Shopify Growth Secrets from the World’s LARGEST Shopify Agency co-founder: Mac King 📈

Jay Myers: [00:00:00] First of all, thank you for coming on the podcast. I wanna take it back a little bit here to, I think it was 2014. Do you know what I'm gonna mention?

Mac King: Was it the first time we hung out in the basement pub in Ottawa? Or,

Jay Myers: I don't know if that predates, if this was before or after that, but I, we had a challenge we sent to Shopify, right?

We were at this, at this stage of our company, we were actually one year we set a goal to build an app a month, and we were like. Well, you know, Shopify gurus, are they still called gurus, like the supply team? No, they're not

Mac King: gurus anymore. Not the preferred term anymore. Yeah, I think there is. Okay.

Sorry.

Jay Myers: But you were a guru before that? I was a guru, yeah. We were like, yeah, Shopify gurus probably know exactly what merchants want. So we built, or we did this competition. I think it was for a thousand dollars. I can't remember.

Mac King: Yeah. Something like that. Oh, and a huge sum of money at the time for me.

It was for sure. Yes.

Jay Myers: I mean, yeah, we got submissions for [00:01:00] ideas for an app, and then we, for the winner, we sent in a town crier. Were you in the room when the town Crier

Mac King: came? I actually, I think I was Now that you mention it. Yeah.

Jay Myers: Yeah. That, so like a here the winner of the whatever idea for an app or something.

And he had to scroll and he read it. And you were the winner of that competition? Yes. Do you remember what the app was?

Mac King: It was a donation app. I thought it was the, by the measurement app. I Did you submit two? I? No. Well, maybe, I don't know. We should look, but I, okay. From my memory, and this is, you know, more than 10 years ago now, which is crazy, but yeah, I thought I, I submitted like a, an app for people could donate.

well, we built it.

Jay Myers: Yeah. So, okay. So then someone, you, that one won and we built it and we actually ended up sunsetting it. I'm sorry, nine years later. Okay. It did well, but yeah, there was another one. Okay. Okay. You know what, we had three winners I think. I think we picked first, second, third, [00:02:00] so,

Mac King: okay.

So that, yeah, I think mine was announced a little bit later or something. Okay. You know, it wasn't part of the, but I remember the town crier, but I, yeah, I don't think I won right away. It was something afterwards.

Jay Myers: Okay. And then we did a second pick or something.

Mac King: Yeah.

Jay Myers: And then fast forward a couple years to 2000, I think it was 16, you became our partner manager and you phoned us up one day and you said, Hey guys, we're starting this.

Shopify Plus experts Program. And we're gonna have Shopify Plus experts. So not just at the time, for those listening, there was just Shopify experts. There was no Shopify, like Shopify Plus was only a thing for about a year before that. And you said I think we were the first Shopify Plus expert.

You're Oh you literally got on a call with us and you're like, Hey guys, I obviously gotta pick you. And we're starting the Shopify Plus expert thing and so let's do this like that. That was pretty much the conversation. I remember you were sitting in a chair in one of the phone rooms in [00:03:00] the Shopify office.

You remember that call?

Mac King: No, I don't remember that call. Like, I, like I said, Jay, your memory is so good. I've. Do not have the same memory as you. So I appreciate you reminding me of these things, but not, yeah, I remember you joining, but I don't remember how I called you

Jay Myers: to, you, we were just a piddly little partner to us you were our Shopify partner, manager, you know, so that was, you

Mac King: know, what?

You weren't a piddly partner. I was really proud of Bold being in my portfolio. You know, for me, I was, it Bold was one of my, was my biggest partner, or was at least one of the biggest partners, you know. And again, I was really like, to me, I felt honored that I got to manage Bold you had such a big reputation and everyone know Bold, you know, and Harley would talk about Bold on stage at the conferences and you know, it, it was a big deal for me actually to be your manager.

Well, thank you man. Thank you.

Jay Myers: Well, you were amazing. I remember you would fly out to Winnipeg and you would attend our events and those were certainly days. I know. Companies evolve and [00:04:00] Shopify's at different stages. I'm of course big fan of Shopify still, like, but those were like the golden years of partner managers, I would say.

You know, like it was, the partner program was growing and there was a lot of,

Mac King: and the way we thought about it was different. You know, I, that's the big difference between now and 10 years ago when it came to the Shopify partnerships, is that as a partner manager and as a partner team, we felt like we needed you all way more than you needed us.

You know, like we were trying to build something, I had to convince people to become a Shopify Plus expert. You know, I had to call, like, you know, you guys were in, were in obviously, as you always were, but some people I had to call and be like, Hey, there's this new, you know, program launching Shopify Plus experts.

Like, will you please be part of it? You know, and I know that you're gonna say no, but like, here's why you should do it. You know? And now there's like a lineup of, of agencies that wanna become a Shopify Plus partner. So it's flipped. It's now

Jay Myers: the partners need Shopify. Shopify doesn't need the partners, almost, you could say.

Mac King: Exactly.

Jay Myers: Yeah. But I still think there's, it's symbiotic, but. Maybe it's shifted a bit. So now, fast forward again a little bit [00:05:00] later. You've co-founded well half Helix, but now Domaine, and you're the co-founder of the largest Shopify agency in the world. What a crazy story you've had starting as a Shopify support, moving into partner manager.

You probably had other roles in there at Shopify that I don't even know about. And now you've built this incredible agency that's you're managing over six, five or $6 billion in GMV for merchants. You've had over 300 launches. Like it's insane. Like do you ever just take a second and look back at your last 10 years, you know.

Mac King: I do actually, I'm, I do that quite often. I think I really practice gratitude and I'm so thankful and I feel very lucky to have been given a lot of different situations in life. But one of them being, I'm from [00:06:00] Ottawa This happens to be my hometown, and it happens to be this company called Shopify was growing in 2013 when I just moved home from a year abroad.

And I got a gig as a guru. Even though I applied as a marketing person, they're like, you have no marketing experience, but how about customer service? I was like, yeah, you got it. so I just kind of landed at this company, you know, and then it's just completely changed the trajectory of my life, you know?

And yeah, as you mentioned today, now, yeah, we're the biggest Shopify agency, which is crazy. And not that the biggest means much, because what's important is being the best, right. And offering the best service and working with the best brands and providing the most value. Like, that's the important thing.

But a scale is. Because we have this scale, we can offer the best service. And because we have the scale at Speci and we're very specific, most other 300 person agencies, they do everything. You know, they'll do a little bit of big commerce and Salesforce, Magento and Shopify. But we have just stayed [00:07:00] locked in on Shopify.

And I think that's what's been really special about the growth trajectory of the company.

Jay Myers: It's amazing. I feel very much the same as you. We, I was a merchant on Shopify in 2009. I had stores on many other platforms before that. In 2009, moved one of them to Shopify Archery. Yeah, that's right.

Supreme Margery. Yeah. Yeah. Ended up selling it to actually a guy. So like, we kept the stores, 'cause I, there was this app store, but at the time there was only, like, I remember there was 10 apps and there was 20 apps and they were all, I would say connector apps. Like they would connect your store to some accounting software or connect to some shipping software.

Like they weren't really. Front end functionality apps. It was more just to connect to other services. But my mind went right away to, well, how, what kind of app? I had a list of like a hundred ideas, like what's possible in the app store to build for my stores. And then we launched this upsell app in 2012.

So again, like I think there was around [00:08:00] 20,000 merchants on Shopify in 2012, somewhere around there. So I have very much the same sentiment as you just gratitude for and for being lucky with timing. It's very different world now. Someone coming in and launching with an amazing app, and I talk to these app developers, they have an amazing app, an amazing product, been live for months, and I'll talk to them and they're like, yeah, we have 12 installs.

Not because there isn't millions of users, but because there's, I don't even know, 14,000 apps. So it's

Mac King: competitive. So

Jay Myers: it's competitive, right? So like it, they've got a great app, a great product, and I'll tell you like way better than an app that we had in 2012. but it's a different world, so I'm very thankful for that.

So,

Mac King: and by the way, same thing with the services side, as I mentioned earlier, we used to beg companies to become plus partner, plus experts, you know, which was not app specific. I know, you know, bold had a services arm at the time, I think, I don't know if you guys still do, but we shut down the

Jay Myers: services side, but we did, we, it was about 65 people at one point,

Mac King: just on our services team.

Yeah. So that and it's a whole different world than the [00:09:00] app side. And it's become much more competitive. And you know, there's, now there's tiers, right? There's Shopify Platinum Partners and Premier and Plus and all sorts of different, you know, metrics that you need to be able to maintain your tier.

And Yeah, you know, we're, we know that we're the number one commercial partner at Shopify right now. That's amazing. So, yeah pretty well. So we're the top of the top which the 1% I guess. So what does Domaine do? Sure, yeah

Jay Myers: why would a brand, just to give some context here, so what, why would a brand come to Domaine?

Mac King: The simple explanation is that we help brands large, you know, again, the large end of the spectrum. Brands doing, you know, $10 million and up but closer to our average as being in the a hundred million dollar range on Shopify. And of course we have a number of the top 10 GMB brands on the platform as our clients number.

I mean, two or three. But, and then the other seven are likely in housing their development. But [00:10:00] we offer a suite of services that surrounds the platform. Creative user experience design, e-com strategy engineering is really, you know, 65 to 70% of what we offer is really dev.

You know, that's mostly what our clients need. What, what brands on Shopify need access to? But what's surrounding it is the important stuff. People hire us because we know that, you know how to do engineering on Shopify, but they stay with us because of the e-comm strategy and the attention to detail and our delivery prowess.

And we launch 85% of the brands that we launch, which we've done, 300 of them have been exactly on budget. Which is not a hundred percent yeah. But that's insane. But it's insane these are all, you almost hear,

Jay Myers: I've heard like the exact opposite. 85% are over budget or closer to a hundred percent,

Mac King: right?

Yeah. And so, you know, I think, and this is because we have like this refinement of process and we have, you know, there's people who've been doing it for five years, the average tenure over Domaine employees over five years in the [00:11:00] agency space. So that's incredible. You don't, incredible don't, people that learn on the job, you know, wow.

It's like you, you come in and, you know, and a lot of times our team members have graduated from other Shopify agencies and kind of like come into the fold afterwards. But yeah, you know, the very simple thing that we try and do is do exactly what we say we will, you know, which is a lot harder said than, sorry, easier said than done.

Right. You know, the, the best analogy for what agencies do is like construction, right? Where, and actually it's the same team. There's a project manager, there's a designer, there's an architect, there's an engineer, you know? Yeah. Any construction project, a physical construction project in your hometown.

And think about how often that physical construction project, you know, they're building a train or a, you know, a light rail station or a new subway stop. How often is it delayed by six months. A year over budget by $10 million. And you know how like that's always Yeah. Right? So that's, the analog is still also true for web develop, web engineering.

 I think we've just figured it a better way to do it so we don't have to go through those delays. [00:12:00]

Jay Myers: And you also have an offering for, just so anyone listening goes, wow, geez, well, I'm not doing a hundred million dollars a year. Turn off this episode. You do have a product or service. It's called Studio.

Mac King: Yep. Yeah. Great point. So we also acquired an agency called Able Sense Aaron Whitman. Oh yeah. You must know Aaron. Yeah,

Jay Myers: yeah, yeah.

Mac King: yeah, his company he sold it to us about two and a half years ago, right before he merged Half Helix and tomorrow were the two companies that merged to Form Domaine.

But right before that happened, we bought Ables Sense and created our mid-market offering, you know, our kind of SMB to mid-market offering. So brands that are doing that zero to $10 million in GMV who are on that growth trajectory. But they want the support of people who have been there before and who kind of know what they're, know what they're doing and what these brands are in for.

So our Domaine studio offering is more of our quick launch program. So. You know, for example, we just launched a you know, we're helping brands get live in eight to 10 weeks, starting at [00:13:00] 50 K, which is like numbers that aren't, possible on our Domaine sideso it's a very quick launch and kind of a reasonable price point.

That's the whole strategy behind the Domaine studio offering. And the big difference is that is the team size and the way that the teams are structured. So Domaine, you basically have access to this kind of full dedicated project team between 10 to 12 people depending on what we're doing. and if there's backend development or you know, backend engineering, for example, and then on Domaine studio side, you'll have access to like two core team members, a project manager and an engineer.

And they'll be able to pull in resources as they need that are not dedicated to the project. So we kinda keep it leaner and keep it meaner and be able to work with different budget types. Nice.

Jay Myers: And then maybe eventually one day they graduate into different levels too, right. So, yes. Makes sense.

Probably the question that comes up a lot is, do I do this in house? Do I hire. Freelancers or like contractors dev contract? Do I go to, I don't know, places like Upwork. There's like, if you type in Shopify in there, you'll find hundreds of [00:14:00] people and this, or why would someone choose to work with an agency versus maybe doing it in-house?

Does that come up? Is that a

Mac King: Yeah, all the time. I mean, you know, and people at all ends of the spectrum have in-house teams, brands that are doing 500 million online, you know, want to all do it all in-house. And oftentimes what the way we work with that kind of brand, Harry's is an example. Harry's razor site, they have their own dev team, right?

And they're quality developers, but they don't have Shopify. So when they're migrating to Shopify, how do they figure out the right way to use the platform? Well, they work with a team like us in order to collaborate on the project. Then hand off the code base to them after it's done, right? So that's the beautiful thing about using Shopify.

So you don't need, you're not like attached to this developer for long term. So that's happening at the very high end, right? This kind of co-development process that we then we've, we're going to eyes wide open at the end of the project, the code, the site becomes yours, the code becomes yours.

You're fully trained on it, [00:15:00] and you can take over. And then, you know, of course there's like the other end of the spectrum, right? Which is like, as you mentioned, you can find a Shopify developer at any price point. You can go to Upwork, you can go to Fiverr and pay $5 for Shopify developer if you want.

You know, you're just getting a different value scale. So, you know, and it really depends on what people's budget are, how much they can spend, how much they wanna spend, right? How big of a plan they have for their brand. Now, I can't really speak to what like that looks like to hire an Upwork or a fiber developer.

I don't know what the quality is. I've never done it, but. I can talk to, like the trends that we see of people who choose us over other agencies, right? Because even amongst the agency landscape we're usually about 30 to 40% more expensive than our peers in this space yet our win rate's really high.

So we still get chosen more often than that's why we've been able to grow. And so that means like the value equation. But the people who end up choosing us are the ones who are thinking a little bit more longer term about their [00:16:00] brand and their position in the market and what they need and how much more they need than just access to a developer, right?

Like how much they need access to strategy and this kind of, you know, email marketing, personalization, other components of the actual website experience that that you're not gonna get just by having a developer. And even more specifically, by having a developer in like a different culture, a different area, or someone you can't talk to, you know, during the day, all of our devs are online on Slack and client facing. So, you know, people are always, our clients are communicating with us in real time.

Jay Myers: That's amazing. 'cause a lot of agencies I know, they shield their devs.

Mac King: Yeah.

Jay Myers: They don't let you talk to them. You have a project manager and you're kind of going through this person and they relay the information because they want to protect the developer time.

But then it's amazing what you can accomplish in a 30 minute call with a developer on the line and you tell them, and they can troubleshoot, brainstorm, and come up with like what might have been 30 hours, [00:17:00] maybe could be done in three hours. So if with that process, I would, I'm willing to bet that even if you say that Domaine's a premium agency and maybe a bit more expensive, you might end up being less expensive because you're coming, you're more efficient.

Like you're coming to a solution that. Correct. Like, is the right efficient, you're not overbuilding over architecting, you're doing the right thing. 'cause you're bringing in, 'cause I do see agencies might have, like, you can't just look at the hourly rate if it means that it's gonna take four phone calls or four hour calls to go back and forth through a project manager versus with Domaine.

If you can talk to a developer for 30 minutes, get to a solution that's, it's, you know, you can't, it's not apples to apples.

Mac King: It's not apples to apples. And but also there's that point, which is it might take longer to do the same thing with someone that you can't speak to directly.

For sure. That is true. The other part of it is especially when it comes to the code in engineering, like [00:18:00] code, it's not evergreen. It doesn't last forever. So like how is this being, it might get done faster, but if it only but if the code degrades or the site speed is slow, or if you're using too many apps that are kind of bogging down the front end of your website, then.

Didn't matter that it gotten done faster. 'cause you're, it means you're gonna have to do it again in a year or in two year. Oh. Like how do you build something that's more robust, scalable, fast, performant, you know, I think that's where you're really paying for experience.

Jay Myers: Yeah.

Mac King: Is like the difference between like a short-term or a long-term solution,

Jay Myers: what's probably the biggest win that brands could see?

I mean, I know there's a range of services that they can get through Domaine, but like if every brand had, I don't know, five or $10,000 that they said I wanna improve my site, I'm investing back into my, not, maybe not just my site, my, my e-commerce business, this can fall under SEO and marketing and site and brand or email or something.

But that like if someone listening is right now they're seeing some growth [00:19:00] and they're like, I want to invest money into the growth. What is the best value that, like what that you think they could do? Sure.

Mac King: Really hard question because there's so many different ways that this can, that you can take the an answer.

And so I'll give an answer that's top of mind for me right now that I'm not sure is the perfect answer to your question. In general I think there's probably more like other low hanging fruit that's more prescient than the way I'm gonna respond. But one way that I think brands can invest right now is through AI search, is making sure that they're showing up more through AI search engines like chatgpt, perplexity and cloud, and you know, Google and everything else.

 What we're noticing amongst our clients, we did an analysis of website traffic trends, which is across our, we have a 95 active clients in the very specific segment [00:20:00] on Shopify, right? The high end of the of the platform. the site traffic is, is flat. You know, it, it's not changing much over the last 12 month period, site traffic has been consistent.

You know, I think that many brands are noticing this right now too, is that it's not like it was three or four years ago when everything was just going up for no real reason. You know, I think site traffic is being consistent. Outlier to that is site traffic coming from AI search engines. It is growing exponentially right now.

 Amongst Data on all of our clients. We know that we've looked at some external data sources as well through Mintel. AI search is growing exponentially, however, it's still a small percentage of traffic. So amongst all of our clients, it represents less than 1% of their overall site traffic.

Right. This is a combined view. But if a brand wants to be a first mover and invest in this before it hits a fever pitch, now is the time to do it because. AI search engines they're pulling, it's kinda like SEO 1.0 back when it was like, yeah, I'm sure. You're an internet guy from the

You're probably right there in that [00:21:00] time period where like, you kind of do this hack, you know, like you build a little landing page of like, what's the best Shopify app, you know, and then that would get picked up and you'd be right in the first page of the Google results. Like, you can do that same thing right

Jay Myers: now with AI search.

I was, before that, I was doing SEO when you would make words the same color as your background.

Mac King: That's

Jay Myers: crazy. Hack it. That was like 1997. Okay. And to rank first in Yahoo, but,

Mac King: but you know what? That's my point, right? So that kind of hack, those are actually available for brands right now on AI search.

 like it's that kind of like ai, Google got really good at SEO and ranking companies through their page. AI search is not there yet. Surprisingly, everyone thinks AI is the future is so smart. They're not nearly as smart as Google for when it comes to like actually delivering quality results yet.

So therefore there's an opportunity for brands to be able to hack that in this current moment in time. Probably not a huge opportunity. You know, there's a six to eight month window. So something that we're obsessed with right now as a [00:22:00] company is helping our brands do that. Like how do we get people to show up when folks are searching?

I went, I got invited to this event the other day and they said that at attire is Hampton's high-end casual. And I thought, what the bleep does that mean? So I went on Chagtgpt and looked up what's Dress Code Hampton's? High-end casual. I wouldn't know either, I think. Yeah. Right. So, yeah.

And then I started shopping on Chatgpt they delivered me what? And I preferred the brand. Vince Chatgpt gave me Essence and they gave me a marketplace to buy Vince off of. What they didn't give me was vince.com what does that tell you? Well, it tells you that like, you know, Vince like could have gotten the direct to consumer site, could have gotten my business instead of, I went to one of the aggregator sites or a marketplace site.

Now a marketplace site wasn't carrying Vince, I wouldn't even got serve them at all. It would've just said, Nope. Go somewhere else. Try something different. So and there's real basic SEO hacks that, not just [00:23:00] hacks, but SEO work that brands can do to show up on AI search right now. And I think that's, to me, presents a big opportunity.

And it's a little bit early, but it's gonna

Jay Myers: be

Mac King: big.

Jay Myers: So how does Shopify catalog play into that? Like Shopify's really investing in making the product structure and data and product schema be very indexable by ai. They're adding in a lot more data points that it used to just be like, you'd have the color size material maybe.

The attributes that Google would need. But for ai, it's like, what does the fit feel like? Is it gen? Like there's a lot more that AI can pull out. And so my understanding is Shopify is gonna make that broadly available. Like if you're on Shopify, by default, your products should be very readable by

Ai. The thing that Shopify does is it's great, I love it, but it also like always levels the playing field. Like I remember like in [00:24:00] 2009 when I put my first store on Shopify, I remember like I was better than all my competitors 'cause my store looked good and it was mobile friendly Like in 2009.

But now every store is mobile friendly. Right. And it's always like the next thing, like you have a fast checkout now every store has a fast checkout. That's the beauty. But also the challenge is you will have products that are indexed by ai, but so will all your competitors. So how do you get that one step ahead bit?

Mac King: Well, here's how you make up for that. And. Is by taste. Like if you have better taste, if your site makes people feel something, if you have a better branded experience, if your imagery is beautiful, if the way that your spacing is in your website works, if you, the transition time between page to page, you know that feeling when you're, kinda like, when you get lost on a website, all of a sudden you're like halfway down on the about ask page.

You're like, why am I here? You know, just because like the website feels good, you know that's taste the evergreen part of all of this. You're absolutely right. Features and functionality, and Shopify keeps releasing all these things on a platform level that are [00:25:00] making things easier for everyone else.

But the way to really stand out, the way to create like a long-term brand is not, don't think of yourself as a merchant. Think of yourself as a brand. You're building a branded website. You're building something that makes people feel something and that's how you stand out. Amongst this, as you mentioned, level playing field for all these different online brands.

Jay Myers: What do you think about content right now? Has content become more important? Like, something we're thinking about at Bold is, I actually. I get all the time now. Someone will say like, Hey, we found your product through chat pt. And then I'll go and I'll search. I was like, oh what did you ask it? What was the prompt?

And I'll go and I look. I'm like, oh, dang. Nice. We can't, they chatgpt recommended us, but then I'll do another prompt and it won't recommend us like it So one of the things I notice that I think might be a hack right now, if you wanna call it that, is chatgpt always adds sources and it's relatively easy.

Like I notice some of our blogs, if we have a stat that having a [00:26:00] bundle on a product can increase conversion 20%. I don't know if that's a true stat, but just use that as an example. But if we have that on a blog and then someone asks chat, GPT do bundles work on Shopify, it references that, whatever stat we have.

So, like, I haven't experimented with this, but I know blogs have kind of been, I don't wanna say dead, but not used a lot by e-commerce stores in the last 10 years. I wonder if now they're more important than ever Oh yeah., To now get as a source back into the AI searches.

Mac King: Dude. Absolutely. And not only as you, me, as you mentioned for brands, for companies like us too for bold Domaine.

 Yeah. Blogs are back baby, you know, and so maybe it's not SEO 1.0 'cause we're not making like, same colored text that's like crawlable in the background. That's like a real hack. But s you know, 1.2, you know, SEO 1.2, which is like content onsite content and offsite content. You know, we've got a client called fellow, they have [00:27:00] coffee products, coffee machines fellows.

Yeah so we're doing an exercise with them where we're looking for like what are they ranking for? How what are some of the AI search terms that are gonna be working? And what we realized is like some of their competitors are, have their own hosted content that is then helping them rank highly like above them.

So yeah, your own blog, it doesn't matter where it is again. Chatgpt is not smart enough yet to make that that leap that like your own content might be biased. So you can create your own content that is biased, that points back to your own brand and own it on your own website. So it's pretty easy.

Jay Myers: Yeah. Google's ahead of that because now you can post as many blogs as you want, but unless other people are linking to it and you have page authority and Google doesn't show it, but AI is, now is the time to maybe take advantage of that. I'll throw one tip that I learned, I'll share. So our, or our recommendation is, if anyone listening to this right now is thinking about just using chat GPT to create the blogs or Claude or whatever tool [00:28:00] they will.

If you just go to it, and if you say you can have an amazing prompt, you can say, I want to create a blog post about, let's say you sell travel luggage, fashion highend, travel luggage, and something about, it's like. You wanna create a blog about how to protect your suitcase on the conveyor belt or something like this, or how to clean it.

And if you ask chatgpt to create a 500 to 800 word blog post on how to travel with high-end luggage that you don't wanna damage and create some steps, products to use, and it runs and creates a blog post that will get detected as created by AI every time. But if you, so these podcasts that I've been doing, I turn them into blog posts after, and I use AI to, to turn them into a blog post.

And I run them through AI detectors there's, Grammarly has one and there's a couple other that you can search. And it comes up as 0% AI. And the reason [00:29:00] why is this is original content, me and you talking right now. So what AI is doing is it's basically summarizing the original content versus creating the content from scratch.

If there's a way, if you're wanting to leverage AI for blogs I'm a big fan of leveraging ai, but don't just outsource it to ai. talk create an audio file, talk to something, go on a, I don't know, go on a podcast, we record something and then use that as the source that creates the blog post and then run it through.

Grammarly, I found, has a really good AI detection one, and there's another one. I can't, I'm drawing a blank on the name right now, but I'll put it in the show notes and they'll almost always come up as like 0 or 1% chance it's AI Versus if you just go to it that they're always like 98%. I don't know how it detects it, but.

Structure maybe or something, but as long as it's based on original content.

Mac King: Okay.

Jay Myers: It seems to be really well. So anyways, that's one piece of advice I'll throw in there. [00:30:00] 'cause

Mac King: I think it's a, that's a fire piece of advice. I and I'll add onto that. I would use whisper flow for voice to text dictation.

It's a great tool. You can just kinda speak into it on your computer and then it'll kind of like, it'll basically dictate all of your thoughts and it'll edit it and make it a little more clear. And then you can take that, the whisper flow text, put it into, you know, a chatgpt interface, make a blog post from that.

Nice. And it should come up with 0% ai. Yeah. Test it for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I want to LinkedIn Chrome Extension now that the, that detects ai 'cause oh my gosh, then that would 90% of LinkedIn. I'm worried that just everything on that platform is just AI now. And have, we just, are we just like having robots speak to each other on our behalfs?

You know, is that what's happening?

Jay Myers: You know, when you see all the posts that are super structured, they start with like a statement and the question, then they have three bullet points and a bit too many emojis,

Mac King: right?

Jay Myers: Yeah. And part of me wonders [00:31:00] I'm the same way. Like I don't engage with them because it feels unauthentic.

But is that just for the time being, like, are we gonna get used to that and will the younger generation engage? I don't know. Right. Like it's, yeah, I think the jury's still out on that, but I feel a hundred percent the same way as you. So, yeah, I always, I think it's great to use AI and I don't wanna go on too much of an AI tangent, but for, I use it for research, for pulling stats, like for that, and then write your content yourself.

But it's an amazing tool for, I mean, you can cut down 90% of your time on any content you create, but still add your touch in it.

Mac King: Yeah. I agree and again, what it's done is it's made taste yeah. The important part. If you have no taste and you're just using AI to just create something entirely for you then it's gonna be clear.

And again, that goes back to the same point. It's like it's, you're not creating [00:32:00] evergreen. You're not creating branded content. You're not creating a brand. You're just contributing to like this like dump of information on the web.

Jay Myers: One thing I wanted to chat about was, you mentioned you're seeing a bit of a slowdown in the economy a little bit right now.

What are some of the things you're doing with brands to help them still grow and still be successful during this little bit of a, I don't know if it's a, I don't know if it's a slump or slowdown. I think people are being a little tight with their wallets, the stuff happening and the political scene, or who knows, tariffs, whatever the reason is, there's a bit of a slowdown.

So what are some tactics you're working with brands?

Mac King: It's true. Yeah. We're noticing that, you know, like I said it's not a red alarm, fire drill, but you know, pretty consistently it's not easy to come across the, for customer acquisition right now to come across big sales, to, you know, that old [00:33:00] strategy that worked mid pandemic

Is not working anymore so one of the ways that we're helping, that we're thinking about brands who can, like how do we transition to understanding what's really important is transitioning to more of a onsite strategy, user experience conversion rate optimization how do you do more with the traffic that's already there with the customers that are already landing on your website is the answer.

I don't think the answer is just like, dump more money into paid media. But the way that we look at it is how do we do more with what you have with your current customers? And there's a number of ways. First, the onsite way to do that is what does the user experience look like? How can you do some AB testing?

First click testing there's a lot of nifty tools in the web where you can input a website and get a, and pay for 500 users to tell you what the first thing they click on when they view your website. And that data is really useful. Where's the [00:34:00] attention going to?

I think that's a way that like anyone can do it themselves. The DIY version, right? sign up for usertest.com, sign up for a first click, you know, website tool. And do run some tests on your own. Because on the other scale, on like the high end scale, it can get quite expensive. You know, strategy work is very engaged and it's also not a sure thing.

 AB testing means you're testing two different options. Doesn't mean that one of them is gonna be better than what you currently have. That said you, any kind of agency or if you're doing it in house or if you're seeking advice, people should have a bag of tricks. There are things that we know work for every one of our clients.

Here's an example, a cart page versus a mini cart slider. If you have a, you have your own a page dedicated to the cart you're losing con converts right there. So we a hundred percent of the time, a hundred percent of the time. Interesting. E every single site you see, Domaine launch has a cart slider instead of a cart page.

Every single one. Yeah. Wow. So that's just the [00:35:00] blanket statement that I know works. Yeah. And every brand listening to this should adopt that immediately. Aside from that, it can get pretty intense and specific about how you really should make changes in the user experience of your website.

And then there's other tools you can think about, right? Which is, again, doing more with your existing customers. Well, how do you. How do you do more with them? How do you meet them where they are? Is it a mobile app? You know, you wanna use a tool like Reactive, you know, we know Zach and Ross and what they're building over there.

Like that's, that's special. I mean, this is the way that brand, that customers can interact with brands they love in a way that feels more intimate to them. And again, I use the word brand, not merchant, because they want to interact with the brand. Like remember, that's at the forefront of this entire strategy.

It's in the forefront of our entire ethos as a company, as an agency, which is like, people should be building better branded experiences for their customers. And a mobile app is a big part on that spectrum.

Jay Myers: I think just two things I wanna pull outta that there, because like, I, it's funny, we've had this internal debate many times, do we call our customers merchants [00:36:00] or brands?

And we've we, we pretty much say brands all the time, but there's been some pushback. So the one argument for the merchant side is that they say smaller. Businesses don't see themself as a brand. They see themself as a merchant. But I would argue that even if you're one person, you should see yourself as a brand.

Like, and the words we use to describe ourself matter, and it's like, you know, like if you call yourself a loser all day long, you're gonna start believing it. If you call yourself a brand all day long, you'll start believing it. Like, you'll start to, you'll be a brand, you'll think about consistency and how you talk, and you'll think of you're a brand, like you're packaging.

 it's just,I'm a big proponent of the word brand. Even if you're one person, you're not like a brand, like a big company. That language matters. I wanted to just hone in on that.

Mac King: No, dude I'm right there with you. And, you know, well, I [00:37:00] agree that merchant is probably more specific of a term, but it doesn't make me feel anything, you know, and that's part of building a brand is feeling something, you know?

And so like. Merchant makes me feel like someone's selling fish in a market. You know, that's not what I want to be like. We wanna build brands and something that makes you feel something that has is more than just being kind of a merchant that's has like a stand in, like an old market and I think merchant was like a word that Toby used as like a english second language person in 2009 that has just stuck.

 and I think it's in need of an update personally.

Jay Myers: Yeah. Didn't youI I think I saw you post on LinkedIn the other day, stop calling people, merchants, something like that. Yeah. That's was, see, I knew that was not an AI generated post. Right. Okay. And then the second thing I wanted to kind of pull out what you said, I, I think you're kind of getting to it and maybe talking around a little bit, like is when you say like, optimizing your existing customer, like first, first party data, like first party, like [00:38:00] to me right now, this is probably the most important time to leverage.

Your email lists, your SMS lists your customers that are in, but also to invest in getting more on that list. And like the only way that, like a lot of brands, like they have a popup, they give away a coupon for 10% off to get an email or they get an email when someone purchases something.

 I did, I had a, we do these, well, you probably know if you listen to the show, these like 1% wins, which is like these short little episodes. And I had this thought the other day and it, I actually, I know that you're, you, this, you're a big believer in leveraging first party data as well too. And made me think of this, like the best brands in the world maybe convert four or 5%.

I don't know. I think the most I've ever heard of is like 10%, but I think the industry average is like two or some, somewhere around there. Two, three, somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. And so that means like [00:39:00] 95% of customers who come to your store leave with absolutely nothing. Like, it's a weird thing to think about.

Imagine a retail store like Imagine Target or Walmart or something that 95% of customers walk in and they walk out. Bizarre. Like, and I know some of them are bots and whatever, but not that many. Like, so what could you give to that 95% that are leaving as a way to start a relationship with them?

Like some kind of offer. Could it even be a gift? Like have, the example I used in the other episode was like, I don't if you're a health company, can you give a shaker bottle like a free shaker bottle? Like literally claim your shaker bottle, claim it not get 10%. Like not a coupon, but like.

Claim it. We'll ship it to you today and it costs you 10 bucks. But you're acquiring their information, you're sending 'em something, you're building a relationship. And when you put that in light of like how much you're spending on ads, it's probably, and I would be willing to bet [00:40:00] if you ran a cohort analysis like everyone that acquired a gift, and it doesn't even have to cost anything.

It could be like, download a $39 ebook on health and wellness that you've written, but you'd give it away for free to visitors or so like something to start that relationship. I think now I would love to hear your thoughts on it too, but like in this kind of slump we're seeing is probably more important than ever.

Mac King: Yeah I think that's a really clever strategy, right? How do you go above and beyond to gain that customer record and that, that information, because to me that's the big. Unlock is how do you do more with the customers that you are already part that 95% of people who you might even have their email 'cause they've abandoned their carts or you sent them a free up product but they've never bought something from you before.

And the reason for that is they have intent, meaning they've been to your site, they've filled out some sort of form, they've given you their email along the way, but it was never quite right. So how do you make [00:41:00] something a little bit more correct for them, a little more on brand for that individual customer?

And the way that we think about it is through personalized experiences. You know I think we encourage our clients to use email marketing to segmentation first off, like, and invest in the cleanliness and hygiene of your email and SMS list and make sure that you're not just blasting the same message to everyone on your list or every active person on your list.

That's not an effective strategy. You have this gold mine here, but how do you build one site per customer? So. We know that Sally's a lady in her mid forties and Peter's a young man who's 26 years old. You sell home appliances. Peter's interested in this new type of blender that's on your website.

And Sally might be interested in a mixing bowl. So how do you send an email to the same two people with the same kind [00:42:00] of structured format so you're not kinda reinventing the wheel each time, but you're using technology to personalize that email experience, that email flow, and then the website that they land on after they've clicked the email.

So they don't want to click a blender and then land on a couch. You know, they click a blender, they land on the blender, they make the purchase. So think about like the full personalized experience from soup to nuts. It sounds so simple, but a lot of brands are not doing this. And for good reason actually, you know, it's actually fairly new technology.

Klaviyo just released this, API for example, where they're allowing Folks to be able to plug into personalization tools on the website. And so you can actually start with personalized content through email and then carry that through by, with this connected tissue, API onto the website after they've clicked it.

It does require a little bit of setup. It's a little bit more technical when it comes to email marketing, but these are the kind of tricks that actually have real value to them.

Jay Myers: Yeah. I've seen some brands doing some pretty creative things with their, when they have their questionnaire or [00:43:00] giveaway.

Actually, who was I was on the site the other day. Might have been Dr. Squash. I can't remember. I loved their pop-up. I think it was them. It instead of the client, by the way, are they a client? Did you do their popup? Where

Mac King: we did we worked with them a couple years ago. Not client, but they're one of the ones that took over the site afterwards.

Jay Myers: Okay. So their current popup, it's like pick your prize kind of thing. So rather than just 10% off, there's three boxes. They kind of, I think they jumble around a little bit quickly and then it's like, pick one and then it un unlocks it. First of all, it's just a great visual experience.

You pick it, it opens, there's confetti or something, and then you get 15% off. So it's not spin the wheel, it's a little bit more simple, full screen takeover. And then they, I think they do this, or I might've seen it in another one, but there's like a couple questions. It'll be like, are you, I don't know, do you struggle with skin irritation or is there any issues with like certain, like lotions or are you here for the, like super long protection or for [00:44:00] the great smelling?

What's more important to you? Or just a couple questions like that. And then you get your code. But I know that what they're doing then is they're tagging that person and then when it goes into their whatever email tool they're using, there's a tag that they care about. Great smelling.

Deodorants or they care about ones that don't irritate the skin or that are aluminum free or something like that. And then they segment their lists and they create different campaigns with the main headlines about our aluminum free deodorants or our 24 hour protection or whatever it is.

Mac King: It's so simple, but it's such a meaningful piece of information, a piece of data on their customer segmentation.

 yeah. No wonder that they're seeing growth and Dr. Squat is doing what they're doing. What a good strategy. Yeah. Well, I want to kind of flip the script. You know, we don't get enough chance to talk, and I assume bold in the background, and you know what I'm used to when we used to have conversations in 2015.

Yeah, I was always interested. I was learning about you and your [00:45:00] business, where you guys are at. I mean I'm really keen to hear what's exciting for you right now? You've heard about AI from our side, now we're thinking about making, you know, like the branded experiences and what that looks like, but.

What's exciting to bold right now I'm And like what are you focused on currently on the business side? I'm so curious,

Jay Myers: man. You are like the first guest that has asked, I’m so thankful. Thank you for asking. We, right now, the thing that is really, I think what that's really important to us, not that I think that is, is you know, we've been doing subscriptions since 2014.

In 2014, if you did subscriptions, like you were ahead of the game. It was like if you had cat food and you sold it on subscription, you're, you were better than your competitors. And fast forward now, like subscriptions are kind of table stakes. Everyone has a subscription. If you don't have a subscription I like to say it's kind of like become a billing and a shipping decision.

It's like some people will subscribe to cat food and some people don't, but it's not like a differentiator if you have a subscription. But what [00:46:00] is a differentiator is how. Creating an experience where customers feel like members and they feel like VIPs, they feel like you know them, that there's exclusive benefits, exclusive access, exclusive pricing, that there's relationship.

 About a year and a half ago, we looked at all of our apps and we kept getting customers asking us like, Hey, I wanna do VIP pricing for my subscribers is, and like we looked at our sales pipeline and like half of them were around VIP pricing. And then we looked, I'm like, oh man, we've got this customer pricing app that we literally built it to do customer specific pricing,

Mac King: right,

Jay Myers: that you can, when a customer logs in, they can be a wholesale or they can vi gold, platinum, different levels of pricing.

And then we've got the subscription app, but they weren't. They could work [00:47:00] together, but it took some work. so we thought, well, let's make that seamless. And then we had this, we have this upsell app, which lets you create these like targeted offers that are different for each person. So you talk about personalization, like depending what someone is buying, it'll offer a different product.

And now it has AI upsells. So it's like even the same product can have different offers for different people based off of what's in their cart, what they've bought before, a whole bunch of other things. But then we thought, yeah, subscribers in their member portal should get exclusive offers that are unique to them.

And so not just a blanket offer of the month, but you have 20 different subscribers. They all log into their portal, they all get a unique offer. Or in that upcoming email that you know, your subscription's going out in three days. Do you want to add this last minute offer? But it should be different for every person based on what they're subscribed to.

So we integrated our upsell and subscription app. [00:48:00] Now, I think this episode depending when this comes out we've got a new app that we're, it's actually in beta right now.

Mac King: Okay.

And so we want to be in the business of creating. Programs where customers stay around forever and subscription is a tool in that, but it's not the whole picture. So

Mac King: I mean, it's very exciting and it's very on brand for you. You know, you guys have always been innovators. Like, here's the hard part about what you just told me, which is that you're creating a new demand.

You're like, people don't know they need this. Other people think they needed a hammer. They don't know they needed a new solution. No, a hundred percent. So you're gonna have to create the demand for the thing that, you know, is the [00:53:00] real the real solution for these brands. But it's not something you've done it's not something you haven't been able to do before.

 You built the apps for Shopify before there was frontend applications, and so that didn't exist before you'd done it. So it's kind of the next step on that same bold playbook, which is, you know, no pun intended. And you know, I mean, it's, yeah, I, I think it's it fires me up. It's exciting to hear that you're still innovating, that you guys are still putting this much passion and thought into releasing these new products.

Thanks, man. So, the thing that wasn't happening when, when Bold started that now we see a lot of, in this Shopify space, obviously, like there's these kind of like large scale single branded companies that offer one product, you know? Right. Did you think about branding it separately and having kind of be, its own thing and its own kind of like, and maybe we can cut this out if you, you're

Jay Myers: like reading my mind, man.

Yes. Yeah. It is. It's got its own name too. What? And it's got its own persona, I wanna say, without giving away too much. [00:54:00] Cool. So it is a thing that, it stands alone. It's, we're not hiding that. It's gonna be part of bold, but it's its own. Yes, a hundred percent. And you know what's so interesting?

I mean, it's, man, you're a very observant, like. We've struggled with this. We at one point had 36 apps. Like we've gotten a lot more focused over the years and

Mac King: and didn't you go to like, other eco ecosystems and come back to like

Jay Myers: Yeah. We launched apps on BigCommerce, on Woo and Right.

 we're just on Shopify now. Yeah. Like it was, yeah. There was a bit of traction there, but it was generally a waste of time.

Mac King: Yeah.

Jay Myers: Like bang for buck, like for every hour spent over there, it was a penny return versus Shopify. Like, there's just, it's a better ecosystem for so many reasons. But yeah, it was interesting 'cause we, like, I remember when, you know, we had a returns app, we had a loyalties app, we've done subscriptions, and we would see a loyalty app raise $20 million and or more with some, with [00:55:00] a crazy valuation.

And we would look at it and we'd go, man, we got, we have more users. We're making more a ARR on our loyalty app. We were seen as a Swiss Army knife for Shopify. We weren't seen as like, to, to investors. You wanna say like, we wanna own loyalty or we wanna own returns. Like we wanna own subscriptions. Right.

And so I think that has hurt us a bit from the investment side for sure. I mean, we've done pretty well with raising, so I'm not like overly concerned about it, but it, the perception is, unless you are a single singular focused and a market leader, investors have a hard time wrapping their head around it.

But lately, like you look at brands like Shop Circle and others that are just like clearer and Yeah yep. They're raising a lot of money and they're basically just acquiring a lot of Shopify apps. So I think that perception has changed a little bit, but we're not making [00:56:00] product decisions based off of that.

Like, if investors don't get it, that's okay. We've, but the ones that we have our board that, like, they're, they get it. Like, and they're, they're invested and they, they understand it. So, but you're bang on. It's, it has definitely been a challenge for so many reasons. So yeah, this one will.

It's and then you're perceptive for another reason too, the fact that you notice that like, we're pushing batteries. Like, it's funny when we, in 2012, 'cause you joined Shopify in 2013. Yeah. So 2012 we launched our upsell app, and when it went live Toby actually got mad at us. Oh yeah because we, I don't say we kind of hacked the APIs.

Well,

Mac King: well also your brand name at the time We should. Okay. Fair. Well,

Jay Myers: fair enough. The brand was Shopify, which was genius. Come on. I love it. Apps. Apps for Shopify. But that wasn't what he was mad about until and when Shopify went public, we, they asked us politely to. Harley message is like, Hey, would you guys mind changing your name?

I think there was a [00:57:00] number of Shopify. There was a

Mac King: bunch, I was part of that team, by the way. Yeah. That we went out and there were Shopify ninjas and Shopify theme builders and you know, there's a bunch of different ones that we had to

Jay Myers: talk about. Yeah. Which I totally get. No, the reason why Toby was upset was so like one of the first early big brands on Shopify was the chive.

Yep. Keep calm and achive on. And this was when they would have, they used our upsell app and when they would have some promotion on Instagram, they would post like all T-shirts, 25% off their, they would get a ton of traffic to their site. Our upsell app would start firing, and for each fire, it's like three or four API calls it, like, checks what product to offer.

It checks inventory. And if they accept the offer, there's an API call to add it to the cart, whatever. But it would take down all of Shopify, like every single store because this one store was getting like a hundred thousand. API called per minute 'cause they were promoting it. And so, Toby got a little bit upset saying You hacked our APIs.

Apps are [00:58:00] not supposed to live on the front end of a store. This was not how our APIs were intended to be used. Which it's super interesting because now you go into the app store, like every single app lives on the front end of a store and that's always the job of an app developer. Like Apple Apps push iOS to be better, right?

Like it's you know, the app ecosystem pushes the platform, but internally apparently about half of the team at Shopify and it was only around 80 people at the time. So not a huge team, but Blair and Brendan told me this later on, they said about half of the people wanted to shut it down 'cause they said No, this is not how the app should work.

And about half of the people said, this is awesome. Look at the reviews. It's all five star reviews. So there was a bit of debate, but internally then they decided to allow it. But introduced API throttling and. Rate limits and some other important factors for apps to function. But yeah, even this most current one that we're pushing out, it took three months to get [00:59:00] approved by Shopify because they hadn't seen anything like it before.

And we had to get on multiple phone calls and explain to them and they would say, you know, we don't get it, we don't get this app. What is the, what is? And then after like, and I wish I would've recorded the calls 'cause after I explained it to them every single time, and I don't wanna say like certain people, but like you would know them.

They would say, oh, this is awesome. I would totally use this. This is amazing that I want this. But you're right, it doesn't exist. And it's pushing a boundary. And I love that because like internally at our, our team is fired up because like. During covid and yeah, you're right. We did expand onto other platforms for a bit.

We kind of, I don't wanna say like lost our way, but we like experimenting in other areas, different things, and like, this is getting back to the core of who we are. We like to push boundaries, innovate, and so [01:00:00] I'm super excited for it. I'll personally show it to you very soon.

Mac King: Yeah we should chat partnership and, you know, not for a conversation for a podcast, but Yeah.

Jay Myers: Yeah. We'll do that off the air. Yeah So, oh,

Mac King: that's

Jay Myers: awesome. Absolutely. Well, Mac, I know we're running, running up against the wall here on your time and can you, any last things you wanna say to our listeners? I know we could talk for hours, but like someone, why someone might wanna reach out to Domaine.

I know I can speak so highly of you. I know every time I talk to a brand, you get an email from me doing an intro because I only intro brands to agencies I trust that I know aren't gonna. Bite me in the butt a year later and say, Jay, why did you introduce me to them? Like, I just know I can trust that introduction.

 but for someone that's never heard of you and doesn't trust my intro, what can you say about Domaine and then where can people go to, to learn more?

Mac King: Sure. Thanks. Yeah. The I mean, you know, I think my advice for any brand and regard like outside of [01:01:00] Domaine but this is something that we do, is to, and if you're, if someone's listening to this podcast, they're already doing that.

But learn from your peers and not just your peers, but people who are a little bit ahead of what you're doing. You know, I think we often feel the question Of like, Hey, what are your other clients doing for X? What are they doing for loyalty? What are they doing for subscription? Subscription? How are they managing the slowdown?

And then because we have this very specialized group of clients who are in this very specific segment of Shopify. We get to give like very detailed perspective and very niche, nuanced perspective about how we're all managing this together. And actually we bring people together every year for our own client conference.

We call it Curated. Last year we did it at Shopify's office in New York. And, you know, we had like the ladies from the row sitting there, but beside the ladies from Tucker, not, you know, these are both women's brands targeting the same age group, but very different buyers, you know, and so they don't have, like, there's not much overlap.

People who buy Tucker not dresses, don't buy the row dresses, but [01:02:00] they got, we got them in the same room and we talked about both companies and they had the same problems. And we got everyone, everyone just started sharing information with each other, right? And even cross segment, you know, a Fenty Beauty was sharing with, oh, with our mattress company, hush.

You know? So like, like how do we talk about a beauty brand sharing with a home goods company? So that's why I would encourage brand builders and people who are selling things online to learn from people who are. Maybe slightly ahead of their journey from themselves, put themselves in these kind of communities where they can learn from each other.

We have one of these communities, but there are other ones that exist. And just keep going for it. Build a brand, build something for the long term. you're a brand, you're not a merchant. And taste is gonna be the real differentiator in this market. So invest in your taste in how people feel about your company.

Jay Myers: Yeah,

Mac King: so good. And you can find us. We have, you know, we're Domaine with an E in the end. You get meet Domaine.com. But yeah, you know, always interested to chat

Jay Myers: And [01:03:00] sorry, which social platform are you most active on for people to follow you?

Mac King: LinkedIn Domaine. On LinkedIn or Domaine Studio if you're in the SMB mid-market segment on Shopify.

 We have a LinkedIn presence on both. Awesome. I'll

Jay Myers: put that all in the show notes. Mac, this has been such a pleasure. I had you on my list to reach out to for a long time, and it was just such a coincidence that you texted a few weeks ago. I'm so glad you did. Thank you for just being an amazing person in the space.

It's honestly, people like you that make this ecosystem so fun, and it's been such a journey. I feel like, you know, it's been journey together since that 2000

Mac King: Yeah. 14

Jay Myers: or our first interactions, and now to both be on the partner side and bumping into you at conferences is so fun. And so just really appreciate you as a person and just hope, just wish you all the best with Domaine and keep kicking butt, man.

Mac King: Thank you, buddy. I appreciate you having me. And you know, it, I feel really good knowing that there's people like you, me and you, and you know, Kurt and [01:04:00] Pointer and you know, the, all these people who have been there for 10, 12 years You know, 14 years who are still, still around and still, you know, part of this community.

I think that warms my heart. I really feel good about it. So I appreciate it. It's so fun to talk to you.

Jay Myers: Yeah.

Mac King: I don't take it for granted. It is special.

Jay Myers: Yeah. Okay, well, we'll do this again in the future. And thanks so much. Yeah, thank you, Jay.