on the screen I have with me right now the person I've been referring to as Kirupa he's the Kirupa on Google so welcome Kirupa Faye great to meet you again you know we had a chat a few weeks ago so much topics to cover that we weren't able to get to because there's only 24 hours in a day as it turns out and so let's continue round two of it here I absolutely love it and I forgot to ask you how to pronounce your last name so please once and for all we should learn how to say your full name finally for the first time I even learned to speak your your last name and um super thrilled that you're here I think hopefully this is a rare

opportunity for my audience and your audience to get to know you at this personal level and uh I I feel you know so grateful to have really met you online as back then the Flash not just a flash developer but the Storyteller a content creator back in 2002 I can still envision myself living in an apartment on Beacon Street here in Boston Massachusetts and just browsing your website for hours hours every day and I was sending and emailing out to people um I feel like it really gave me a voice it felt like you know a project a website created by a friend Kirupa.com that's still live and thriving today so yeah this this is fantastic does this surprise you when I introduce you that

way

it does because I typically don't have these type of conversations with people on a regular basis and I let my content speak for itself so I try to protect myself out of the equation oftentimes so many times people have no connection with like me being the person and then the content doing its own thing which is on like you know weird icons and logos and so on people think it's just more of a brand not an actual person behind it

but you are very very real and uh if I may for those of you who are new to Kirupa's content I just want to give you a very quick background and then we're going to delve into today's series of questions I'm so excited to talk all of talk to all of you guys about what it's like to be an entrepreneur an entrepreneur because Kirupa now is a product manager also at Google as well as continuing to run Kirupa.com and also we're going to cover AI the AI mindset what it means for your business how to really leverage AI without the overwhelm so uh Kirupa has spent most of his life trying to simplify app development by helping build a variety of tools platforms Frameworks and products many

of which you may have heard of if it's only fitting that you continue to follow that passion as a product manager at Google leading an effort to Reinventing how apps are built in parallel Kirupa is a popular content creator who has been blogging and recording videos about web development topics since 9 1998 with a few best-selling Tech books and some total totally sweet bios written a third person of course sprinkled along the way you can find all of his work on his blog Kirupa.com yes that's just his first name his YouTube channel as well his Twitter account also search by at sign Kirupa and we're going live on restream if you're curious how to get started with streaming live streaming there's a link all in the description below with

that said Kirupa I would love for you to finally share and talk about what was it like for you to be like a middle school student back in 98 and I thought you were at least 25 or someone I look up to um and uh what was it like to be a middle schooler and be able to like start from scratch and build an audience that way

it was just fun in many ways because today the whole idea of content creation and being able to do things has all these structures and these like criterias for success and so on with social media and all of these things back then there wasn't really any of it my goal was I'm doing fun stuff with in Flash I'm learning cool things I started sharing it with some friends they had some questions on oh how do you do this I want to create it myself I started emailing out my instructions on what I did and that doesn't scale well at a certain point so let me just put it on a website and I just played with like front page Express and that's good composer they came free with the

browsers back in the day you know it's all better Netscape or inexplorer in God in addition a very basic notepad-like editor where you could type in content and it would displace HTML it didn't matter that I had no idea that what was being created with HTML tags it'd be uploaded images and be uploaded and so on geocities was a popular web hosting service it was just getting started at the time where you have like probably one or two megabytes total to be able to upload your content and you got this like really long URL and but that was good enough for me I was like okay I can now share this URL or link to people and they can now learn more about it let me

have to personally email them and do these things now newsletters were not really a thing back then at least wasn't something that anyone could start on their own and so today would be a case where like why do you change away from newsletters like we're the best thing ever we're like yes you know going 30 years 20 years later and say maybe but the URL in the web was like just getting started back then it was just exciting to be able to create content upload it you know they're it's a funny thinking back at it they're supposed to have mega zip drives you know in my you know parents's attic somewhere and it shows the very first versions of these websites where in the HTML the path to

the images was hard coded to a location on my hard drive I had no idea that it had to be you know slash images relative to the server you're hosted on and things like that so that's how early the days were of both me not knowing anything about web development and also a state of what was available in terms of learning about web development at all I think web monkey was a very popular website that existed back then I think lynda.com was just starting to create content so to some of your audience right now they're probably wondering like wait this sounds like you know 80 years ago and for the most part when it comes to technology it might as well

have been wow it's just incredible to hear that mindset of being a kid and want to share the work that you're doing uh and not having so much fear and doubts and I love talking to folks like yourself because now fast forward you know 20 plus years 26 years after 25 years to do the math and do you feel any different along the way you know when you hear other craters today oh I have so many doubts I'll never be able to be successful I won't be able to make money to quit my full-time job and along the way you know did you feel like that anxiety somehow followed you or do you feel like your intention these days is different I'm just curious like what

goes on in Kirupa's mind I mean it is very different I just picked a lot of creators just explaining like if they want to make a career in content creation what it's going to be like and so on the the hard part really is that as with any kind of a creative Endeavor the power law applies where only a very few people succeed many are this Middle where they're just basically making break even and a large number are basically you know not profitable or anything to make to make it successful so what I always tell people is that do it because you genuinely enjoy doing this you know not because you're seeking external validation or the the Kudos that comes from like being a popular

product Creator because it's a very good chance that we may not be a public Creator forever and so you should do it for things like you want to learn better you want to better articulate your ideas you want to reach a new audience do it for those reasons because those will never change and they'll give you a goal that you can keep working towards even when the external world is not giving the validation you might think that you deserve because and then I also explain to myself as well you know I talk about my story here is that I was very lucky in many ways you know my parents are both very highly educated and so therefore I didn't have to worry about like you know juggling like school with

like a part-time job and then also being able to do all this and you know I had all the resources to have like a computer internet you know all the software I needed like you know I had all those luxuries so those gave me an advantage as well and so I'm never gonna like discount any of those efforts that absolutely played a big role in helping me have this mindset of being able to do all these things you know I grew up where a lot of the books that I read as a kid where you know biographies you know but also had like all these business books and books on stocks and investing that my parents would always read so in the back of my mind I had all

these active resources that kind of just incidentally led me to doing some of these things and thinking about problems in a way that just gave me an advantage

um wow I love to delve into your childhood a bit more because I realize you're probably living pretty closer where I was at the time as well where I still am um for those of you who are joining us live I know that I can't see all of you especially if you're tuning in from LinkedIn but we can see your questions you don't have to come on live to join us on the live show but if you have any questions please leave them in the comments we're going to do our best to organize them and answer them live throughout this conversation and so Kirupa back to you in terms of upbringing should I assume that you grew up in Massachusetts or somewhere in New England because I know you ended up

going to MIT here no all right no no

actually you know I grew up in a few places my dad was a material scientist and so in the 80s Europe was really big into like lighter more fuel efficient vehicles and so Italy was one of the first countries that I lived at the age of two actually have moved to Italy you know time within the first languages I learned and then I went to Germany a few years later where I did my kindergarten first and second grade and then it was the U.S ever since you know the early 90s was the U.S started investing heavily in you know vehicles that were more fuel efficient lighter weight the same thing that Europe did about 10 years ago and and ironically Alabama was a place that so much auto manufacturing

and investments in r d happen in the US at least you know at that time and so I lived in Birmingham several Birmingham Alabama called Hoover and that's where I spent the most of my life until I went to college in Boston and then I moved to Seattle where I live now for work and you know this we enjoy here now oh wow

what a journey do you think uh you know I do you think this moving around especially in an earlier age uh do you have any memories of it do you feel like you belonged you know there's some backstories when it comes to creators and technologists so that I'm trying to like dig in a bit here maybe I don't know maybe it's a normal very normal childhood

I mean I think it's a it's normal in many ways I think I think kids adapt to our situation they're put into I do enjoy the idea of having moved around in many places you know initially I always felt like you know I wish I could stay in one place I can have like friends for longer than x number of years and things like that but in looking back at it though you get to learn to think on your feet you get much better at like adapting to a new environment new school how to make new friends very quickly but I do also think that because I moved around so much I really you know glomped off this online World in many ways because the URL the community build

online doesn't change no matter where you went to so once I started creating the blog and then once I figured out how to create an online Forum easy board was the first like software as a service kind of thing we just went to you signed up you got like a very basic Forum again the URL was like completely bizarre but that's okay though and then I moved to be bulletin which is a very popular service in the early 2000s and for creating large communities yet you know Envision power board and so on and and so Place creating that online community I was able to kind of in some ways form friendships and and people that I met there that I still meet with today in

fact actually today at 2PM I'm going to be meeting with like a bunch of people online from the community I've known for like 20 30 years who have actually never met in person and we just kept this like you know monthly or every two months we just have this like hangout where we just chat and just like catch up on life and a lot of them were also are on the same age as me when they got started with web development and the forums and so on they're also like working in various tech companies or working their own companies and so on and that's been an interesting way for me to kind of balance out the my real world where it was always changing even if you're like

Middle School to high school even in the same city it changes so you know include college and later on you never really make long-time friends like this and so therefore it's actually great to have this online community that always an anchor for me where no matter where I went to or what I did I always ended up like having that connection with these people who always stayed there regardless of what was going on in my personal life wow that's a staple right

there there may I ask if the community is private or public if people do want to learn more about it yeah it's just

it's just on my website group.com if you go to the forums you'll see there's a link for like a hangout meeting and they can just go there and join it wow you're

so casual about this oh I still have some follow-up questions but first we have a question also from a long time follower Adam leffert are there parts of how the tech industry is talking about the future direction of AI that you feel are closer to reality and others that maybe miss the mark

wow I'm not a very good question and I think as with any new technology there's a bit of a hype cycle that gets created where everyone is like going to talk about this is going to change the world it's going to destroy the world you know all extremes of it and then once it does from that settled you'll get to the point where like if you hear the tangible problems that AI is going to be solving you know I think a lot of us have seen many of these Cycles going you know year in and year all the time I think like chat Bots are the really big thing that happened like you know maybe you know 15 years ago and then it keeps coming back every five years I think

we're probably due for another cycle where chat Bots become the next big thing again it's going to replace humans completely but I think a and crypto was the other one that kind of keeps coming up in various waves and Cycles as well I do think that AI is more close to reality in many many of the things that people are saying because it does solve a very tangible problem problem because if you take a step back and take away all the layers of just the Fantastic narratives that have been created around it a lot of the work that we do whether it is in our personal life or personal life it's just repetitive memorization regurgitation type of activities and if we say that that level of work is not

really the thing that our brains really suited for can we automate that away to something that so we can spend more time doing higher level thinking and higher level tasks as it turns out AI has been fantastic for this and we talk about AI today as this like you know brand new thing but we've been having AI for many many years we just don't really realize it you know when you for example you just type in a URL in your browser and you happen to connect to a network somewhere in the middle of the world like in Europe for example you get really fast connection we don't really think that's actually really smart routing and really smart machine learning goes on behind the scenes to

know that at this time of day when someone is accessing this service it's going to be a lot more traffic coming in so instead of sending them to this location we're going to send them somewhere else or when you look at your photos on your phone both on an iPhone device or an Android device its ability to be able to search based on what you type in from the images it's been analyzing that's been going on for years and that's fantastic I can type in cat I and knows exactly which pictures that I have are of my cats as opposed to like you know looking for actual descriptions I might have specifically specified of it being that spell check autocomplete when we look at you know any kind of

like airplane ordering when you go to like order seats on an airplane to travel somewhere all these things we've been benefiting from AI greatly for a very long time what has happened recently though is that we've hit the technological Tipping Point where it's no longer just something that very those smart people with very deep technical knowledge can take advantage of and then we benefit indirectly from it we can now more easily access some of the capabilities directly so I do think that in the future we're going to see more things that AI is going to take care of for us because those tasks may not be the most important things that we should be focusing on the downside of course is you know creative Destruction has two

sides to it one is the utopian idea is that our people are of freed up to basically do more higher value things the downside of course is that what if there aren't any more higher value things that are available to do where those new things don't pay as much as what was done before it's a quality of life something we can continually sustain those are all open questions that I think the entire industry is grappling with and trying to figure out but I'm definitely an optimist when it comes to AI though I do think that we've seen a lot of great benefits over the years about what happened you know another great example of it is just like you know whatever credit card fraud detection it's my favorite examples of

it is like they have so much data about you where they know that if you are not in this region making a purchase they ping you very quickly about it so I'm always just amazed the number of things that aren't really called AI but realistically it's AI it's a large data set with a computer trained on it it does interesting things ah fantastic

answer I love it and thank you Adam for the question that kicking us off into this AI Direction because uh I feel like I live in this bit of a like a dilemma and like almost like a dating situation so a bit of a context I'm gonna try to break down into several questions which is on a regular basis I get emails from AI companies you can tell it's always something something.ai phase world I would like to collaborate with you on you know creating content video review blogs and we really want to connect with creators and even small businesses and on the other hand I also run these Creator communities and I also I'm very happy the sort of the first hand insights into why creators are hesitant

uh where struggles or experience these unique challenges that they find adopting AI can be quite difficult um or maybe not in in a way that's not very sustainable so I'm going to break down the questions here because kuruba giving your ex experience in Tech and now working as a product manager at Google I would love to pitch your first question which is related to what are some of the trends and things that you have seen the general AI whether it's generative AI or other AI companies are doing that are helpful versus not very helpful or maybe when it comes to like product marketing what are some of the common mistakes that they're making uh to kind of find more difficult to reach the audience they wanna they wanna reach

It's tricky to answer that and the main reason is that everything is changing so rapidly with many Technologies we often have this cycle where something brand new is introduced we hit the wall maybe six seven months later and then the water then bounces back and it hits steady state and at that point you can take a step back and be like okay what work what didn't work and let's now figure out the best practices are in this even though chat GPT and some of these Technologies came out over a year ago we still haven't hit that wall yet you know there's still this massive influx of change that's continuously coming in new things that are coming out that people were like I didn't know it

was possible to do some of these things and so we're right now observing the world changing a lot of these content creation areas without really knowing like what the boundaries are yet so for me to say at this moment you know here's what the best practice are and here's what aren't it's very tricky because whatever idea I have today of like oh this is a really bad idea tomorrow overnight becomes a massive success and I'm like I was wrong you know it turns out my assumption here was not correct there's still more energy left in this in this current beam of you know AI technologies that hasn't fully hit a

wall and reflected back yet yeah it's very true now I think about just different tools like whether it's one or many things change so rapidly even the AI features that exist within a certain AI tool they are changing so rapidly so one very severe customer support ticket just could just be easily solved by tomorrow so things are constantly changing I do think about some of the things that you have learned as you know I worked as a project manager and briefly as product managers as well back in the day more than a decade ago so I'm kind of trying to also learn as much as I can from you one of the things that that comes to mind is that we spend a lot of time for instance

marketing creating content but once the product is sold a lot of companies kind of complain to say well there's very quick to cancellation there's a lot of dissatisfaction from customers but then I look at the successful relatively successful companies and notice certain Trends and I would love to kind of get your ideas and thoughts one is definitely the sense of a community whether it's Discord or or Facebook Community whatever it may be kind of gather people who are actively using this including influencers and active users to address their questions and really listen to their feedback so I think that's really helpful and the other is like humans speaking of AI human support somebody understanding what the issue is being very attentive and and all that and the thirdly I guess

generally is how to think about like integrating whatever it may be a feature or where the entirety of the product into a Creator's workflow so it's one thing to say right around look at this generate show notes so easy automate but it doesn't actually the company doesn't fully understand how creators actually think and do their work and having different variations of it so I would love for you to you know comment on my observation my like off or maybe something I haven't paid attention to

yeah I think you summarize it very nicely in terms of like what companies are trying to do and why some of them are having difficulty here because AI is not going to solve ultimately your inability to talk to customers or understand Market needs maybe it will you know I may be wrong maybe five years from now you can just tell the AI to automatically solve some of these things for you but it still requires you to do some homework to make sure you understand why are people what's the main problem you're trying to solve what is the price point they want to solve this at and how are you going to build something that's going to meet their appropriate needs but to go back to the

first part of your question on how do you mention make sure that companies are successful here I think so much of the industry and this is purely from both academic and from Best Practices there's a huge emphasis on what's known as customer acquisition costs it's like you have a customer how does it cost to acquire them and everyone optimizes heavily for that particular metric but then there's a long-term value of how much does it cost to maintain the customer because we also know that when a customer churns and leaves your world getting them back in is either possible or exponentially more expensive than it was to get them back in and the amount of feedback they might give to other people were Word of Mouth spreads and

they say why they're dissatisfied with you it's all trust and brand loyalty that you'll never get back I think two big companies over indexed on just acquiring the customer but then once they have it they don't spend as much effort into how do you make sure they continue to be happy this is where I think AI could play a role on one hand the idea is you want to be genuine you want to make sure that you want you know you don't want to be seen as like a corporate entity you want to put you know your human face forward because that's a surprise surprise humans relate to humans more than they relate to machines but the child of course is that it takes time it takes effort it takes

difficulty to scale how to actually make sure that you can make the communication happen in an efficient and timely manner if you have millions of customers for example how do you give them a personalized experience this is where I think AI can play a huge role because as you've seen already with various startups today they have used AI extensively to make not just a chatbot experience we have a problem but also with the follow-up conversations I'm like hey how's it going you know you've been using the product for X number of days you've done a b and c how what are you experience doing that the AI has the knowledge of being able to kind of personalize the message almost the same level that a human being can which is

something that is going to be interesting because that kind of a high touch experience was often limited to very expensive deals expensive products where you had a dedicated human being a signed account like a hand for these products what we're going to see that is that level of service might be given to a lot more individuals who are using a free service or freemium service for example who may never have had the experience of what it's like to have a first-life follow-up that generally seems to indicate that there's interest from the company or the service provider in doing something better for you

wow I love how you tied right back to AI being able to help in a very specific Manner and uh without interrupting this sort of the human intervention a lot of companies I think when they think about even from the AI company's perspectives about focusing on automation but I also find a really intriguing when certain AI companies really emphasize the human capabilities where whatever tool features may be it's only assisting you to you as a Creator or the company to have your stories be heard um you know and to be able to you know share your products and connect you with the Right audience so that's fascinating um I would love to touch upon Community this is like a really I feel like Community can be a little rough subject

for me because over the years especially most actively since I would say 2015 maybe 2017 I've been trying different angles trying to build a community and now I end up with a very small intimate Mastermind community of creators that I I've seen and I can't even fathom like how huge companies and millions of users trying to build a community and service them because oftentimes you know really depends on where you're going with the product where you're where you're traveling as a company I mean that could be you know going from you know Public Library to public bathroom pretty quickly like all the complaints and things like that so you how somehow you know build a very successful community and how do you nurture how do you think

of a community building how do you nurture um the community members

I think the number one thing is moderation you know one of the things that when I you know manage the communities that I you know for crypto.com for example it's very particular the there's not a three strikes in your out rule it's at one strike on your outro because it's just noise and so it's been a very strict policy and it's also been a great team of moderators over the years that you know have done a fantastic job making that happen and I get a lot of questions for it you know I get criticized for you know you're being too strict you know why can't we talk about you know a b and c you know like there's very strict rules and like you know if it's if

you're going to talk about something that's going to cause unnecessary drama and negativity and friction do I talk about it which means most political topics are off topic anything controversial going on publicly you know because the community's laser focused on one thing which is foreign development building cool things designers and developers coming together to create interesting things if it's not related to that I don't want to hear it you know because it's not designed for that kind of a world and so it's very much a you know I have a very strong point of view on that and that you know I it helped you know work with a lot of moderators to make sure that point of view is actually in many ways in four so it's

not a democracy it's not a Town Square in that sense and that's one way to maintain a community without having the the massive amount of work that goes into what you might see from like let's say facebook slash meta or Google or Twitter in how they have to handle it because one of the things is that I still am the only person officially works on quebe.com and all the various things and I automated so much of everything else around it or then I work with like Volunteers in a crowdsource whereas other capabilities for it and my goal has always been to keep it that way like it should be something where if I don't touch it for like a month nothing should be on fire I come back and just

pick up where it goes on because life gets in the way work gets in the way and all these things and I always made sure that this would not be a situation where I have to basically sacrifice quality of life to maintain the side project of you know writing and creating content with the fun part needs to always be there and Community is one of those things where like you mentioned it can go from being fun to being a terrible experience very very quickly so I'm always very conscious of in the slightest amount of like things from like this is this country's not going the right direction it gets immediately pulled because it's okay the nice thing is there are many other communities that you can go to to have

those kind of conversations and it doesn't have to be this one well very

clear and concise thank you since you brought up Kirupa.com again if you guys are watching now is the time to ask any any questions my questions related to thinking about building a team because I know that when you're a middle school student you started out this project you probably did not expect the massive impact and growth rate that it had in just probably you know months or just a few years and at one point I don't know which point because I wasn't there did you realize that you needed a team or someone other than you to support it and then today as we're recording this 2023 sounds like is it now a project a company you can walk away for one month things are not going to be on fire so

could you maybe give us an idea of how to think about structuring a team you know who you have on the team to be able to do that

yeah in many ways there's never any full-time you know people working on it you know the only place where I had people was in the moderation side says the forums got more popular there were hundreds of thousands people online at any given time I you know it was easier to have like a group of people who were already on the forums already spending time there to be able to you know help clean up and make sure that things are going well and even for that it wasn't like a a full-time activity for anybody you know it's most people and when they the thing is that when they see the center of gravity of your content being generally positive generally on point Technical and factual it creates this

idea that okay here's acceptable content here's unacceptable content so it's not a case where every new person is going to need to have a Hello of hand holding to be moderated it's more of a case where some you know a very small minority of people will have to be you know educated on the proper ways of how this forum operates but the as long as you maintain the quality of content in general it it creates a self-documenting kind of a philosophy where yep it makes sense I would not go and do you you know these kind of things just like you wouldn't go to using your library example go to a library and start like you know playing the drums for some reason you know you just kind of know

that okay this is a library the general idea of libraries is meant to be very much a you know place of you know required you're trying to learn you're trying to be respectful of other people doing things in a personal space and all of that so therefore you know what it's exactly what connectable Behavior I think it's very important for a community to kind of have that same level of like at a glance here's what is and isn't acceptable and that greatly reduced the amount of extra work they need to do on there the content itself you know this is a pro and a con in some ways right you know I'm the primary writer for it I've tried hiring writers to do you know content you know on my

behalf and it pros and cons of it is that yes I get more content out but I do spend a lot more time editing it because it doesn't quite fit the style the tone that I want to have for the content to be so I stopped doing that you know a few years ago I said okay you know what no more excellent writers again because I think it's just best for me to create some of this content early on though some of the early writers that we had were fantastic and they were ones that were actually Learners just like me because they were genuinely doing this because they were learning and they want to share their knowledge as a way of you know retaining that information and that

was actually a really great way for them to create some of that content and that content is still on the website it's still fantastic I'm still highly you know educated you know inspired by seeing some of it as well

but he started hiring people though who are not in deeply immersed in creating content or how The Beginner's mindset of like if I put myself in the shoes of someone who has never done this before how would I do this it gets more tricky because that little genuineness is often missing and today when someone brand new comes to me and says hey I want to write I'm learning about this can I write for your blog I'm like no please don't actually create your own blog because it's so easy if I go to go to Wordpress or go to you know Squarespace or any other websites I started building your own portfolio brand because I no longer need content anymore but it may be beneficial for you to have your own

platformer can do this and I'll be happy to link to it instead unless you approach I take nowadays you know back then I was really into motive like yeah it's difficult for them to do so and they have no opportunity to get their content out so let me go ahead and make this be a place for them but nowadays I think it's much better to create your own area and that's something to talk about in the future as well is that how do you make sure to create your own brand especially in a world where the idea is for each of us to be diluted into nothing but a metric in some of these big social networks wow no I I had to write down personal branding it

wasn't even part of uh what I thought about in the agenda but again it naturally just surfaced up um so right now it sounds like wow you have Community moderators people who are already in the community know the ground rules and then you create the content I just have a couple of maybe follow-up questions in terms of cadence because you know this traveler blogger burnout I think in general content creator burnout is very real because of the competition on Google you're not you know these days I noticed it takes a long long a lot longer for example some of our top ranked content has been written you know from six months ago or even before that so I can see I think that's actually a

secret sauce of who are doing this who are creating a new website starting a new blog yet don't expect things to just start surfacing into you know top ranking positions on Google within days or weeks it doesn't work that way um so I wonder how you think about metrics which you mentioned SEO and the Cadence of your content creation publishing schedule

yeah I played a long game as you can probably tell right now you know I'm still doing this even though I started 1998 and the number of times my traffic on the website has dropped by 90 you know over a period of like six seven months it's probably like you know eight nine times in fact right now my traffic you know compared to what it was let's say like eight months ago it's down about 80 and I'm completely okay with it and the reason is this is that the way I create content nowadays is that my goal is to reach as many people with my content as possible and one of the things I've realized is that there's only so many people you can reach online

a lot of people still like physical books and and so on so a lot of my time nowadays is spent working with Publishers on taking some of the content I have and creating of course a lot of new content and going into these areas especially like you know around the world in educational institutions in schools and college universities where they just are much more accustomed to learning from a book instead and so I mentioned earlier that I like to write books a large part of the books are based on the kind of already created product for free on the on the website but the other parts of the tune to what teachers are trying to do to teach their students on some of this material as

well because at the end of the day I'm my goal really is that I want to have people learn enough to create cool content create cool ads cool websites I can check out and be like oh that's a really well done website you know it's probably the nerdy side of me coming out but that's the ultimate goal of like why I started doing this a long time ago how do I keep doing it right now it's less so that they only learn from me or they only use content that I've created or only spend time in my community so I realized the best way for me to democratize some of this is that there are millions of teachers and millions of college professors around the world who

are looking for content on all these various topics but it's often written by people who aren't people like you and I who actually you know learned about programming learn about this the hard way and care about these kind of things is done purely from a lens of like okay here's an academic topic here's what the job market requires this have top skills how do we match the those two equations together and create something and some folks that area have been quite good but I'll say most of them are absolutely not relatable to a student who is trying to learn something for the first time and we touched up on this when we chatted last time as well about like how I had great difficulty you know doing computer

science in college because I felt the material was just like not speaking to me in a way that made sense I'm like first like give me the why why don't you know about this like give me a reason for what I need to learn this giant wall of text because just learning for the sake of learning so I can regurgitate on the exam it's not a good reason for me oh in the back of my mind I always wanted to go back and if I had the time and the bandwidth to go back and revisit some of this how would I create a better book A Better Learning material that's part of it and and that's what I've been feeling like my time on so my content

creation on the website has gone down significantly which is of course as you know unless you create more keep creating more content you're not gonna that flywheel has to keep spinning anytime you stop it that means that traffic is going to drop as well and I am fully okay with that because you know a year or two from now again I'm gonna get back to creating content again for the blog and the website and the YouTube and all the videos and all of that stuff and it's gonna get back up again as well because once you see the formula like what it takes to build an audience without get traffic from it you don't really forget it and it's really changed it's human nature doesn't really change

much either you know people are looking for a problem how can you solve it well and then how can you do some very basic SEO optimizations to make sure that your content reaches Their audience and so from to answer your question again it's uh I don't think about analytics and success in quite the same way as a content creator might because you know I I'm not using the website or the blog or success from that in any way to sustain my everyday quality of life it's a thing that I do outside too kind of reinforce the things I learned to retain the knowledge of things that I'm learning right now but it's not in any way designed to you know continuously have to grow because I need to meet the

external needs of investors or audiences and things like that so I can take a break like that for a year and come back and it's okay nothing would have ever

gone off wow so I must ask this question because I think we are in a slightly different situation so I'm someone who is a full-time entrepreneur I don't have any dedicated clients I don't have a client who's considered like a corporation that pays me a salary I do have you know three to five clients at any given time and this has been the case since 2016. and I tell people these days about 50 of my time is spent on face World anything face World blogging video content creation so just like groupa.com now could you imagine like uh or Envision one day doing Kirupa.com full-time uh because I'm sure you have multiple revenue streams and all that at this point do you think you will be uh

you might be happier or do you really do you still like this hybrid approach because I think this is something very relatable to people that I think possibly more people prefer having a salary and working something on the side I just want to kind of break it down a bit

so I tried it actually for a year you know I was at Microsoft HMI you know hit my like I think Vibes like eight years to that point I was like okay you know what I'm gonna just take take a year off and just do this full time and the thing is that I had a hunch going in and my wife wasn't telling me you know I'm not are you sure you want to do this for you know these reasons well the website was more successful than ever the content was more popular than ever and so on I was extremely unhappy and the reason is that I genuinely enjoy the the conversations and the challenges my day job in some ways often brings I often

like to talk about like you know I like to specialize in working at very large companies because there's a certain survival skills you learn at being you know in a large environment and I really enjoy the you know both the ups and downs of like what large companies provide both in terms of like you know political drama you know exists in any large organization but also the ability to have impact at scale without having to do a lot of the typical work that smaller companies have to do around like you know building up their brand building up their awareness and figuring out the scale prompts itself so you can really swing really big and hit for go aim for defenses when you work at large

companies and I miss that you know working for myself I was like I need the drama like I'm not creating any drama myself North aiming drama for me I don't talk to people about an interesting challenging problems I love like you know work with other PMS you know mentoring and managing and editing all these things I I missed all of those kind of things as well and so about you know a year later I wrote three books under the same period of time actually so it's a very productive time for me in many ways but I say okay you know what this is great that that can now go on in parallel for a couple of years you know because books have a lifetime that goes

for a while and I'm gonna go back to getting back to like doing work again and so yeah I tried it I I like keeping it as a hobby not as a full-time job because I'm just like tuned some people

are so I think that's such a positive message for people who are watching this segment to know that you don't have to quit whether it's your current or future full-time jobs or part-time time jobs and still be a content creator you know I think we're all kind of born differently different different chemistries different brain chemistries uh you know we and also depending on like I think the seasons of Our Lives as well like different ages and you know who we invite into our lives and whether we become parents or not I think that truly has a lot of impact on how we design our work and personal lives with that said Kirupa are you currently working remotely where do you prefer to kind of go into the office

yeah I prefer to go in the office I live very close to the office as well so you know multiple times a week I go to the office and you know do my usual work there and then I work from home as well which is and I think what working at Tech job is that as long as I have a laptop and an internet connection you can be productive pretty much from any where you want and so you know the only miss of course is the in-person interaction with various people you might be working with so there's a nice combination of it so I think the world's going to figure out how do we navigate back into is it going to be fully remote it's going to be fully in office it's

going to be hybrid and you know the pendulative keep swinging you know you know different directions depending on which month of the year we're talking about right now so I think right now we're going to this like a hybrid world where you know you spend some time in the office you know and then you spend some time remote but you have to have a balance between them yeah absolutely

agreed so uh I kind of pivot a little bit away from personal branding when you brought it up so I do want to talk about it in case I think still on both our channels there are a lot of people who are very new into their personal branding Journey or those who are you know just build a website wrote a couple of blog posts and they're also people uh sitting there feeling like this is something they've been wanting to work on and this frankly could be people of any ages I know people in their 50s uh you know still working corporate and thinking about this for the first time so I would love for you to talk about how to get started when people are

thinking about their personal brand you know different niches that they should consider like where are these what kind of mindset where should they start

I think the important part is to start start somewhere and you know I'll talk about why I think it's important to have your own personal brand you know and it's involved over the years in terms of how I've seen the industry evolve as well but in many ways there's probably something unique about you that is that makes you very successful in your job are your things that you do and that knowledge is something that only you can actually share and get out to others because others can be looking for information on this very topic and that's where I think the first place to start with is find out what sets you apart from everyone else out there you know if you're not you know if you're

someone who enjoys let's say you're very good at like mountain biking or hiking or anything like that that absolutely share some of your insights onto not just why you like it but how to be you know how to get better at it and things like that because of the love of genuineness and authenticity that comes from you're talking about it that others can't really replicate and then over a period of time you'll be known as the person that's like oh yeah there's something about let's say hiking I'm going to talk to this person because they know all of these things about it and and it used to be that that's all you need to do it's like yep just put your content out there you're going to

be good and you're going to be fine the challenge of course is that but you know I like to say like we're living this world right now where every minute of our day is in some ways you know being competed for by various proper products and companies and services because in at this point they realized we could maximize everything X the number of hours in a day that we have and so even you know it's like you used to be that yeah you know you except for sleep you had all this time of day to do where it's things that you know company couldn't you know companies will like you know look for you but even now like you know you're sleep tracking there's so many companies that are

trying to like buy for your attention on like you know who's yeah there you go and so on so I think it's no longer just important for you to just have you know create content and build your brand on your own is to actually own that messaging of it on the platform as well like own your own platform like you know you have phase world for example it's not twitter.com face world it's not like you know facebook.com Facebook it's face World itself so it doesn't matter if you know 10 years from now 20 years about 30 years from now the platform goes away or they decide that you know we don't really care about content creators anymore so we're gonna download any content content we're only going to talk

about content that results in people buying you know product a b and c instead and having done this for such a long time I think I stumbled upon this accidentally but I'm glad this happened because if I had built my entire website and blog on let's say on a third-party platform whether it was even WordPress or whether it even was like it's a geot or so on you know except for WordPress all the services end up going away which means all those links and URLs went away people's emails addresses would have to me would have gone would have bounced and all these things so that it was a hassle but that it happened to build my own platform was probably the one thing that I always go back and say like I

have no regrets at all in any of it not even like an ounce of regret on it and so even today when I see people saying like I'm gonna post all my content on Twitter or I'm going to go to Hash note and create all my content I'm like it's great to start off on it maybe create a duplicate parallel you know copy and paste version of it but own your own domain own your own URL because that is never going to be going away anytime soon whereas everything else you're at the mercy of the algorithm or your emergency of the concreation because the incentives aren't aligned you know the incentives you might have for why am I sharing content why do I want to be

successful why do I want to do things are often counter to what networks have as their main reason for motivation because at the end of the day they are for-profit corporations and their goal is to optimize for what will get people to spend more time my product so we can get more data about them so we can then use that to better influence what purchases you might want to make because we know that if you're searching for let's say you know you know the food of these type of type things you might be interested in like the ingredients for buy that instead so here's a link for it and so on and that flywheel for them is very different than the one that you want which is I just want to teach

people I want to make people successful in these areas and for the the most part there's not a lot of money for them or for you to be making this outside the internal satisfaction you have of having thoughts among these things and so own your own platform absolutely critical and your brand needs to be tied to that not to be anything else because you know Twitter stockx.com what do we do now do we all go back and change the blue bird to an X I have no idea oh that's true I

didn't even think about the impact of all our signatures and things like that but actually I forgot to show you the shirt uh which is teach everything you know um so I wore this specially for today's interview because I feel like this is so this is true to your brand as well as mine um I must you know at the beginning I want to ask this question I think it's kind of that moment now which is as a young child uh people who might not even be able to really understand like the impact of Kirupa from 98 until I was sitting there was already very very popular and I mean it's it's up there you know to me it's one of the most successful like Tech websites of all

time and still thriving today now coming in like at such a young age it's like a little Hollywood star right uh you know being I don't know it's like Macaulay Culkin like a lot of these people didn't really end up in in good places but to me it's like you're this entrepreneur at such a young age and having one of the the most trafficked website and then now 25 years later I'm sure they're ups and downs what have you learned in terms of setting your own expectations and mindset and um you know how have you felt like over the years because you've certainly come through it all at this point just based on this conversation

you know I think it's just one of those things where party survivorship bias I think I just happen to be at the right place at the right time where technology was getting to be like the hot industry we want to be in so the blog was doing its own thing I went to a you know a good University so it's easy for me to get my first job and then you know do interesting things on the on that side there so I think a lot of it you know it's hard for me to figure out exactly how much of it was like tangible things that I explicitly did to get to where I am whereas how much of it was just the environment that I was in that just

naturally led me to being where I am right now because as I mentioned I was at MIT which means for me to get a job at Microsoft was I just walked in the career fair you know I'd say like hey I'm interested in joining you know doing this it was like a 10 minute chat and then they flew me in you know they think the chat went well they flew me in and then like you know I was interning there and then you know my internship went okay so I got a job offer when you know went back a year later it was in many ways like the things you know when I look at it right now and I Mentor like a handful of students who are currently

you know in in graduating from business school right now in product management and talking to them about like how their job experience is going right now and things like that it is very different you know because the environment the economic environment is very different the expectations on people on what it means to be you know to be successful in industry is very different as well there's no social media there was no pressure for me to have to compete against you know all these various people yeah there are headphones websites that I you know always cracked as like you know am I doing better than them or worse than them or you know how are they handling all these things but it was entirely casual it's like yeah I

can see indirectly but I don't know like exactly like you know what are they doing day in and day there was no Instagram and all these things so I think the pressure on people today to be able to Veer off any direction and not be focused is very very high for me it's always laser focused on being able to make sure that there's always going to be a hobby it wasn't going to be a full-time business because you know I knew enough about myself to know that wasn't going to be a good idea and of course I got to prove that out many years later when I actually tried to make this a full-time thing I'm like yeah I'm not good for this is not my cup

of tea in so many areas I think those really helped you know having a strong you know family you know Foundation having strong set of friends having the real world you know in many ways for me it's like it's a real world I'm like this is the online world and this is real this is the real world like what I'm doing right now and being very conscious about that I think always played a big role in as well because I always knew that you know friendships and things you make online aren't the same as the strengths the bonds of the friendships you make I think it's a it's a big one and I knew that there had people I met online who I've met in

person and or you know lifetime friends with but then a lot more people in real life though that I tend to rely on wow

so how sweet of a statement and it's so truthful to you your brand and yet you're so humble uh yes it's true that perhaps in many ways both of us are privileged and blessed to have lovely family days and our education at the same time on top of that it still takes a lot of effort and and self-esteem they're going to keep pushing forward especially in in today's climate and we have you know just about like six seven minutes left for those of you who are listening watching thank you so much please drop your questions and let's you whatever time we have left we're going to try to answer them with us that I do want to Pivot a little bit to the maturity of a content creator and one of

the pain points that I I've been thinking about and I I aim to talk about it is the mindset of Automation and clearly AI is inevitably part of that conversation for Content creators so especially for my community people are running in this case they're blogging regularly they're creating podcast content a bunch of people are moving towards video podcasting live streaming like what we're doing right now and at the right newsletters it just this overwhelm has been hovering you know over us for for quite a number of years so yay automation so I would love for you to talk about the AI mindset for Content creators as opposed to for companies but for Content creators you know some how to actually think about it like to actually integrate whatever it

is into their workflow without the overwhelm without the regret and still be able to learn something new

I think the way to think about it is AI is a way of scaling your abilities great things and so if you think about you know let's say you're one person you know shop creating content you know you're playing the role of you know here's my I'm going to Source ideas for the content I'm going to create the content now I'm going to edit the content Market it and undo all these things but with with AI as a content creator put yourself in the mind of like an editor-in-chief of a really large magazine let's take wired as a magazine example right they have a large number of people who are making you know creating content doing the website doing all these things but they have an

editor-in-chief or someone whose primary job it is to make sure that content is going in the direction that needs to be going whether it's the design the editorial the art content you know the the content of the text and all of these things with AI we didn't switch the mindset around a bit now now you're no longer going to be playing the role of all these eight different you know wearing all these eight different hats you're going to play the role of This One Singular person who has full creative control over the output itself and your job now is to write the right prompts so imagine you had a staff of writers you know write me a topic about a b and c what type of a b and c you go

to the team and say like the research team and say what are the topics you should be writing about all those things cannot be done by an AI system instead so automate as much of that as you can so when you wake up every morning in your inbox you see here the top five topics that are coming up in all these areas here are the Articles you've written on these topics here the images are generated for it do you like this or do you not like this and your answer should be I like this don't like this change that change this 30 minutes later the AI system comes back and gives you here the things that we want to do like great ship it and that gets shipped on

your blog on YouTube if it's a video on Tick Tock if it needs to be turned into like a video automatically and then on your newsletter and all these things and as the air is getting more and more capable it's going to be a point where you know when you're Tick Tock and YouTube videos will actually look like you're actually speaking you know even though you're not active in recording or you're into speaking your face is absolutely perfectly representing your voice and your tonal inflections are perfectly represented and the output is essentially the same as what it would have been had you been in the studio recording in all these great detail that's where I think the future is really going to get into which means

there's going to be a lot more quantity of content which has always been a thing in the past where you had crowdsourced firms oh no you know externalizing just creation of content and the quality of it is you know often hit or miss just like before higher quality content will win out lower quantity content will naturally not win the aggregate number the quantity of content will of course probably exponentially grow and this is going to be you know more incentive than for you to be able to be on top of your game but this also means that a lot more people who would have been intimidated but a Content creation process who would not be able to say like confidently I can write this really well but I have a

great idea that I'm not right or I can write really well I don't have really good ideas these large number of people can now make up for some of their you know skill gaps by using AI to you know close that for them and then be very successful as well so we're going to see is like our jobs can become more difficult we're gonna have a lot more competition but I think in aggregate Society will benefit because the higher quality content created by a human being you know augmenting their skills with AI and not needing a large number of people to make some of these things happen will probably create content that is almost going to write with Wikipedia in level of depth for a large number of a trade

topic that you wouldn't normally think about you could have the most you know very precise you know hobby or ideas only like 10 other people in the world might be interested in but those 10 people now will probably get content that was almost like it was designed for a millions of tens of millions of people kind of an audience so I think there's going to be a a lot of great things that automation's going to bring here wow

that's uh I feel like we all need to take a pause and and re-watch this and think about the fact that we could literally start an online magazine and this time around it doesn't require hiring dozens of writers a big budget but you could literally start from your little office your bedroom wherever that is and that is so powerful you still have the creative control I think that's such that's so important to emphasize that you should make decisions good bad how do I iterate based on this may I ask a Kirupa what are some of the AI tools or or Technologies Beyond AI that you're interested in exploring your reading about your testing out

yeah I'm a big video gamer yeah I love video games I love like you know that entire world of like being able to play role-playing games from early so I can like try out you know what works and what doesn't work without doing it in real life and so the Fallout series is one of my favorite series of all time you know it's basically a post-apocalyptic world where you know early 1900s 1950s America discovered nuclear technology and found like really great things with like Robotics and all of these things and then the world kind of went haywire because the robots kinda you know did some you know things and then the world ended and people were in college shelter you know it's a great story in that sense but what I always

loved about that game is how sophisticated robots became to be able to do everyday chores like you know clean their you know clean your car or like walk around and like you know do all the things that you might not be interested in doing and they also had the ability to learn from what you're doing you know in the past so five years ago to be like I told science fiction still further away and so on and you know Boston Dynamics was creating really nice videos of like what robots can do and not do and things like that it's in the last two or three years we've seen this massive shift where like you went from like you know roombas and like iRobots it's like robotic vacuum

cleaners to really having robots that do you know in the industrial sector like you know machinery and Manufacturing robots have been doing a lot of great work for quite a while but just like with chat GPT I think when you go to see the consumerization of that into our everyday lives and that to me is for terrifying and fascinating because on one hand robots have almost unlimited strength and they have unlimited capacity to work and to process information now imagine that now they have access to being a able to not only realize what their shortcomings are and how to address them but also the ability to go and make those addressing automatically happen it's not going to be us going like oh here's any firmware

updates I'm going to go inside for them like they're going to know how to go to the computer install something get it on your machine and insert it into their brains and I'm absolutely fascinated by that world so I know some people are going to be like that's gonna be the end of humanity as we know it maybe but it's inevitable and so I'd rather embrace it and be ahead of the curve on that as opposed to you know being too worried about it and so I'm reading a lot about

that world yeah fantastic well the last question to ask what are some of the newsletters that comes to mind or resources or people or places where you read because we all you know we're all following Kirupa who do you follow

oh this is gonna be a tough one for me to answer because no matter what I answer I'm gonna end up offending a subset of my friends and people that I that I follow and so I'm gonna say in general you know I'm I'm not abandoning Twitter uh you know X right now and so I still use that as my primary source for being able to Source content I do cure that very heavily to the people I follow and that information out loud in my my news feed it's very heavily tested my areas of Interest which is really fun and design development a lot of cool artwork and of course AI related things and through that I've met a lot of interesting people and of course my day

job keeps me very inspired as well oh

fantastic thank you so much for your time and we're right on time for anybody who's looking to learn more about career but please do follow him especially your front-end developer but in general I think you're a content creator you don't understand the AI designed you know development philosophy Kirupa.com is the way to be and it has been for the past 25 years thank you so much Kirupa what a dream come true to finally meet you in person and uh and be able to talk like we're you know friends and peers and this is such a blessing for for me

it's a great conversation fee you're fantastic at this so keep doing this

thank you so much you're going to take us offline now hey everyone leave your comments and we will see them read them reply to them later thank you for joining us