Connect with Tony Herman:
Doug: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug Show, and I’m excited today because we’re gonna be able to talk to Tony Herman and he emailed me back after asking about, um, folks that were using ai. Coding tools to build apps or something useful for themselves. And Tony wrote back and he had, I don’t know, six or seven specific things that he actually used AI for and not just sort of hobby projects, although a couple of ’em are useful hobby projects or something interesting that he was working on.
But he also has been building. Actual tools that have a business purpose for various different areas. Now, Tony, how are you doing today?
Tony: Well, I’m great. How are you, Doug?
Doug: Doing awesome. And we’ve just been chatting, working through the normal tech issues that happen whenever, uh, you try to do a remote recording, but we’re both, uh, tech savvy and we work through it and everything’s going.
I want to jump right into some exciting stuff because while you’ve. You know, built several tools. You did have some, uh, background in, in coding and building websites, which is obviously helpful. So you’re not walking in completely blind, but you have been able to build some tools or apps kind of in a short amount of time and have a usable product on the other side.
Now, I know you have more than one example of this, so I’ll just ask you to describe like one of these. Projects that you’ve worked on where you were able to come up with an idea and then execute and have something on the other side in a fairly short amount of time. And I’ll give you a second to think if you, if you need to, but give us an example of that.
AI Built Service Area Maps
Tony: I think one of the first ones was we needed, um, a coverage map. We had a client, I have a website design business, and we had a client who needed to show what area they covered to help qualify their, their customers. So, you know, we turned to Google and you can make one in Google, but it’s very complicated.
It just wasn’t working. So I asked ai, you know, what, what can we do? Is there another way to do this? And it said, oh yeah, we can do this and this, and we can build it using these tools. And, you know, within a, you know, 15, 20 minutes we had a, a map that we needed for that client and we went ahead and put it on their site.
A few days went by and, you know, this was just sticking in my head, like, I wonder if this is a real need, you know? So I said, well, can we make a tool that can do this for people? They put in some information and yeah, we can do that. And it started building it and it was, you know, it’s back and forth and, uh, that was with chat GPT and it was.
A pretty early version, you know, so there were more hallucinations and it got confused. And so it was more of a struggle. I mean, that was like a year ago maybe, but we got it. And so I put it out there, service area maps.com, and people can go there and make these maps for free. And, uh, we added state maps.
Um, there’s a leaderboard so you can see who’s getting the most traffic. Um, so that was pretty fun.
Doug: Cool.
From Client Fix to Public Tool
Doug: And the great part is it was like a specific problem for a specific client that you were able to roll out. When you were building it, were you thinking, Hey, this could be a generalized tool that many people can use, or, and you were building it that way versus like a very custom solution.
So coming from. Sort of the consulting world and seeing big scale implementations, a lot of times one of the worst things people, these companies could do, they would get a custom solution ’cause they thought they were special unicorns or whatever. So they get a custom solution instead of an off the shelf thing and it’s way more expensive to maintain a custom solution.
And half the time they, they were just getting customizations on and off the shelf thing that was completely unnecessary. The whole point being. Did you build it from the beginning knowing that, hey, let’s make this general so a lot of people can use it?
Tony: Well, it was at the beginning. It was just for that client, you know, and I was thinking about it and that got me to go, well, there could be more people that want this.
But the way I kind of build is like, well, if I think I’m going to use it again in the future, let’s make a tool. Or even on my website, half the content there is just for my reference, because I had a problem once and I’m like, what’s the solution? I know where to go find it. ’cause it’s on my website. And my thinking is if it can help other people as well, why not?
I’ll just put it out there. So, you know, I thought, well I’ll build this tool, put it out, you know, throw against the wall, see what sticks. And, uh, you know, I have a few sites I can promote it on. So I started doing that and just, you know, let, let my baby go.
Doug: Yeah,
Tony: right.
Doug: And,
Tony: and it kind of took off a little bit.
Doug: Very good.
Early Web Career Origins
Doug: Now let’s, let’s go back to your origin story of starting to code and build websites and all that stuff. So take us back to the beginning, maybe some of the first stuff that you were building, at least the timeframe and what you were using.
Tony: Yeah, I mean, we could go back to age 12 when I was programming on a Texas Instruments computer.
Doug: All right.
Tony: And save saving to cassette tape.
Doug: Cassette. Oh man.
Tony: Yeah. Um, no, but in, uh, college I went to UW Madison and you know, the web was brand new back then, ’cause that was early nineties. And, um, one course on the web, that was it. But you know, I got my degree in communication, arts, radio, tv, film. So I started working at a company that sold that equipment around here, pretty, it’s a nationwide, they’re pretty well known.
And I said, selling the equipment. And then I said, Hey, your website could use some help and I can do that. And they let me do that part-time. Then they gave it to me full-time. I started producing 700 new leads a week for them. So they showered me with awards and other things. Wow. Because, ’cause it was taken off.
Um, yeah. And then I went to another company for a while, which is interesting ’cause it was on the other end of the spectrum. So I was, first website was for real technical people. Right. These audio engineers. Those type of guys. This other company we went to was agricultural, so it was for farmers. So that was the other end of the spectrum for me.
That was eye-opening. We even did a focus group with these farmers. We had ’em use the website, found us in an interesting thing. These guys got big hands, so using a keyboard wasn’t good for them. They gravitated toward the mouse, you know, they need to be able to click on things in order to use the computer.
So that was like the first chunk, right? There was those experiences after that.
Founding the Agency
Tony: Um, I knew some guys who, uh, were trying to work through a missionary network and then get some home goods to sell at like. Home parties like Pampered Chef, but it’d be from, you know, a place in India, an AIDS hospice. The ladies there make quilts, so sell those authentic goods, those quilts, and that goes to support that AIDS hospice or whatever.
And they’re traveling around. They got to India, they said, the guys there said, you know, we could, um, we could make the website. There’s people around here that can do it. By the end of that trip. You guys should go form a website company. So these two guys came back, they knew me, and we, we got the company together.
That was back in 2001.
Doug: 2001. Wow. All right. So is that, are you still working there now? Is that, is that like the origin of like the company that you’re at now?
Tony: Yep. Yep. This is 25th year.
Affiliate Marketing Gold Rush
Tony: Um, and I’ve been doing affiliate stuff on the side. Uh, what was really interesting was my very first success with affiliate marketing was awesome.
So I found this software called Associate Omatic, which I think is called Fresh Store now, but it would, it was PHP and it would build, you plug in your Amazon account and it choose categories and it would build the store for you. And I tagged it onto a, a domain I had, which was a local web directory around here that was doing really well, Yahoo style.
And because of that authority on that domain and with all those products, I was getting tons of traffic. I remember making like 150 bucks a day in commissions, uh, around Christmas. So from the middle of October through the end of the year. I got a $4,500 commission check from Amazon.
Doug: Nice.
Tony: Just ’cause I plugged that stuff together.
Doug: What year was that?
Tony: I, I would think it’s around oh 3 0 4. Somewhere in there.
Doug: Oh man. Way at the beginning. So that was like, right? Yeah. Like the early days of the associates program at all.
Tony: Oh
Doug: yeah. Holy cow. And just to like put the. Uh, like how impressive that is. So I got involved maybe like a decade later, so kicking some inflation or whatever.
Although inflation wasn’t too bad in those years because of the great recession, and now we’re getting into finance stuff. But, but basically, I. Amazon wasn’t selling a ton of o other stuff. I mean, they obviously had more than just books, I believe, in 2004. Right. But I mean, yeah. Now people spend, I, I don’t know, you’d go around the neighborhood, you just see like Amazon trucks circling around, like delivering stuff constantly.
But like in 2004, people weren’t even, I mean. They were a little scared to put in their credit card in the computer. Right. So like right to, to make that 4,500 back then is insane. Very cool. So you had, you, you had a taste of that. Um, how long did, were you doing like affiliate stuff, um, and different projects over the years?
SEO Updates and New Hustles
Tony: Pretty heavily until Panda and Penguin hit on Google. ’cause it was just so easy. I was with this group and they had a network of sites and we could poke on each other’s sites and you only needed, you know, 200 words per article back then. You know that? Yeah. And, and it was crazy. I built, uh, another website about contact lenses, and the top month I had with AdSense on there was about 3,500 in a month through AdSense.
It was. You’re printing money back then,
Doug: so crazy. Interesting. And, and again, all that stuff was before my time. But it’s funny ’cause I, I know probably a lot of the audience they were, and they are aware of how it was maybe in the 2010s and beyond, which was the old days. Yours is like prehistoric, like 20 and you’re like, PanIN Penguin, which the first of.
One of those, I guess Panda, the first one came out in like 2010. Is that right? Or was it 2012?
Tony: Sounds, sounds right. I used to remember that better, but something like that,
Doug: it doesn’t matter. We’re getting old now, so it’s like, it’s over 10 years so it’s, or 15 years now. So it’s like, dang, we don’t, we don’t need to use our brains to remember that.
Okay. So you dabbled around, things were di different. You kept building websites and you would. You know, see these opportunities and have folks in your network. And did you keep dabbling through the 2010s and all that?
Tony: Yeah, it was much tougher ’cause I was used to it being just super, super easy. Um, but we had to try to recover.
And you started doing more long form con content and, uh, trying that. I, I did a lot with, uh, publishing books on Kindle. Um, that was, that was nice. ’cause you’d have sales every month.
Doug: Okay. Got it. Well.
AI Children’s Book Story
Doug: Let’s, um, we could reminisce about the old days, which is kind of fun in some way, but we wouldn’t talk about ai.
You gave us a great transition. So you’ve worked on several projects. I’ll give you a chance to mention the book that you worked on. So you did some, some, uh, Kindle Publishing, but you have. Created a children’s book here recently. And then after we talk about that, we can talk about the software side of it and those tools.
But tell us about the book. And you could even, I think you could hold it up if you would like, but we can link to that if people wanna check it out. Yeah. What’s the story with the book?
Dinosaur Tracks Ski Lesson
Tony: So, um, this was my 20th year being a ski instructor is up here in Wisconsin. And, um, I had a lesson a few years ago with a boy.
And the parents are like, he’s like five, and the parents are saying he does doesn’t turn. He just goes straight. So I got up to the hill, up to the top with him and I said, well, we’re supposed to have a lesson today, but the manager came and told me that we have something else to do instead. He’s like, what?
So I’m like, okay, so there was a dinosaur out here last night and he left tracks all over the hill and we gotta cover them up. This was like at the beginning of the day. Our job is to go cover ’em up so people don’t see him and get scared. And he was in, he was like all the way in on that. So I go, let’s go over here.
We went to the right, found one and I covered it up. I’m like, let’s go over there. And we went to the left and we stopped and we covered it. And then by the third one, he is like, there’s one over there. And it was the other way. And he called, right? We just did the lesson that way. And the parents are there and their jaws just dropped.
They’re like, how are you doing this? So, and even by the end of the day, they came back to me and said, he’s been all over the hill. He’s been finding tracks left and right and all this, and he’s just turning, they’re just so happy. So I thought about it this year. I’m like, that should be a book. You know, like, I gotta share it, you know?
So. I used, um, antigravity ’cause that just came out. I’m like, let’s, let’s try it. And it told the story of the lesson and it put together, um, the rhyming part of it, which is, I mean, anyone who’s a writer knows that’s hard. But it did all of that. And then it even did the illustrations. And I first had an electronic version, but then I found a place online that will give you like the, the.
Hard cover. This is, uh, actually a soft cover, but this is what it’s called. It’s called Swoosh the Snow. So, and it did, uh, all the illustrations, the back cover, I’ll show you some pages inside.
Doug: Nice.
Tony: This way. So it’s got, um, a bunch of that. And then in the back here I wrote Attorney guide for the parents on like how to.
Do what I did on that lesson.
Doug: Got it. That’s cool. Have you, or do you market it much or are people buying it or how do people hear about it and stuff?
Tony: Yeah, I got this going about halfway through the season, so I think next season will have more momentum when I can promote it more, but I made a website, actually lovable, made that website.
It’s really cool. For basic one page, and then I’ve been trying to promote online and I was showing it to friends and people are buying it. So I probably sold close to 20 or 25 so far, but
Doug: mm-hmm.
Tony: This’ll work for every season.
Doug: Got it. Okay. That’s pretty fun. Going back to the original, and this is just for my own curiosity, so in the actual lesson when the.
When the boy was going around and filling in, what? What were the actual footprints or holes that you were filling in?
Tony: They weren’t there. They
Doug: were. They were just divots, nothing.
Tony: Engineering. Okay. Nothing. It was legendary. I mean, it was just groom snow, you know?
Doug: Yeah. That’s funny. Well, and the thing is, um, ’cause you, you come out to Colorado occasionally, you mentioned it, um, in the pre-interview discussion, but there’s a place called Dinosaur Ridge over by Morrison, um, kind of near Red Rocks, which we have been to, and there’s actually like huge, um, footprints that you, you can see, um, this, these whatever fossilized, um.
Uh, uh, whatever. It’s like an old river bed that fossilized or, or however that works. Um, have you seen those, are you aware of this Dinosaur ridge over here?
Tony: No. I was at Red Rock in. November. We just went through it, but I didn’t know about that.
Doug: Yeah, it’s just, I think it’s, um, I can’t remember if it’s north or south, but it’s right off of like four 70 and 70 ish, that vicinity.
But, um, next time you’re around you can go. It’s just short little hike, um, on those ridges. I know when you’re driving you can see those and it’s all part of the, the Red Rock structure, so. Okay. We can move on from the, the dinosaur footprint portion of the podcast, which that’ll be an interesting chapter on the YouTube side.
Okay.
On Your Mark Game App
Doug: Let’s talk about, um, on your mark. This is one of your favorite projects. Tell us about the concept of this app, and we’ll dig into some of the details, but what is on your mark?
Tony: So it’s a, a game you play in real life, but it’s guided by your phones. And I had. Like this one, I gave the idea to AI and it helped me build it.
So you’ll have a mission. So everyone uses their phone to sign up. You don’t have to download an app, it’s all handled on the website. You just send the link out to like your group chat and everyone just joins on their phone and then they, the phone guides them through the whole game. Everyone has their own version going on, but they’re all together.
So the example I usually give is. Your mark is Doug. Okay? You gotta get him to say the word orange twice in 30 seconds. So everyone knows the game is going on, but you don’t know what if people are being real or if they’re playing the game. So I was like, I was like, uh, do you think this looks red or orange?
What do you think, Doug?
Doug: Right. And then orange probably.
Tony: Yeah.
Doug: Or orange.
Tony: Orange. Orange. Okay.
Doug: Gotcha. And
Tony: then, so there’s a bunch of those. Yeah. And we, we played it on our, our ski trip in November out there, and it was a TA ton of fun. So I’ve been making the game better ever since
Doug: And.
Building with ChatGPT and VS Code
Doug: How did you prompt, or what, what tool did you use?
Number one. And you mentioned it’s just on a website, so no one has to download anything. So yeah. How did you, uh, get started with the prompt?
Tony: I gave the game idea. I was using chat CPT at that time. Still still use it. Um, and the big thing for me with chat was when it started connecting a tool so I could use VS code and it would.
Open those files and make changes there. You know, that was game changer at that point. But, um, so I gave the idea and I gave it kind of how I wanted it to work, but it came back with something better. Like I thought I would have to send each player their own link to join in, but it figured out how to do it with just sending everybody the same link.
Doug: Okay. That
Tony: blew my mind.
Doug: Got it. Okay. And then.
Prompting Like a Team
Doug: As you, so you put in the prompt, you had kind of a skeleton of the idea, and then how much did you provide, like requirements or guidelines or constraints or anything like that. Was it literally like, Hey, we, we want a game kind of so we can interact with each other and tell me what ideas you have, how much back and forth did you have?
Tony: I think the initial prompt and stuff was pretty open. So I’m usually working with my team and that’s kind of how we work, is I give them the general direction, answer any questions and let them go at it. And I’m kind of really good at finding, finding mistakes. It’s a gift and a curse, but you, if you show me something, my team shows me something, I’m like, that’s off by two pixels.
Move it to the left. And they’re like, how, how did you know that? And I’m like, I don’t know. But, or even testing a website, I will, in two clicks I’ll find a mistake and it, that could be the only mistake, but I can find it really fast. So that’s kind of how I worked with AI is let’s just go and I’ll tell you what changes we need to do as we go.
And it actually was like I, I was saying it was easier and it figured things out better than I thought it would.
Tweaking Code in VS Code
Doug: And then you mentioned it sounded like you wanted to be able to go and edit some code, you said vs. What is that? Visual something? I don’t know.
Tony: Yeah, visual studio code.
Doug: Okay. So you wanted to have the ability to go in and tweak and all that.
So did you need to do much tweaking in this case?
Tony: Small things. I figured I’d handle ’em on my own and I usually just have. Um, AI use PHP and standard hosting kind of set up. I did one project and no js, but I don’t know JavaScript that well. So I say let’s go to PHP, and there’s a lot of libraries and stuff built, so it’s, you know, it’s not the most modern coding you can do, but it works really well and it’s efficient.
So I would go in and make small changes or I, I’d get stuck and then I’d ask for help with the. Style sheets or whatever, and it was more of a collaboration, I think.
Doug: Okay.
Do You Need Coding
Doug: And do you think it’s necessary in this case to know some coding, whether it’s PHP or some other flavor of, um, JavaScript or something like that, that people want to use, or you just kind of prefer to be able to get your hands a little dirty because you do have the background?
Tony: I think it’s getting easier. Even over the last year and a half that I’ve been doing this, uh, the results you get out of AI have increased dramatically in a good way. And it’s catching more things, um, adding something to your prompt, like before you show me, go over the work and make sure that it’s done right.
I mean, you used to kind of have to say that more, but now it’s doing that more itself. Um, so I think people shouldn’t be afraid to get into this kind of vibe coding. Um, I prefer to see the code and know what it’s doing. And, and when I’ve talked to or seen other videos online about developers using a, at a code, it is pretty necessary to go in and get an understanding of the code and what’s happening, especially if it’s.
Enterprise or if it’s for a company or it’s gonna be released into production, like hobby stuff. Okay. Something bad happens, not the end of the world, but at enterprise level you definitely have to, you have to do your regular testing and everything. So it, there’s a range I think. Sure.
Doug: Okay.
AI Debugging Gets Real
Doug: When interesting, I chatted with a friend of mine who.
He’s a computer engineer, software developer who was working at a big, huge tech company, cutting edge stuff. And funny enough, um, whatever, two years ago he was like, ah, I tried to use, some of the tools are pretty crappy. I talked to him maybe a few weeks ago and he said, oh. They’re really good. They are kind of amazing.
And they started to do a lot of their like code reviews and debugging with ai, with Claude specifically. And he was like, it’s, it’s catching stuff that has been, you know, tested and in the code for many years and it catches it and you know, it’s hard to test things sometimes. And he mentioned it. There were things that, you know, didn’t break in their testing through many different layers, and it would work.
And then it’s just such a rare case that they, you know, they didn’t identify, but Claude did. So they’re actually like doing better. Um, sorry. Like the humans are doing better. By having like better debugging and error checking and all that kind of stuff. So that, I mean, it all checks out. I mean, people were, people in the AI world, they were making a lot of claims for a long time.
So it’s just like some of the realities maybe catching up to the stories we were hearing. And it’s hard to decipher between the two, which is why I’m always skeptical, right? So if we hear like the AI CEOs saying something, it’s like they’re obviously. I mean, they’re selling things, so it kinda, they need to talk it up, but, and anyway, super interesting.
Improving Game Onboarding
Doug: So can you give us an example of like some of the improvements that you’ve made? So you, you developed this, you went back and forth, you played and you’re like, oh, we could actually do better. I’m sure you got feedback from your friends, you saw how certain things worked. What improvements have you made?
Tony: So I was noticing that people were starting games but they weren’t going to the end because I have like an admin dashboard I built so I could kind of watch what’s happening. And so I had a friend, she’s also an instructor and we’re sitting around and she’s like, alright, show me this game. Show me how to get it going.
’cause I don’t get it. And the, I got to find out what she was thinking and what didn’t make sense to her. And I’m like, alright, I got it. I knew exactly what to change to make it easier to get the game going because, uh, so it’s, it’s, I don’t wanna disrespect her, but you gotta think, can Homer Simpson do it?
Right? Like, like lowest common denominator. Just you want. Grandma to be able to do it right. So you gotta develop and, and work to that level, and then everyone else will get it too. That, that was the biggest kind of takeaway at, at the beginning.
Doug: Interesting. I know my wife likes to come up with like games and activities and stuff, and a more.
I probably get more frustrated than I should when I’m just like, okay. You know, people will figure it out. They’ll just, you know, they’ll talk and bullshit together and it’ll be fine. But I mean, I could appreciate to give a specific activity and I was just thinking it could be interesting to put in, like I’m thinking of her family.
She enjoys to do that with her family specifically, but there’s a bunch of inside jokes, so I’m sure you could probably, you would have to think and create a database of inside jokes and then like integrate those into. The game, or if everybody loves whatever Seinfeld, then you can come up with themes all through Seinfeld, of which, um, sure, I mean, there’s plenty of information in all the episodes or cataloged and all that stuff, so you could just have like Seinfeld references and jokes or South Park or whatever.
And of course if as long, if you’re selling it as just personal use, maybe no one will give you a hard time. But everybody. This is not, uh, legal advice. Seinfeld may come after you, right. But the, um, the idea is sound. You could make these games that are probably fairly straightforward, right? It’s nothing super complicated.
There’s no big hard coding issues you’re gonna run into. It’s just like a database of stuff and then like, if you accomplished it or not. So, okay.
Tony: Great.
Adding Themes Fast
Doug: Anything else, uh, interesting with, on your mark?
Tony: Yeah, I did add some themes. So there’s a office theme and a school theme. I did a Valentine’s Day theme and I coded that.
I added that theme in the car, driving up north to go skiing with a buddy full of my laptop and worked with AI and got that done. Uh, so that’s, that’s what I like, is. Like I get my best ideas when I’m taking a shower, when I’m away from everything. Right. Or with friends mentioned stuff. It’s just fun to just hop on, coat it, get done.
Boom. There it is. That’s cool.
Doug: All right.
Tap Click To Explained
Doug: We’re starting to get to the point where I need to make sure we cover everything. So you kind of have maybe like a micro app strategy and there’s a specific tool. ’cause I was like doing some, um, preparation. There’s a tool called Tap. Click do two. And this solves a specific problem, which I experience often.
And it’s kind of funny ’cause I was like, oh, what is, what is this? And I was like, oh, that actually, that’s a, that solves a problem. So what is this and what does it do? Why, why is it a, a problem that needs to be solved?
Tony: Yeah. So what happened was I was, you know, in, in Instagram watching reels and stuff, and I’m wondering why.
Sometimes it’s staying in the Instagram app, browser app, sometimes opening Safari. So I started asking AI, like, what? What’s up with that? They said, well, explain the technical stuff. And I’m like, okay. But then it brought up points like, well, if people are in their native app on their phone, they’re signed into Google, they have different things already set there.
So that app is. Preferable to the in app browser. So if you code a link a certain way with some code behind it, it’ll pop out of that in in app browser and go to the native browser. Chrome, or Chrome or Safari, whatever you have. So I’m like, okay. So we played around with that. I’m like, this is a great idea.
And I, I didn’t even know this problem existed. I was just. Curious why, why things acted that way. I just have that kind of mind. I wanna know. So we came up with, uh, tap, click to, and I, the only way I’ve figured out I monetize it is just throw some ads in the dashboard. So that’s the only, uh, thing for using it.
But it was like a week or so ago, I’m like, I wonder how many clicks this thing has gotten. So we. Wrote a little script to tally that up and it was over a million. I was like, holy cow.
Doug: Interesting.
Tony: Because I, I would see the side of it, but I’m like, I don’t know, maybe they’re using it, maybe they’re not. Um, and I can see what they’re redirecting to, which is kind of interesting.
Um, as nothing private ’cause they’re giving these links away. But, um. You just wanna see how your app’s being used, but that’s what it does. And if I was doing any, any kind of marketing or my profile links are now all that, or if I was running an ad, I would use that, um, to it. And it’s not, it’s not like Link Tree, it’s just a pass through kind of app.
Doug: And one of the advantages if people aren’t connecting the dots, so let’s say, and this is what happened to me, right? So I saw an ad for whatever, like a pencil. Which is not a real example, but I saw an ad for like a pencil or maybe even like native content that popped up and I was like, oh, interesting. I click and I’m like, oh, how much are these pencils?
And I’m in the browser for Instagram, which is okay, but a lot of times I’m like, I, I wanna click around and they take up a little room on the screen. Inherently, I don’t like Instagram or any, any of these social media apps, even though I use them like everyone else almost. Um, so I’m like open and I have to take action.
I have to click the little, um, dot, dot, dot open and external browser, and then it sends me over there and this, um, tap, click dot two or TO. It does that for you. So it creates a link. So that’s what the link will be instead of me clicking and then it opens the browser inside Instagram, I would click the link and then it opens externally.
And one of the big advantages is like, um, I’m logged into Google, cookies are set. So if you’re running ads as a business, then you have that tracking built in. Is that, did I catch that right?
Tony: Yep, exactly right. And then for me, I use the open and external, like I might wanna look at this later, but I want to keep.
Being in Instagram,
Doug: right? Yep. Okay. Yeah. Very good. And again, it’s like a, a micro, um, little problem, but could be an important one for certain businesses and. Yeah. Again, especially if they’re running ads and they want like the tracking and the cookies and all that stuff, like, it gives you visibility versus, you know, you may lose that inside Instagram.
’cause obviously Meta doesn’t want to give any data away to anyone. They just want to take every, take everything. Yeah. So,
Tony: yep, yep, yep.
Doug: Okay.
SEO Rank Tracking Tool
Doug: What, what’s another tool that you’ve done?
Tony: Here’s the SEO one. Um. Top 100 serps.com, and what that’ll do is it’ll give you the real ranking of a keyword.
So, you know, in Google right now, your, your results are based or influenced by your search history, right? So for anyone in SEO, they want to find out the real ranking. You can use VPN, that’s what my team does. But I connected with a data source and with that we can give the real ranking of a, a keyword. So it’s, you get better tracking of rankings and so forth.
Doug: Got it. Well, and it’s a great, um. A great example of a tool. ’cause I was gonna say, as soon as I got started with anything online, I learned about some sort of rank tracking and the limitations you have by trying to check it on your own. And I know that was one of the most common tools that I used is some sort of rank tracking sometimes or standalone, which it sounds like that’s what kind of you are creating, but.
I know those are often integrated within more sophisticated suites of tools like SEMrush or hres. There’s always some sort of rank tracking that you wanna pay attention to, and you could make your own now essentially. So.
Hosting and Tech Stack
Doug: One other thing I wanted to ask, you mentioned, um, I’m going back to the game. So it’s on a web browser, it runs off a browser.
Where do you host that? How do you manage that portion of it?
Tony: Honestly, it’s, it’s shared hosting. Right now. I have another server I can use. If I start seeing a lot more traffic to those, I can, um, bump them up to a heftier server, but. If it’s just on kind of shared hosting. Um, so it’s pretty accessible. Um, yeah, nothing too special.
Doug: Is it, um, is it WordPress like a lot of people are familiar with, or do you It’s like a custom thing, so you just up, like what do you do? Like, I don’t even know the mechanism.
Tony: Okay. So yeah, PHP scripts is what most of it is. Tap, click. I tried. Um. Doing that one, using a word, made it a WordPress plugin. Now it runs in there and basically made it a WordPress site, a SaaS and, uh, advantage there is, it’s really easy to do blog posts and add content to it to help help the site grow.
Doug: Okay, so for like, for the game, you could just install the files and it’s just like running on a page and. Like you don’t, you don’t need the database. I mean, WordPress is like a blog format. It’s like way more complicated than it needs to be. So I can understand. If you could strip away like all the BS of WordPress, then you just have like a lean situation where it’s just PPHP text execute.
Tony: Right. So it’s just PHP files. Yep. That’s what runs on your mark.
Doug: Okay.
Tony: Simple with that database behind it.
Doug: Got it. Okay.
Advice and Tool Picks
Doug: So as we’re wrapping up here. I want to, I wanna give people some inspiration. Do you have some advice for people that wanna, you know, check it out? Maybe they have a little idea, a little problem in, in their life or in their business where they want to try and solve it and maybe they don’t have a coding background.
Tony: Just try it. I mean, what, what’s it gonna hurt? You’re gonna learn something. Maybe one in 10 things you do is actually gonna get traction. But I’ll just build tools for myself. I built an in Image minimizer website and just ’cause I didn’t like the ones out there, I kind of wanted my own, but just get an idea and just try it.
See how far you get. Um, you can get a lot of help online. You probably find some people that you know that are into it that could help you. But, um, a lot of it’s. Really happening in the background. A lot of the technical stuff has been pushed way back with vibe coding. So, um, now’s, uh, probably the best time ever to take an idea and get it into production.
Doug: Which tool would you recommend people start with you? You talked about using chat, GPT, but I know, um, lovable and anti-gravity and a lot of people are using Claude for more, maybe bigger problems, although Claude could obviously do other smaller problems, but which do you recommend from an ease of use standpoint for a beginner?
Tony: I started on Bolt and then I went to. Um, lovable antigravity is good ’cause you can see all the code and everything. So I like, I like that one quite a bit. The clawed version or a, the chat GPT version is good. I set up clawed code the other day that runs into terminal, you know, so that’s probably a little intimidating to people, not to have a nice kind of shiny interface.
It’s, it’s pretty cool. Um, so I would probably suggest, uh, lovable at this point.
Doug: Give
Tony: it a shot that, that could change. Yeah.
Doug: Alright.
Next Apps and AI Readiness
Doug: And before we let people know where they could find you and connect and all that stuff, do you have any apps or ideas that are coming up that you’re gonna work on, say, like in the next few months or something like that?
What’s on your mind?
Tony: Always, I probably have gotten started. Um, um, well a big one is, um, that I had trouble, I probably coded for three, four months last year. Had trouble launching it. Um, was, uh, helps you find the key words for a website and what you should focus your content on called Rank Check and a Rank Check Pro.
So that one, like, it’s kind of like coders get writer’s block sometimes you keep thinking about something, you’re like, I don’t wanna mess with that. And, and it’s kind of hard to get into things sometimes it, but it you to start taking the first few steps, you’re like, that’s all gone. You’re into it. So I gotta do that.
And then another one has to do with AI readiness, which is a very big thing for. Any business out there where I’m seeing, you know, Claude Bot as a AI assistant, go to websites, book appointments, get quotes, do all these things on its own, and sometimes that’s through email with the business owner or whoever’s responding.
But right now a website needs to be able to handle AI assistance coming to it. It has to say exactly. What they do, how they do it, who it’s for, process, give pricing. Like that used to be something that a lot of companies to hold back, no. Contact us and get, get a price. Right. I think all that’s going out the window.
If you’re not, if super transparent now with what you do and your pricing and everything, you’re gonna get left behind, you know?
Doug: Interesting.
Tony: So what that. Go ahead.
Doug: Oh, it just, it, that’s like not something I was thinking about. ’cause I don’t use any, um, AI assistance like we were talking about, but a lot of people are testing it out and like that’s sort of the cutting edge.
And as those. It become developed in maybe something where I would want to use it, where I’m like, oh, actually this does save a lot of time. A lot of the kinks are worked out ’cause I don’t wanna fuck around with all this stuff. Right? Like I don’t trust it and I don’t have an interest in like figuring out the debugging portion, but other people do and that’s great.
But like once it’s adopted, then yes, like you’re saying, the businesses will need to be able to, um, like give the right information. So great, great idea.
Tony: Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s in a rustic stage right now and people are using it, but it’s, that’s the biggest thing that’s happened this year, and I think within a couple months, you know, it’ll, that’ll be serious.
That’ll be other things out there. It’ll just go and do it for you. So businesses have to get ready for that and. A lot of it is just putting as much information about your company as you can on your website.
Doug: Mm-hmm. Interesting.
Where to Find Tony
Doug: All right, Tony, this has been pretty fun, and I want you to let folks know where to find you, and I know you’ve listed some of the projects and we’ve talked about the projects you’re working on.
So yeah, just where do you want people to go, and I’ll link all this in the description so people can get to it. You don’t have to write it down if you’re driving in your car or whatever, but yeah, what do you have going on out there?
Tony: Sure. Yeah. My main site is tony herman.com. H-E-R-M-A-N. Please go try on your app, on your mark.app.
’cause I want to see more people playing it and try to make it better. So probably those two.
Doug: Very good. Awesome. Tony, thanks a lot and, uh, looking forward to see what you’re working on in the future. Thanks.
Tony: All right, thanks Doug.