of people are going to do that too now because I think the corporations have killed UX and Google, Microsoft, they just made it so, you know, they invented their own way.

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They invented their own guidelines and UX systems. And then everything is just the same. I just can't watch that.

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I think one of the things is you're sort of like, I think what you have your niche is SEO and traffic. And you explain it.

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You explain it to allow small players to have a shot. When it comes to UX and like perception, all I can say is how I can relate it and connect it to SEO is earned media, link building.

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This is the best way to grow your business. Right. If you have, look, I, you know, I run a product studio.

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I teach SEO bot type design patterns to my clients. That's how inspiring it is. You truly with SEO bot, the way you design it, the way you present a new way of UX, a new pattern, UX, you have inspired so many people.

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It's just so close to you that you dare to think differently and being bold about it and execute on it. I think there is a lot of people think about great ideas and they don't execute on it.

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And that's what pisses me off. Why don't you go after that idea? And I think what gets me really excited about AI is that now we can execute on those crazy ideas.

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And, but you know, I have this one belief, which is, which is very contrarian and a lot of people don't agree with it.

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But I think you slightly covered it now.

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Like I think that if you build truly great product, the product is the marketing.

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So like a lot of people think that you build a good product and then you go and market it and that works to like a lot of people do that. But the other option is to build a product that's impossible to ignore the product.

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That's impossible not to save your bookmarks, not to share with your friends and share in the community, in the WhatsApp channel, like all those places or in a blog article.

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And I think today, especially for founders with, like for booster founders. I would say that's kind of the best shot, like making products so remarkable that people just share it for the sake of the use case or pattern or they want to show somebody how things can be done or they just like it.

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And if you like something you just want to share to others because you feel like you discovered something that's cool. And you are now being useful to the community by sharing that cool thing you found.

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And, and that's from one hand, I'm, I'm selling growth tools, which are like SEO and listing etc.

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Because I understand that the average founder and majority of the people. They probably don't have either time or talent or or it will take time for them to be able to build remarkable products and and then they need more kind of boring ways to grow with just SEO, etc.

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But I think in the long term, I always urge people to go there to actually build products in a way that they are remarkable and UX is the key there. Like, the most developers don't realize that UX is like 80% of success in a product comes from UX.

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And a lot of the products often don't even do things differently under hood but the great UX changes everything. And some people say like, what's the point like you're kind of putting UX on top of the same thing what's the value.

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And I think there's huge value and huge value here is that very often users don't even use the tool because they don't understand it or they think it's the is difficult.

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So the value of good UX, I think, is that you let more people use a tool that others, otherwise they wouldn't use at all.

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In SEO bot. One thing that I was really, really crazy about was that there should be no reason why you fall off the track, while trying to use the product so there shouldn't be any step where you don't understand what what to do, because a typical user who knows everything, it's easy for them.

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But most founders did, they never did SEO, they don't know the terms they don't understand a lot of things and they thought like how can we simplify it like so simple that you enter your URL.

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And then it just tries to do everything for you. It explains you it's transparent, it tells you what it does. But all you have to do is to watch and say yes, yes next next yes, and just approve things so you feel there's control and you also understand what's happening and also it's educating you.

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So it shows you where it does. And if you don't know where, where is that what's the key word what's the traffic it kind of. Just you on the way. And eventually, basically, anyone like a random woman 45 years old who is running a little shop selling flowers, she can just use it

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I have users like that you know I have people who are like 50 plus who use it, and they say like I have no idea I never tried anything like that. But you know I, I just tried and kind of works and then so cool and and they have this messages and that's kind of the best message to get when, when, when you help somebody who, who has options, it's one thing, but when you have people who don't have options, the only option for them is to go for agency and pay a lot where they do everything for you but that's something an option like that.

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That's something an option like it's too expensive for flower shop.

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You know, in a small town to pay free for K to agency so I think that's what UX does I think UX just basically opens up opportunity for more people who otherwise don't have that opportunity, which is often even more important than the product itself.

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So the technology itself is available but so to make it actually available, you need UX so without UX, it's technically available but not practically.

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I see SEO bot as my SEO employee. That's how much I see it.

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And I think your read of your users are very correct, you're dealing with users that they have smaller businesses, right. They don't understand SEO and they go to this SEO agency calls and get burdened and bombarded by these crazy terms that they don't get what, how would that correlate to growing their business.

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And then they see that a 12 months roadmap, and they see that okay the output that we're getting every month is is not much compared to what they're paying again, these are small businesses for them 3000 4000 is a considerable investment.

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And then they come to SEO bot sees that whenever I come in the beauty of SEO bot here is I can, I can recall, we can recall like three podcasts on SEO bot UX to be honest it's so good.

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It offers me that first of all, folks, download SEO bot, not download, use SEO bot and see it for yourself.

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It said on the right side tells me what article has been published being the schedule being worked on on the left side, give me an update. Kudos to you on the prompt engineering which I would like to get into how much time is invested in getting the prompts right.

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I'm good. It's clear what's happening. And then I think one thing that you allow things brilliant, allow me to write my own articles, which I'm now doing so for example now I'm using rock and perplexity.

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I'm doing the search inquiry and like see what kind of topics are relevant. I give it a title and executive summary, and it does it for me so I can that way sort of like work with this you bot to sort of like, hey, here are some articles ideas, schedule them like doesn't argue with me, I want them to go live, we shall see you never know what market picked up on so I think I have like 20 articles per month.

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I have 20 articles per month, 29 sorry. And then it's a combination of my articles and SEO bot and let the best article win. Yeah, exactly. That's kind of the cool thing there that you can start passive it just does things for you.

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Whenever you have time, I do the same so once in a while I just come up with ideas I give them ideas for those headlines, and then I can forget about the thing for two months then it does ideas on its own.

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And it's 50/50 like sometimes my ideas win sometimes the his ideas win and it's, it's interesting. It's kind of really like having an employee that that you moderate and you're giving the ideas but if you don't, it's still working.

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That's the best part, like it's always working. Like, you can help it or not but it's always working. And you know our, our next features are going to be quite crazy so basically one thing I'm adding now is that it'll be able to build tools for you, you know, now it's popular to build the small tools for SEO, like calculators and generators and all those converters.

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Yeah, and SEO Bot will be building those tools for you will be finding the tools, the ideas, and just building them for you and so you do nothing just says here's a tool I build it.

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And you can also ask like for example you think that for my audience, it would be great to have these calculator of whatever of taxes, then you ask like in tax calculator for small businesses in France and then it creates for you, which is next level because it's, it's building

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software for you, functioning software that that just works, there's no extra work on top of it. And then the other thing it will do is, it will build directories for you so directories are pretty cool and it's like a directory as a content on its own.

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So, you can have a directory within your website like on on the sub folder, and it can be like tools or accountants or all schools or whatever fits your audience.

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And one way to do that is to have a domain for directory, but the other ways to just host it on your existing website which is which is as good so I do both I have directories running under my SAS tools on the sub folders, and then it will just do the research

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and finds all the hundreds of items and then it just puts the categories filters search and everything. So basically, now the end goal here is to completely emulate the best SEO game possible, like the whole, the whole game not not just the article

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now is, it will be like department, you can call it SEO department, where it just does everything that can be done in the SEO game, including links directories tools blogs.

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And also it will show the step number five is that we are already connected to your CMS.

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But now we only run the blog. But the next step is that we also help you with other pages, like you have already pages you have the links you have footer and all those things. And then it can optimize those pages for for keywords, it can link pages with each other.

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So that's basically the end. Like, at that point, there's nothing left for you to do. So you can only watch, and you can come up with ideas all the time you can come with ideas for pages for mini tools for blog for directories.

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So you're kind of this advisor so you you give ideas, but he just executes everything. So you're just dating a guy now. Another idea, I think, and follow up question on that is that I think you should look into how you can help your clients and users, because we have two topics now, Google Search and basically LLM Search.

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Right. How we can get listed in those, I think that's something I don't have an answer, but I really want to be listed there. And I don't know what the solution is. And I've checked it I check crock, I check chat GPT I check perplexity, everyone gives different answer.

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I have solution for that so that is a part of the bigger solution. So I have multiple tools, and in, they're going to be working in a tandem, like now I have index rusher listing bot and as you have what, and they actually complement each other, and you should use them all together because they're part of the whole strategy.

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And now I'm also building two more tools. So one is PR agent.

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So it's like a CEO bot but for social media and for external blogs for SEO bot is for your blog. But this one is for external, it will reach out to journalists, it will guest post on medium and other places, and will also tweet and post on LinkedIn, Twitter and everywhere.

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And one best way to get into LLM search is to be in the internet in the social media so for example grok.

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And it's mostly using tweets. So if you ask it what's the best school to go to, then it will actually search best schools in New York for example, it will find the tweet, and then I find several tweets and post information from there, like that's 100% people even kind of hacked that so they, they tweeted something then they

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post grok and grok pulls it up so you don't even need a lot of use for that because if it's specific content, same as in SEO like if you have very long tail article that's very specific, like not generic but specific, then most likely you don't have article, like, there's a low chance that others made it.

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And same here so pure agent will be helping you to distribute your, your brand into the internet in this way, and then this will help you with LLM search.

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Since the advent of tools like yours and there is write sonic to that right sonic. How have you, so you probably observing how Google react to this kind of tools.

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Are they setting up measures to sort of like AI proof the content and make sure that.

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So, basically what happens and I've been watching that every single day for like three years right. So, before AI, it was easy to spot bad content, you would just do it by counting the number of times to certain words are present.

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Usually, the content farms were doing that they would kind of copy paste the same lines many times. So it was kind of easy. There were like algorithms and they could find it.

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And when LLMs came in, it was the old algorithm stopped working, because content farms start using LLMs.

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What happened is that Google want to figure out how to fight against bad content. It wasn't the AI content, it was the bad content. How can they fight against bad content in all days the bad content was from farms where they would copy paste the same section,

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100 times on the page and it kind of worked often like this keyword stuffing where you would just repeat the same word 100 times everywhere on the page with, with no connection to that section.

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And some were winning big with this and then Google found a way to fight it and then they were fighting it. And now suddenly all these bad players started using LLMs, and it was harder to fight against them.

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So, what Google thought is that it's practically impossible to recognize LLM generated content, because a) even the good content might be LLM generated, so you can create good content yourself and ask LLM to rewrite or translate to different language.

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So now it's LLM content. But in fact, it's your content. Every sentence is yours. It's just rewritten. Should they punish it? Of course, no, because this is just part of, no, it's if you punish that, then you punish everyone who translates the content, everyone who tries to improve the content because their grammar is not so good and etc.

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But it's wrong. And so, and they said publicly, it's written on their statement that they will, they're not and they're not planning to punish AI generated content as such.

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But they said they plan to punish low value content. And in old days, you can easily define what's low value content is the content that that's a mess that's unreadable.

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But now AI always makes readable content. So now they said that we will use users to understand whether the content is good or bad.

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So they did a huge change in their algorithm where they put a lot more weight into the user behavior, whether users click, read and don't come back. It means that they found what they wanted.

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So now what they do, they give everybody a chance. So you publish an article and the article gets some views quite quickly. In all these people said six months, but now it takes the weeks in weeks.

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Sometimes in days your article gets views. So they give it a shot and then they give it a higher shot to see whether people click.

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And then once people click, they try to track what happens with that click. If the user came back to search and try to click again since the item wasn't good enough.

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And that's basically the feedback from the user. And if users like it, then Google thinks great, go up.

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And now it's easy to answer the question whether AI is bad or good. So as it's not about AI, it's about the quality of the content.

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Can AI make good content? Well, again, it's so easy to answer. You talk to Chagypti and we all talk every day.

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If it wasn't able to produce good answers, we wouldn't ever talk to it. Right? So we talked to it. We get good answers every single day, every hour. Like I talk all day long.

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So AI can give good answers. And it's proven. Millions of people every day get good answers from AI.

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It means that there is no reason to think that AI is not capable of producing good content. So it's all about the good content.

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100 percent. Thanks a lot for breaking this one down. I think that's very necessary. I use AI all the time. Some of my posts get half a million views on LinkedIn.

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Exactly. Over 500 likes. But what I do, I'm not stupid about it. I've trained my agents. I gave them my writing style guide.

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I gave them like, you know, posts I like and then I asked. It's actually quite a work. I can be very transparent about my process.

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I give the draft and my AI agent, LinkedIn social LinkedIn post agent. That's what I call it.

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Give me three variations based on 150 posts that I handpicked. I liked. And then writing the style guide. I want the post to be written.

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It gives me three variation. I copy paste part of this one, this one, this one. Combine it. Then do some edits. Then I post it.

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And then people say like, will LinkedIn punish AI generated posts? I don't think so. Like, people give their votes.

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Like, if I like it, I like it. It doesn't matter how it's been made. And then some say, well, AI generated it. Well, at the same time, you've been guiding it.

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And if you've been guiding it, then it doesn't matter about the details. And what exactly have been guiding there as long as it's useful, because it's not a competition of writers.

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This is a competition of content. And if content is good, then who cares? And I think for SEO, that's the game. And that's the game for social media.

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So basically all the systems, Reddit, like all the content systems in the world are using the same algorithm now. They just rely on the user feedback.

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If users read it, share it, like it, great. And it doesn't matter how it's been made. With AI, without AI, like, it doesn't matter at all.

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Because if it's AI and it did a really, really crappy job, people won't like it. If it's a human who has done a crappy job, you will not like it too.

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So bad content is bad from both. Like, it doesn't matter. Good content, again, doesn't matter from whom.

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I think people who just keep repeating this topic about AI possibly hurting your SEO and all those things, in 99 percent of the cases, these are the people who do nothing.

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Like, it's the people who don't do anything. And then when you do nothing, you justify the absence of action by saying that I don't do it because that and this.

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And so they don't create content themselves. They don't create with AI. They do nothing. And then they say, oh, I heard that Google is going to punish that.

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So that's why I think it's the topic of the conversation, I think, slightly gone now.

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I don't see people talk a lot about that because the proof is there. It's been three years now.

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And there are a lot of proofs that basically if you go to any topic and you search and you click the top results, half of them are AI generated already.

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And everybody knows that. But often you will find that you will read it and you will be happy because you found the answer.

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That's it. And even more, Google itself now generates the answers with AI.

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So if you're in the US and you ask anything, so you have this AI answer on the top.

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So how would you think Google will punish AI if it's using AI to generate answers itself?

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Very good. Very good. John Mars X, walk me through what kind of problem because I know you're a very problem driven entrepreneur.

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Maybe like maybe you can explain what do you mean by problem driven? I really I think there is two in a very general sense.

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There are two types of entrepreneurs, one that is obsessed with finding problems that a lot of people have, one just like, oh, OK, someone else is doing this.

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Let me just repeat it, replicate it or whatever the case may be.

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So what kind of problems you have seen, detected, identified that led you to create Mars X and what's your vision behind Mars X?

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Yeah, I started this project in 2019. So, yeah, when I started that, people didn't even know what those words mean.

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And if you ever said to a smart person that AI will will be part of coding, you will be generating code and all those things people would love with you.

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So I have this pitch decks from 2019 and 2020 where where I tell the things which are like exactly like 100 percent matched to the reality today.

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Like basically, if you see that you would think that I just looked around and wrote it today and here's the LinkedIn post idea.

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Pick one of those a slide from the pitch decks and I predicted this two thousand and ninety.

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Oh, yeah, I've done that. But, you know, it's just often people think that it's not true that you probably it's bad.

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I wasn't posting like, you know, if you had a tweet from back then I would just repost it.

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Right. But I started just a year and a half ago. So but I have predictions from back from 2023, which I reposted that I predict agents.

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For example, in 2023, I said that agents are going to be the biggest thing and bigger than everything else.

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And I was probably the first who said that. And then the year after, everybody says that.

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So I think when I started that, my problem to solve was that building solutions to problems was so complicated.

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So if you see a problem anywhere and you want to solve it with SAS, you think that like you your mind would focus on actual solution.

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But then whenever you start working on the solution, you would just get exhausted by doing the basic things which have to be done before you even start working on the actual pain that you are trying to solve.

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In SAS world, it's like 90 percent of every SAS is the same.

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Like these user log in and the settings and the search, like all the basic things and even hosting, deployment, monitoring, like a lot of little things.

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And you would have to have a team of seven people just to spend six months just to get the basic product that's not yet solving the problem.

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But it's just doing the basic things that you have to do.

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And after that, it's like similar to if you want to make a movie before you can tell your story in the movie.

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You have to learn the moviemaking, like the basics, and it will take you like 15 years to learn.

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And only then you can tell the actual stories you want to tell through movies.

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And I thought that I have to shorten that cycle.

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I have to let people get straight there. And why are we in 2019 and we're still doing everything from scratch, like every company that starts doing anything,

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they have 90 percent of their time spent on doing the same things.

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So the idea of Mars was that what if we have a system where there are a lot of micro apps that handle every little thing that's common, like all the common things.

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And then there is an AI that takes those micro apps and slightly adapts them and connects them together and gives you the specific boilerplate project for your tool, for your project.

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And from here and on, the only job left for you to do is the exact new thing you want to add there, because in every project, it's incremental improvement.

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Like, you do the same like everybody else, but then you add the little thing on the top, little cherry on top of the cake.

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And that the cherry is where you want to spend all your time as soon as possible.

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And that was the idea. And I solved my own problem because I wanted to build a lot of products.

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I saw a lot of problems in the world in B2B. I want to solve this product.

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And then I thought, like, I have to have so many people if I want to solve all those problems.

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That means I have to raise a lot of money for that. I have to have office, team, people. But I don't like to work with people as much.

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I like to work with co-founders, like with a few people. But I don't like structures. I don't like organizations because it becomes politics.

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And also, you have to raise a lot of money for that. If you raise a lot of money, you have to also, you know, you have a boss, you have a board and everything.

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And I wanted to get rid of that. So that was the whole pain.

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So I want to enable myself to build cool size products quickly. And to do that, I had to invent this platform that that works like a SaaS builder.

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Like there are website builders there, different kind of builders. But this was SaaS builder.

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And until this day, nobody's doing that. So I'm I'm still pretty much the only one doing that way, focusing on SaaS building.

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Not websites, not apps, but just SaaS. Yeah. And I somehow ended up, I'm never launching Mars X publicly.

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So it's still in a closed beta, mainly because I felt like if I launch it publicly, I will have to work on it full time because there will be demand.

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But I really like to work on problems towards business owners rather than the builders.

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So it's the audience, it's different audience, because I think builders, they benefit, but they they have options anyways.

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Like I will not change their life completely. I will just save them a year of life. All right. But they will find a way anyways.

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And I saw all these AI builders coming and I thought, all right, those guys will solve their problems.

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But then I saw the other group, the one I just mentioned earlier, like now this small business owners, and their life isn't getting easier.

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And nobody is taking care of them. Nobody like they're just in the void.

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They're just being eaten and just overcompeted, outcompeted by the large funded corporations.

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And how do I help them? And then I thought, all right, then I use Mars X as my own tool and I build SaaS tools, mostly around growth and some around building.

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Like I have this no-code builders for directories and websites with landing pages. And I built all those tools to basically democratize the whole process for the small players.

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And I think I've done that pretty well, and I will do a lot more than that. And I see a huge effect there.

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And now I'm pretty happy for this choice because I see that developers are doing just fine with me or without me.

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They're doing just fine. But these other audience, they're not doing fine.

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So whenever I get them as a user, their life changes. And that's kind of big. It wouldn't change otherwise.

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So basically, I'm trying to build things in a way that for my typical user, if not me, they would never start using anything like that.

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So with Mars X, you try to basically go down the path of SEO, but how can I basically get SaaS app building out of the way for founders and product owners?

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So that was it basically all the way from idea to front end to back end to database to hosting, full all the way from the tip to tip.

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So A to Z. But then you realize that if you're going to do it, you're going to attract a lot of builders,

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builders one demand, one futures, headache, customer support, tickets. No, I'm going to keep it in the beta. I'm going to use it.

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I'm going to basically do try to find people, owners, business owners, wherever the case may be, and see what kind of problem they have.

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Use the platform to build this thing and release them. Exactly. Because I felt that will be more useful for the world because I could easily anticipate the development in the AIID tools,

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like things like BALT, Lovable, Coursor, like all those things, I anticipated that they will appear and I knew there will be huge development there.

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I knew there will be a lot of money drawn into there. So I knew that that problem will be solved and I don't like to solve problems that other people can solve.

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So basically, I'm not a typical businessman who just wants to make money where it's possible to make money.

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I want to solve problems which otherwise people wouldn't solve and it will just hang around forever until you solve it.

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You have such a clear, you have done enough soul searching to know what you want to do in this world, what you want to manifest and execute and what you don't want.

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And that's very inspiring for me. Yeah, thank you. I think it comes just with time because when I was in my 20s, I just did what everybody else did.

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So I just tried to make money, raise money, exit and all those things.

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But then in my 30s, I felt like that game is predictable. And one day I thought like, so basically, if I don't do this, then he will do it.

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So basically, if I disappear from the world now, then the world will be the same.

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So I'm not really bringing innovation. I'm just trying to out-compete the other guy.

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So and when I felt that the whole thing changed for me, I felt like, so it means that practically, whatever I say in my marketing, I practically work just for money because it's only the money that comes my way in this case.

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And if I'm removed, the final users will still get what they want from somebody else in almost the same timeframe.

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In that case, I'm wasting my time unless money is the only thing I need in life. And then I thought like, what I really want is I want to accelerate the progress and I want to remove problems.

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So I want to ease the life of the people. Like some group has a problem.

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I want to remove the problem, especially in cases where one group has a problem, the other doesn't have the problem and is slightly unfair and nothing can be done about that.

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Like those cases are the most bothering cases for me because it's not like the other group doesn't deserve. It's just the circumstances, for example.

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And one big circumstance that I saw was the access to capital.

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And I saw that basically growth in the old days equaled to the capital. The more capital you have, the faster you grow.

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But that's unfair because the capital is available to people who live next to capital.

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Like you will never find somebody from small village in India raising money from San Francisco.

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You'll never find that. Does that mean that there are only like not talented people living there?

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No, it's just. And then I felt like that's the problem that's nobody's solving and I know how to solve it.

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And basically, that was kind of the mission for the last four years and for the next four years, I guess.

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Very inspiring. I need to listen to this twice. You wrote a post recently directed to 18 years old of this world.

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Can you end this beautiful podcast talking to them directly? What you meant by that post in a give them an executive summary?

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Yeah, I think the reason I came up with that post out of blue was that I have so many DMS from young people who tell me

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I've been trying to build this project, this startup for a year and I'm still having no revenues and it's a failure and probably I should not continue.

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What do you think? And I always reply saying that imagine you're trying to be a basketball player

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and imagine that you just try to play for that one year and then you're not Olympic champion.

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And you're saying like I have to quit. Like that's not the case.

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Whenever you do sports or music, you break down your path into a very, very long journey of 10, 20, 30 years.

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And you understand that the first five years is just practice.

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The next five years are the practice with competition and then the real competition and then maybe you go higher.

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And whenever you see somebody who is successful, let's say you see Michael Jordan or Messi, you never think that, whoa, Messi is so cool.

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He's playing, he's winning. I could do the same thing in a year.

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You don't think so. The first thing you think is that, oh, this guy had been doing this for 30 years.

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If I did for 30 years, maybe I'd get there too. That's one reality.

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But then I saw the other reality, which is startups, where for some reason the whole media news and social media,

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they all portrayed in a way that everybody succeeds overnight.

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Like if you open TechCrunch or acquire.com, their newsletter, like all the newsletters,

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they all only portray only mentioned the stores where somebody started six months ago and now they're making a million.

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And if those are the only stores you see, then you think that that's the only reality.

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There is no other reality. And now you are the guy who is doing this for 12 months for two years and you're not even close.

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And you think that you're just so bad at it.

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So you feel that everybody is good, except me.

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It's similar to Instagram, where people think that everybody is more happy, more pretty and has a better life.

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Same with startups. And my point was that the expectations are totally wrong.

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And I think people should just change their expectations and expecting to succeed with the startup in the domestic.

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I think it's good if that happens. It might happen. It can happen.

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Like you can't be lucky and become Olympic champion in three years.

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The odds are so low that you should only look at the path and the journey as it's sport or music or things like that,

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where you have to have skills, practice, intuition.

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You build that app over three, five, seven years, and then you are strong,

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smart enough to start producing truly useful stuff to the world because you need a lot of skills for that.

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You need to be good at ideas, execution, taste, design, a lot of things.

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And you can't acquire that too quickly.

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And if you rethink the process and you realize that this is like a 10-year journey,

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then you'll be enjoying the journey because my whole path started that the whole generation is depressed.

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And why is it depressed? Because you're one year into the game and by your estimate, you're failing.

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And in fact, you're failing just because you have expectations which are not realistic.

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So if you had different expectations that for the first year,

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your goal was just to learn to launch something to the internet and that's it, or even smaller than that, then you'll be happy.

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So we define your expectations so that you're actually happy about the progress and the process

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and you're not expecting yourself to make a lot of money just months after you start.

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And I think if that happens, A) we're going to have more happy people around

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because it makes you just unhappy to feel like you're a failure.

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And B) people will keep doing that for a longer period of time, because I think most people quit too early.

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So they quit in the first two, three years because they think it doesn't work.

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And then they go back to their jobs.

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They kind of failed, they are unhappy, but they work.

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And we'll lose these founders from the founder pool, which is bad because for the society,

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the more people try to take risks and build stuff, the more progress we're going to have,

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the more competition we're going to have and the less chance that corporations are going to monopolize the world.

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And that's going to, all three are prerequisites for a great future for the world.

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- We don't want 1984, for sure. - Yeah, exactly.

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- We have to really do our best to avoid 1984. - And sometimes I feel like the reason why that narrative

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is being pushed by corporations because they control the media is that it's good for them.

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It's good for them if young people get discouraged really quickly.

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They're like excited quickly and then they fail quickly and then they go back to corporations.

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That's kind of a good deal.

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I mean, the way you operate in the world changes when you realize everyone acts on their self-own interests.

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And that's not different for corporate too.

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They're like, they're by American laws.

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You heard that first five years is practice, the second five years is practice with competition,

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after that it's competition. Be patient and go after.

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Don't give up. Thanks a lot.

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Thank you for listening to UX for AI.

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Join us next week for more insightful conversations about the impact of artificial intelligence

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in development, design and user experience.