The Exchanges

Q What have you noticed clients asking for in the last six months that you think is really going to change the way your company operates?

A Yeah. So by no doubt the biggest thing right now is, uh, AI. And, um, especially AI discoverability being, being found on, uh, chat GPT and so forth. I think there's an amazing opportunity right now for, for any business to, to think about that. It's, it's a new channel. Historically, when we talked about SEO of website, of how websites are being found, SEO was kind of equal to Google, but that world is shifting and we're seeing The increase of traffic from some of these chat platforms, because people are now not just going to Google, they're going to chat GPT, grog, perplexity, all these tools. And I think it's, there's an amazing opportunity now to think about your website as these tools really feed on content that is on these websites. And how can you optimize that content to make sure that when an end consumer is asking A question or a prompt on one of these chat platforms that your website shows up in the results.

AI assessment note: “biggest thing right now is, uh, AI. And, um, especially AI discoverability”

Q Is this something that you can code into your system that as the website is being created, the SEO is being built into it, or is this something separate that still needs to really be worked on by the client directly?

A So it's combination of things that, you know, from a technical perspective, the platform can take care of. Uh, this is integration. This is stuff that we do underneath the hood where the person building the site doesn't necessarily need to be involved. We take a lot of that hassle away. It's integration with the, the crawlers, the, you know, the Bing crawler, the Google crawler, and updating them whenever content is changing. It's creating schemas. There's a lot of technical things that are being done that I don't want to kind of, uh, waste too much time on getting into those specifics, but I think those are good and nice, but really the more, the more important thing is the content on the website. Uh, and I, and that doesn't change a lot from the kind of more, more legacy SEO world. It was always about content, right? Content is king. Um, and you know, what Google calls, um, EEAT, I think is, is, uh, was relevant then and is relevant now. So that is an acronym that stands for experience, uh, uh, expertise, authenticity, and trustworthy of the content. So it's not about just adding more content to your website, uh, or having AI just spit out more content than adding those. It's really thinking about You know, how do you, how is your content relevant coming from a trust? How is that content trustworthy? Is it unique? And this is what you still need humans to, to create that type…

AI assessment note: “it's combination of things that, you know, from a technical perspective, the platform can take care of”

Q Do you ever get scared of your success or do you ever feel scared that it's going to go away?

A Yeah, I think, you know, scared, uh, or, you know, worried, or maybe concerned always of, you know, market changing. Like you see the biggest companies that we've known in the world, um, you know, many companies, you know, don't exist forever, uh, or in their, You know, they have their heydays and, and, you know, somewhere down the line market dynamics change and they lose that, right? A lot of companies that we've known historically are, you know, a shadow of themselves this day is like, you know, companies like, you know, IBM or, um, Blackberry or Nokia, right? Like things, things changed over the, you know, in a decade or two. And, um, you know, I'm, I think In the same way about our company, and especially now with AI, I think about, you know, are we building the right things? Um, I see, you know, tools out there like, um, you know, like the lovables and the repletes, um, kind of the new age way to build, not just website, build apps. Uh, build websites. Um, you know, what, and I kind of think about, okay, what are we doing to compete with that? Um, so I'm, yeah, I'm mostly as kind of the founder and the CEO, uh, co-founder and CEO, uh, my, both me and my co-founder talk a lot about like the future direction. I feel like it's our job to constantly ensure that we have product market fit. Right? That the, our customers, the product that we've built for our customers always, a…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I think, you know, scared, uh, or, you know, worried, or maybe concerned”

Q How much longer do you think people will be using elements and blocks? Like for example, I used WordPress for years and for probably almost a decade or more, I was using Divi where you have elements and you put information into these blocks. How much longer until these are dead or are they already dead?

A Yeah. Great question. So I think, uh, what we'll see is, um, and we are already seeing it, uh, a fun fact is that 65% of websites being created on Duda today are using one of our AI assistants. So we've kind of added multiple AI assistants in different stages of the site building process, and these are very heavily adopted capabilities today. So I think it's what I've, what I've seen, what I've noticed, and also talking to customers and, um, is that AI, again, it's, it's, it's a very analogous to what I just mentioned before about writing content. Take, we will take it to the website building world. AI can give you a really great head start for a website, right? Today with very little information, I can tell it You know, I'm, um, I wanna build a site for, let's call it Itai's Ski Shop, and it will create a website with, you know, all ski equipment and snowboard equipment, and there'll be a lot of information there about skiing and so forth. So it's, it's a good head start, but I think where people hit the challenge, the challenge that people are noticing with these LLMs is many times that Afterwards to, it maybe brings you kind of to the 80% completion of the project, but it doesn't bring you all the way to a hundred percent. And many times kind of that last leg is very difficult to do just with Text just with kind of a chat interface. Cause you're, you kind of know what you wa…

AI assessment note: “starting with the LLM and then having the complete control over the blocks”

Q How long did it take for you to recognize the situation and then make that pivot?

A Right. So there, so really there were kind of the two pivots, right? The first pivot was more of a product pivot from a mobile only product to this responsive website builder. And I think that was a very difficult pivot. The name of the company back then was due to mobile. So we were kind of a mobile only mobile focused company. And suddenly, you know, me and my co-founder come to the management and later the company and say, Hey, we, We're, we're, we're gonna go fully responsive. We're not gonna just stay in this mobile niche. We think that, you know, the future of the company, we have to build this product that, um, solves for all different types of screens. I think that was a, I think it required quite a few conversations and we, you know, we persuaded them that this is the right way to go. We pointed, I think, always coming grounded with data and showing, you know, especially if you start to see some slowdown in certain areas like, uh, You know, we're a very data first data focused company. Um, and even when you try something new, it's not, you're not betting the whole farm. So we had a lot of revenue writing kind of on mobile, and then we kind of built the second product and And I'm glad that we did that because at some point the revenue from mobile started flatlining and because of the dynamics changing in the market and gladly we had this other product, but it was still …

AI assessment note: “it took probably two years for that new product to kind of be”

Q How long do you think until this kind of functionality is prevalent?

A Well, the things are moving so fast. So who, like, I wouldn't believe it where, you know, chat GPT launched in kind of, I think that was November three years ago, three years ago. Yeah. And look at where we are today. So it did move very, very quickly. And, you know, I'm still astonished by some of the results that I get today, either in our own tool or just in generally in other tools and every, Other week, a new tool pops up, and we're all amazed for a while, and then it kind of, kind of, oh, yeah, that's, of course, uh, that AI can do that. So, you know, I don't know, things are, things are moving very quickly. I think it's very hard to, to forecast where we will be, you know, three years from now.

AI assessment note: “I don't know... I think it's very hard to, to forecast”