Building Trust in the AI Era | Amit Zandberg

Speaker A: Welcome to Building Better Developers, the develop and grow podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back. We are continuing season 28 and we are Building Better Developers, the developer podcast. Actually, let's say we're develop the Building Better Developers podcast because people have so much trouble with developer, so we're just giving that up. I think we're just like, although I love the little, like, you know, we have like a nice little icon and stuff like that. And I still think this is a word that's going to catch because I think as we get more into AI and people being able to use AI with their developer skills to very quickly spin up entire organizations, um, sometimes AI slop, sometimes not. Uh, I think we're going to see the developador become more of a thing. Uh, so you heard it here first, but more importantly, you've probably heard it from me first, but you're going to hear it again. I'm Rob Brodhead, one of the founders of Developer nor better known as Building Better Developers. And, uh, I am also the founder of RB Consulting, where we help you find clarity, we help you avoid organizational drag, so you avoid expensive technology mistakes before they happen, get your investment right and make sure that you're not yet another statistic. Good thing and bad thing. Good thing is, oh, gosh, this is a challenge because we've got so many good things. But good thing for me is travel is being able to like, I am, I am in a season of life that I am very regularly out there doing different stuff, exploring the world, seeing all kinds of cool stuff. And, uh, I'm looking at you, everybody in the world. There's a lot of cool stuff out there with you. So, uh, if you ever get a chance, just like check places out, check out the stories and things like that. Uh, bad news is there are some areas of the world that the stories are just really emotionally heavy and not the happiest his thing. It's like the world is not full of happy endings. There are some people in places and things that have gone through some stuff we'll say. And, um, you know, it's like your heart bleeds and stuff like that. Sometimes it's going to be a little tough, but it's always good to know, you know, there's good knowledge and bad knowledge out there, I guess. But, uh, it's the things that you can't unsee. Um, but you can unsee Michael. You can just hit pause or something like that, but you can't unhear the incredible introduction he's about to give.

Speaker B: Thanks, Rob. Hey, uh, everyone, my name is Michael Melaj. I'm one of the co founders of Building Better Developers, also known as Developer Nerd. I'm also the founder of Envision QA where we work with businesses to assess their systems, identify what's slowing them down and guide you towards the right solution Instead of guessing or over building too many times, businesses are struggling, especially in the world of AI. That's where we come in. Good uh, thing, bad thing. Um, still Tennessee weather. It's horrible, unpredictable. That's the bad thing, uh, good thing. Moving on, on some projects, getting into some other things and uh, looking forward to uh, some new ideas I'm trying to flesh out for Q4.

Speaker A: Uh, yes, Q4 is almost upon us as we are recording this. But what definitely is upon us is part two of this episode. So we are going to pick up right where we left off, part two of our interview with am. So you've got a, it sounds like you've got a pretty wide range of places uh, that you're, you're doing reviews for in that how do you, do you have you guys built uh, like um, you know some sort of metrics or scoring system or something like that that you have internally to help you. Uh, once you, once you get all of the AI summarized reviews, do you have a way to um, I guess we'll start to say score or rank uh reviews so that you have something that's useful to the users so that you can compare, uh, do a direct compare from mentor A and mentor B. Or is it really more. Are you really relying more on the human side of reviews saying like this guy's great or this guy's not that great.

Speaker C: Yeah in the end of the day it's like a marketplace. So you want to get into all part and then you search for the first and you want to find it by any other category. It can be like store, it can be like rice, it can be you know many those things actually you can also choose learning so much better experience. But mostly it's by score and price. So what we do when you living with me, there are some parameters that you are working by and you know quality of the mentor. Enjoy the process of learning results and you give a great one to try for each one. And from this you get like any, your review is like get average of 1 to 5 by all data that you tell us and we of course aggregate it with all ah the other users in order to get the Open score which is 1 to 5.

Speaker A: So now how much. How far back to you uh, is there like uh, how do you get all of the data? Is there something where you've gone back or you do have, so you try to keep it to sites that have you know, over 100 reviews or something like that. How do you handle the situations where you know some of these places are just starting and they have very minimal, you know reviews that are on a, like a trust um, pilot or one of those kinds of sites? Um, do you, are you scouring and scraping all these trust sites to get it or are you generating your own uh, review data from select sites?

Speaker C: So we have a couple of reasons, a couple of network because it's really spread and there is no such place that you know, concentrate all the things. So the first thing is we wanted to focus on um, controversial mentors. Not on a mentor that everyone is saying he's good also on them. But we wanted to be controversial to help people to decide whether this mentor is good or not and they can really save people from. And what we did is we took those mentors and of course also other good mentor because we also wanted to recommend good mentors, the city leader group because we after a lot of people give us a streams. So and then we took the reviews from class dialogue and from the students and community and forums and reportable students and we just tried to outwe them like from few months we just try to outweigh them like crazy until we got it.

Speaker A: Now how do you. This is a wide problem. This is one of those. There's a, you know, it's a very broad uh, area to start with and we always talk about you know, niching down and niching down a little bit and how did you. How do you keep this from just being a. Or is it. Or is your goal to be a, you know a review of any kind of review that's out there or have you started with smaller uh, bite sized chunks like maybe specific types of mentors or specific types of courses.

Speaker C: So let's say for process if you say an online course we have, we have a lot of things that can come up. There is like a udemy course which is like $9 and mostly like a presentation or something like that. There is an online course for by institute or something like that. And dollar mentors like creator made education people who are posting content and then want to teach you more about their expertise. So that was our focus. Our main focus is to focus on let's say online courses that are created by mentors and by definition for mentors is someone who is posting content and he's the face of his company and you are learning directly from him, not by his students, not by any other place to him.

Speaker B: So it's interesting. So uh, you know you're still talking broad that you're kind of pulling in a lot of information. How do you go find this information? I mean there's. Are you regional specific? Are you just looking all over? Because I mean there is a lot of information out there good and bad. And as Rob mentioned before, some of these startups, uh, or some of these instructors or coaches use tools like Udemy, use tools like Teachable that may just be getting started and they don't have a lot out there. How do you define quality? You go find these um, reviews, go find these you know, classes and such.

Speaker C: So we started by getting the information about the class and about the course. So we try to really focus on very, very objective data. For example what you're going to learn about the creator, uh, frequently asked questions, things that there is no way to translate them into this way or uh, this way. Those are just objectively facts. And from then we started to first research his review. Every mentor almost have like his own testimonial page. When people are leaving review, we treat what feels real from there also they, a lot of them have Trust, Pilot or any other things like that. We pick up reads from there and a lot of them have like community or Reddit focused me or something like that. People are talking about them. So we researched those topic and we asked people about what they think about him and him and him in order to understand whether it's good or not.

Speaker B: So when you're doing this research, um, you're looking at these sites, you're looking at these people. Are you also looking. You uh mentioned you're validating that their emails are valid, uh, things along those lines. Are you also going out and looking at social media like LinkedIn, Facebook to see if they have an active presence there as well or is it just all focused on an online like website or Udemy or some type? Of course.

Speaker C: You mean for the course creator? Yes, for the course creator. We I think entirely focus on creator which means they are posting on Instagram, um, they are posting on LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, places like that. And we put those people because on you and you have with me and from you to me also you have no ticket courses. We wanted to focus on the high ticket process that people really, really need refuse in order to decide.

Speaker B: Gotcha. So you go from the social media to finding uh, the mentors there.

Speaker C: Exactly.

Speaker B: Gotcha. I thought it was the other way around. That's where I was confused.

Speaker C: That's connected to the other question that we are not very broad because we are focused mainly on the content, um, creators, social media guru.

Speaker B: Gotcha. Okay, that was my disconnect. Sorry, I had it backwards. I thought you were doing it the other way. All right, that makes more sense. So, uh, how are you going out and you're doing this, you're building this database, you're building these reviews. Are you building kind of a mentor selector? Like someone could come in and search for like, hey, I need someone for this type of course, like say Java development. And it's going to say, hey, here's all your Java, uh, developer coaches, uh, and courses. Or is it more of a community where you come in and say, hey, I'm looking for this. And then you get feedback from everyone on the site and here are all the reviews and things of that nature. I'm curious how the user experience is.

Speaker C: No, the first one, it's operating like marketplace, let's say Yelp. It is like we are the Yelp for online process or uh, online creator application.

Speaker B: Nice. Um, so one more and I'll pass it back to Europe. Um, so with this online experience that you have, um, are you currently focused for all media? Is it just web? And with that, are you also plugged into AI tools? So if I were using ChatGPT, um, anthropology, any of the AI tools, if they were to say, hey, um, go look at this site and find me these things, will it be able to go search you or are you blocked from the AI tools from being able to utilize your site to pull in information?

Speaker C: Yeah, so of course web, because people will look into Google or something like that and they want to find those use. And about the AI, of course, I think it's like we talk earlier about the. The AI overview is depressing my traffic. So I think that the AO or GEO or whatever you want to call it are the next thing. And we work really hard in order to then take the data. You know, for example, when someone we look for this method of views, we work really hard to make sure the data the AI engine is taking is from us. And in that case when someone will to know more. I was similar with this. We will go into from the ChatGPT, he will offer him to go into all those and find us and find the reviews and that's. Are we giving the Value for the user.

Speaker A: Uh now do you One of the things that's really key in a situation like this, a system like this is building trust. Do you have when people are looking at reviews and looking at on your site for reviews, do you have um, backlinks to like where it comes from? Can they see where the sources came from so they could actually go back and even look maybe at the the original reviews.

Speaker C: So no, we didn't do it because what I'm trying to do is we're trying to do the place of the trust. So our promise is to make sure the review on offer are the real one and we are not taken from M anywhere else that can be manipulated or um, maybe the mentor can ask for review or take the review or anything like that. You don't trust me. So we always add what you trust and we make sure sure that the added is trustable and because we want to be this source.

Speaker A: So what do you do? Because this is again where it starts getting really challenging. So how do you. What are the steps you're taking to build trust with your uh, with your customers, with the people that you the users for your site?

Speaker C: M. So I think the first and obvious thing is don't make sure there are not mistakes in the mentor rating. It mean making sure that let's say a mentor is not taking this reviews and you see like a super controversial mentor with 300 reviews and all of them are five. It's. It's the question of a plus because obviously it's fake and obviously probably ask his close is lo spend um only in So I think the first thing and the other one is more I think you know, like marketing. That's how the product it's this marketing thing. But when we want to hit the real trader and not with the fake one and we given our value and with credit and people are talking and people got value and of course I think the most important thing for us is when someone is using all those and the tools shows is really good. This is like a marketing asset that talk about us and talk about our health team and build our price over time.

Speaker A: Now how do you. Yeah, because this is another one. So over time you'll have reviews that will be um. You know, sometimes they'll ebb and flow. They'll be very good, they'll be very bad. But then also you have reviews that go out and then maybe they get you know pulled back off the site or things like that. And then of course if you're summarizing along the way you can lose some of that data. So how do you um, how do you keep intact that original core data and make sure that you don't lose too much in translation, particularly from that AI summary piece where you're sort of taking them, summarizing and then passing them on. How do you ensure that AI doesn't cut too much out of it?

Speaker C: So I think that's more in the content engineering and the field that you are giving him. You know, as long as you have more field, the data on each field will be more accurate as long as it's not too much. And then you need to, you know, to create on its own. So that's the first thing. And we also trying to do that to make sure is because we give the length of the option to improved and let's say you got bad reviews and then you decided to switch your product and get it better. What we are doing is we taking Only the last 100 inclusive to or um, the reviews for your past year. It mean if you, the reviews on your site are before, you know the, it's the first one and now we got 500 reviews and the first one was like three years ago. It's still not the time.

Speaker A: Um, so you do try to do a uh, uh, a weighted kind of approach to it essentially where the more, you know, more the recent counts more than the past.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. Because you know you can always improve on the online course. It's not like a hard product to build. You can just decide that if you want to take it out there and you can and we want to give conf. And also to the student defense the whole process and we don't want them to miss opportunities like that.

Speaker B: And that makes sense. One of the interesting things you're talking about here, you're trying to um, become kind of the go to place the gold star for these um, mentors and these for your students and these reviews. But how are you going to stand out? How are you going to ensure the quality of your reviews that they aren't going to become. Everyone's going to look at them and say oh, this is just AI. How are you going to ensure the quality of this and basically get the trust of the students, the people coming to your site that what they're reading is really a real review, especially if you don't have link backs to the original messages.

Speaker C: So I think it's going back to the job of building like a great product that makes sure the reviews are possible and from there on um, the rest will follow because once you got three reviews. And once you get a system that knows to detect the review detector, the bad reviews, make sure no one can fake it, no one can do what you want. So once you get that, the product is just leaving it and the product will make it count.

Speaker B: So do you have any concerns that in three months, six months, that someone else could use AI and literally copy your site and spin up something similar, literally stealing your data and basically saying, hey, come to my site. It's better than yours.

Speaker C: You always can do it. You can also do it for other places like ebay, but it will not help you so much because salespeople will not cost you. The second you got the supply and you got the demand, which means people are checking you. And of course the uh, Google authority from, from your, you know, if you, if you copy my content, Google will not give you the quality like I am, and it's affecting me. And from the other side, the creators are working with me. And a lot of creators want to get rated and want to show the group is great with the people. And as long as they, uh, are doing it politely, they want to work with me and they want to use my site as a marketing group.

Speaker B: Excellent. Now I got, um, a couple other questions for you. So one, what is the biggest challenge that you see? I guess we're almost into Q4, but what is the biggest challenge that you see for the remainder of the year in getting your business out there, growing your business and getting people to your site?

Speaker C: Um, I think two things. And one is just increasing the distribution, just getting more people to find you on Google, get more creators to use all those to their own business, just building the distribution. And other thing is making sure the AI does not beat the SEO. And I really wish that, you know, all the news about AI is eating SEO, AI is ruining Google. Something like that will not be true. I, I believe they will not be true. That's why I'm in this business. But you know, sometimes you might be wrong. So that is one challenge. And even if this is challenge, we will, we will make sure to overcome it. And I'm sure that there will be some ways to business, even if it's from like AOGO or press or I don't. Now.

Speaker B: So we talked about this year where what is the next thing or the next feature or what is the direction that you want to take your company going into the next year, two years, three years, with the knowledge that AI is advancing very quickly. Things are changing. The whole Internet is changing the way we do things. Online, especially around AI. What challenges do you see in your future and how do you plan to grow your business over the next few years?

Speaker C: So the side of being in Google and being the first on Google and focusing on it. I also focus on getting a guy to use my data as the go to. So anyone is looking for tools or for uh, reliable tools or for reviews for specific mentor. My goal is to make the ChatGPT Cloud take the data for me and recommend it to other people because now if you can beat them, join them and that's why they, they will use my data and this is huge advantage because there is like a huge load of ChatGPT only recommended courses from all post and it's valuable for everyone who's using whether it's user or creators.

Speaker A: New butts can be challenging these days. That's uh, I mean that's uh, I love your idea of you know, if you can't beat them, join them is it. And that's a good, I think that's always a great long term strategy is to try to get to a point where you're, you are the source of, of data. Um, you know gathering that and getting trust in it obviously is always going to be the, that's the hurdle but then once you've got it um, it's worth it to uh, other organizations and to start sort of working off of you a la trust pilot in some of those that have become very well known because they did it right long enough. Um, so it takes a little time to do that but um, it also takes a little time for us to have an episode and since we're running out of time, uh, I want to say thank you for your time and appreciate you for hanging out with us. What is you know, if somebody's been curious about your site, um, or just curious about uh, what you do and how you do it, what's the best ways for them to get a hold of you.

Speaker C: So always I'm on all posts that I own and if anyone want to talk with me, get in touch with me, you can always get into my LinkedIn or my ex LinkedIn. That's where I am. I think I'm the only Amigan in the world so you will find me excellent.

Speaker A: And we will make sure that we have uh, links in the show notes for those um, so those of you guys are listening so you don't have to like you know pull over or you know accidentally crash while you're trying to take notes of these things.

Speaker C: So.

Speaker A: Well thank you so much for your time and hanging out. For those of you who are listening, uh, thank you for hanging out and be working on your becoming better developer skills uh today. Uh, this is definitely one of those that it's a it's always interesting to talk about a startup and launching a business and some of the challenges that are there. Particularly, uh, because it always does come back to what's the problem you're solving and how do you make sure that you do it in a way that is repeatable and in this case trustable. Uh, so hopefully these are some good questions for you to ponder with whatever your latest side hustle is and um, best of luck with it and let us know if you have any questions uh, that we can help you out. As always though, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week and we will talk to you next time. This was sponsored by RB Consulting, your partner in building smarter scalable tech. From startups to established teams, RV Consulting helps you turn tech chaos into clarity with proven roadmaps and hands on expertise. Visit rb-sns.com to start your next step forward. Also sponsored by Envision, they help businesses take control of their software by focusing on what matters most quality, reliability and support you can count on. Find out more@envisionqa.com thanks for tuning in to the Developinor podcast where we're all about building better developers and better careers. I'd love to hear your thoughts or feedback, so drop A note to infodevelop.com be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube or wherever you listen. And remember, a little bit of effort every day adds up to a great success. Keep learning, keep growing and we'll see you in the next episode.