Future of AI Chat Bots, Living in Australia and Reading Life Changing Book by Alex Hormozi | Liziana Carter DSH #288

presenting people with an offer inside of the child bot and then if they don't purchase we're getting the child bot to start new conversations over weeks, even months.

Follow-up.

Exactly.

They start conversations tackling those objections because people come into the bot and sometimes they just buy and then we collect more data around why they're not buying and then we build that back into the follow-ups.

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great

how are you good i can't wait to uh get into chatbots today with you yeah it's uh it's gonna be an interesting conversation absolutely yeah so i first heard of chatbots years ago uh many chat was kind of the first one right

many chat yes i started with many chat in 2016 i tried a few different platforms in the meantime, then I came back to Manichat.

They are by far the most the most complex.

They have the most functionality, although still not enough.

We've actually built a mini SAS on top of Manichat.

Oh, wow.

But they also have a very good relationship with Meta.

And so that puts them at the forefront of pretty much everything that Meta is trying to do with conversation, with messaging.

We got into a lot of Meta programs with them testing out all sorts of features.

And so, yeah, Manichat is the way to go right now.

And talk to me about why you went all in on chatbots.

I know the open rates are pretty high on Messenger, right?

So I did chatbots between 2016, 2018.

I was running my online fitness business at that time.

And

I pretty much taught myself chatbots.

Then I kind of dropped off.

I got a job in the Microsoft space.

And then I still wanted to have my own business.

And so I quit my job.

I went on a cruise and I did a lot of research.

And then I settled on a chatbot agency.

I felt like during the two years that I'd done chatbots, I liked it.

I liked digging out.

There was a lot and I could see

the future kind of going that way.

And also I'd been hearing about, and it was 2019, right?

I kept hearing about AI and how I could potentially make it work with AI.

I wasn't entirely sure how, but I just saw that being the future.

And so I opened this chatbot agency and initially I was doing gyms and mess bars yeah and right about the time when my chatbot like started picking up with a few clients COVID hit and so I had to pivot to the e-commerce space that was pretty much everything that was working back then and so

I

that's what I've been doing probably for the last four four straight years wow mainly e-commerce probably 90

95% of our clients have been e-commerce

but then we've also been getting a lot of interest from coaches, course creators.

You know, you have 11 million followers.

So

coaches and course creators that have massive following and they just don't know how to monetize it or do more.

So that's also been a bit of our target market, but mainly e-commerce.

And

we've pretty much right now we're reverse engineering their best performing funnels.

When we kick off, when we launch a chatbot, we have a look at how are you, what's your acquisition process looking like right now?

And so we reverse engineer that and we convert that funnel into a chat funnel.

It's almost like a guided conversation.

But when we look at their acquisition process, we usually ask them, you know, what are the top three to five reasons why people don't buy from you immediately.

Let's say you run a Facebook ad, they land on the website, people have questions.

And so they can have that conversation with themselves in their heads, like, is this going to work for me?

You know, they have or they can have it with a brand and progress faster to check out

and We're pretty much converting that funnel into a chat funnel and so we're taking purchase rates because you said open rates click-through rates That's just super high, right?

That that is super high, but the at the end of the day everybody every business is looking how am I gonna make money out of this like where's where's the revenue coming from what are the numbers looking like and so with an e-commerce site, it's going to convert, you know, one to five percent if you're lucky, maybe kind of that's where the benchmark inside of a chart funnel.

We're seeing anywhere between seven to thirty-nine percent

purchase rate, not conversion, like not clicking to the website.

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To the website, actual purchases.

That's hot.

That's that's yeah.

And so that's what pretty much what we're doing.

We're

presenting people with an offer inside of the chatbot.

And then if they don't purchase, we're getting the child bot to start new conversations over weeks, even months, sometimes.

Follow-up.

Exactly.

It's like free retargeting.

They start conversations tackling those objections.

And so we keep improving that follow-up process based on what, because people come into the bot and sometimes they just type, will this work for my skin?

You know, how is this?

And then we collect more data around why they're not buying and then we build that back into the follow-ups.

Interesting.

Every business should have this then because the conversion rates rates are high, open rates are high.

There's almost no competition right now, almost nobody's doing it.

Exactly.

And the cost is pretty reasonable, too.

Yeah, and with what Mera, because Mera has been actively working on pushing messaging, even messaging ads, like messaging ads, so it's scalable.

It's not just leveraging organic traffic, it's also scalable with chatbot ads, messenger, and Instagram DM ads.

But what they've been working is allowing businesses to free push, like free push notifications because

per Meras policies you cannot re-engage a chatbot subscriber outside of a 24-hour window since their last interaction

however there's a way now where you can get their permission just like they would opt into your email list or SMS list they opt into your DM list and they you build a subscribers list a DM list and then you send a broadcast that is literally free Wow that is nuts yeah a DM list sounds like a really valuable asset to any business business.

Yeah, they've been rolling it out over the last couple of years.

So they initially tested it out on Messenger.

We were in the Beta program with them, and we tested it out.

Then they opened it up to the public.

And now we've been testing Instagram DM lists in Beta probably for about a year.

Oh, you can do it on Instagram now?

It's literally just opening up now.

So they're rolling it out to everybody on Instagram now.

That's exciting because I literally get over a thousand messages a day on Instagram, probably.

Wow.

And I'm probably losing millions of dollars.

And it's not just the DM list, the email capture

rate in the DMs.

So every single one of our chat funnels has anywhere between 92 to 99% email capture rate.

Wow.

So you could use it to collect a fat email list.

Massive.

So on organic, you're going to collect higher, right?

Because people know you.

But even with paid traffic, so we have clients who are running messenger ads,

the conversation literally starts with capturing the email address.

With ads, the capture rate is not that high.

So it's anywhere between 75%, 85%, sometimes even 70%.

If you're literally doing top of final, it's probably going to be 65%, 70%.

It's still a very high email capture rate.

Yeah.

And a lot of newsletters are selling these days for high valuation.

So just having an email list of...

10,000, 50,000, 100,000 is a really big asset to any company.

Yeah.

Because that increases your company valuation as well.

And now that there's DM lists, I mean, they might even factor that when you're selling a company.

Absolutely.

We have one of our clients now who is literally talking to investors and they're presenting what we're doing with them on the, as a part of their business plan.

Wow.

Did you raise money for this company?

I did not.

No.

All self-funded.

Oh, yeah.

Started from scratch.

Dang.

Because it sounds expensive to build out this software, right?

It took us about two years, but at the point where we've started, so the mini-saaS that I'm talking about sits behind Manichat.

Got it.

Many chat does not have a way to track sales.

Revenue,

it doesn't, that's it.

You can see, like you said, click the rates, open rates.

That's pretty much it.

Oh, it can't track revenue.

Wow.

So we've built a mini SAS in the back end

that allows the chatbot to know in real time whether these people are pressing an order or not.

And we tie that attribution to the email collected.

That's why we aim to collect email addresses at such a high rate.

And if that purchase doesn't come, then those follow-ups trigger.

Interesting.

Because otherwise, you don't want to spam people, right?

So, first of all, you have to give them the option to say, you know, no thanks, maybe later, not interested.

Because DMs convert really well, but they're still very personal, sensitive channels, so you don't want to spam people.

And so what we've built in the back end is a system that tracks revenue and a bunch of other metrics that

just give our clients a lot more insight into how people are buying, when they're buying, what makes them buy.

So they can see literally what, if they build 15 follow-ups over the course of a month that starts new conversations,

they will know which follow-up converts better.

So they can see, okay, follow-up number two, 10% of people bought.

Follow-up number three, only 1%.

Clearly, that's not working so much.

So let's tweak that a little bit.

Split test test it, yeah.

Correct, correct.

Wow, this is so fascinating.

So, is there a number of people?

Is there a limit to how many people you can have on these lists?

Or is it unlimited?

Not that I've seen so far.

So, we've worked with accounts of up to four to five million followers.

We haven't hit a limit so far.

Wow.

I'm just thinking, like, even like Logan Paul's brand, Prime, he could build a fat list and then, whenever they have a new flavor or something, just send out a blast.

Yeah, that's it.

This sounds super useful and super cost.

You said it's free to send out a blast, right?

They might make it paid at some point.

Meta right now is free.

That is crazy.

Because to do that over any other ad platform would cost thousands.

Yeah.

And imagine if you're running a Messenger ad, you're literally getting people.

So we're getting people in the in Messenger.

We're capturing email.

We're getting them on the DM list, presenting them with an offer.

Then we start following up on them over a month if they don't purchase.

Wow.

So, you know, running ads like that will beat any other ad.

That's That's cool.

So, when you're running these messenger ads, what cost are you getting per subscriber on average right now?

We're not looking at the cost per subscriber, we're looking at the ROAS at the ROAS.

So,

we want that ROAS to beat

all of our clients' ads in their ad account.

Wow.

Yeah, if you pull that off, they'll sign up all day.

You almost did like what Alex Becker did with Hairos.

Yeah, so we're actually, some of our clients are using Hairos Hairos as well.

And they've just now got us to track via Hirosh as well.

So we can see the difference between one and the other.

Because our tracking system is not 100% accurate because we're relying on attributing orders back to the email address.

And so if we're capturing email addresses from, you know, let's say 90, 95% of the subscribers, we're still missing that 5%.

That's one thing.

The other thing is that some people, that's not a high percentage, maybe maybe one to two percent some will give us one email and then place the order with a different one

and so right now we're testing to see you know what does hiro say say compared to what we're tracking like what's what's the actual difference that we're that's there yeah i suspect it's anywhere between three percent ish yeah i mean i have multiple emails i don't order anything to my personal address on my um on like certain emails you know what i mean yeah so that makes sense uh where do you want to take this thing do you want to raise money Do you want to take on partners?

I don't have a reason to raise money right now because I've already bootstrap it.

It's highly profitable and it's scalable.

So what I want to do now is scale it.

And so that's where we're going.

You know, one year ago, there were three of us on the team.

Now we're 10.

And we're scaling fast.

One of the factors that helped me take it to where we are now has been Hormozy's, because we spoke about Hormozy, Alex Hormozy's million dollar offers.

pretty much changed my offer, started running Facebook ads, and that just blew up.

Wow.

And all 10 people are in Australia?

Nobody's in Australia.

Oh, just you?

We are everywhere.

Canada, US,

Latin America,

Thailand.

Yeah, we're everywhere.

The thing is that I'm the only one based in Australia.

The company is based in Australia, but all of our clients are US and Canada based.

So did you grow up there and you're just still living there?

No, I'm Romanian.

Oh.

I moved to Australia seven years ago with my daughter and pretty much started from scratch.

Wow.

So what caused you to pick Australia?

You could have picked anywhere, right?

I saw a photo of Surfer's Paradise on

Noah.

That's what caused it?

Well, I was following this girlish fitness.

influencer Emily Skye who lives on the Gold Coast

and one day she posted on Snapchat a photo of she was coming back from Sydney.

I saw Surface Paradise.

I looked it up and I saw Surface Paradise on Google.

Wow, I want to live there.

I didn't know exactly what it was, but I'm like,

that sounds like a dream.

Manifest.

I read about it.

50 days of rain a year.

Everything else is sunny.

It's just right now is summer in Australia.

Yeah.

So

honestly, for me, it's just the best life.

Sounds beautiful.

Big change from Romania too, I bet, right?

Yes.

There's no beaches out there.

We we have, but um, it's different.

The society is different, the lifestyle is different.

A, you know, a first world country, to me and to my daughter growing up in a first world country, that's just

you can't beat that.

Right.

Because I know how I grew up and I know that by the time that I was thirty, I'd hit a ceiling.

Professionally um speaking, you know, I had had pretty much everything I wanted.

I had a house, cars, I had everything, but

there was no more challenge for me in Romania.

Like, where do I go from here?

Yeah.

And then if I'd hit that ceiling by the time that I was 30, what's to save my daughter?

She was going to leave either way.

So I'm like, I might as well do it now.

Wow.

So there's not much entrepreneurship out in Romania.

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Well, click the application link below in the description of this video.

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There is some, but I feel like the culture is different.

The opportunities are different and just Australia is just different from all worlds of view.

People are happier.

Yeah, every Australian I know is super happy actually.

And

maybe it's because of the sun.

I don't know.

Probably.

They say people in Cali are happier than people in colder places in the U.S.

It's very similar.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow.

You run into Andrew Tate out there?

No, I've seen he's in Romania, but

I think I had left, yes, by the time he was.

By the time he blew up.

Yeah.

So reading 100 million offers by Hormozi really changed your business.

And you said you're going to one of his events too as well, right?

I I signed up for it.

I literally have a call at 2 p.m.

today with his team.

Wow.

And hopefully, I get in and go to the workshop and I meet them.

What are the requirements to get in?

You'd have to be making at least 250 million, 250K per year.

And obviously, you need to have your numbers ready.

And

that's pretty much all I said.

Wow.

That could be a life-changing event for you.

It could be because they're looking at helping you scale, you know, paid traffic, scale teams, which is exactly what I need right now.

Yeah.

So when it comes to the paid traffic, how did you learn to do that?

Did you take a course or something?

I'm not doing it.

I have a media buyer.

Got it.

But like I had a few nasty experiences.

Like I hired a different media buyer before.

They charged me a lot to build a funnel and didn't work out.

And then I found these other guys that they're just

for me.

So they already brought my cost per book call down.

They've nailed my funnel.

You know, they just handle everything.

Yeah.

I could bring it in-house, but for now, I don't want to because

too expensive.

Yeah, I had a bad experience.

I feel like everyone had a bad experience with a agency because a lot of the incentives aren't aligned.

Yeah, because they'll charge you like a flat monthly plus percent of spend.

And at that point, they just want to spend as much.

They don't really care about profitability.

Right.

So

I like agencies that are

that charge like

I don't know, like a rev share maybe.

My media buyer charges just a flat fee per month.

Yeah.

And that's it.

Okay.

Plus, like by now we've nailed the funnel, it's working.

And I mean, all we have to do is just shoot new creatives every month.

Nice.

Is it on uh ClickFunnels?

Um no, my website is built on Webflow.

Webflow.

Yeah.

Got it.

It is very easy.

It's like a sales page to the bo to booking page.

Or sometimes we just run an ad, like a one-minute ad, to the booking pa booking page.

That's it.

That's cool to see you making it work on Facebook ads because a lot of people um left Facebook ads.

It got too expensive for them.

Sometimes

it gets expensive, but what we've seen and what we've learned is that there are periods where you just don't see any booked calls for like a day or two and you almost freak out.

Then it goes back to normal.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm starting Google and YouTube right now.

It's crazy.

Wow.

I'm growing 20,000 subscribers a day right now on YouTube.

With the ads.

With the ads, yeah.

Really?

It's nuts.

And it's pretty cheap, too.

Like, I'll be at a million.

I just hit 200K today.

Last week, I was at 100K.

So I'll be at a million in like two months.

Wow.

On YouTube, which is

I'm doing it myself.

I mean, my so Alaric Heck just came on the podcast last week.

He owns a YouTube ads agency.

So I asked him for tips, but I was doing it myself before, and he just helped me optimize them a bit.

But YouTube ads right now are hot.

I tried TikTok and Google and some YouTube.

Couldn't crack it.

Really?

Again, it was a different agency.

Different agency plus different offer.

So I'm just trying to get more views and subscribers.

I don't have anything to sell.

So I think it's a different type of model.

But in general, YouTube, in my opinion, is one of the most valuable platforms.

I'm literally starting YouTube.

Yeah.

In a couple of weeks, I have my editor, view editors.

I told them we're kicking off YouTube at least one video a week.

I'm going all in.

Like, even though I have 11 mil on Instagram, I value my YouTube following more because I know in the long run, that's gonna produce way more connections and money and stuff.

Interesting.

I mean, the long-form viewership is just so powerful.

You know what I mean?

Building an audience off just shorts, it's not really an audience.

They don't have a bond with you.

I agree, because I'm posting my shorts as well on YouTube, but it's good for views, but it's not like a long-term play, in my opinion.

Yeah, that's smart.

Is uh podcasting big in Australia?

I don't think so.

Um, Obviously, there are people who do it,

or maybe I haven't paid attention to it too much.

I've been on a few podcasts.

Most of them have been US-based.

Interesting.

Yeah.

I like to think long-term.

So, like, I'm learning Spanish right now, partially because of my fiancé, but also I see the Spanish podcasting space starting to blow up a little bit.

Really?

So, in like two, three years, I'm going to be interviewing people in Spanish.

I speak some Spanish, and my daughter doesn't want to learn French.

So she got me to get her a Spanish tutor.

Oh, nice.

She doesn't want to learn French?

She doesn't.

Why?

Because she doesn't like French.

Interesting.

So I'll say this, okay?

I've been to France, and no offense, because you sound like you like French people.

It was probably my least favorite country.

I do not.

Oh, you don't?

I don't like French.

I'm the same as she is.

In school,

I studied German.

Okay.

And I did not want to learn it.

And my mom always told me, you have to learn foreign languages.

And I knew English, and I had picked up Spanish from just watching TV.

And I told her, well, I speak Spanish.

I'm like, no, you don't.

Yes, I do.

And I started speaking Spanish.

I'm like, okay, then you have to learn how to spell it as well.

So she took me, she put me in tutoring to learn how to spell Spanish as well.

And then I'm like, great.

So I won't learn German because I know Spanish.

That's impressive.

You learned a whole language behind your mother's back.

By accident,

I enjoyed watching telenovelas on TV.

Yeah.

And I watched them for years, probably.

And then I just suddenly, I could speak it.

That's one of the quickest ways I've been learning it.

I watched Netflix in Spanish with English subtitles.

And it's, yeah, because I tried Duolingo.

I had like a 300-day streak and I barely learned, honestly.

Yeah, that's how I learned as well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I just go to the sauna and put on like 30 minutes of whatever.

I'm watching Narcos right now.

That's definitely the quickest way.

How old's your daughter right now?

She's 12 this week actually.

Wow.

Yeah.

Congrats.

Thank you.

And you raise her by yourself?

Yes.

I have a partner.

We've been together for five years, but mainly by myself.

Wow.

Initially we we flew and moved to Australia with my ex-husband but we got divorced, he left back to Romania.

So it's just been her and me for for a while.

So that first seven years it was mainly just you and her?

Um in in Australia, yes.

Wow.

Yeah.

That must have been tough.

It was tough in the beginning because I kept insisting on building an online business and I was usually always broke.

I didn't want to do anything else.

I kept trying all sorts of other businesses.

My online fitness business usually was

however much I put in Facebook ads, I made back.

So I would see that

as a win because, you know, I gained a lot of experience.

But I also had, you know, I tried affiliate marketing, I know, a print-on-demand shop.

And after about two to three years of doing that, I'm like, okay, this has got to stop.

I go and get a job.

And I got a job in the Microsoft space

because with my studies and everything from Romania, I could do a lot of stuff.

I just didn't want to do it because I wanted my own business.

And so I got a job in the Microsoft space.

That went really well.

I was doing about 100K a year.

And then, you know, again, I hit a ceiling with that job.

I was implementing one of Microsoft's ERP systems, Business Central.

But again, there's only so much you can do in the space, right?

I mean, and I didn't want to have a job.

So at the point where I put some money aside, I quit my job and I started my child budget agency.

Nice.

And the first year, did it do well?

Did it kick off right off the bat or did it take some time?

No,

I think it took me about six months to get some good clients under my belt.

Okay.

And it was just me at that time.

So like literally, I had no fulfillment costs.

No, even now, like if I didn't have my team,

like we don't have

overhead, not much, maybe a few thousand dollars.

So it's not a lot because our clients literally pay for everything themselves.

They manage that, whatever they, that's the incur the costs.

But because whatever we build becomes their IP, their build is all theirs.

So we don't have to spend too much.

That makes sense.

So what's the goal for 2024?

You got any goals?

I would like to take my agency to one mil per month.

Damn, one mil a month.

Let's do it.

It's not that.

I don't think it's that hard.

I love that.

And I would like to better package the mini SaaS that we have right now because

it's there, but it's complicated.

Like

somebody else who comes in could not manage it.

We manage it.

We set it up for each client and then they just see everything in a nice format, but it is not packaged properly got it um my agency like potentially could i would like to exit it in two years it would be a lot worth a lot more if i had that mini sas stacked on top of it so there's some user friction there yes yeah that's part of what makes sas so valuable when people like becker can figure out how to implement it easily yes and people don't even have to do any hard setup because anything coding i'm out like i'm not doing that you know what i mean that's why shopify was so ahead of its time because prior to Shopify, you had to know coding to make an e-commerce business.

And it was just like you mess up one line, the whole site shuts down.

And I have some horror stories of like the site closing on Black Friday or something important.

You know what I mean?

I've had, like,

we've had Black Friday probably in 2022.

I remember we had a client.

Their website, we had built this massive like DM list inside of Messenger.

We didn't have Instagram back then.

Their website crashed.

We did a countdown,

everything was going through Messenger.

We built this VIP list.

You only get access through Messenger.

We send out the broadcast and like, you know, the free push.

Yeah.

Their website crashed.

Too many people on it.

Oh, my God.

They probably weren't on Shopify because Shopify is really good about that.

I can't remember.

It was in 2020.

Yeah.

But it was, wow, that was a big stress for me as well.

Although.

They probably blamed you and then it was a whole fight.

No, they didn't, but it just didn't turn out the way that it should have.

Right.

Because everybody had worked so much.

And then it just didn't.

It was like a 30% probably of what it could have been.

Yeah.

I'm really excited to try these lists out because I know Instagram kind of limits your DMs per day, like 100, 150.

But with these lists, you could just send out.

If you go through many chat, it won't.

You might have at the volume that you're at, you might have issues if you also automate comment replies.

Because I do it with my, that's how I grew my Instagram account using comment to DM automation.

And I had one of my very first posts go viral.

I think it's at 1.3 million views.

Wow.

It's at around 30,000 comments.

Damn.

And because it took off and the chatbot kept replying at the same time, I didn't realize it.

Yeah.

They restricted my account for a week.

I couldn't comment.

And that was it.

Everything else worked.

Oh, that's not too bad.

Wait, so you can do comments with this?

Comment, reply.

I might need that because I get thousands a day, and it's like I can't even respond to people.

I kind of feel bad.

Yeah, so if you build something very easy, very evergreen, where they comment, and you can even exclude if you know you get some negative comments, we get our clients to exclude.

I've done that, yeah.

I exclude them.

And it won't fire on those comments.

Got it.

But it would just simply reply, no, check your DMs.

I sent you a DM.

That's it.

Yeah.

It doesn't have to be in the context of what's been asked or anything like that.

Wow.

No, that's a good funnel.

Cause then once they're in the the DM, they're in your messenger list and then get their email.

That's it.

And in the DMs, you could literally have like some form of freebie and say, hey, would you like to download my whatever?

And then they say yes.

Next step, great.

Type your email below and I'll send it to you.

Yeah.

That email flows to what CRM do you use?

HubSpot.

Yeah, we use HubSpot as well.

So it flows to HubSpot.

It triggers an email to be sent, but you can also deliver it via DMs.

So now you're literally in front of that audience via two channels: email and

DMs.

I've seen it set up in people's DMs where when you go to message them, it pops up like a message.

Yeah, that's a conversation starter.

Got it.

There's a lot of ways you can pull people into conversations, like from stories, from reels, from live videos, even from your website.

So we literally have clients right now who have buttons on their website as we used to Instagram DMs.

Wow.

I need to step it up with my DM game.

We're going to talk after this for sure.

Liz, where can people find you and the company and what you're up to?

Yeah,

if if you look up Liziana Carter on Instagram, or you can go to our website, getgroya.com.

Awesome.

Thanks so much for coming on.

Thank you.

Yeah, thanks for watching, guys.

As always, see you tomorrow.