[00:00:00] Ghazenfer: We are really heavily investing in our content, as I said, like okay, writing multiple books, podcasts, all of those efforts are increasing. I would say the last three months is the one really, when we started the video content. Before that you didn’t see any video content from us, ’cause these podcasts and all of those, I’m sure we will see the results of this maybe in a year.

[00:00:21] Intro: Welcome to Content Kingdom. This is your backstage pass to the people. Tools and the trends shaping the future of content marketing. 

[00:00:32] David: And welcome to another episode of Content Kingdom. I am your host David G. Ewing. And with me is Ghazenfer Mansoor. Ghazenfer, welcome to the show. 

[00:00:43] Ghazenfer: Thank you, david. 

[00:00:45] David: Hey, man, I, uh, I really have had a good time meeting you at all kinds of, uh, uh, entrepreneur organizations, events.

Uh, I know you’re a DC member, and, uh, yeah. You know, we seem to meet up at eccentrics, uh, from time to time and, uh, I always love our conversations and so. It’s super cool to have you on the show so we can kind of hear a little bit about, you know, your journey and what you’ve gone through as an entrepreneur and how you’ve, uh, come to, uh, to arrive at the current day.

And so, uh, I’m excited to get started. So, um, same here. I’m excited. Nice. Nice. Um, so to get started, let’s, uh, let’s begin at the beginning of your content journey. So in your entrepreneurial story, where is the first intersection of you and content? 

[00:01:28] Ghazenfer: Well, the content started when I first went to school, obviously, but real in the business world, I would say.

Yeah, I, I, I think the official content, probably, I think our first blog was written in 2019. Or January, 2020, right before COVID, like two, three months before COVID, that’s when we hired somebody. We started writing blogs, then we outsourced this. 

[00:01:59] David: Sorry to interrupt, but was this at Technology Rivers or was this uh, at a previous company?

[00:02:05] Ghazenfer: This was at Technology Rivers. 

[00:02:07] David: Got it. Got it. Okay. Sorry. Please 

[00:02:09] Ghazenfer: continue. And just to give you a context, so Technology Rivers, we started in 2015. So the first five years, uh, all the business was through referrals, meeting people at conferences, eccentric or whatever are the different conferences. We go meet people, build relationships.

That’s a typical way, um, for the service businesses to find new customers. 

[00:02:35] David: Yeah. Yeah. And you’re good at it too. I mean, I, uh, I think that, uh, I’ve, you know, I, I have been at conferences with thousands of people and it seems like if you’re there and I’m there, we’re talking at some point. So, yeah. You’re good at this, man.

So, all right, so that’s 2015 to 2019. You’re out there doing what we all do, right? Hustling, building up business, shaking hands, kissing babies, doing the whole thing. And so, what made you wanna start a blog? 

[00:02:59] Ghazenfer: Honestly, when you look back, you can connect a lot of dots. Looking forward. You don’t, yeah, so I, I mean, I didn’t, I, I didn’t know.

We just wanted to, like, as we were figuring it out, how do we grow the business? How do we scale the business? What are the ways to get customers? We just wanted to, um, write something so that build the credibility, build thought leadership. Um, and this is the advice that I got from some experts as well. Uh, I was talking to people at conferences, so I do enjoy talking with sales and marketing people, so I’m not always talking to real prospect, but like learning from others how, and this is one of the common question I do ask people.

How, how do you get business? What are the best ways? What worked for you? What there are some people share, some don’t. But this is one of the tips I got from somebody that, yes, so we do get inbound and that help us up to some conferences help us build those connections more or make those connections more stronger.

[00:04:11] David: Yeah. 

[00:04:12] Ghazenfer: So you do do need a combination of both. So in our case, we wanted, so again. Honestly, there was no strategy at that time. We just, we learned the hard way. 

[00:04:22] David: Yeah. 

[00:04:23] Ghazenfer: Let’s call it this way. 

[00:04:24] David: So what was that first blog article about? 

[00:04:26] Ghazenfer: I don’t remember on top of my head. I’ll have to look at it. What was the first blog about?

Probably seven ways to, for the product strategy or something like that. Okay. 

[00:04:37] David: All right. Got it. And in those early days, what encouraged you to keep going or what discouraged you and made you almost wanna stop? 

[00:04:45] Ghazenfer: Um, so in the early days you don’t, obviously it takes time. So now I advise everybody, yes, start whenever you can because you are not gonna see the results right away.

So there are some discouragement, um, while you are writing it. Nothing is happening, but it’s like what? It’s like you go to a conference and expect that you’ll get a customer next day. It’s a relationship that you build those conferences one off. Yes, you do get, meet people at a conference and they become your customer next day because they, the need was so immediate, but many times it’s about building relationship.

It takes time. So same thing with the content. It took us a long time and COVID did help in a way that, okay. Now we had more time, so let’s double down on it. So we started writing more. So interestingly, put a blog. Then we said, okay, now what do we do? We’re writing a blog. How do people know? Okay, now let’s hire somebody for digital marketing.

And then we started creating those bite side content. We extract six, seven messages out of each blog, create an image, started using Canva. So put a content calendar. We started putting it out. Then we realized, okay, this is, yes, we are sharing something, but it’s not enough. Now let’s start writing some eBooks again.

It took longer time, but then when did you start, you started writing? It was started in two, 2000 during the COVID time, but yeah, I think the first ebook took long time. 

[00:06:29] David: Yeah, 

[00:06:30] Ghazenfer: because, and did you write, you wanted to be perfect, outsource it? The first version was outsourced. 

[00:06:35] David: Okay. 

[00:06:36] Ghazenfer: All right, cool. So, so that’s where the back and forth, because not everybody understand your business.

They would write it and that I’m happy. I mean, I can talk more in detail in terms of the context, outsourcing versus internal, like different experiences and I can go deeper in that. 

[00:06:57] David: Yeah. 

[00:06:57] Ghazenfer: On that topic. 

[00:06:59] David: That’s fascinating. ’cause I mean, you know, the ebook is a, it’s a big undertaking. It’s one I haven’t undertook taken because it just seems so daunting.

So the fact that you did it is pretty cool. So, so I’d like to unpack that a little bit, if you want to talk about it. So you went, you went for the ebook. Walk me through the decision making process. How did you arrive at that decision? 

[00:07:16] Ghazenfer: So we wanted to write something because, okay. The blogs are there, but I think the next part is okay.

The cts, right? So you, you put the blogs out, you have a, okay, now what do we do? We, we tell people, let’s say we share something. They come to our website, they look at the portfolio, but how do we know who these are? So the decision was mainly to collect their information. That’s how we got to this thing.

Okay? So then we created the ebook. Uh, top eight Ways Suffered Development Project Fail. And how to rescue them. And those are the common problems that we, um, that we encounter. I would say more than 50% of our projects are fixing broken projects. Customers come to us that have been working with somebody, could be internal, could be external, outsource team.

The projects are not completed. They’re broken. Be bad design. Uh, just never ending the requirement. Challenges the UX is bad, app is crashing. There are so many different reasons people are coming. We build the app, it’s working, but we’re not retaining the users. So, so all of those challenges. Okay, now we’re getting, we have, we have seen all of those problems.

Can we write something to share with our audience so that they know. They understand what are the reasons different projects fail and how do you rescue them? Because bigger, that’s the important part. 

[00:08:51] David: Yeah. You understood. But know what the cause is. They wanna know what the solution is, so, yeah, definitely.

Exactly. 

[00:08:58] Ghazenfer: Right, right. So yeah. So coming back to, yes, collecting people information was the main reason. Okay. We started, how did it work? Ebook, it’s the same challenge now. Why would people even go to your website and download it? So that means you still need a digital marketing effort. So you need to do a lot more around that.

So you, you have a content, you have to create the visibility of it. You have to have those right content that people are willing to put, give your, give their information to download, and then your content should be good enough. They’re willing to come and ask for more information and wanna talk to you.

So all of these are relevant. 

[00:09:45] David: So, okay, so I’m getting this picture that says you guys, you know, you did the blog thing and we’re like, okay, we did the blog thing, but it’s not going anywhere. People aren’t like, they’re not just flocking to us, right? ’cause it’s kind of crowded space. And then you, in the middle of the pandemic go, let’s do the ebook thing, and you write the ebook.

And it sounds like a pretty compelling ebook, right? I mean, I’ve had software projects at Fail and I would love to read that book and know what’s going on. Um, so that’s great, but now you’re in a challenge. People still aren’t, you’re still not breaking through, right? Because people aren’t just like, it’s not, if you build it, they will come.

They’re not flocking to the content. It’s a, a, a problem. I’d love to know how you, so how did you solve that problem? What did you do to try and. Get it out there and like really start to attract the customers. 

[00:10:29] Ghazenfer: It’s, it’s an ongoing problem because you one, and then there’ll be another problem because your competitors are also, uh, doing, uh, the same thing.

Mm-hmm. There was one page, so I’ll give you another example. So if you search sometime ago, if you search for top, uh, if you search for hybrid mobile app development firm. Or cross-platform hybrid mobile app development. We were coming number one or two on Google. And then for, for many years. The problem is we, and we didn’t hire anybody.

I just wrote genuine content. What I knew about cross, okay, what are the different types of cross-platform? What are, what is hybrid? What are the differences? The context were so good that it became. Uh, number 1, 2, 3 on the Google page for a long time. With time, obviously others picked up. We didn’t update our content, we lost that ranking, but the key is having a genuine content.

So if you keep writing good ones, you will get to the number one. 

[00:11:38] David: Yeah. So what do you, uh, so what happened after the ebook then? So you get the ebook and you push that, that out. What happened next? 

[00:11:48] Ghazenfer: So we did multiple experiments. So we, we got a training with magnetic marketing, which pushed us toward those, uh, sales, uh, I would say sales emails or handwritten cards.

So we went through that. So we also created another ebook, uh, well, I would say, yeah, another ebook that would. W that would allow us to get downloads and get the people addresses as well. That didn’t get as much traction because again, you need to make an effort and not even for people to download, give you their address so that you can mail them something.

Yeah. Uh, in Route 10. But this interesting thing happened. Along the way. So we wrote multiple eBooks and when we, then we wrote one ebook about, uh, free app playbook free, free app promotion playbook. And it ended up being 35 pages long. So that was an internal hire. Somebody was doing it and we said, oh, that’s too big for ebook.

We don’t want that, and it still did not have some of the contents that I wanted, but okay. Let’s, uh, reduce this one, make it a smaller four or five page ebook so that people can, I mean, that’s what I believe. The ebook should be small, good enough that it has concise information. People read it quickly. So let’s build a small ebook.

And then we took that and converted that into a real book, and that’s what started as my real book, which is now called Beyond the Download, how to Build Mobile Apps that people Love, use, and Share Every Day. 

[00:13:40] David: Okay. All right. Wow. So then you went to, so we expanded 

[00:13:44] Ghazenfer: it, obviously we expanded into a real book, then we started, then we, we interviewed our customers.

We interviewed some other people. We added their case studies. We added specific chapters that could help. ’cause I’m involved in mobile for a long time, since even before iPhone and Android because I wrote, um, um. Control home appliances through mobile, through the palm devices, around 2000. That was the software I wrote.

Yeah. Creating WML based is cool 

[00:14:17] David: and stuff. That’s a, that’s a long time ago. 

[00:14:20] Ghazenfer: Yeah. 

[00:14:21] David: Alright. 

[00:14:22] Ghazenfer: Wireless communities on a web and WML based, like those flip phones. So yeah, so, so my involvement with mobile. Long enough. Then I worked with a mobility startup to build the mobile platform. So all of those, then iPhone and Android came, things changed, but obviously then we started building things on top of iPhone, uh, and Android.

So leveraging those experiences, that book came out. 

[00:14:49] David: And how’d that book do? 

[00:14:50] Ghazenfer: That book is out with a publisher now, so we should be launching before the end of the year. It went through many iterations with the publisher. So the last one went is probably going to be the final one. I’m confident. Nice small cosmetic formatting changes, so I believe it should be out before the end of the year.

[00:15:14] David: All right, so the big question everybody’s gonna have, including me, is how did you find a publisher? 

[00:15:20] Ghazenfer: My coach suggested, uh, book Baby, which is a baby book, whatever is that. It’s, it’s a self-publishing. So yeah, I went to the self self-publishing route ’cause the book was all written it. Now it’s just a matter of putting it out.

[00:15:36] David: Nice. Nice. All right. Well that’s fantastic. So, um, so the book is coming out. Do you have a scheduled, published date and a launch party that I can go to?

[00:15:48] Ghazenfer: I’m waiting for the publisher to give me the final date, but we’re hoping sometime before the end of the year it would be out on Amazon. The party date, I don’t know. I’ll have to figure that out. 

[00:16:00] David: All right. I, I, I would prefer January if, uh, if my, my, uh, of course, I mean, yeah, December is not 

[00:16:05] Ghazenfer: going to be for launch party.

[00:16:07] David: Alright. Sounds good. Well, that’s very exciting. So, okay, so Ghazenfer, walk me through then, what’s your strategy for, uh, promoting the book next year? 

[00:16:17] Ghazenfer: I think we’d like to do another podcast on that topic in terms of, um, promoting, um, 

[00:16:24] David: alright, the book. We’ll have that one. 

[00:16:26] Ghazenfer: But our, for us it’s more important.

So for us, most important is building the credibility, showing the authority, because the book talks about the experiences that we had, so people know us from mobile app to open. So when somebody has a mobile app needs, you can go to any other company or you can go with a company who knows how to build it, who have been building it for many years.

And we have written a book on that topic. 

[00:16:57] David: Got it. So do you see this book as something that when you meet a prospect, this book will add credibility to the prospect? Or do you believe that you know the way you’re publishing it, that people will call you? Or do you want to give this book to your existing customers?

Walk me through how you’re planning on using this particular piece of content. 

[00:17:12] Ghazenfer: It’s going to be a combination of that. It’s more about when we talk to the people, it’s showing the credibility. It has 30 plus different strategies. So it’s, as the book name says, beyond the download. It’s not about another download on your phone.

It’s about building the app that people really use, building the app that people love, building the app that people share. So if people are using it, then you have a retention you, you don’t want people one time using and forgetting it. So if you want to build it is for existing people who already had a, have an app, you could learn about those strategies and improve your app.

Or if you’re building an app, the book can give you tips on. How to build an app so that you have those strategies so that you can build an app that is not just a one-time download. 

[00:18:03] David: Got it. 

[00:18:03] Ghazenfer: Or you don’t have to use the ads just to download. 

[00:18:07] David: And let’s unpack that for a minute. ’cause I’m, I’m super interested in mobile apps.

I mean, content Lion. My company doesn’t do mobile apps. It does the backbone of content that can be a source for like a mobile app. And so you being a mobile app developer, walk me through like today. With the cost of mobile apps, I don’t know if it’s been falling, but it seems like it has. Who do you think is kind of the untapped market for mobile apps?

Like who should be building a mobile app that’s not building a mobile app right now? 

[00:18:35] Ghazenfer: So that’s a bigger question because a lot of it it, it really depends on a business use case. Some people just want to build a mobile app. We have seen every type of people and where they could be using the web app as well.

There are use cases when your application, when your business really need a location based, or when your business or application need a features that are more specific to the mobile app for a better experience. For example, if you’re building, again, mobile app, downloadable app is definitely. Um, it does make sense if you’re building in something like DoorDash or Uber or any of those with a location based, we’re, so it’s, it’s not really just for content consuming.

The web does really good job, so, but in some cases you do need mobile app. Um, especially when, 

[00:19:37] David: oh, sorry, go ahead. 

[00:19:39] Ghazenfer: I would say especially in cases of content where. The experience makes a huge difference because web is not also good for everything, even though it may just be a simple content, but the caching and some other features, which again, on web as well, mobile, you can have a lot more control within the app in terms of how you handle certain things.

So you can have a high performance on the mobile app, you can have it offline. You can have many different ways of doing it. 

[00:20:10] David: And do you, uh, does Technology Rivers focus more on like B2B mobile apps or B2C mobile apps? Or are you B2B and B2C agnostic? 

[00:20:18] Ghazenfer: Mostly B2B, I mean. Oh, really? Okay. We do B2C as well, but for our customers are B2B, so obviously we’re working with those businesses, but the end product could be B2C.

Okay. 

[00:20:30] David: Got it. And is there a particular industry that, uh, that you see as kind of like emerging in the mobile app space? 

[00:20:36] Ghazenfer: We’re, we’re doing, majority of our work is on the healthcare side, and that’s where we also see the mobile is emerging. But I would say I, I wouldn’t tie it to healthcare only ’cause mobile is really in pretty much every space.

I think it’s industry agnostic. It’s the specific use case within that industry that makes a difference. 

[00:21:00] David: Got it. Got it. Okay. And, um, so you, you know, you’ve got this book and, um, and, and you’re gonna drop it and it’s gonna add a lot of credibility to everything that you’re doing. Um, it sounds fantastic.

Are there, uh, are there other forms of content besides the book that you’re, uh, also exploring right now, like podcast? 

[00:21:21] Ghazenfer: Yeah, absolutely. So I, I have a podcast called Lessons From the Leap. Um, that’s, wow, what a great name that 

[00:21:27] David: goes right with our content line and content kingdom. I’d love to be a guest.

Absolutely, 

[00:21:32] Ghazenfer: absolutely. Love to have you. So yeah, lessons from the Leap. That’s a podcast. Uh, we’re do, we’re doing a lot more webinars than we used to. I’m doing speaking and I’m working on. Two other books as well. So those are in addition to the one that it’s already out. Mobile is based on my prior experiences on the mobile side.

Other book that I’m working on is 10 X Growth Strategy, how Proprietary Technology can Help Service Businesses scale faster and get Higher Valuation. So that’s the thesis that I have for. Growing the service businesses, and that’s a bigger part of our business, building the software for service businesses to help them grow faster and get higher valuation for their businesses.

[00:22:24] David: Well that’s Fascinat. This is my 

[00:22:25] Ghazenfer: keynote talk as well. This is my book as 

[00:22:28] David: well. Okay. So how, uh, how do you go and find the time to do this and be an entrepreneur at the same time? 

[00:22:36] Ghazenfer: Well, entrepreneurs are supposed to do all those different things, so I have an amazing team. Different people are doing these different roles.

Somebody’s, and you are, you are working with my team. Uh, so, you know, like there are, uh, there are podcast people, there are people who are working on webinar, people who are generating the content. So a lot of that stuff happening, but it’s all because of the amazing team. 

[00:23:04] David: Got it. So would you say that you’re kind of like the spider at the center of the web and you’ve got like the whole team out there helping you get stuff together so that you can then take it and work with it?

[00:23:14] Ghazenfer: Yeah, absolutely. I cannot do it alone. There’s no way. 

[00:23:18] David: Um, got it. And so walk me through this. How do you. Find your voice, uh, in when someone else is working with it. ’cause I struggle with that a lot. I’ve had people ghost write things for me and then I get it and I’m like, eh, it’s not how I sound. And then I, I wind up tearing the whole thing down and I wonder sometimes, gosh, should I have even asked somebody else to write that?

’cause it’s dispiriting to them because I just tore the whole thing apart, rewrote it myself. It took me a lot of time. How do you, how do you handle that problem? 

[00:23:46] Ghazenfer: It’s a tough problem. Um, and. We, we tried different thing. Uh, I mentioned like the, the reason the ebook took so long was because of that, not that the content writer had any problem.

She was amazing. It’s just they are writing it from their angle. I give example of our page that went number one on Google. It’s because of the genuine content. So that’s the challenge you’ll have. When you see somebody’s contents as well, if the marketing people are writing it, they can do great on a marketing side, but the actual specific content has to still come from the person who knows.

So there are different strategies. So sometime what I do, I will do a call with the team. I’ll just record it so they can extract multiple messages out of it. So, and this is one of the strategies I’ve seen many people do. Let’s say you can block a day, which I’m not doing a whole day block, but you could block a whole day and then your team can interview you on all the topic, go in any detail.

You can have even different shirts so that it, you pretend that these are different times. So, so, uh, once we have those contents, now. You can generate blog contents out of it. You can generate even books out of it. I mean, literally, then you can do anything out of that. So you can have one day of interview could generate a few months of content for you, but that’s where you will have a genuine voice.

I mean, that, that’s in our experience. That’s how it, because that we all struggle with that like. The team giving you the content, but they’re, because if somebody’s just doing a research, unfortunately it’s coming from the internet and others have done it already. So yeah, the AI version. The AI version.

The AI version. So I’ll tell you one story. So we wrote, we have three, we have three eBooks on hipaa. He work. Most of these apps are web or mobile apps are HIPAA compliant. So our checklist is, um, HIPAA compliant checklist for mobile app development, for web app development, for web and mobile. We search a lot on internet.

I don’t know, probably like 20 different eBooks that we downloaded or different checklists that we downloaded. Not a single ebook had a stuff that we wanted. Because it was all written by marketing people. None of them would cover from a development perspective. They would cover, okay, there are the administrative rules.

There are the, like all the ones that you see standard, because everybody’s copying each other. I’m not saying copying, literally copying, but copying in terms of that’s the knowledge. But when you are writing an app or a web application that needs to be abl, it goes way deeper. Those encryption, audit authentication, authorized, these are just four, five high level things.

You go deeper in it than who should sign ba. How do you make sure all the third party tools you are using are following your hosting provider, your um, uh, your plugins or anything? How do you get the BA signs from the all? So once you start looking at all of those, then you realize, oh, none of these were there.

And then things change with time. Obviously now you have ai. Before that it was mobile. Same rules cannot apply. So if people are. Adding the PHI data and ai. Good luck. Now it’s out of your hand, right? So you can’t comply, right? So yeah, a lot of those strategies. So we have done it so much, so many times, so we are sharing those.

So, but when we were creating, we couldn’t find any of those. So that just tells us how people, how the existing contents are. And I’m not saying there are no genuine contents. There are probably, 

[00:28:17] David: yeah. Well, you know, you’ve hit another problem that I think I see a lot too, which is I’ll go out and before I write something, I really want to be original.

Well, ironically, the way to be original is to first understand what’s already out there, right? Because if you just happen to write the things that are on 25 other websites like that wasn’t original, even if you thought it was right. So I definitely do my research to try to figure that out too. But here’s the problem I struggle with, and I’d love to get your thought on this.

You know, a lot of that internet content. Can be, I I, it’s pejorative to call it fluff, right? But it’s, it’s, it’s kind of skin deep. And I wanna go deeper and be like, no, you don’t understand. I’ve, you know, I wanna go on this knowledge, but I’m afraid that if I go too deep, it’s not that I wanna hold back, it’s just that I might terrify my audience with technical jargon.

Right. So it’s a, it’s a balancing act on that, and I struggle with that. And I’d be curious to know. How do you handle that? How do you handle going? How deep is deep enough and how do you, who are you writing for when you are writing your specific content, adding your voice to the world? 

[00:29:20] Ghazenfer: That problem happens a lot, especially when we give our technical team to give us something in for writing.

Obviously they’ll do a lot more technical. So yes, that challenge is there and there are some content that we just write for those technical people. Yes. In our case, for example, our audience could be, let’s say CTO. Some CTOs are very high level. They don’t care too much about, and some are. So just to cover that gap sometime if you are sharing that even the management may be sharing with their team, Hey, look at this, this stuff.

So that doesn’t mean we don’t write technical at all. We do write some of those which are a little bit more technical than. Business level, so we have to cover both, but you’re right, that’s a tough problem. 

[00:30:14] David: Is there, when you were writing about mobile apps, is there a particular persona that you typically are trying to address?

Are you, are you really focused on more of the technical CTO, who’s hands-on who knows all this stuff? Or are you trying to appeal to A CTO who’s more strategic and maybe not as, as adept at that stuff? What, where, where do you typically like to, to imagine when you’re writing. 

[00:30:37] Ghazenfer: So our right, our target is primarily CEOs and CTOs who are more strategic CEOs, CTOs, uh, product owners, um, even the ops people, CEOs more high level.

We want to solve a specific business problem. Technical is a way to get it 

[00:30:58] David: there. Got it. Okay. So, you know, you, I wanna definitely move the topic to AI and talk about AI for a minute or two. And I really would like to address AI from two different perspectives. One perspective is, of course, uh, using AI to generate content.

We’ll get to that second, the one that I wanna address first off is. It seems like there’s a belief right now, and I’ve talked to other people who run technology companies that the world is like, oh, now that we have ai, these tech companies, like they should be able to create this thing in like five minutes.

You know, I was, I was literally having a conversation with this entrepreneur this weekend and she was saying, oh, I’ve got this great idea for an app. Uh, I wanna build it. But I, I, I think like any development firm, they, they could probably do it in a weekend and I’m sitting there going. I don’t think you understand what’s going into building an app.

So are you facing that same perception right now and how are you, what’s the reality to you? 

[00:31:51] Ghazenfer: We do see that, that’s very common, but uh, I think it’s one of those hypes and then when, when people do it, they see the results as well. So it’s like I tell people, okay, do you wanna write a blog, take a topic. Put it on chat GPT. 

Chat GPT will give you, says, well, I want 2000 word blog, and you get it in 32nd. Are you gonna publish that as is? Probably not right, because yes, it gave you the great content, but is it for your business? Now you’re gonna start tweaking it. We say, oh, okay, we have this angle. So you want to give your angle, you want to share what services you want to recommend.

Or link what portfolio item, um, what other blogs you wanna link. So what examples you want give. I mean, yes, it may know what time you can train it, but you still have to do a lot. So you realize that the content that was supposed to be written that you generated in 32nd now, it took you to three hours or two hours to optimize to the level that you wanted.

So same thing in a software. So you use Rept or any other tool to generate it for over the weekend? Yes, but that’s a replacement, uh, in my view for your hand sketches. You know, before in, in the, in the past, you would just create a simple requirement document, maybe hand sketches, you’ll define the flow.

This is how you’re communicating your requirement. Now people can do lot more. Create the initial POC just to get a clarity of the requirement, but that that may not be production ready. And by the way, and all those two great tools do great job, you can connect with the backend. You can’t launch as well, but that may not be enough to go long term.

So it are challenges. For example, if you look at the code that was generated. Be at the the level that you want. Let’s say as your business is growing like the now, you have to maintain that code. You’re not gonna be just giving another prompt to start another version because now you have existing data as well.

You have to make sure that is taken care of, right? You know how, how much hallucination you see in the ai. You generated with a prom, you generated another set of code. Realize that existing code is changed. It did not have the same context that you previously had or whatever the changes you made. Now, suddenly, even in the existing application, the code changes that are made are no longer the same.

Code changes. Suddenly you started realizing the thing that we’re working has stopped working. Yeah, so that’s when, that’s when you start. To work with the develop real developers. Yeah. I do hear from people. I said, well, unfortunately, yes, you are right. But at the same time, it’s if, if that was so easy, all the developers would’ve been out of job by now.

As of now, they are not. Yes, the productivity is increased. You have to be way more productive than before. But it’s also not as simple as, oh, you could do it in a weekend. 

[00:35:23] David: Andrew used. I totally agree with that. ’cause it seems like people don’t, you know, the, the funny thing is, is even when you, uh, in the old days before, before AI code generation has never been the bottleneck to writing code.

Right? There’s, is it secure? How is it integrated with other things? Is it extensible? Did we modularize it correctly? Like those are all detailed things that people who don’t write code. May not understand how that works or how it gets encapsulated, but, um, but then, you know, what infrastructures it go on.

Is it all secure? How are we gonna test it? Where’s, you know, and so I think I found that AI is like automating some of the lowest level tasks and that’s great, but it’s not doing the organized. Critical thinking to, to produce a full solution. It is just doing, you know, kind of in a silo, some handy work and that’s great, but that is not what, I don’t think that’s why people are hiring you.

Uh, it’s just to generate if loops and, or if statements and for loops, right? Like it’s to do the, the bigger picture of like, how are we gonna scale this app, secure it. Make sure that it’s maintainable and, uh, and, you know, can exist over the long run, not just for the next six weeks. You know, and I’ve watched a, a lot of people step and fall on that, so. Okay. 

[00:36:37] Ghazenfer: Yeah. 

[00:36:38] David: So that’s great. I mean, and yes, 

[00:36:39] Ghazenfer: it does empower people for sure. No doubt. It increase the productivity of the developers. You can write faster, you can have a test coverage, you can have code documentation. So we don’t underestimate, we use it all the time in our application. So maybe 40% or 30% in productivity, but that’s still pretty good compared to when you didn’t have it, so Oh yeah.

But more importantly, more importantly, it’s not about getting it faster. What I’ve seen is you are doing it better because there were certain things you were not doing before, let’s say. If you look at it, all the developers were not always writing the test cases or you didn’t have a full code coverage.

Those are a lot of hidden problems. Now you are able to identify those more quickly. So yes, it is helping you. It is. So it’s like anything, what we talk about, like AI is not replacing people. It is empowering people. Once people start seeing how it is empowering, they realize, oh, this is not replacing their job.

But now they can do 10 more things. Because the expectation from them has always been to do 10 more. They’re always not doing 10, 10, 10 more things. Now they can do those 10 things or eight out of those 10 things. 

[00:38:02] David: Yeah, they’re looking better now. We all should eat our veggies, but sometimes we just leave ’em on the plate.

And, uh, yeah, in the development world where time is of the essence, a lot of times I’ve seen that, you know, they cut corners on the back end because they’re just out of time and, uh, and now they can cut less corners and uh, and get a much better result. So, uh, that makes sense. Let’s, uh, let’s pivot to using AI in.

Content creation then. So, um, you know, there’s like a big push pull where we all see the power of having AI generated content to work with, but we also see the utter phoniness and hallucinations of. Content created by ai and the fact that it just doesn’t land or resonate with people, it’s not necessarily even no, no matter how hard you train it in, quote your voice.

How, uh, how are you approaching that and using AI to generate content, um, for, for your business to advance and grow, you know, your company? 

[00:38:57] Ghazenfer: So we are using different strategies. So for example, example, know we’re using GPTs, we are using, uh, projects in Chatt, p, d, and Claude. So we load all of our content.

And then when we have those prompts, when, when we are creating those chats inside those, it’s leveraging the data that you’re already sharing as part of your resources. So any content that come out, they will come out of, based off of the content that you shared. It’s not, you still will have elucidation.

So another thing we always say, there’s always a human in the loop. You cannot just generate and put it on the loop. On the website, you can automate the process. You can create agent that can take you 80% of what you want, but you still, or maybe 90%, but you still need some human in the loop. And that part is the main one.

That, and then even sometime even that data prep, where you need some data, even for the AI to make the recommendation because AI is not just gonna create anything. I mean, it can create anything, but then it’s not your, but it cannot create anything for you. So you have to have the right data. So that data mapping is important.

How do you map your data and then generate the context out of that? Got it. I know if that makes sense. Or what you were trying to explore was. Different. 

[00:40:27] David: No, I think that, uh, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, I think yeah, trying to use like some kind of MCP to just give it, get it a chance to get some raw material that’s at least close and then shape that clay with your own voice is really, is not that much different than the first ebook you created.

Because you said that was not generated by an AI, it was generated by a person, but it was a person who had kind of taken material and information from you and did their best and then you had to grab it. I kind of see like that there’s a parallel between both of those things. Do you. 

[00:40:55] Ghazenfer: Absolutely. You, you are a hundred percent right.

[00:40:58] David: Got it. So, all right, so now this is kind of like my, my final question. You’re the CEO of a company. You’ve clearly invested a lot in content. Um, a lot of our audience are people who, uh, invest in content and have to justify it to their CEO or their chief chief marketing officer. How do you justify the, the time and expense you put into this to yourself?

[00:41:19] Ghazenfer: So earlier in, in, in the. Mentioned that in the first five years we only got the business through referral, through meeting people at conferences. I don’t know exactly when it started because once we started writing the content, it took a while. But now I would say in the last two years probably there were two projects that came through referral, everything else inbound.

Wow. So lately when we ask people, how do you find us? They’re either finding us on Google, even though we’re not doing much on SEO, whatever, we, we just rely on genuine content. Uh, if you search for top healthcare, HIPAA app development firm in the us, you get asked number one or two on ChatGPT, on Gemini, on Claude, on perplexity.

So many of those, yes, you don’t always get the same result, but that those, that’s where we’re getting most of our leads. So people are obviously looking at all these places and they are, obviously, we can’t train them, so they’re pulling the data from different sources. So all the content that we are generating, I think our, we do see the ROI in my focus is lot more on the marketing, not necessarily doing.

The other ways. I mean, not that we get, we we’re not valuing the, the in-person relationship, but those are time consuming. Those are expensive. You still have to do those. But we are really heavily investing in our content. That’s our, that’s going to be in the next year or two. We want to have all of our projects through inbound, that that’s our preference. So we’ll see how that goes. 

[00:43:16] David: Fantastic. I’m sure 

[00:43:16] Ghazenfer: it’s changing and we keep learning as well. As I said, like, okay, writing multiple books, podcasts, all of those efforts are increasing. So the more contents we have, because I would say last quarter, I would say last three months is the one really even we started the video content before that you didn’t see any video content from us because these podcasts and all of those.

I am sure we will see the results of this. Maybe in a year, maybe either we’ll stop or we will increase. 

[00:43:49] David: All 

[00:43:49] Ghazenfer: right. 

[00:43:50] David: Well, it sounds great. Well, it sounds like the best way people can connect with you is just ask their local LLM, like, who’s the best mobile app developer in the world? And, uh, you’re gonna pop out.

But if people wanna connect with you directly, Ghazenfer what’s, what’s the best way for them to contact you in technology, rivers, and, uh, and get to you guys? 

[00:44:08] Ghazenfer: So my website is Ghazenfer.com. That’s where you can learn more about my book, my podcast, and my business website technology.com. And then if you search on my name, it’s, you’ll only find one LinkedIn profile with my name Ghazenfer

[00:44:28] David: Alright, Ghazenfer for thank you so much for, uh, for coming on Content Kingdom. We are so glad that you’re here and uh, and thanks for being such a great guest. 

[00:44:37] Ghazenfer: Thank you for having me.

[00:44:44] David: Uh, drones love them or hate ’em. 

[00:44:46] Ghazenfer: I would say hate them. 

[00:44:48] David: Um, favorite social media platform? 

[00:44:51] Ghazenfer: LinkedIn. 

[00:44:52] David: Uh, iOS or Android? 

[00:44:53] Ghazenfer: iOS. 

[00:44:54] David: Ooh, from the mobile app guy. That’s a, that’s a spicy take. All right, cool. Favorite book, kids books even count. 

[00:45:02] Ghazenfer: I can probably give you 10 books. 

[00:45:05] David: So you gotta pick, gotta pick one. Let’s rule.

[00:45:07] Ghazenfer: So who not how. Ooh, by Dan Sullivan. 

[00:45:10] David: Good book. When I have some me time. This is what I do. Sudoku. Favorite type of pet? I don’t currently own 

[00:45:17] Ghazenfer: goat.