How to Build Trust with your Email Subscribers with Aaron Randhawa

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Hey there, welcome back to another episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I'm Anne from the Food Blogger Pro team, and this week Aaron Randawa joins Bjork to explain the different processes behind the Forked Spoon, where Aaron manages technical operations so his wife Jessica can focus on what she loves most: recipes, photography, and creative work. They'll talk They talk about how email infrastructure can play a huge role in protecting a creator's brand and improving deliverability, as well as the lengthy process of earning a verified logo in email. The conversation also explores the outcomes of Aaron's changes, how AI has improved business workflows, and the freedom that comes with outsourcing your weaknesses. From email performance to accounting opportunities, Aaron and Björk share practical ways creators can use technology and expert support to build a more resilient business. And now, without further ado, I'll let Björk take it away.

Aaron, welcome to the podcast. Yeah, great to be here, Björk. Last time we were chatting around a dinner table, we were at a Raptive event and connected. And one of the things I love about any conference, any event, is you're able to connect with people who you normally wouldn't when you're kind of out and about in your daily life, even digital life. And it was fun to be able to connect with you and your wife, Jessica, to have a conversation around the great work that you guys are doing and then to be able to share a conversation now on the podcast. So before we get into some of the specifics, some things that even just in reading some of the notes that you sent over, I'm going to be learning. So I'm going to have some questions about some email tactics that you're using, some AI tools that you're using. But before we get into that, talk a little bit about what your role looks like, how you guys kind of divide up the work that you're doing, because I think it's always interesting for people to hear. what that looks like. So within the context of, uh, you know, the work that you two are doing together, um, on The Forked Spoon, what does your role look like?

Yeah, so there's a kind of a clear separation of powers with us. Uh, Jessica, I make sure that she focuses on being the, uh, the best creator that she can be. Um, so for me, that, uh, that means removing any distractions or anything where it is taking away from her, you know, creating great recipes, creating great content, making sure photos are dialed in, testing recipes. So I try to take away all the technical stuff, all the operations from there to really let her focus.

Yeah, it's one of the things that we often see. It's oftentimes it's married partnership, husband and wife, or another partner will take on the technical, whereas the other partner will take on the more creative. We've also seen it with parent-child, seen it with siblings, where somebody plays the role of creator, and that's what they really love, that's what they're really good at.

Yeah.

And then somebody else kind of fills in with the technical considerations. I think one thing that's important to point out for somebody listening and they're like, I love creating, but I feel like I have to do the technical stuff because I don't have somebody, maybe not in a relationship or are in a relationship and that person isn't somebody who would be technical in that way or has another role or has another job. Do you have any thoughts around how to find somebody who would be a good fit for that person who is a creator who wants to have somebody who's essentially doing what you're doing? And even like, how would they go about framing that up to find the right person to fill that role? Like, what are the characteristics that you'd need for somebody to fill in that role?

Yeah, I would definitely focus on vetted lists of people. So I think a good place to start would be like through Blogger Pro. You guys utilize, or a lot of the people that you recommend are, I don't know, companies and individuals that we use and have been using for years. Like, Like Casey Marquis, we've had 4 audits with him, so he's a genius, he's a savant. Everything he says is just Google gold. You know, Andrew and the NerdPress team, I know they've been on quite a few times. Yeah, it's, they're amazing at what they do. They're on the bleeding edge of everything you need to do in Cloudflare to, you know, be on top of it. So, Definitely start with a good resource like Food Blogger Pro.

That's great. Yeah, it's a really good point. And I think about it within the context of home stuff, which is obviously very different. But one of the thoughts I had is like, man, we have all of this stuff that we need to get done. I feel behind on stuff all the time. How am I going to figure this out? Who am I going to have that's going to be able to do that? And it's so, sounds so obvious, but the conclusion that I came to is like, oh, I can't find like one person to do all this. I need to find the people that have an expertise that are my go-to for like plumbing and gardening and, um, you know, like dry, who's my drywall guy? We had to like cut a, we had a leak above our office and we had to like cut something, a piece of the ceiling out. Now, for 5 months, we've just had like this hole in our ceiling after the plumbing got fixed. But I think it also applies within the context of business where, okay, if you have this issue, if you have a problem, who are you gonna go to to fix that specific thing? And what you said is great, which is like, we have these people that we know of that have developed businesses with this narrow expertise, SEO, you talked about Casey.

Yeah.

Site maintenance, upkeep, site speed, Andrew and the NerdPress team, like they're really good at that. I love that idea of kind of building out your team. necessarily W-2 or even 1099 type roles. It's more of like vendors that you can go to. And I think about us as creators and creative business owners being super routers. Okay. If something comes in about Google Workspace, okay, who are you going to go to that's going to be the person that's going to answer that? Who's the vendor you're going to go to? Increasingly, and we're going to talk about this related to some of the things you've been working on, I think it can be AI. Like AI is getting really good at becoming an expertise for me as an example around like some of the things we're going to talk about with email, like DMARC and like deliverability and things like that. But I think increasingly I find it important to have a human in the loop expert who also is then using AI to be that expert. So, um, love that. I think it's important to point out. Um, we're going to talk about some of those technical things that you've gotten really good at, uh, through the years in order to get The Fork Spoon to, you said comfortable sharing with us, 2 million page views, which is amazing a month, hundreds of thousands of followers across multiple platforms. You've launched a membership component for an ad-free experience. But the thing I want to start with that was new to me is actually email. I know that you've been focusing on email a lot. We hear people talking about email a lot. You recently went on this long-running project, long-running journey with a partner of yours named ChatGPT, um, to figure out how to do something really unique within email around branding and logo and images. Tell me about what that is and even like how you discovered that this was a possibility.

Yeah. So I think it probably started, um, maybe 2 years ago, maybe a year and a half ago. I, uh, noticed in Gmail, just on the app in my phone, That, uh, I think maybe I placed an order with, uh, Best Buy. All of a sudden I noticed that they had like a blue checkmark and they were verified and their logo came in on my email, but they weren't a contact. So I was wondering why, when I'm looking at my inbox, they got a logo and they had a blue checkmark. So I started digging into that. Um, and if you actually click on the blue checkmark, it just kind of sent me down a rabbit hole telling me what, uh, What it is, how they got it. Yeah, kind of long story short, it's a process called Verified Mark Certification, VMC, and BIMI. That's another acronym. I'm blanking on what it is now, but—

Brand Indicators for Message Identification. I can't believe you didn't just have that sitting in your brain. Yeah.

So, Started talking to Chat a bit about that and yeah, even started talking to some other email experts in the industry and it was so new and cutting edge that they hadn't even heard about it yet. So I figured since it was that new, I should probably dig into it and see what it looks like to implement that since at the time we We were transitioning from Mediavine to Raptive, and Raptive helped us get really dialed in on Kit. And we were seeing the returns already from what Raptive was helping us with Kit, just our click-throughs were going up. So I figured I'd build on that.

Yeah. Can you talk about, before we get into some of the specifics of BIMI and VMC, what were some of the things that you did with email that, you know, you talked about implementing some things and you saw a return from that. What were those things? What were the things that you're doing that were most beneficial as you focused on email more?

Yeah, so with email, it was, there's a lot of things that helped out, but yeah, getting your DMARC, which is process you want to, you gotta have SPF records and What's the other one? DKIM. You also have to have those really set up well in order to get DMARC. So that way, email providers like Gmail and Yahoo and Outlook and wherever it's going, it's, it can verify that it's coming from you and your domain compared to somebody else spoofing you. So getting DMARC set up was one of the things I worked out with chat, obviously not on instant, but putting it on like higher reasoning to make sure I got it, uh, uh, done right. Um, but yeah, kind of building up your DMARC, going from, uh, where you start from, uh, none to, uh, getting it all the way up to, I believe it's reject, which means if it's not hitting, um, the, uh, if it's not coming from your IP, basically it's going, it's not even being accepted. It's not going to the spam folder, but it's, it's gone. So they won't accept it. So it's just part of kind of email health in general.

I just went through a, Yeah, I went through a process. We have like multiple different domains, um, and they're all kind of scattered around in terms of where they were for SPF and DKIM and then DMARC. But I, you know, a lot of acronyms, but essentially what you're trying to do here, specifically with DMARC, to paint the picture for people, um, is, again, this is, nobody will be quizzed on this after. But just for context, domain-based, so essentially pinchofyum.com, theforkedspoon.com, that's the domain. The domain-based message authentication reporting and conformance, that's what DMARC stands for. So essentially it's like verifying, this is how I think of it, verifying that when you send an email from any of the platforms you send email, that you are verified to send that email. So that's what DMARC is doing. And SPF and DKIM, are the records that allow you to verify. And, um, so as we kind of work through that tree, DMARC is like that process. SPF and DKIM are the ways that you do that verification. Um, and then the thing that you point out is important because there's 3 levels, the policy, you know, when you're implementing these, um, none, Then quarantine and then reject. And I'm going to paint the picture here. Tell me if this is how you understand it as well, that what can happen, uh, the best case scenario is that you implement this and anytime you send an email, it goes through and it's fine. Whether you're sending it from Kit, whether you're sending it as like a transactional email from your website, like if somebody comments and there's some follow-up that happens, whether you're sending it from like a Google Workspace account. Right. So like bjork@pinchofyum.com, those go through okay. Let's say somebody tries to spoof it and they try and send something on behalf of pinchofyum.com, then if it's set to reject, it just automatically, it doesn't even show up in somebody's inbox. It doesn't even go into spam. If it was in quarantine, it would go into spam. And so essentially what you're doing is you're limiting people from being able to pretend that it's you. But the reason you have those different levels is because when you first start to implement it, you want to monitor it to make sure that all of the different places you're sending email from, which are multiple different places, it's your, you know, I just listed them off, but like Kit, but maybe you have, um, you know, some other email service provider you're sending them from. You want to make sure that all of those are being reported and then you can sign up to actually get reports to see. Yeah. where emails are being sent from. Are, do you get those reports? Is that something that you get? And are you reviewing those?

I did. And I didn't realize how many reports I'd get. Yeah. When you turn it on and maybe you've had a similar experience, but all of a sudden, you know, if your list, you have, you know, hundreds of thousands of people on it going from Kit, then you're going to get a report from every single one of those servers. With what happened to those emails, if they came in or not. So when you're first starting out, one thing you can do is you can download those reports and throw it in a chat and

ask,

how's it going? Yep. But another thing that just came out pretty recently is Cloudflare has a DMARC management tool. So you can actually Uh, plug it in to have Cloudflare receive all those reports and they put it into a nice beautiful dashboard for you.

Yeah, that's great. Um, for anybody who's, this is getting nerdy, but I think it's important. This is why we're here. Um, for anybody who has turned those on, essentially it's this automated process where like the server will send it back and be like, here's the update on the DMARC. Um, you know, what got through, what didn't get through, super hard to read. Really. It's not like, You'd look at it and understand. So you need a tool to interpret it. I didn't know about Cloudflare. We use one from ActiveCampaign that's free called DMARC Digest, which sends like a weekly email, kind of similar idea. I think you have to pay if you want the dashboard version of it. But yeah, at this point we have all of our accounts set up. So there's SPF and DKIM. Mm-hmm. And That they're all set to reject. And so if anybody tries to spoof on our behalf, you know, email on our behalf, then it doesn't even end up in spam. It just gets thrown out. But the idea is over time, did you do this where you start at none and then you kind of monitor to see, okay, are we sending from somewhere that we didn't think of that we need to add SPF and DKIM records to verify? And then you go to reject and, or then you go to quarantine and then you go to reject.

Mm-hmm.

And reject is like the safest version, but you kind of work your way up there. Is that how you did it? As well?

We are still on the quarantine.

Which means it goes into spam.

Yeah, goes into spam. So as of even, I think like yesterday, the last time I looked, everything that we are sending is going through, but there are, you probably see it too, there's some forwarding that happens as well. So if somebody has, say, a Gmail account, but then is going into Outlook is being forwarded to Yahoo, and then some of those credentials can break along the way.

Sure.

So, um, at the end of the day, I mean, similar to you, we're trying to get, uh, you know, the most amount of eyeballs on emails as possible. So I haven't gone fully to reject yet, but it's definitely something I'm looking at implementing. Yeah. Just wanna make sure that those forwarding doesn't,

uh, break

it. Yeah. Break it.

That makes sense. I should look into that. I think that, um, I haven't done a super deep dive. I think that some of these, um, DMARC digest emails include information on forwarding, but I haven't looked at like, uh, does that break on occasion? It would be a really good thing to look into so I can make a little footnote of that. Um, so that's a really important takeaway, um, for people and, uh, you know, to the conversation we've had, ChatGPT, Claude, 5.5 Opus just came out. It's really good. All these tools are going to be really great partners in kind of trying to figure out, even for you to understand, what is your— do you have an SPF record? Do you have DKIM? Do you have, you know, all of this stuff set up? You could even just give it the transcript from this podcast and say, I'm trying to figure out if I have this set up, can you help me kind of figure that out? It sounds like that's a little bit of what you did with the B-I-M-I and the VMC where you notice this, you observed, you were like, wait, Best Buy, how do they get a logo? Like if they can get a logo, we can probably get a logo. And like this blue checkmark, there's kind of a trust thing there across the internet, um, where if you have a blue checkmark on social media, anywhere else, automatically people are going to trust it more. than not having one and used ChatGPT to kind of go through this process of figuring out how you can actually do that for The Forked Spoon, eventually getting to a point where my guess is now when you send an email, it includes the logo and a blue checkmark in somebody's inbox.

Yeah. That process, it, uh, um, yeah, it definitely took about a year to do it because, uh, one of the things that you have to have in order to get Um, for it to be verified. Uh, there is a lower level where you, um, don't get the checkmark from Google, but you still get some benefits. But to get the full blue checkmark like Best Buy has, like Apple has, like, uh, uh, like basically all the, the big companies, um, if you're looking just through your inbox, um, you need to have a trademark for that logo itself. Um, So just with this conversation I started having with ChatGPT and going through getting our SPF, our DKIM, our DMARC going, one of the first things that I knew was going to be the part that took the longest was getting the trademark. So working with ChatGPT, I was able to build off an existing trademark that we already had filed back in 2019 when When we first got our LLC filed with the state, I decided right then and there to trademark the fork spoon. Worked through LegalZoom on that one, and months later trademark came in. Recently renewed that. But building off of that, ChatGPT was able to help me easily file all everything I needed with the the US Trademark Patent Office. And yeah, 9 months later after working with ChatGPT, it trademark came in. No issues.

Amazing.

So

yeah, the trademarks are interesting. You need a trademark if you want to, let's say you have a company and you want to trademark the name. You know, we've trademarked Pinch of Yum. That's one thing, but then there's also the category of the, like the logo, which you have to go through the process separately. And so It sounds like you had gone through the process of trademarking the name, The Fork Spoon. So if somebody else tried to come out with a blog or a social account named The Fork Spoon, they couldn't do that. That's been super helpful for us. One example is, I think it was on TikTok before we posted there or was on there, somebody was posting under Pinch of Yum and we were able to use our trademark to get that specific handle, which we wouldn't have been able to do if we didn't have a trademark. Another important piece within that that you referenced is once you get a trademark, you have to continue to maintain it. So you get it and then it's like 5-year and 10-year renewals, I think, that you have to make a note of. And if you even do the trademark search online, you'll be able to see like, you know, you'll search for whatever word, you know, taco, and you'll see like 9 out of 10 trademarks are defunct. Like they don't exist anymore because people haven't renewed them. And I think sometimes people don't know. They think they still have a trademark, but they don't. So that's a really important point. You went through the process of trademarking the logo in order to then be able to use it to get this higher level. It sounds like there's 2 levels, um, that you could— there's VMC, uh, to get this, um, BIMI certificate. There's VMC, which is, uh, requires a trademark. And then there's CMC, which is kind of a newer, easier to qualify where you don't need a trademark, just proof that you've used the logo in public. But then Gmail shows the logo without the checkmark for CMC, which it's like, go through the process, do the higher level, um, do VMC, but you need the trademark in order to do that. Did you have like a circle logo that worked well for that? Or did you have to create a new one that would work within the context of email?

Yeah, so we ended up using just our, um, oh boy, I'm blanking on it now. Uh, just our logo that shows up at the top of every tab. Why am I blanking? It's the, uh, favicon.

Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep.

So we ended up using our favicon. Um, so we use that, but there is one thing that ChatGPT's, um, pointed out to me is you don't wanna put a color on it. You want it to be gray when you trademark it, because if you do it in gray, then it, um, basically allows you to trademark every color.

Oh, interesting. Sure.

Instead of just that one color that you upload.

Yeah. Because if you do a color, the idea being if you do a color, then it's suddenly you're locked into what that color is supposedly. Oh, interesting. So could you then use a color in your, in your BIMI, uh, application then?

Correct.

Okay.

Yeah, I could use any color. So we ended up using the original color, which it, uh, still is. Um, but, uh, yeah, basically, uh, you want to get the, the most amount of, uh, protection, um, just to future-proof yourself. So in this case, so it was, uh, to do that, I was just going with just a, a gray instead of our What is it? It's like a blue.

Sure.

Some kind of like off, um, yeah, mid-century blue that Duane came up with for us. So

yeah. Love it. Um, from WP Cultivate, Duane, is that who you're— yep. Um, so the, is there, was there a size that you picked for that? These are specific questions, but I'm just curious to know what you learned along the way.

Um, so I can't remember if there was a size, but you definitely want to have history of using it. Sure. So for that, for ours, so our name is The Forked Spoon. It is kind of a play on a spork. So our logo is just a little spork in a circle, and you need to have some history of using that. So in our case, we had just gone through a theme change with Cultivate and they changed the color of it, but we kept the same spork. Dwayne came up with a new overall logo, but the spork stayed the same from a previous logo that we had. So we, I had to submit proof on that trademark application. And I think the proof that I gave was actually using Uh, web archive and showing that, um, a few different dates that it was, this is what it looked like and it was in existence.

Yep.

That's great.

So that's the thing that takes a long time because it has to be reviewed. A trademark attorney has to, or not attorney, but like a trademark office government official has to look at it. I think what they do is they look and see if there's any other examples of it being used that are similar, and then they would reject it if it's like too close of a logo to something else, but eventually it gets passed. So now you have a trademark. Nobody else can copy that logo, which may be helpful, maybe not. The reason it is most helpful in this case is because then you can go through the process with BIMI to say, hey, we have this trademark. We want our logo to start showing up in emails. And Also, that trademark then allows you to get the blue checkmark along with your emails. There's some sort of verification that exists within that as well.

Right. Yeah. And, um, yeah, at this point, so it took about 9 months to get that process done, but within the, I obviously focused on getting that trademark going first and then, um, cleaning up, getting our email health, like we talked about earlier with the DKIM and SPF and DMARC. Getting that to the point where it is accepted to get that BMC because you can't have, you need to have trustworthiness and the authority to be able to do that. So it's just part of like email health. You can't get a blue check mark with a logo only if you have a trademark. You also have to have implemented all those things so that way mailboxes do trust you. So it just adds to that layer of trust overall. Yeah.

So, um, this is, you know, I was just kind of doing a little bit of research here before. So it kind of works the same way where you publish a DNS record then, uh, like a BIMI DNS record. It says it points to your logo as an SFG file and then mailbox providers show the logo only if your email authentication is solid. So is there some like BIMI authority that you have to like apply to, or how does that work? Before we continue, let's take a moment to hear from our sponsors. Building a creator business isn't getting any easier. Between AI, constant platform changes, and the pressure to keep growing, it can feel like you're running just to keep up. That's why we're excited to partner with Raptive. Raptive works with thousands of the web's leading independent creators, including us, to help them earn more, grow smarter, and build sustainable businesses for the long term. They combine industry-leading advertising with personalized guidance, data-driven insights, and a team that's constantly helping creators adapt to changes in search, AI, and the broader digital landscape. They're also leading the charge to protect creator content and advocate for a future where independent creators can continue to thrive. And now it's easier than ever to join. If your site gets at least 25,000 monthly page views, you can apply to become part of the Raptive creator community and get support that's designed to grow with your business. To learn more or apply, visit raptive.com/fbp. Thanks again to Raptive for sponsoring this episode.

Yeah, there are, um, there are third-party companies that specialize in these types of certifications and a whole plethora of other certifications as well. So I just working with ChatGPT, it pointed us to the biggest one. I should have looked it up. I'm blanking on the name now, but I ended up going with kind of the biggest and well-established one out of them. Sure. And yeah, you have to pay 'em a yearly fee to maintain that certification. So they do the actual certification, And then I had to upload that SVG file in a specific format. I think it's like Tiny SVG 1.2. And they either give you the option to host the file on your server or they could host it on their server, and then you have to add your credentials back into your DNS. Um, pointing to either your server or their server hosting it. So in my case, I, uh, let them host it.

Um,

figured I'll put the burden on them. And, uh, yeah, it, uh, it was a long project with chat and it was great kind of when, uh, all of a sudden it happened.

And you got an email from yourself. Yeah. You're like, it's one of those moments where that you're probably at home by yourself. It's like you've been working on it by yourself for a year.

Yeah.

And then it comes through and then it's like, you take a sip of coffee and smile a little bit and then like go on to the next thing.

Yeah, basically. I showed Jessica, she's like, oh, great.

Yeah. She like, even she's not impressed. Yeah. And then you're like, okay, all right, what's next? Um, was it DigiCert? Was that the company?

Okay.

Yeah. Um, so. One of the questions that I would have is like, did you have anything that you could quantify in terms of like, there's the reality that it's just like, there's a trust signal that exists there and who knows the benefit of that, but that I would say probably undeniable to some degree that that's beneficial. My question would be, did you see any like uptick in open rate or anything like that after you implemented this?

Uh, we actually did. So we saw quite a, we saw a good uptake in opens, clicks, and less unsubscribes, um, especially with, uh, uh, new subscribers. Um, so we do have, uh, WrapDiv's, um, uh, was it gated print turned off?

Mm-hmm.

And that you, in order to print from your recipe card, And you have to enter your email address so you can check that you don't want to be added to the list. But yeah, we get hundreds of subscribers every day from just having that on and then just all the other functions on our website for saving recipes and whatnot and being added to the list. So from that gated print, yeah, those subscribers, we saw a bigger uptick of people that actually stuck with us, I think. Because of that BMC mark and kind of that trustworthiness signal. But during this time when I implemented it too, there was some bot filtering stuff that Kit was doing. So the numbers are a little skewed, but every time I kind of run— Sure. The numbers from before and after via the MCP connection I have set up with chat to Kit, it shows a good 10% uptick in opens.

Amazing. Yeah. So can you talk about that real quick? I think it's an important thing to point out, the MCP Kit connection. MCP in general, I think is important for people to know who aren't familiar. I think people are getting more and more familiar, just this idea of like connecting ChatGPT or Claude. It's like a pipe from your ChatGPT or Claude to another source of data, in this case, Kit. So can you talk about how you use it and maybe a specific example prompt that you gave Kit in order to understand the benefit that came before and after implementing this?

Right. So, um, yeah, I mean, just working with, uh, AI chatbot, you can basically tell it, uh, look at data from 2 months before this date. I won't tell if the date is when I implemented VMC, but look at the data before this date, look at the data after this date and tell me what's changed. Right. Or look at subscribers with this tag on the data before and after. Yeah. And then all of a sudden you can get those numbers that we talked about.

It's such a great way to use, uh, to accomplish the goal that we were trying to accomplish before, which is like data analysis without having to become an expert in the platform. We've implemented MCP with Clarity. If there's any Clarity users who are listening, reach out to us because we're starting to roll this out. But essentially what we're trying to do with Clarity, and for me, it's all of, essentially all the data that I have anywhere in my life, is like, how do I build a pipe from Claude and ChatGPT, or I use OpenCLAW as well, to that data source in order to then be able to query in natural language? So we're not having to figure out, How, what do I click and what button goes where? And like, how do I figure out the analysis tool? You just use natural language. And for me, I really like using WhisperFlow too. So I'm literally just talking and saying, you know, your example, hey, 2 months before this date and 2 months after, how did open rate change? What did click-through rate change look like? And it's like, You can get that data really easily in a way that before would've taken a long time. So for those who aren't familiar, it's an important kind of 201, 301 for some of these AI tools, that idea of MCP, which is a really good one. So start to finish, it's about a year-long project. Most of it is the trademark, but once you get the trademark taken care of, then it's a relatively quick process to be able to go through the verification because you're adding some records to your DNS, you're using this service provider. What is the cost? Did you say approximately a year for it? It's like $1,000 to $2,000 range?

Um, yeah, I think it's closer to $2,000. I think the price, uh, there was a rate increase from the time I started until when I actually implemented it. So I think I ended up paying probably close to $1,800 for just 1 year of having that verified mark.

Yep.

And then there's a cost of doing the patent itself.

Sure.

Quite recall, but maybe that was like $600.

$650, I think. Yeah. Yeah.

So, and then I obviously saved some costs doing it myself with Chat. But like I said, on, I think maybe I told you before the call or during the call, for our first patent, I did it through LegalZoom years ago in 2019 for just the fork spoon, the words.

Yep.

I think they charged me at the time maybe $750 on top of the other fees. Yeah.

The actual filing fee.

Yeah.

Yep. So it's like a huge, I mean, I'm seeing that in lots of different ways where you're able to like previously something that you had outsourced, you're able to bring in-house because now you have this expert, which is ChatGPT or Claude. The last question that I had is like how that shows up differently to your knowledge in different email inboxes. So, um, we've talked about Gmail. Is it present similar or different to your knowledge across different email accounts? Gmail's the most important just because it's the most popular, but do you know how that looks across different platforms?

Yeah, different platforms treat it differently. Um, But I'd have to look at the specifics. I don't have it off the top of my head. I don't want to misquote it either, but— Yeah. I think the vast majority of 'em do show you do get some benefit from it. So it's not a situation where there's just no benefit from it. And then also going through the process of, you know, getting VMC, you're also giving the, all these different mail providers, uh, more reason to show your email in the process, 'cause you have to have that DMARC on there. Mm-hmm. You can't have it be set to none. You have to have it set to quarantine at a minimum, I believe, to get, uh, your VMC. So just doing the process and going through it is helping get you outta spam folders or getting you into the right inbox. Um, uh, but yeah, in general, yeah, I can't think off the top of my head. Maybe Yahoo and Outlook. Um,

I

don't know if you have it in front of you, but

yeah, I'm trying to, I'm trying to remember what, um, it, it said. I, I, I think your point though is that like, Going through this process, um, here it is. Uh, shows up Gmail. The logo shows up in Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Apple Mail, and FastMail for those millions of FastMail followers that are subscribing to us. Right. Um, Yahoo and FastMail will show a logo even without a certificate. Apple has historically required a VMC. Um, So, uh, yeah, but I think your point is a really good one, which is as we rely more on email, it's important for us to think about trust as it relates to email. The way that I thought about it was like, how do we keep bad actors from emailing on our behalf? That would be the SPF, DKIM, and then the DMARC process where you are connecting your Ownership of a domain to the places that you are sending email. For instance, if you have a domain and it's registered in GoDaddy, making that connection, you know, from GoDaddy to Kit. So like there's a connection there. So it's like, okay, I've said I'm going to be sending emails from Kit. It's verified. So you don't get people, you know, randomly sending emails from some other platform or from a third-party thing. Saying that they're you, but kind of spoofing it. And so there's that trust signal, but then there's also the visual identification, which we've talked about, which is also really important as well. Huge takeaway and a really fun one for me because I just had never heard of that and wasn't familiar with it. And something that we'll for sure look into. One of the things that you talked about and that we talked about a little bit was AI. I'd be curious to know, what does it look like for you to use AI and what, in what ways are you using it as a tool daily? Are there any creative ways that you've unlocked to kind of partner with it, whether it be like computer use or auditing things or reviewing, you know, emails before you send them out? It doesn't have to be within the context of email, but I'm just always interested to hear how people are using AI because we're all using it in such new and creative ways.

Yeah, I think probably one of the best stories I have with AI, I have a few of them, but I actually kind of opened up to AI. I don't know if you want to do this, but I threw kind of tax ideas at it. Yeah, for sure. And so as far as trying to like get our company set up in the best way and also like on a personal level, and after we get paid, making sure that we have all the right deductions in for our Situation. So during some long chats that I had with ChatGPT, this was probably during that kind of same period where I was going off the deep end into VeeMark. I started realizing that we needed to hire a new accountant and—

What was it that made you realize that? Was it like things that ChatGPT surfaced that felt like they were missed by your accountant?

Yeah. That and just taking advantage of like certain deductions that were more, that were available to us now, but not like maybe 2 years ago.

Sure.

That were big kind of needle movers for us. Yeah. That just weren't caught at the time.

Do you have an example of one of those for, and would they apply to other creators or more specific to your situation?

I think it, for our situation, it was more of a personal one outside of business. There was a business aspect of one, so it was moving to an S corp.

Oh yeah, for sure. Can you talk about why that's helpful for people who aren't familiar?

Right. So when you, so when we originally started, I'd mentioned in 2019, we, that's when I filed with the state and we had an LLC. So for years after that, we were just filing as a sole proprietor. So when you're filing as a sole proprietor, basically you ended up having to pay more in taxes, I think for like Social Security and Medicare, you kind of feed into more of those buckets.

Yeah. Like self-employment. It's kind of this weird self-employment tax where you're paying All of the money you're making, I think this is how it works. Tell me if this aligns with what you found. All the money you're making is considered like your salary essentially. And when you have a salary, you have to pay self-employed salary. You're having to pay both essentially like your portion of Social Security, Medicare, the FICA, but you're also having to pay the employer portion of it.

Right.

I don't know. I don't know what the totals are, but it's like 14% and then like, so you're having to pay each side of the 7%. Does that sound right?

Yeah, that sounds about right. So yeah, just having some conversations with ChatGPT made sense to move it over to an S corp. So yeah, we found a new attorney who also found some other stuff. A

new accountant.

Oh, sorry. Yeah. New accountant, not an attorney.

Yep. Yep. And I'm pulling up the numbers here. It's 7.65% employee, 7.65% employer for a total of 15.3% for the total FICA. So like, you know, if you made $1 million, You're paying 15.3% tax on that. And so if you, for anybody listening, it doesn't have to be that much, but like $500,000, you know, $200,000, whatever it is that your business is making. If you're self-employment, you're paying that 15.53%. If you switch to an S corp, my guess is this is what you did. Then you pay yourself a salary.

Right.

And so technically as a self-employed person, you're still paying that because you're paying the employee and employer portion. But then on the amount above that, you're not paying that. You're not paying at least that half of it. So ends up being like a pretty, by just checking a box on your tax form, it's like one of the easiest ways to save on taxes. So a super smart thing. Did you just discover that by having a conversation with ChatGPT?

Yeah, I mean, I was familiar with it. I mean, in our case, I'm kind of a squirrel when it comes to savings. I am sort of— Love it. I've put a lot of acorns away in retirement funds, so the savings wasn't as maybe substantial as other people if they weren't saving as much as we were. Sure. For retirement.

Because it was tax-deductible savings that you had. Yeah.

Yeah. So we had to kind of find the right line with our accountant to both maximize what we could put into Basically the 401s, whereas before it was like SEP IRAs. Yeah. With SEP IRAs, you could have a much higher maximum per person. But in the end, with just the two of us being on the S corp and the salaries that we gave ourselves, we were able to get it kind of right about at that same level and get some savings in the process.

Yeah, I would say maybe like if somebody's with your site, if you're making more than $100,000 and you haven't set up an S corp, I would say that's maybe the tipping point of when it would make sense to talk to your accountant and say like, hey, does it make sense for me to set up an S corp and pay myself a salary? So you're not having to pay quite as much in self-employment tax. I think, you know, we'll just go full nerd mode on this podcast, which is great. It's all, it's like my favorite type of conversation. You had mentioned squirreling money away, and I think one of the things that people think a lot about is like, number one, how do I get my business to a point where I'm making enough for this to be a substantial income?

Yeah.

Then once people are making a substantial income, or even just like an adequate income, a salary, then the question becomes like, how do I be strategic in saving and investing? And you mentioned SEP IRA. We've When, before we had employees, we did an I-401. But can you talk about that a little bit? Like some of the intentional decisions you've made about investing? Because I think that's a really important piece as well for people to think about.

Yeah, with investing. So yeah, right now, like the 2 of us on the S corp, we have a 401 self-employed. And I personally, so I read The Economist cover to cover every week. I've been doing that for probably 15, 16 years now. And just one of the things you kind of hear about in The Economist over and over again is just, it's the market, right? So luckily for, I'm sure a lot of your listeners, In the U.S., we live in in the largest economy in the world. So, how do I say this? So, with with that, the market, if you kind of conceptualize that into like the stock market as a whole, one way to track that is through like S&P 500 index. So, it's the top 500. Profitable companies that are publicly traded. So one of the best ways that's been proven to generate money when you're saving it is putting it on the stock market and putting it on an investment ETF vehicle like IVV or VOO, which are basically tracking that index. And to be on that index, you have to be profitable for a number of quarters in a row and be one of those top 500 companies. So if a company's not profitable, they fall off after a certain amount of time and another one fills its shoes.

You mean in order for a company to be included in that fund, they have to be—

In the S&P 500, and then the index fund tracks The S&P 500.

Sure.

So I'm a big fan of just investing in ETFs and like IVV. So like the rate on that is like, I think it's 0 or 0.003% is like what commission they take out of it. So it costs nothing to basically invest in it. But then if you put money with a manager who's going to actively manage your funds and where it goes into, that manager's goal is to basically beat the market. And most managers don't beat the market, or at least not consistently. Maybe they'll have 1 or 2 good years, but most can never kind of beat the market per se. So I'm definitely a big fan of just investing it in the US economy, which is It's S&P 500 via like IVV or VOO.

Yeah, it's, I mean, you hear Warren Buffett talking about that where it's like, what would be his recommendation for his like, you know, kids or wife if they had to take over their personal, this wouldn't be within Berkshire Hathaway, but personal funds. And he's just like the S&P 500. Yeah. 2 important things to point out there in that you talked about this idea of a solo 401. So for anybody who has a business, And doesn't have any employees, this would be a really important thing to put a pin in because you can invest if you're under 50 up to $72,000. Does that sound right? And so you can, and it's tax sheltered. And so one of the things that we need to think about as business owners is just like, You have a business and that business, if you're lucky enough to grow it to produce income and profit, then you get to make the decision on what to do with that. And you could squirrel it away, you could spend it on boats, you could take a trip, you could do all of those things. But as we know in this world, things change quickly. And so we need to be strategic about thinking not just like, okay, we made some money this year, how do we have a good time? Great, we can do that. But also, how do you think about the future and ensure that you have money for the future? That solo 401 that you mentioned is a really important one, especially for people who don't have employees because you can put a crazy amount of money in each year. And so I think that would be important for people to point out. And then also love the point around like low-cost index funds. Yeah. You know, VTIVX US. So we have a little bit of majority US, 60% US, 40% international is kind of our approach. But same idea, which is like, hey, put it to work in the market. We have companies that we are working on, and when we work on those companies, they produce income. There is value in these companies that we are creating, which you can see in these marketplaces like Quiet Light Brokerage or FE International. You can go and see like, okay, people are buying and selling websites. We have the thing that we are creating is valuable. It's like a tiny little small-cap company that creates value. And that value is because it's producing a profit. If it produces a profit, what do you do with that profit? Well, One of the things that I think is best to do, and it sounds like you're doing this as well, is taking that and putting it in other companies so it continues to work on your behalf. So I think it's super smart and a really good point and some like really awesome takeaways for people here. As we close out, what is your advice for people who are looking to stay competitive, who are looking to stay on top of kind of the technical considerations with their site? Things are changing, things are evolving. Things are moving so quickly. As somebody who's involved in the technical side of things day in and day out, what is your advice for people on how to stay on top of that and how to stay, not, I was gonna say relevant, but it's not relevant. It's how to stay on top of it when things are moving so quickly. What would your advice be?

Yeah, I'd say, Just make sure you work with people that are smarter than you in other areas, right? Like I mentioned earlier, you know, Casey, I trust him completely. When anything he says to SEO, I'm going to do it. I'm going to, I've had 4 audits with him and everything he's ever said to do, I'm done. Mm-hmm. And those first audits were huge, massive checklists. But yeah, it's, you know, on the, On the website maintenance side, it's, you know, going with a company like NerdPress that is going to maintain your website, but then they have their, what was it, every other week email and reading everything on there to make sure you kind of are in the loop on what's going on in the industry and, you know, subscribing to your newsletter. I've been getting that for years now on my personal one. So Knowing kind of just what's happening. And even with, you know, tools like AI, if you don't have time to read the whole thing, you can get it to summarize right now in your Gmail box or your Workspace box. So you get your little TL;DR. Yeah. So it's knowing what your strengths are and knowing where you can Knowing where your weaknesses are too, and maybe outsourcing those weaknesses to professionals who can do it better than you.

Yeah,

that's great. And kind of getting more information from them so you can make better choices.

Yeah, that's awesome. Love that, Aaron. You guys both are doing such great work. Really appreciate you coming on. I learned a lot and excited to share it with people. So thanks for being a part of it.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Hey there, Anne again from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, we would greatly appreciate it if you could share it with your community and leave a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts. Join us next week for our next episode as Bjork interviews Dan Boquest from Savor the Best. We'll see you back here soon, and in the meantime, we hope you have a wonderful week. Bye.