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Justin Esgar:
Am I less pixelated?
Eric Anthony:
Oh yeah, you're fine now.
Justin Esgar:
Anyway, what I was saying was I'm an avid lover of eight bit music, but not the actual music. I found some band called the Eight Bit Big Band, and it's basically big band versions of songs from Nintendo Entertainment. So the theme song for Superman Brothers two, the moon board from the Ducktails video game, the Chobo song from Final Fantasy because I'm a nerd.
What's up everybody? Justin here, host of the All Things MSP podcast and I want to take a few seconds here to talk to you about ACE'S conference. ACE'S conference is a business focus conference for MSPs with topics ranging from marketing to management, human resources to business strategy and social media, legal, all of those things that help you grow your business. Now, ACEs conference is strictly content driven. It is not sponsor driven. Yes, we will have sponsors there. You will learn about new vendors and things like that, but it is not driven by them. We want you to grow and elevate your MSP and that's what it's all about this year. ACEs conference celebrating its 10th year and we're glad to be back in person. May 15th and 16th in Salt Lake City, Utah. Tickets are available now@acescomp.com. That's A-C-E-S-C-O-N f.com and use the coupon code at MSSP to get 10% off. If you have questions, find me on the All things MSP Facebook group. That's facebook.com/group/all things msp. Glad to help you out in any way, shape or form. Can't wait to see everybody live in person. May 15th and 16th in Salt Lake City, Utah, come check it out, ACEs comp.com. We'll see you there.
I feel like I should start the episode.
Eric Anthony:
We should decide what we want to talk about first.
Justin Esgar:
Yeah, whatever. Who cares? What's up everybody? Welcome to the All Things MSP podcast. I'm your host Justin Esgar. With me always is my good friend, podcast producer extraordinaire pirate, and man who doesn't have a plan today, Mr. Eric Anthony.
Eric Anthony:
Oh, I had a plan.
Justin Esgar:
I want to tell you about my chat GPT story and I kind of want to feel like you'll pick up on this one really fast and we can do this for the episode. So apologies in advance, we'll do better next time. I learned something about chat GPT today that I did not know and we hired a new employee, this guy Fred, who showed me this. I've always just gone to chat GPT and said, rewrite this email so it doesn't sound like a four-year old wrote or something like that. And what I have never done is continued from my original inquiry. And so what I learned today was because when you do a chat g bt, if you're on the chat GPT website and you make an inquiry and it spits it back out on the side there on the sidebar it right across and it tells you the topic or whatever, I've always just started new ones every time.
What I learned today is you shouldn't do that because it can feed information from your previous answers. So now I was writing an email about the upcoming ACEs conference and I wanted it to learn more and I try to figure out how to do prompting better because typically I will do rewrite this email, but today I kind of was explaining what the conference is, who it's targeted for, what are some of the add-ons, whatever. And then I said, knowing all that, go and rewrite this email so it's more enticing or whatever. And it did a wonderful job chat g BT four, which you have to pay. I think it's $28 a month has access to the internet. And so I said, learn about ACEs conference. And I was like, here's the url. And it literally the little cursor thing, the little movement thing said, I mean, I dunno why I use this binging, but it said, looking@acesconference.com via binging, and I said, learn more about ACEs conference. And it started pulling other websites. Basically it did a binging search, Bing binging, binging, binging, binging.
And it pulled information about the conference that is not readily on our website, but it put together an entire thing. And so my guy Fred then said, there's a way to do this and this is another thing I learned a lot in. This has literally happened by the way, an hour before we're recording, okay. He said, tell it that you wanted to learn about your company. And the way you do that is by saying, what questions can I answer for you to better understand my company? And so it knows it's a conference and so it spouted out a bunch of questions, which of course I don't have my window in front of me.
It said, certainly here are some questions I can do to better assist you with a SAN number one, objectives and goals. What are your goals? Are there specific metrics? Two target audience, who's the target? Are there new target audience segments? It gave me 10 solid questions, so I gave it all the answers and I said, okay, now what should I do? And it says, here are some of the things we suggest you do. And one of them was like to tweak our Eventbrite page for better performance. So I was like, well, I'm not going to do that. I was like, here's the registration for the page. What do you think? What do you do? And I said, rewrite it with page optimization. And it spit out a gorgeous set of content for me that I simply because lazy, copied and pasted, I mean I read it first, I read it first, but I copy paste it and then to make it even better, I said, Eventbrite now allows you to have an FAQ section. What questions should I have on the FAQ? And it gave me 10 questions and I said answer them.
Eric Anthony:
So what you're saying is if you don't know where to start with chat, GPT, ask it where it thinks you should start and what questions it needs to tell you where to start.
Justin Esgar:
Absolutely, absolutely. Also, another new thing, I mean, I don't know if this is new, but this is in the bottom left. Once you've signed in, if you click on your profile picture, there's a section there called custom instructions and it says, what would you like chat GPT to know about you to provide better responses and how would you like to chat GPT to respond? Because at one point I had it researching virtual computers and telling me about it, and it kept referring to me in the third person. And I wrote, well, how can virtual computers help? And Chad JBT came back and said, it seems that you run an Apple consultancy and so Justin Esgar would be able to help with these things, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I wrote, am I Justin? Because at this point I'm now paranoid and it said yes.
And so I asked it. I was on my guy Fred, I was like, am I Fred? And it said no, because it knows I'm logged in and it figured out all the other pieces to it. So it kind of blew my mind a little bit on the respect of a lot of people talk about AI and I think a lot of people are talking about AI the same way everybody talked about NFTs. Oh, it's the next big thing, we got to get on it. And those monkeys are worth, they're not even worth the salt that people that's on my tongue right now talking about it. Right.
Eric Anthony:
Well, this is interesting. I honestly hadn't heard anybody bring this up before in terms of asking chat GPT what questions to ask. And I mean I think that's brilliant in terms of prompting. I think that there's a whole workshop that could be done on prompting chat GPT for MSPs.
Justin Esgar:
Yeah, for sure. Maybe
Eric Anthony:
That's something we should do.
Justin Esgar:
We should do that. That'd be a good one. Just to backtrack, the whole story was when I said rewrite this email, it rewrote it and I said, given what you just put out, and I said, you as if Chad's real thing, what text should be on the CTA button to maximize? And I actually wrote conversation because I wasn't banging do what I meant and I meant conversion. But chat GPT figured out what I meant to say and it gave me seven. I wrote conversations and it said, for maximizing conversions for sales. And it gave me seven options with reasoning. It's not just random words. So like it said, one, secure your early bird spot. Now this emphasizes the limited time nature. Two, join ACEs 24, the highlight book, the event, and the financial benefit, all these things. And so then I said, I'm going to choose number seven from your last response, what color should the button be? And it gave me the reason why it thinks I should use red, green, blue, orange or yellow or contrasting colors. And it said, given these, the best choice would be based on your color, your branding or orange and here's why. And it picked, our color is red, but it picked orange I reason. And then I said, okay, where should I pull the call to action based on your original response in my email? And it actually referenced four things above and told me where to insert the button.
And not that I'm shocked by this in the respect of I didn't know that I could do, I knew it could do some of this, but I never realized the ability for layering. And that I think is what really does it because everybody, dude, the amount of people who have called me in the last month since their last announcement or whatever, it has been being like, I want to spin up my own jet GPT, I want my own GPT. I don't know why everyone calls it AGPT. Maybe I'm deaf. I call it an LLM because I know it as an LLM.
And I'm like, well, what are you going to do with it? And a lot of people have come to me and said, I have proprietary things that I do. I I'm a researcher or I'm a this or I'm a that or I'm a designer and I'm looking to build out my aesthetics differently or I'm doing very complicated math or whatever. So I understand, or even support professionals, there's definitely an IT support professionals who want to build out their thing. Now that I've seen the layering thing, it gets me more excited. If you go back to our episode with Tim from Halo, the integration of chat GPT and AI into Halo, because in that episode he even told us he's the LLM with, what was it, like 50,000 sanitized tickets that plus your own data set from answering things. And if you build out your knowledge base properly and you answer tickets and you actually document, which that's a whole nother conversation, document the answers in the tickets. Oh my Lord, this could be so powerful. I wish it understood a little bit. I ran into an issue where I was like, you could upload a graphic in CPT four, and I said, this is our logo, please use it and recognize the colors. And it was like, I've recognize that the colors here, a red beige white. And I'm like, well, yeah, sure, but they're not really because an X code and things like that. And I was like, insert it into emails and it can't do that. It can only do chat, but wow.
Eric Anthony:
Yeah. Well, you may not be surprised at how many vendors at IT Nation this year had something new related to ai.
Justin Esgar:
That's the new buzzword is the problem,
Eric Anthony:
But it's not just buzzword. There's a company called Nine Minds and there'll be a video interview that I did with them at the show as soon as I get through the 400 gigabytes of footage that I shot at IT Nation that one of the main things it does is just makes your technicians responses better. You talked about it, asking it to write an email so that it doesn't sound like a four year old basically does the same thing. It takes it from technician speak, which we both know can sometimes be kind of harsh because we're very matter of fact, very technical, very just we want to put the points out there and get to the next ticket.
Justin Esgar:
Did you unplug it? Make that sound nicer.
Eric Anthony:
Right? Right. So that's kind of what it does. And I did some other things too, but unique uses of AI to enhance not just the knowledge and the effectiveness of the MSP, but also to increase the customer experience of the MSP. And I think that's a place where this is really going to come into play AI used for customer experience as that kind of go-between between the technician and the customer.
Justin Esgar:
Yeah, I wanted to start to, I think chat GPT four does this chat, g BT 3.5 doesn't, but it can start to understand your personal voice because it has more emotional awareness. It could understand, I was reading an article on it, it could understand feeling upset or depressed or anything like that. Whereas chat GPT 3.5 is very stoic or whatever it is. And so I think that if it has the ability to have, let's call it emotional awareness, even though it's not really what it is, it should be able to start to understand voice awareness. But at the same time, now that I'm thinking about it, I'm saying this out loud. I'm like, if I feed it a bunch of stuff that I've written and I write a four year old, it's going to start and I'm like, write this better than a four year old. It's going to start outputting stuff that looks like a four year old wrote it,
Eric Anthony:
Maybe
Justin Esgar:
Write this in my voice, but if I were older, wiser, and more educated,
Eric Anthony:
Isn't that what we all want?
Justin Esgar:
Write this in the voice of the person. My mother wishes I
Got write this in the book. I can't do anymore. I can't do anymore. I'm sorry to the listeners, and I'm sorry to the viewers who watch me keep fidgeting, my chair broke, by the way, Herman Miller, which is what this chair is, is amazing that all I had to do is take some pictures of the parts that broke and they're sending me a box. They told me this. They go, we're sending you a box. All you have to do is wheel your chair into the box, take off the label, and FedEx will pick it up. And I'm like, what? I'm like, this is a chair. You don't have to take the chair apart. No, no, no. They're sending me a box, an empty box the size of this chair and I'm going to put the chair in it. They're going to fix it and send it back. And they waited for the parts to arrive before they shipped me the box. So this's, why I am not son's chair for a while. So it points to Herman Miller for that. Well,
Eric Anthony:
And that's why you pay more for Herman Miller, right? That's
Justin Esgar:
I guess
Eric Anthony:
They can afford to provide you with that type of experience because they charged you that much for the chair. By the way, there's a lesson for MSPs in that the higher your margins, the better the experience you can deliver to the customer.
Justin Esgar:
What's funny is, I was talking to some team members the other day about this because we're putting a proposal together and I saw a TikTok a couple of days ago from Alex Herma, which for those of who don't know, he owns acquisitions.com. He's like a big dude. He used to run own a bunch of gyms. He's got an interesting story. And I cycle through these celebrity business people. Obviously everyone started with Gary Vaynerchuk. I did James Cher, the Grant Cardone and Louis how whatever. So I'm currently on the Alex Mazi kick. Anyway, he had made a comment about if you're trying to sell a product, you can sell a $10 product and a $20 product, and most people will buy the $10 product because it's cheaper. And they think that the value to get from 10 to 20 is in there. But if you sell a $10 product and you sell a $1,000 product, more people would be inclined to buy the thousand dollars product because the value is so far distance from them.
They're wondering what they're missing by getting the $10 product. And so I was talking to our COO who's in Missouri, and we were talking about doing an audit for a client and I said, let's do this, this, whatever. And I was like, let's make it a real sellable item, and we figured we were going to charge 'em whatever it's let's say $10,000. And I said, let's make it so that way they buy the $10,000 one because just saying $10,000 is a lot of money. We're also going to give him the option for the do it yourself for $3,000. And I explained my reason why and he said, dude, this is what makes you New York and not understanding people in the Midwest because people in the Midwest would be like, I'll take the $3,000 and do it myself. And I said, then they don't understand the value of the business because it doesn't.
And I called 'em out by saying one of our biggest clients in Missouri would never take the $3,000 option. They would take the $10,000 option. And he kind of thought about it and realized that I was right. What's funny about this is he's not the first person to tell me that I think too much like a New Yorker in the regards of I sell on a high price point or our per computer cost is more expensive than it would be in the Midwest and people in the Midwest will pay that. And I do not agree with that sentence in any way, shape or form. I think they might not pay if the difference is 1 65 a computer versus 180 5, yeah, they're going to take the 1 65. They look at it's different. But if you're selling them a $3,000, do it yourself or $10,000, we're going to do it all and certify it.
Most businesses, and again, businesses would buy the $10,000 one because they understand that there's going to be some sort of inherited value with that. And so going back to talking about value and pricing and why I paid more for the chair, that's exactly what we're talking about, right? Because you can sell a higher price point no matter where it is in the country or in the world if you can provide the value behind it. And an easy way to sell that higher price value is to give them a low price value that clearly undercuts the inherited value of the item. You know what I mean?
Eric Anthony:
And there's another philosophy behind this with a three-tier pricing. If you want to charge X, or let me do it this way, this will make the explanation a little bit easier. You want everybody to buy something at Y price. You have an X price, AY price, and AZ price. The value difference between X and Y is big. The value difference between Y and Z, not as big but premium,
Justin Esgar:
Right?
Eric Anthony:
And it's the same idea. It's just that with three options, they will tend to go and gravitate back to the middle. Most customers will. Now, those that want the premium experience, they'll go for the more expensive option because they want the premium experience.
Justin Esgar:
Let's put real numbers on this, right? If you have a $75 option for your low end and then you have a 180 5 and a 1 95, most people are going to go for that 180 5 because even with the premium, something to that effect, right? It's funny because we see this every day and humans don't even realize it because Apple does this, right? There's the base model machine for 1299, but for $200 more you can get the 16 gig machine and then for $200 more on top of that, you can get the five 12 gig machine and then for maybe another 150, you can get a one terabyte machine. Next thing you know, you've now spent five, $600 more to get what you feel is a better value.
They have, there's obviously is a little bit more step out and they have a ladder structure to their pricing. But for MSPs in general, yeah, I think I have a three tier pricing at virtual computers. We have a monitoring our pro plan, we have full and we have premium. The difference between our full and premium is a $15 difference, and what you get is fractional CTO services. And at that point I was just like, you know what? Let's just make this easy and go all that. We don't have enough differential to offer a real premium thing.
And it's not like the people that are on my premium pricing are calling us to the table for fractional. I mean we'll do QBR and such, but that's not really fractional CTO services. So I've just said whatever, let's just put everybody in the 180 5, which in Columbia happens to sometimes be lower than 180 5. Not always. I try, I don't dunno who's listening to this and I don't want my clients to be like, you're charging me different than that guy. Everybody's being charged differently because some clients have been with me for 16 years and some clients have been with me for 16 minutes.
So the difference in pricing, it might be slightly regional, but at the same time, I think the difference in the value proposition, which is what we're talking about, should be enough to get people to push 'em in the right direction. Yeah, I was thinking about that while you're talking like, okay, so if we do this proposal, let's just say it's a $10,000 proposal, we're going to give 'em the $3,000, do it yourself, the $10,000, we're going to do it for you. The question is, what would be that 11 or $12,000? What more can we offer in that we wouldn't be offering in that 10 because we want 'em to do the 10,001. So what should we be offering in that $12,000 audit that we're not doing in the 10,000?
Eric Anthony:
That's a good question. I'm not the security guy, so I'm not the guy to ask, but
Justin Esgar:
Well, this makes really, really good episode then. No, if you can't see, you can't up with
Eric Anthony:
A question that
Justin Esgar:
If you're not watching the YouTube, you can see me coughing and dying in the background while I called Eric out on the spot. Yeah, yeah.
Eric Anthony:
But that's okay just because I can't tell you exactly what to add, right?
Justin Esgar:
Yeah,
Eric Anthony:
You need to just, well, so I had this conversation recently. I co-hosted the channel engage channel program, engage in November, and one of the topics we talked about was what things go in your stack and how to figure out what goes in your stack. And I think once you figure out what the different value propositions you want to deliver are, then you fill in what those features are. And again, I would never sell on features. I would always sell on value. So I'm not selling a managed XDR, I'm selling managed threat response, managed protection and threat response and
Justin Esgar:
Remediation time
Eric Anthony:
And remediation. So you sell them the value, not the feature, and you just need to decide what baseline is, what's the minimum you'll accept what you want them to actually do, and then the next level up, which is that premier experience, and it's not just experience, right? You're still adding stack items that add value, but there are things that mean that they're going to have a less likelihood of having issues or downtime to an extreme level.
Justin Esgar:
If you go to chat GPT and you put in to the whatever that, what did I say that section was called? The who are you in the custom instructions and what do you want to know about better writing? Put in there and put in who you are, what you do, the areas you focus in, the type of clients you focus in, and then see if it spits out what your stack should be. That'd be an interesting response because then you can say, where's my value problem? How do I increase or decrease the value by X amounts? And let chat g BT do the work for you. That's sort actually speaking of which there is, I saw there's a chat GPT under explore. I noticed this today. There is a tech support advisor from setting up printer troubleshooting. I'm here to help you step by step from chat GPT. We're going to talk about that in another episode. I got to go see what this thing can do. Of course, the icon of it is a hamster with a headset on because internet
Eric Anthony:
Well, and that's what chat GPT is trying to turn tech support into. But I think PT, not Chat, GPT, large language models, AI in general are going to continue to bring us some very unique solutions to the industry over the next several months. And as this is probably going to end up being the Thanksgiving episode, I am thankful for that.
Justin Esgar:
I'm thankful that Chat GPT told me how to end this episode and it said I should say, thanks for listening to all Things MSP podcast. Join the Facebook group at facebook.com/group/all things msp. Check us out on YouTube at youtube.com/at all things msp like us to subscribe, follow us on all your favorite podcasts. What leave a review, that's the word, a review,
Eric Anthony:
A comment, whatever.
Justin Esgar:
Just because it wrote it doesn't mean I can read it. Leave a review, leave a comment, tell us in the Facebook group what you're thankful for this year, and your answer should be us for doing this show for you. That's it for us. I'm Justin, that's Eric Bae,
Eric Anthony:
From your host, Justin Esgar and myself, thank you for listening to the All Things MSP podcast. Join the All Things MSP Facebook group or follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube. The All Things MSP podcast is a biz POW LLC production and even though we drink a lot of it, this podcast is still not sponsored by liquid debt.