[Music] hey guys what's up and welcome back to the channel and welcome back to another episode where I'll be interviewing SEO experts and entrepreneurs from around the world we've got a very special episode for you today where I'll be speaking to the founder and developer behind topical map AI Mr Pete mcferson ladies and gentlemen all what's up Dad thank you oh Todd I just saw Todd pop up our business partner charl I'm sorry thanks for having me man excited to be I appreciate it awesome great start to the show already and shout out to Todd as well might as shutting down Discord right now right now yes let's let's not focus on the SAS project anymore so actually let's focus on the s project so let's jump into the questions the very first question I have for you is actually how did you get started into blogging coding developing affiliate SEO email SAS social website Acquisitions how did you get started in all these things I'll give you the short version the short version is I never knew what I wanted to be when I grew up I went to college I went through like five different Majors I ended up graduating and getting a degree in sociology which I did nothing with and I went back in accounting and I got degrees in accounting and I got full-time like grown-up jobs corporate jobs in accounting and I hated it and I've been blogging since 2009 mostly like online some like Personal Diary stuff and then I had like a bluegrass music blog just like hobby stuff no idea what SEO was but I started just writing on the internet creating websites that sort of stuff and mostly for fun I did that for years when I was in accounting and I wanted to quit I do something different right side hustles I started more and more websites from uh the affiliate side of things SEO a little bit of e-commerce which I was terrible at FYI I I lost like thousands of dollars on my very first Ecom and it was just it was a mess but I never stopped trying things and in 2016 I did end up quitting my corporate career I took a job at a startup that was like halftime they're going to pay me like halftime salary but I got some benefits as well and I could you know do side hustles so I could figure out my next thing and the other half well spoil alert I moved my family uh couple hours down the road my wife quit her work we had two kids and then the startup like lays me off after one paycheck I gotta figure out what to do so that was the start of uh do you even blog which was a podcast I started in 2017 and little by little I grew the income I did more SEO sites I had a couple of dozen at one point a couple of YouTube channels a couple podcasts the coding thing didn't start until just a couple of years ago but it's just just been uh I was going to say boring maybe not boring but it's it's exactly what you would think right I started knowing nothing I had a lot of failures and I just kept trying things and kept trying things and here we are been doing it fulltime for about eight years a slow and steady progression right yeah awesome well that's that's a pretty good journey though to be fair aside from maybe the the getting laid off after a month salary part that might not be the the most nice of a gut punch but in general it seems like you had a pretty good trajectory and like you said you've kind of done a lot of the projects right so you have a bit of a taste for everything and an idea of how to do a lot of different things so I want to ask you you said there you just did coding in the last two years or the last couple of years even was that a direct result of AI or was that a result of something else yes and no I always wanted to code things since like 2008 200 since back in college even I found it interesting I would Dabble here and there I dabbled in JavaScript I dabbled in Ruby on Rails uh PHP a little bit and all this other stuff over the years and every like 12 months I'd get an itch to like oh I actually want to build a project and I would get into it and I would realize this is going to take me this is gonna take all my time like if I actually wanted to do this it would just take all my time so to answer your question yes when like I've been following AI for years and years but when that first like chat GPT December of 2020 1 or 22 whatever year it was 22 that was like oh okay now this doesn't actually have to take up all of my time anymore now I have a little bit of knowledge of code already I can use this to leverage some of the logic that's more advanced how to put things together I can literally ask how to deploy stuff like I have this assistant now that allows me to actually ship projects and so when that happened I I did the same thing I've always done which is let's see if I can build something and it took me months but I launched it it was the first project that I was like oh crap like I actually coded this and I launched it and since that day that was like two years ago now I've just been that's been like my full-time job right like just getting better getting better churning out projects some of which have no users some of which have a couple thousand users and everything in between so yes AI was really the Catalyst behind this awesome so you have as you just said there kind of like an MVP first mentality right which I I I well I kind of agree with to an extent and there is it seems that that mentality has kind of taken off this year in as as a kind of relation to levels IO and Danny postm on Twitter and stuff with their like fot to Ai and stuff like that a lot of them are just saying you know ship ship ship deploy deploy deploy you know wait for problems after fact and wait for the money to kind of print itself right I I like your approach especially in the digital marketing SEO world what have you learned from constantly sh shipping especially so rapidly right yeah I would say one of the biggest benefits to um not just code but shipping shipping shipping anything whether that's uh content projects like websites or uh YouTube or podcast or code or whatever I say the huge benefit here is getting better at determining what's going to work or predicting what might work when you first start you have no idea you're like oh this is going to be like a billion dollar app idea and then it's crap right and you don't have any users and you have no audience or whatever that is I think the more you ship the more you build you start to figure out like ah you know what there's actually not any potential with this one maybe I'll do it anyways because it sounds fun that's fine go have hobbies but you get better at trying to predict actually this is a pain Point people have and will pay for and I don't think I'm the best at this of course I'm not I'm not pretending to be but that is one thing I've noticed about myself over the past year two years is deter in like I have this idea I have lots of ideas going through that list and trying to figure out like I think I can actually launch this I think I can actually build it and I know how to Market it or at least that first step of the marketing that's what I'm best at I'm not good at the like scaling thing that's not me but I hope that answers your question yeah 100% and it kind of leads me almost to the next one kind of perfectly which is how do you come up with those new project ideas constantly is it just looking at gaps in the market is it using other tools and saying no why don't they have this feature is it kind of or is it just some secret mad scientist Source well you mentioned Peter levels and there's a handful of other uh Indie hacker indie devs or whatever they call themselves these days that I follow and they all pretty much say the same thing and I think I agree and this is going to be my official answer scratch your own itch that's where all my things have come from so topical map AI came from the fact that I hired multiple firms to produce a topical map I I ran into this I interviewed this guy named Casey Bello belli Bello doesn't matter who's just crushing it with a few websites over the past couple years and it kept bringing this up this is like a couple years back topical Authority topical Authority topical Authority and I kind of knew what that was but I wasn't totally an expert so I'm looking around I'm hiring people service agencies or whatnot to build me topical maps for existing sites new sites Etc and they're charging me like I won't tell you how much they charge but thousands and thousands of dollars in some cases and their deliverable is literally just like a spreadsheet and then I'm looking at this like yo I could have asked chat GPD for this and sure enough I went and found some YouTubers they're kind of doing this and the tool was built out of the fact that like okay I literally just want to I want to make this easy for people I honestly just want to make it cheap for people to start with they just need to be able to get some data a topical map some topical Authority even if it's not perfect instant and cheap right it's my own itch solving my own itch so I think the more people do things the more projects people start they can develop a mindset of just realizing when they're having a paino they don't always not everybody does this right they don't think about this I think about this constantly I have a pen of paper with me everywhere I go I have like 20 pain points a day small stuff stupid stuff stuff related to Chocolate stuff related to pickle ball stuff related to weight training like everything I I now just make a list of every single paino I have and you know it's a potential business idea one day I definitely think I should have a a notebook in front of me though sometimes my handwriting is that ineligible that even I can't read it myself so oh totally mine's awful I think most developers and most coders tend to have pretty terrible handwriting to be fair I think it's just uh we're so used to the typewriters these days right what do you prefer in terms of being a oneman gang or you just had you worked like startups and kind of in teams and stuff as well do you like having that team aspect of moving towards a giant project or do you really like being that onean gang that can just deploy deploy deploy yeah we it's funny because we've discussed this question off here as well as we work on projects I am definitely a oneman uh operation as opposed to a gang operation not because I don't like people necessarily but I also just love control over my own hours and Charles you already know this but uh I try to work as little as possible I do and that's hard when you have a team I'm not opposed to it uh I have Freelancers I have contractors that have worked for me over the years and everything's great there I just really like my Independence I like my freedom I have two kids I have a a new puppy that we got about two months ago which has been a ginormous pain in my rear and I just prefer to do that stuff be frank uh it's funny I'll say one more thing because I think maybe you're going to we were going to talk about this you called me a developer and thank you by the way I used to tell people I'm not I'm not a developer I'm an indie hacker or Indie Dev or whatever you want to consider those people and I was realizing this morning maybe I am now like I feel like I was uh not a wolf and a sheep's clothing what's the word I'm like a duck that you see on Tik Tok or Instagram who lost his family it got separated his family and got adopted by like a pack of wolves that didn't eat it and now the duck thinks it's a wolf that's me as a developer like I throw together tools I hack together tools but I think at some point over the past year to maybe I got proficient enough where you might actually consider me a developer I just thought throw that out there just throw that out there I I normally put whatever I I normally put people's labels and again it's it's horrible to know label anyone anything right but labels honor man I'm a developer that actually sounds good well I I normally label People based on how whatever they're spending the most amount time time on right so I used to think oh I'm an SEO because I spend I spend all my time doing seo seo seo nowadays I spend most of my time like delegating and speaking to people and doing connections and everything that's more entrepreneur stuff and maybe even like investor stuff maybe not quite yet you know but I definitely don't see myself as really an SEO anymore and that might be crazy to some people out there especially that have followed me for like the last 15 years but I really do think as you just said you do kind of evolve towards a point and a lot of the time you don't even realize you're doing it it just kind of happens as a result of your day-to-day activities right for sure yeah I used to consider myself a blogger that was my number one label not so anymore yeah when was the last time you wrote a blog post that's a great question January or February January or February earlier this year six seven months ago yeah damn see that's I I wouldn't class you as a bloger anymore either to be fair at that point right yeah yeah the next I wrote a blog post I mean AI wrote a post that I edited and human human put in that kind of puts me perfectly onto my next question which what are your thoughts on the last year plus for bloggers in Google right and especially now with the recent I'll be it mostly small recoveries that we've seen over the last couple of weeks from the a August core update what's your thoughts on everything that has happened around that kind of situations SL situations you know yeah I can't blame people who are frustrated I used to I used to not blame but I used to think Google updates are always going to come it's part of our job as seos and marketers to overcome them to adapt with the changes and do something different and figure out new ways to get eyeballs right that's what marketers do things are always going to change I think since August September last year like the H uh helpful content update Stu I have more sympathy and empathy now for people who got crushed because my own sites got crushed I was making like um one I I had a mechanical keyboard brand this is all public now so I can share it I was making like three grand a month which was easy it was only like a year and a half old at the time I wasn't even like focusing on it it was just it kind of making some decent money right it got crushed by Google and I heard the same thing from I mean we've all heard the same thing from bloggers and creators I uh I think things are moving faster right like AI came out a couple years ago and now all of a sudden every tool on the planet has Ai and your phone has Ai and your smart TVs have ai now and all the above that's okay things are just changing faster and I think the Google updates as we've seen are also changing maybe a little bit faster or in more drastic ways so I think number one the ability to adapt never been more important and it's probably going to get worse before it gets better right the ability to completely switch gears different could be different projects entirely could be massive strategy shifts like the ability to adapt super important and the ability to adapt a lot super important and uh there's three things number two I think patience and forgiveness I think as things move faster people get more and more greedy somehow I know this is me personally I want things to work and I want them to work right now and when I don't understand what Google's trying to do and I don't understand how to rank content anymore I get kind of beat up with myself and frustrated with myself I used to be way more patient when it comes to that I think that is going to be key as these systems sort themselves out we gotta be patient don't sell off projects immediately just because they got a little bit of dip like we can hold out we can figure this SEO or Google or AI thing out we can figure it out and the only other thing I'll say I'll close with this 20 you said you've been doing like SEO for like 15 plus years I still think it's the same game now as it was then it's people using the internet to find things period search Pinterest YouTube Google anything they're gonna keep doing that whether they ask chat TPT or Google or anything else remains to be seen but as long as people need information there's got to be somebody that gives it to them and so if you can't figure out how to get in front of people whether it's this platform or that platform you can't figure out how to use AI to to compete like you're going to get left behind it's always been this way it just looks different now I think people don't want to accept that people think that we've gone over the cliff and we can't come back it's always been the same game in my opinion yeah 100% no I I agree as well and I I also think to an extent that as you just said users will continue to do the same thing and it just depends on what platform you are at and as seos we aren't Google optimization experts we're supposed to be search engine optimization experts right so should be able to adapt to those other search engines those other search algorithms and things like that otherwise you're not really an SEO you're a Google o right and I don't want to call you a googler because that might be offensive to some seos so the the second last question I have is how do you manage all of these projects at once and that actually comes from shra from ET yeah it's a great question and the answer is I don't I've been telling people for years I I once had a mentor this was again 2017 a mentor tell me Pete I think you have amazing potential out of everything you do I'm gonna give you that as a compliment however I think your biggest problem now and maybe forever more is going to be focus and I raised my hand and I said you're absolutely correct and that is still the case to this day so how how do I balance so many projects and I do have a lot of projects I don't I usually work on one thing at a time period and not like I work on one thing for like 80% of my time and like 20% of my time elsewhere I usually like 95% focused on one thing at a time but I switch very quickly I've I've coded and shipped like like six projects maybe in the past two years uh like apps web apps primarily and I think I have five or six content sites and three YouTube channels and two podcasts but I'm never working on more than one thing at a time it may look like I balance a lot of projects but I really don't not I don't know I'm not super human I'm not even like massively productive anymore I just focus on one thing at a time relentlessly and then lose focus like a dog seeing a squirrel and then I run after something else and that's how I like to work by the way I'll close with that I do this intentionally now like I'm aware I don't have a lot of focus and I've structured my work life to revolve around that I don't I'm not like a bajillionaire I don't make a crap ton of money but I more than enough to do what I want to do for the most part right so it's a lame answer but that's the truth no it kind of perfectly puts me on to the last question as well which is how do you stay motivated right because a lot of people tend to get motivate motivated by the fact that they have got like one baby that they're going to build to be this big giant company you know they they've got that thing but because you're switching between different projects different teams different businesses different business partners even sometimes right how are you staying constantly motivated and even avoiding burnout when you're juggling kind of all these even multiple different roles as a solo entrepreneur as well yeah I just pulled up uh this note I have from Noah kagan's book The Million dooll weekend I think that's what it's called it came out like a year ago or something I'm gonna read it to you because this is my answer quote this isn't about willpower or self-discipline no one is going to nag scold or intimidate you into starting a business my personal favorite way to approach starting a business is to have fun make it fun and you will overcome the fear so ignore the fear point but that's my answer like I don't stay motivated I don't think about motivation at all I don't even feel like I stay inspired I try to the best of my ability not to work on things I don't want to work on and it's funny when you have fun doing something you're gonna be motivated motivation is never an interest in people's head when they're doing a hobby that they enjoy they just want to have fun that's the human nature in general and I think I'm pretty good at organizing my work life around that so that's it I do I do suffer from burnout I'm suffering from burnout right now on a project just because I've been focusing on it for a couple month Charles says sorry Charles is like the genius who's like telling me what to do I just had to like implement it and be done with it but other than that like honestly I just try and have fun I've structured the way to get paid for having fun and I'm not an expert at it yet but that's my philosophy that's what I'm working towards I think this was a really interesting and great episode and honestly I think you've given people a lot to consider and think about especially in this world which continually seems to be quite pessimistic recently right and you've just given people a a window of Hope genuinely into like blogging development SAS project all of this kind of stuff it was a really fantastic episode is there anywhere where people can find you online afterwards thank you Charles uh I would say I've just switched over so people can find me at my name.com Pete mcferson docomo people elsewhere but now I'm trying to just have one weekly Roundup newsletter and then really is like a Roundup like I just kind of share interesting things it's kind of revolved around entrepreneurs ship and marketing but not really it's kind of gotten away for me a little bit but Pete mcpherson.com there's a link right there there's a forum you can sign up if you really want to follow around that's it I'll put a link to that in the description down below I'll see you guys in the next episode Peace