Niching for Developers: Lessons from Wes Towers (Part 1)

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season of Building Better Foundations. We are the Building Better Developers podcast, also known as Develop-a-Nor or vice versa, depending on how you know us and where you first found us. Today we're going to continue doing some interviews. We've mixed this up in our foundational season. You'll find out, I think pretty much if we don't directly talk about it, what some of the foundational principles are we're going to head on today. Before we get into that, because I'm going to allow him to introduce himself because he will do it so much better than me, I'll first introduce myself. My name is Rob Broadhead, one of the founders of Develop-a-Nor, also the founder of RB Consulting, where we are what some people call a boutique consulting company, where we help you as a business owner figure out where you're at, how to leverage technology, create a roadmap and then implement that roadmap so that you can leverage your technology for success into the future. You can check us out at rb-sns.com. We have got product services, technology assessments and all kinds of goodness there. Good thing, bad thing that has run into me recently. Good thing and bad thing. I guess the bad thing one would say is that I have had, in my family, I've had multiple car dings lately. We've had scratches, we had a car that got hit and then it got hit again, rear-ended and then it got totaled and then a little later got totaled, got hit and not totaled again, but hit again. The bad news is people are coming after us on the road. The good news is the cars are already dinged up, so the damage has been done. Might as well just bring it on at this point. We can't get much worse than that. Right along those lines, we can't get any worse than my introduction, but we're going to see if Michael will do so. Go ahead and introduce yourself. Hey everyone, my name is Michael Milosz. I'm one of the co-founders of Building Better Developers, also known as Developmenter. I'm also the owner of Envision QA, where we help businesses take back control with custom software that's built around their needs, not the other way around. Our focus is simple, great service, smart solutions and rock-solid quality. We build tools that replace frustrating systems, streamline operations and are fully tested to work right the first time. Check this out at Envision QA, where we combine development and quality assurance to give you software you can trust. Good thing, bad thing. I'll start out with the bad thing. Kids called last week, their HVAC system went out. Nice cold day, they turned on the heat, boom, it goes out. Good thing they had a fireplace, all I had to do was go collect all the downed tree looms that were in the yard, so they had a nice fire going for a couple of days until that was fixed. And as I alluded to at the beginning there, we have a guest today and I'm going to let our guest, Wes Towers, introduce himself. Go for it, Wes. Yeah, firstly, thank you, Rob and Michael for hosting me on the show today. It's a real privilege to be speaking with you both. So I'm Wes from Uplift 360. We're down here in Australia. You can probably pick up my accent in Melbourne, Australia. And so we're a website development agency. So we do websites, we do SEOs. We're calling it Search Everywhere Optimization with AI and so on, large language models. So we're working a lot in that space and we're really dialed into a particular niche being the construction and trades related industry. So we serve them with their websites, typically WordPress websites and go from there. And that's where we're going to dive right into that. I've actually recently had several conversations with people that work in the various services provided to trades industries. And we've talked about how they are sort of unique, particularly when you deal with technology, because I think a lot of people have the perspective that the trades are not technical. They're just like doers. They go out, they hammer nails, they create things, they fix pipes and stuff like that. But they're not really technology savvy. But I've found that actually most of them very much are. But they're also in, it's actually a sort of unique challenge because they also are in one of these industries where there's a lot of noise. If you're a plumber, there's a lot of plumbers out there. And it's really hard to distinguish yourself. And that's where I really want to focus a little bit today on some of our discussions is because we fall in the same thing. We're from a technology point. If you're building software, if you're providing IT consulting services of some sort, if that's your side hustle or your main job, it's a crowded industry. There's a lot of noise. And so I think we'll start with thinking about that. And obviously, you already mentioned WordPress and it sounds like it's sort of a, you're not doing anything that's like crazy or insane. It's really, it's like, let's get to the basics. And how do we, as a customer, if I come to you as a construction company or something like that, how do you start that conversation of finding a way to be heard amongst the noise? Yeah, well, firstly, you're right. It is quite a different scenario dealing with founder-led construction companies, tradespeople. Because they are practical people. Like, you know, working with their hands, dealing with tools and machinery, and they're fantastic at what they do. Pragmatic, practical, down to earth people. And I love the clients we serve, but they're not, oftentimes, they're not very tech savvy. So they're the smaller kind of businesses we're working with, small medium. Once it gets to the next step up, it's a company where they'll have a marketing team, for example. Maybe they've just got a marketing person or they've got a someone at least looking after that for them. It's not the founder who's doing everything. So that's the different scenarios. And the one key thing working with any of these people, really, is to remember that they don't care so much about the process and the technology and so on. They care about the outcome. So it's so easy for me and everybody, particularly working with the people we're working with, to get bogged down with the tech and explaining to them the amazing things we're doing. But realistically, what are they wanting? They're wanting a website that's going to bring them more business. That's effectively what they're doing. And they're wanting the message to be clear and compelling and from a marketing standpoint, for the message to be heard and to sing it from the rooftops. So those are the sorts of things that we speak about with the clients. And so I have a team of developers now, so I don't even touch the development side of things. Back in the day, I'm not a full developer like you guys, but just did WordPress websites for many, many years now. The business has been over 20 years. But now, and particularly with the tech advancements and things changing so fast, I barely touch the technical aspect. I mean, the basic WordPress, yeah, cool, I can jump in. Some of the sites are more sophisticated than that. So I just trust the team to do it in that way. So every niche has its own benefits and challenges. But I think niching is the real secret to success moving forward. As the technology becomes easier and easier, we'll need less of technicians for basic tasks. We'll always need high level people to do high level things. But the basics will be often taken care of. Me, for example, basic WordPress websites, that's incredibly vulnerable to software taking over that whole field. So I've got to bring a new level of expertise. And that's why niching is really important because I really get to understand who they are, how to communicate, how to draw out of them their core messages so we can express that online through multiple avenues. Ned, you end up because you're in a sort of stay in the play in the same industry when you play in that niche. And this is particularly always been interesting to me because you're in advertising, you're in marketing. That's part of what you're doing is you're trying to distinguish customers from the noise. But then also now you're within that niche. So how do you work the things that are the commonalities from customer to customer and saying that, hey, we understand you, while also being able to say, we're going to understand how to separate you from the competition so that we can create a unique message. Yeah, that's a brilliant point, Rob. So it certainly streamlines things when we kind of understand their industry as a whole, but we don't know the nuance of precisely what they do. And the specifics of what they do and how they do it differently and why they're better than everyone else effectively is the core thing to draw out of them. And so sometimes the founders are kind of short and they don't spend a lot of time wanting to talk, but what we have found is they will open up in a venting session. So they'll easily complain about all their competitors. Now, this is a behind closed doors discussion, but I just give them the permission really, and even draw it out of them, all the complaints about all their competitors, what they're doing wrong and what's wrong with the industry and what everyone complains about. I call it the shadow side of people. So the dark side, once we sort of understand that, and that's so easy to draw out of people, once you give them permission to complain, it's like a cathartic kind of experience for them. But once we understand all of that, we can reverse it. So what's the opposite to all of these things? Because that's who they are. And that's what we've got to highlight from a marketing perspective, from a positive frame. You would never want to bag your competitors online and say it from that negative connotation, but there's always the inverse, the opposite, which is the positive thing, which we can draw out and highlight those things. And realistically, they're the most important things to feature in all your marketing material, the points of difference, because most buyers will have a rough idea of the whole industry. But those nuanced differences are really compelling. That's actually, yeah, it's really interesting because you also with that, you figure out what they're emotional about, what they're fired up about, what they're excited about is because you're going to find out like, this is probably why they went into that business. So that is what gets them up in the morning because they're annoyed with what the competition does. And so that's actually brilliant. That gives you not only that flip side of the positive of this is what they provide, but also something that obviously they're pumped up and excited about. So it's something that they can get behind that charge and say, yeah, yeah, this is what we're going to do. We're going to be, you know, this is what we do. And we're not really saying that they stink, but we are saying that we're really good because we do it this way. So yeah, those discussions behind closed doors are really powerful. And I think developers would be able to relate to that because often there's, you know, it can be high intensity. And when things go wrong, it's incredibly stressful because you'll have clients and customers complaining and they don't appreciate the level of work it might take to resolve some of the issues. So I'm sure developers can appreciate it's the same kind of feeling for the trades people or the construction people. Sometimes things outside of our control go wrong as web developers. Sometimes their worlds, things don't go quite right. The weather, for example, might delay a project massively. They can't do anything about that. But the end client is frustrated. So there's lots of tension and emotion that you can draw out of people in the industry. So I think developers can relate. I know my team of developers sometimes that the client's expectations of how quickly things can get done is unrealistic oftentimes. So they feel the pressure at times. I realize that. Yeah, that is. I never thought of that, but I guess that is really a that is a similarity from developers to trades is that I've met so many times I've had discussions with specialists in those areas where there's electricians or plumbers or HVAC or those places where they're. Yeah, it's like it's it is sort of a science, but there's so many things that can go wrong. Or you have like here I know we've had issues where like vendors will take forever to ship something. So you want to fix it and it's a quick fix, but you're waiting on a part. And it's just like developers. Sometimes you're in a situation like, well, this is sort of out of my hands. I would love to be able to do it faster if things lined up. I could get it done today, but these things are blocking me from it. And you hate it because you have no control over it. But it's like that's that's the the drawing cards that you have. Yeah, 100%. I do want to step back because I did. I said really to talk about like, how did you get into targeting this industry? How did you get into targeting construction as your as your niche? Yeah, by accident, really. The niche found me rather than the other way around. And even starting the business felt a little bit by accident. So I started because another person I knew was closing his business. It was a small business that just wasn't producing enough for him to make a stable income. So I said, I'm throwing in the towel. I'm going to get a real job. And so I said, well, what are you going to do with your few clients you do have? And he said, well, you can have them. So that's where I started. So it was pretty small starting point. But yeah, back in those days, I did anything and everything for everybody because you just need the income, right? So you do that. But that opens up a whole bunch of headaches. Obviously, you take on projects that are just outside your core skill sets. So I remember one website we did when I was doing everything. I did a dating website. This is before the apps and so on. So, you know, people jumped online and on a website and did those connections. But it was really sophisticated and advanced and it really needed a high level of development. So it was beyond me. And at that stage, I had a small team that my lead developer pulled the pin. He was the one who did the proposal, did all the scoping out, did everything. He was the only one who knew how to do it. And then he quit the job a couple of weeks in and left me in the lurch. And I had to figure it out myself. I did get there. I did get it done. The client had no idea that the turmoil I was in in the late nights and all that. But we delivered. We got it out. She was really happy. She sold that business, did really well. But yeah, so to Nish in over the years, I realised at one point, hey, all my very, very best clients who are the happiest, they all kind of look and sound the same. They're kind of in the same industry. It's not all of them, but the great overwhelming majority. So everyone says to Nish and I thought, or niche depends on how you say it. But I realised, hey, this niche has found me. I should leverage this and really dig deep. And then over the course of time, you sort of get to understand the nuance of each sort of industry within the construction, within the trades. And then you learn something that works for one company. And then it's likely to work for the next to a degree. It might be needing to adapt a little bit, but you just learn what works. So you can get quick runs on the board for them. But every niche has its challenges and so on. And it's about learning how to communicate to the individuals within those entities. It's quite different dealing with a founder to dealing with a marketing person within an entity, depending on the size and scale of the business. So you've said you've been doing this for quite a while, that you've kind of, you've hired people now, you're not quite in the weeds as much building the WordPress sites and that. Kind of looking back where you're at today, what are some of the challenges you're still running into within your niche, in this industry with these tools that you're using? More so like kind of back in the day when you were hands on doing this, like you said, dating apps are now on mobile phones and that. Through the transition of change and over the years as your business has grown, what are some of the challenges and things that you've had to do within this technology to kind of grow your business and stay within this niche? Yeah, well, about three years ago, I've got a business valuation, which is a real wake up call because it came in a hell of a lot lower than I anticipated. And business was stable and it's predictable, it's doing really well for a long time. All the signs were good to get a good valuation, but the value has said to me, hey, look, the rise of AI is a massive threat to your business and not just your business, but your industry. And so no one's buying uncertainty. So they want some level of certainty that what it's produced before is reliable to produce that for years to come. And he said, I just can't simply give that level of certainty. So therefore I've got to lower the valuation. That was a real kick in the teeth. You're building something for so long and then some piece of technology, AI, has the potential to disrupt and put my business at risk. So after sulking about that for a while, I put myself together and realized, hey, I've got to get better at understanding how I can implement AI into our standard operating procedures to build the websites faster and to keep on top of the technology because things do change fast. Because if I don't, I am vulnerable for the business to collapse if I don't stay on top of those things from a technical standpoint. And there are things I dabble with from time to time from the tech standpoint, particularly with, I use Chatjabuti, the developers more so use Copilot as well, but for me, just Chatjabuti because we're dealing with a bunch of plugins. And you guys probably know with WordPress, not everything always plays nicely together. And we haven't got experience with every single plugin, particularly if we inherit a website and we take it further. So you're picking up what someone else has put together and cobbled together sometimes. So there's a whole bunch of headaches sometimes when things get really updated and things don't work anymore or things don't get supported anymore and you've got to troubleshoot those sort of challenges always popping up. But with Chatjabuti, it's awesome because I might not have an understanding of the plugin itself and why it might be causing an issue or how to even deal with it. But I put it in there and most of the time it troubleshoots pretty closely to spot on. I've found over the last couple of weeks, it's telling me lies the last couple of weeks. I don't know what's going on. It's usually fairly reliable and robust. And hopefully it gets back to that. Will, something, have you guys found that? Do you use it? Are you finding a bit of... Yeah, it's interesting. Even when you, I use Chatjabuti a lot too, and even using folders and stuff like that, it'll get cross-purposes sometimes. It'll pull something from somewhere else or it'll get lost. It's like, you sort of have like, if you think of like this long thread of a conversation, sometimes it'll jump back to something and particularly, yeah, I love debugging things like that, like plugins and libraries and those kinds of conflicts where it's just like, you don't know all, there's too many to know. And she's like, well, okay, well, how does this, how can we maybe figure this one out so that it won't cause us issues? We can get these things to not clash. And it's so often I'll have to like really tighten down the conversation and say, wait a minute, back up. This is the version I'm talking about. This is the environment I'm talking about. This is what we're looking at. Because otherwise it's pulling too much information in. And it's like, yeah, that made sense a week ago, but it doesn't anymore. And it's sort of, you have to get it to sort of like clear stuff, almost like clear the context and go with a clear conversation. Yeah, that's true. It can be so challenging because as you say, sometimes you'll have everything really in a tight folder, but all of a sudden it's pulling something in from my personal chats I've had with it that have no relevance to, I use my chat GPT almost like a psychologist half the time, which is probably unhelpful for its learning about me. I hate to think what might happen if that information got leaked, whether I'd be locked up in a psych ward or something like that. I'm not sure. That's what we're doing. We're putting all our information through these tools. It is an interesting world. We're living in security and privacy and all that kind of stuff. People are incredibly careful and cautious. Even from a marketing standpoint, like we used to have free giveaways, like an ebook or something in exchange for an email address. These days, people don't want to part with their email address because they know they're giving away part of their privacy. It's not free. They're giving their privacy away. So they might get spammed for the term of their natural life if they do that. And so there's a lack of trust out there and just a concern around that whole who has my information and what's happening because there is legitimate hacking and things going on these days too. So it's good and bad. There's the positive and negative in that people are aware of what might happen. But then people are also cautious with working with people like us, particularly if the website's capturing any data about the clients. Yeah, it really does go back to having earned somebody's trust almost right from the start before they're even going to give you like almost before they're going to give you that handshake of an email address. You got to earn some trust there. Yeah, 100%. That's where it's at really for any industry and business too, because it's so easy to mass produce content at scale that reads pretty well and even a video that looks polished or even your voice. I was talking to a guy on another podcast. He did his whole book. He's written a book and he's used one of the tools to have it, the audible audio version. And it sounds just like him. He can't spot the difference and it's his own voice. So it's crazy the amount of tech that can mass produce content. So we've got to find new ways to stand out from the crowd and earn that trust. That's the key really to business. So you mentioned that you started looking at using AI tools to help build the sites faster, things of that. Have you integrated AI into any of the sites that you're building for your customers? Have you actually embraced AI chat bots, things of that? Or is it just strictly more of the automation side of thing to help streamline the business flow? It's mostly the streamlining of the processes. Just some of the plugins we're using are making it easier for the optimization point of view. So people just miss the basics of the meta titles and descriptions or do it wrong oftentimes or those sorts of things. In these days, you just press a button and they're all done and they're done pretty well. I mean, if it's a massive website and they haven't done any of that stuff, it could take hours and hours and hours to manually go through, figure out what the page is about, write something that might attract search engines' attention. But now with a few clicks, you can get that done super fast, which is amazing. Challenge with that is though everyone else is doing it too. So it just lifts the stack. Not everyone's doing it, but a lot of people are. So it lifts the stakes as well. So it'll be interesting where things go because things can get done so fast. There's tools that claim to do your whole SEO at the push of a button. We're not using anything like that. We still like to read what it's writing and understand and control it. It's just the quality we want to produce. It's about balancing those things. When you're having your conversations with your customer, are some of those things in the back of your mind when you're talking to them about building these sites or maintaining these sites on what tools you can utilize to quickly spin up or maintain the sites? Or do you just go in more on just understanding who the customer is, what they want, and then go from there, look at what's out there already for that industry and construction, but for that particular customer to build them something that's useful for the customer based on what they need? That's right. Often the customers will have a bit of an idea of what websites they like, and they might not be able to articulate why they like it. I studied graphic design multimedia back in the day, so I'm coming from the design perspective. Once they start to show us what they like and we can understand and guide them what the benefits or the potential downside of what they like to produce the outcome that they're trying to achieve. From a tech standpoint, just with the people we're dealing with, I've just got to be really careful not to overwhelm them. There's important things to make sure they understand. You build a WordPress website. Obviously, if you leave that for any length of time, even a month, there's going to be security issues that all the different plugins might need updates. Updates are coming out all the time. That maintenance side of things is really important. It's sometimes hard for other people to grasp that because they think, I've built the website, we're going to leave it for 10 years or whatever. That's what they think, but it's just not the case. It could be able to communicate that effectively so they understand the importance of maintenance. It can be a challenge to communicate sometimes, but I just have to get better at doing that. That's actually just a side note, but there's actually, you mentioned the idea of maintenance. For companies like this that are, they tend to be pretty static. I think I've seen companies that have had sites that have been there for 10 years and they haven't touched it, and it's obvious. Is there a standard timeframe that you usually say, hey, you probably need to touch this and do little tweaks and updates on every three months, such a year, six months? Is there a standard timeline that you try to do to just keep it looking fresh and smelling nice? Yeah, most clients, I would say, give some level of overhaul in design every two or three years. You're right. There's one client we launched a website for who chose not to do the maintenance, not to continue with the maintenance. It might be 12 years old. It's ridiculously old. I don't know how it's still standing. It seems to be still there. I don't host it or anything, so it's not really a client anymore, I suppose. That's one of those things. That's rare. This is the curious thing. People think they're going to build a website and then that's it forever. They don't realize in a few years business evolves, things change, technology changes, there's new opportunities. There's so many changes, particularly in the world right now. It's ideal if we can continue supporting them every month, really, for the maintenance. For the search engine or the search everywhere optimization, that's a monthly effort as well. But then there's clients who will choose to take the risk and not get the maintenance and come back in three or four years' time, two, three, four years' time, that sort of thing and have an overhaul. That is where we're going to pause this episode. This is part one. Part two is right around the corner, actually a couple days around the corner, but nevertheless, it will be coming soon. We're going to continue our conversation with Wes and it's going to continue to get into all of the good stuff. It's really fun to me because it's an area where I don't think people have enough discussions when you talk about some of the trades, construction companies, things like that. But they have been some of my favorite customers that I've dealt with or in the trades in those areas. This is continuing to be a good one, I think. There's a lot of stuff you're going to get that I don't think you're going to realize as a... I know I didn't realize as a developer how similar you are to some of these other lines of business and maybe where you can learn some things from how they do stuff. As always, we can learn more from you if you'll shoot us an email at info at development.com. Check us out on development.com. We've got comment forums, contact us forums, you name it, developer channel out on YouTube. You can check us out there and leave comments, feedback. We'd love to hear from you there. Subscribe, leave feedback wherever you listen to podcasts on Twitter, actually on X, still thinking that on X we are at developer. We have the developer Facebook page. Where have you know, like turn your head and yep, developers like developer is right there behind you just like stalking you or something like that. And we would love to hear from you at any point and then that will keep us from stalking you weirdly in the future. That being said, let's wrap this one up and let you go out to your day, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week. And we'll talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the developer podcast. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success.