The future of SEO in the AI era 🔎 Harry Sanders

Founders need to stop caring about ideas, right? Like, frankly, no business fails because there's not enough ideas. It fails because so many founders are coming in every day. I've got this idea. I got this idea. I want to do this thing. We should do this thing. And it's just chaos, right? You can write down all your ideas. And then when you're at a point, when the team's at a point where they're like, oh, I actually feel like we're breathing for once. That's when you bust out only your favorite one or two ideas out of that list. Otherwise, you just overwhelm them with rubbish. Every idea you have, you sit on for a week. You never go to the team with an idea you just had. You sit on for a week, you consolidate your ideas.

Hard.

Yeah, it's hard. It's discipline.

This week's Millennial Master is Harry Sanders, founder of Studio Hawk. At 17, Harry faced something no one should. Sleeping under a bridge in Australia, with nothing but a backpack and a laptop. But a social worker handed him a plan. He took it, learned fast, and built one of the world's top SEO agencies from scratch. Today, Harry leads a team of over 140 people across 3 continents and hires what he calls wholesome nerds with low ego and high potential. His rule is simple. Ideas don't build companies. Discipline does. In this episode, we talk about what AI search is actually changing in SEO, why founders should sit on new ideas for a week, and how to hire and grow wholesome nerds. Millennial Masters is brought to you by Jolt. Fast, reliable web hosting built for founders. Whether you're launching a WordPress site or scaling an app, Jolt gives your project a rock-solid home starting from just £3.95 a month. You'll get 99.99% uptime, support in under 30 seconds, and flexible payment options including Bitcoin and Amex, so you can rack up those points while you build. Get your first 3 months free at jolt.co.uk. Smart hosting for people building what's next.

Harry, welcome to Millennial Masters. Where are you joining from today?

Joining us from Atlanta today, Daniel.

And that's because one of your offices is based there, but you are originally from Australia. And Harry, I know many people build companies to escape fear. But I know you built yours while living it. So take me back to that moment under the bridge in Melbourne. What was going through your head when you realized you had to find a way out?

Yeah, so my story starts off, I was 17, I was in Melbourne, Australia, and I'd had a, you know, interesting life growing up, but eventually fast forward to this point, I'm 17. My mom's couch surfing. I'm living with my dad and his partner, and she comes into the room one day and says, um, it's either the baggage or me. And, um, he chose her. And so just like that, I left with my backpack, which I had my laptop in, and I spent my first night on the streets of Melbourne. And initially I thought it would be a short-term kind of thing. I thought, you know, I'm 17, they'll get me in a house next week, tomorrow, who knows. But that began the 8-month journey of couch couch surfing, homeless camps, and being on the streets.

And at what point did it stop being about survival and you decided that you're gonna start building something that could last for yourself?

Well, I'd love to say, Daniel, that I had this great idea and I was gonna, I was just so full of work ethic. To be frank and to be very honest, after about 2 months of living on the streets, couch surfing, going through all that stuff, I had basically given up. I couldn't get a job. I couldn't even get a job at McDonald's. I tried to get freelancing work for other agencies because that's what I was doing before I was kicked out and just nothing was working. And I remember, you know, the catalyst was I had an incredible guy that I couch surfed with, Brody, who was really an angel for me, taught me about living on the streets and stuff. But the catalyst really was a social worker that I got assigned called Carla. And I got assigned this social worker because, you know, when you're homeless, you're trying to get shelter and places to stay. And a lot of the time the requirement is you get a social worker, which back then I thought was a waste of time. But now I look at it and I go, wow, that was the most incredible thing to ever happen to me. And she sat down with me and she built what's called an individual development plan or an IDP. And it's basically a pathway to help you, you know, rejoin society. And so I went down through this thing and I remember, Daniel, the first words out of my mouth when I sat down with Carla was, I just crossed my arms and I said, so you're going to get me a house or just waste my time like everyone else? Because that was not my first social worker. And I remember I was just such a, you know, you just have to remember the mindset you're in. I was, I was depressed. I was, I'd given up, but she just laughed. And I remember she said, um, no, we're going to get you back on track. And she told me about this program. Um, she knew I couldn't get it. I was struggling to get a job and interview. And she said, you know, you, you've like, you're very good on computers. There's a government program called Getting Down to Business, which teaches people, young people, disadvantaged people, you know, about business. Would you want to do it? And I don't know. It was one of those things. I was just like, well, why not? Like, I may as well give it a go. And that was the start of the journey. So, you know, it was never, to be honest, it was never, I'm going to build this empire. My first, my biggest dream at this point, Daniel, was if I had enough money to get a share house, that would be a success beyond my wildest dreams. So that's, you know, that's where it started, not necessarily, you know, trying to build the biggest company.

So what did you do next? You've been put on this plan and you started taking this course.

Yeah, so I started rocking up to this program and I remember they gave you $20 a day.

You had your laptop?

I had my laptop. I remember they gave you $20 a day for lunch, which I thought was just the most extraordinary thing I've ever heard of. And they paired me with a mentor. Now at this point, Carla had been helping me for a little while. She'd been helping with my mental health for quite a few months by the time this program started. And, you know, long story short, Carla had actually done a lot for me. I realized that she was, she was, you know, she was not working on Fridays, but she would still work to come chat with me, which, you know, I found out and that, that had a really profound effect on me that people would be willing to do that for me. Who, and I, I just felt like, you know, a burden everywhere I went. And I joined this program, and so I really, the mindset I had coming into this program was, I am going to give this my 110%. I owe it to Carla because she's spent so much time helping me. And if it doesn't work, I can say I tried freaking everything and the world is bullshit and it's all like, it's all doomed to fail. And so that's what I did. And so I got there and they paired me with a mentor called Graham, who I call my third angel. And he was this, you know, grumpy 82-year-old ex-CEO. And I remember getting there and being like, oh my God, what is this guy going to teach me about computers and building like a business? But I was just so naive. I mean, this guy knew everything about building a business. He didn't know about tech. That was my job. And so he sat with me and said, well, what business would you want to do? And I said, well, Graham, there's only one thing I actually know how to do on computers. And the only thing I actually am actually good at doing on computers is SEO and programming. And he's like, well, tell me about this SEO thing. And that's honestly where it all started.

And how did you manage then to build it into a $10 million agency? If we're going to fast forward, what were the steps? Because a lot of people think that this sort of success can happen overnight. If anybody who hasn't been an entrepreneur, but just has been employed can, or through social media can get the wrong idea about how long it takes to build something real and meaningful.

Yeah, totally. So, I mean, I've always been grateful. I think one of my biggest advantages, I can listen. And so I've always listened to people that are ahead of me or people that knew things I don't. Like I really, so Graham helped me, taught me how to set up a business, register a company, do all those things. And he previously I was freelancing for agencies. So I was white labeling and Graham, I don't know, it sounds stupid to say it out loud, but Graham said, well, why don't you just work directly with clients rather than agencies? Because agencies don't really want to. Have you, like, you know, and so we set up StudioHook, or I set up StudioHook, and the idea was instead of to do full service marketing, we would just do SEOs and we would work directly with clients. And, you know, got those first few clients from networking groups. I mean, it just snowballs. Like, I mean, we got those first few clients from networking groups. I was very good at SEO. I loved it. It was this perfect mix of logic and creativity. We were able to get results very quickly and started getting referrals from them. And along the way, you know, hired some other people that were from difficult backgrounds that I really believed in who are now, you know, fast forward 10 years, just doing incredible things. And, you know, we came up with the second USP. So the first being just SEO. The second thing that really changed the game for us by accident, honestly, was, you know, I'd worked for all these agencies and you have like account managers. So people in between the engineers and the client, right? And their job is to make sure communication's good, the client feels loved, all that kind of stuff. And I said, Well, we're only doing one service. We're only doing SEO. Why do we need an account manager? Couldn't the clients just speak directly to the engineers? Because there's so much fluff and bullshit, sorry, in the SEO industry, you know, and we removed that barrier and that exploded because people loved, even if their SEO specialist was a little nerdy, we call them wholesome nerds, they loved being able to work directly with the strategist, the engineer, the person doing the work. And it just cut through so much miscommunication and The company skyrocketed.

Harry said you've been hiring wholesome nerds. I love that term. So now, if I'm right, you've built a team of nearly 100 people across 3 continents.

Yeah, more now.

And you did it without necessarily chance chasing fancy CVs. So what do you actually look for in a person when you're hiring? Is it chance that you didn't have somebody didn't believe in you to hire you in those early days, and you look for those traits that others didn't see in you, so you had to start on your own?

Yeah, it's a good question. It's evolved over time, right? When I started out, frankly, I didn't have the money or the reputation to hire, you know, existing killers. But one thing that I've always been good at was spotting potential in people. And I think that's very important. I think that's a very important skill for any entrepreneur to have. So I found people that I thought, you know, people had passed on or not given a chance to. And hired them, you know, because I thought that'd be, you know, really good, but realistically, I just didn't have the money. Now we still do that even though we have money because, you know, our competitors wonder why our staff are so loyal and why they work so hard. Well, it's because we build our staff. We truly invest in them. We have world-class learning and development programs. We have teams of people that lead learning and development. We hire people with no experience. We train them up and become world-class SEO specialists. And yes, we look for, in our hiring rubric, there's two columns. There's one side which is wholesome nerd, which is where we're looking for people that are passionate about things that have, you know, just wholesome and nerdy about something. And then on the other side, we're not hiring people that are too cool for school. People that think they're better than other people, think that they're like, oh, why would I do SEO? Like I'm too cool for that. You know, that's the kind of people we avoid. And then we value, we hire based on our values of create wow, continuous growth and learning, have each other's backs.. And then that's how we basically formulate our hiring rubric and how everyone in the organization gets hired. Now, the caveat is obviously we hire a lot more experienced people in very senior roles now. We still look at them to be a wholesome nerd. If they're not a cultural fit, they're not a fit. But yes, I'm a very big believer in, you know, seeing the potential in people, going past people's CV and going, where could this person be? Because I honestly do think that so many people are capable of so much, but they're just in the wrong organizations. They're not given the right opportunities.

Now, Hari, founders tell me on Millennial Masters that it's always different, and also from my experience, that it's always different when you go from one, just yourself, to your first employee, to your first 10, and it becomes a totally different beast after your first 20. I'm wondering, what are your reflections from this? Especially as you not only scaled staff, but you also scaled across different countries and continents. And there's cultural idiosyncrasies there too, that what you would call maybe a wholesome nerd in Australia might not be the same in the UK and will certainly not be the same in the USA. Hmm.

Yeah, that's a good point.

Yeah.

Look, when you start out there, I think it's very interesting because, and it's probably not talked about enough.

And maybe it's a good version.

Yeah, but you can't copy the advice of, like, if I went back to 17-year-old Harry or 18-year-old Harry with one staff member and I said, oh, you got to do this, this, this, this, this, you have to have L&D programs. It doesn't work like that. What works at 100 doesn't work at 1, doesn't work at 10. And there's these big inflection points in between. So one person, the people you're hiring are very different than the people I'm hiring today. At 1 person, you're hiring scrappy generalists, people that can wear a lot of hats and do a lot of things. They're not exactly clones of you. You don't want that, but you want them to be picking up the blind spots and you want them to be okay doing a lot of ad hoc random tasks because guess what? You're not going to have SOPs, processes, systems, all the things that you're expected to have when you're much larger. And you don't need to, frankly, it's just not the time of the organization. 10 people, you need to start hiring really specific specialists and you need to recognize at 10 people that you're now the bottleneck in your organization. You need to empower the staff to do the jobs without you as a cog in the machine. At 20, it's similar. I mean, we've got about 140-odd staff now across Melbourne, Sydney, Atlanta, London. I'm not operationally involved in really anything in the business. I've removed myself fully because I'm a barrier., right? So you need to recognize what is, you know, I love that my favorite saying is like, what's the, what's like the, what's the drawback right now? Like, what are we not solving for right now? What's the biggest constraint? That's the word I'm looking for. What's the biggest constraint we have right now and solving for that? And I think a lot of entrepreneurs realize that they're the biggest constraint and you need to build up instead of the generalist you've been hiring previously. That's the point where you need to hire specialists to do specific roles, specific PD, and just do that thing. And the hard part is, Daniel, This is the worst part of business. Sometimes those people that were really great generalists don't make it to the next stage of business. And that's—

You're not the first one to tell me that. But yes, they— another entrepreneur suggested that. Do they become baggage in the business?

They can, they can, if they're not properly redirected, or they're not able to take on this more specialized role, and they still want to be a part of everything. At some point it's better for both them and you to separate. And look, I think the best way to do that is to give them a nice lump payout as a thank you, or else, you know, I remember these people built the business with you, right? Well, they really worked hard. Some of them do work out. Like my chief of staff in Australia was my second ever hire. My general manager in the UK was my third ever hire. And sometimes they do work out and they become fantastic assets. But, you know, look, that's why they continuously learn as well. Yes. Yes. So they need everyone in the business needs to be continuously growing and learning. If at some point someone caps out that learning, you know, including you as a founder, that's when you're going to have some serious problems.

And you said the founder can become a barrier in the business. At what stage in your business you realized you were becoming a barrier to your own growth, to the business's growth?

There's a couple times. So the first time I realized that I had an issue was around 10 people, right? You know, I was managing a lot of the different sales, the operations, making sure clients were happy, doing all that kind of stuff. And I realized that if something didn't change, we would always be around 10 people. And this is what I see a lot. Some people just, they stay around the same size of company, right? They might be 10 people for 10 years, right? Maybe that's what they want. There's nothing wrong with that, but that represents a fatal flaw in the business model or how things are working operationally. And often, 9 times out of 10, the people that I chat to, it's because the founder wants to be involved in everything. The founder wants to know everything, touch everything, feel everything. And it's so counterproductive because like we mentioned, Daniel, when you're starting out, every founder wants that.

It's hard to let go.

Yeah. Yeah. At the start, you need to be like, that's what a good founder does. You can't like You can't behave like that when you're one person. You need to be across everything. Even 5 people, you need to be across everything, but you need to let go. And so I realized that and I started building and started accepting that not everything was going to be to the exact same standard that I was doing it to, but I needed to train and let people make mistakes and coach them in order to actually build the business to the next level. So that was a point. And then there was another massive point, maybe around 30, 40 staff where I realized, and you know, a great mentor, Graham, told me, you can either be rich or you can be king. You can't be both. Now being king represents being this, you know, being the person in the organization that everyone loves that comes in that says hi, you know, or being rich is building the organization that doesn't need you. I'm not needed in the organization. I will walk into London. I'll say hi to people. People don't really know who I am. People aren't sucking up to me because they know I'm not the boss. And that was a big like ego hit of going, I'm a good leader and I'm great at seeing the direction of the business and SEO and what we need to do. I'm not a good manager. I don't want to sit down with people. I don't want to do KPIs. I don't want to go through budget dashboards. I don't want to do the things that a great manager does. So if I were to, if I were to buy this business tomorrow, would I hire Harry to be the manager, the GM, or the CEO of this business? No, I probably wouldn't. So who is going to be the GM and the CEO? And that's when I changed the whole structure and I put in different general managers in each region and I stepped back.

But that was already at the point where you were overseeing multiple countries' offices.

Well, yeah, so we had the London office that we started about 5 years ago. Now London was amazing because London was always running by itself. Australia was the one where I was You know, I did the classic entrepreneur founder thing where I was like, oh yeah, like the business runs without me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. And then I'd go to London to do the expansion and then everything would blow up back home, right? Because in my head it ran without me and in my little magical fairy tale that I was telling myself to sleep at night, yeah, it was all good. But then when I actually physically left and was doing the UK expansion, that's when I spotted the cracks. And so I'd always recommend founders and entrepreneurs like go take a holiday, take a break, literally go away. And then when you come back, you'll see all the cracks and they're the things that you're still needed for that you can now fix.

It's so hard to do, to take a break from your own business. Naturally, you've done it, but you said that happened after you were already 5 years after you had a London office.

Yeah.

It wasn't something that you came straight away, you could detach from straight away, right? There was a process there and turmoil.

Totally. And look, to be very, and to bring up your previous point, you know, everyone, like people in our industry go, wow, you guys are like, you blew up overnight. You guys are, you know, everywhere in the SEO space.

10 years is not overnight.

10 years, dude. Like I've been here 10 years. People think we've been around 2 years. In my first year of business, I made $30,000 and that's not including expenses. You know, we're doing $20 mil now, but it's taken us $20 mil, what, US, but it's taken us 10, 11 years to get there. But yeah, the people don't recognize that. So yes, I've had a lot of time and a lot of experience, you know, in the 11 years from 17 to 28 that I've built and grown this business.

And you said on a different podcast, if I'm right, that no one sets out to build a shit agency. Yeah. Yet so many are, I believe were your words.

Yes.

So Harry, what do you think most founders get wrong about building a service business people actually love working with? And I'm sure you're going to tell me about your people and the team you've built as well.

Yeah, so look, the people, the lifeblood of every business that you build, right? And I think that there's definitely something to be said about the hiring mantra we have around wholesome nerds and giving people a chance and growing them. Is that unique? Not necessarily. There's a lot of service businesses that do that, right? You know, do I think they do it to the same standard? Maybe not, but that's because we have a lot of scale behind us now. I think the difference between when you, like, when you set out to start an agency, you're taught to say yes to everything. It's like improv. Yes, and. Someone's like, oh, I need a website. You're like, yes. I need AdWords. Yes. I need this. Yes. So you end up doing a lot of stuff and that gets you off the ground, right? That helps because you need money in the door. I was always very deliberate. I always just said, we just do SEO. We don't do paid ads. We don't do anything else. We don't do your emails. We don't do your website. It's just one thing. And we do it damn well. And I think that that business model, or more importantly, what you say no to dictates how you build a service business or any business, right? What do you, what are you actually exceptional at delivering? Because the more things you try and deliver, right, the worse you are at delivering them. And it sounds awful. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you know, if you're up against an agency that does websites, ads, SEO, email, all these different things, they're just not going to be able to compete against someone that does one thing. So that was what allowed us to get cut through. And as you scale, it's very hard to say no to things. We probably say we could probably be doing an additional $10 million, $6 million, who knows in revenue if we said yes to more things.

But we would be a shit agency because you wouldn't be as good on what you're laser focused on.

Correct. We would lose, we would slip on SEO because we'd focus on fixing these other parts of the business, which would mean SEO is not the forefront and focus. It would also mean that like these other areas of the business, there's always fires in every area of the business. In SEO, we just need to do one thing, right? It's like everyone in the whole business is focused around delivering that. Whereas the more things we add, The more complexities there are, the more managers we need, the more we need to charge, the more like, it's just, it's, I'm not saying it's bad. There is some incredible full service companies, but like I said, no one, like no one, you see a lot of bad agencies. None of them set out to start a bad agency. It happened because of business decisions they made that cascaded down to the service quality.

But from a client point of view, and that's been something I wrestled with as well myself over the years. You admitted yourself you're leaving money on the table, clearly, even up to 30% of your current revenue. So that's a good chunk. But you also want to maintain your focus and your specialty. At what point do you think there is a good point to compromise and start expanding services because clients prefer not to have to deal with multiple businesses? For a variety of services?

Yeah, and I think that this is something I think about every single day, Daniel, and what services we should offer, what services we shouldn't offer. You know, over the years we've, we developed content now, which is for SEO. We do digital PR for SEO. I think the line stops, we do SEO and we do services that help with SEO. Like we do Reddit optimization now because that's now part of AI search. We do AI optimization because it's a part of the new SEO. But we're not going to start doing paid ads. We're not going to start doing website development, right? People ask us for that, right? But look, I play a lot of video games, too many video games. And if you build a video game based on what your players are always asking you for, you end up with kind of a crappy video game. You need to, as a developer or as a business owner, find out what clients really want and how you can deliver that to them. Yes, they might want everything in one service. I mean, how great would it be if Amazon just did everything in your business, Daniel? Like, you know, there was Amazon for service and it just did everything under the sun. Well, it doesn't work that way because they couldn't do that that well. So we have a, you know, an onus on us to, you know, go to clients and clients do want multiple services because, you know, they might want paid ads. We can say, well, we'll work with your paid ads provider. We'll join their Slack. We'll be like a seamless integration for you. But, you know, whether you're working with one agency, two agencies, you're still going to be working with multiple people at the different agencies anyway. So you may as well bring it together. And nowadays we traditionally work with brands that have marketing managers and marketing managers' jobs are to wrangle these different parts together. I just don't think any agency and certainly no individual is capable of doing everything.

Leaving this topic for a second here now, Harry, because after the evolution of a business, I'm also interested in your evolution and how you look back at it. What has been for you the hardest part from evolving your identity as a survivor to CEO of a multimillion business across multiple continents with hundreds of staff?

Look, I think it's interesting. I look, I'm a big advocate of learning. I think learning is the, you know, if we're talking about skills you need to have, it's like seeing potential in people. Yes. But I think overall it's learning. You can learn anything, but you just need to be open to it. I've joined countless groups, masterminds, people, and I'm always doing that. I'm still learning. I think my primary job now, if you look at my PD, which is like my founder PD, which is going to events and learning things and bringing them back to the business with knowledge and ideas. I've probably reinvented myself a dozen times in terms of challenging beliefs that I really held firm and questioning them and evolving them. And, you know, I love being wrong. I love you know, chatting to people and finding different ways to look at things. But I think the biggest way you evolve yourself is just honestly being very open to where it goes. And I still think I hold a lot of my personality. I'm still super goofy. I'm still super nerdy, tinkering around with home automation stuff. I'm still playing video games, but I'm just, I think, a better version of myself in the regard of more confident. I mean, if you saw me at 17 versus now, I can actually talk to people. I can actually go to events. I previously, I was so nervous. I was so shy. And, you know, a big part of it is growing with the business. And so I think you just got to expose yourself to people and groups and, you know, podcasts like this that help you do that. Or else, you know, what do they say? Like without external forces, you know, you can't expect an internal difference.

Confidence comes up all the time. I've even had a particular newsletter item this week about it. And I am curious about your journey towards confidence. Most people would You cannot be fully confident at 17. You are a teenager, not fully developed physically or mentally. So that's, that's one starting point. But a lot of people fear putting themselves out there and making themselves vulnerable to other people's views and feedback. And you had to put yourself out there a lot at the beginning for finding clients, not only delivering the work. And then as the leader of the business responsible for the livelihoods of 140 people?

I think there's no trick, there's no like hack, you know, you can just, people saying just be more confident. I mean, it doesn't work like that. It's, think of confidence like a muscle in your brain. It's your brain. I mean, confidence is tied to your, like what you do. You know, I didn't want to go out and network, but I had to, to get my first clients. I felt physically sick. You know, to go out and do that. I, you know, I did my first public speaking thing like 6 months later when I was, I think I just turned 18 and I vomited after I spoke and it was such a terrible presentation. I mean, horrific. And I vowed myself I'd never do it again. And here I am traveling around the US speaking at events. But I think every time you do something that pushes you out of your comfort zone in a good way, it makes you more confident. It, it's like strains that muscle. Think of it like this way, it's like going to the gym. You know, the first workout you ever do at the gym, the next day you're just wrecked. You're just like, oh my God, is it like this every time? But then the more you go to the gym, the more you push through that feeling, the more you're like, oh, actually this is okay. And you're always pushing to the next level, the next thing. And that's exactly what confidence is like, or anything is really like. So the more you're pushing out of your comfort zone and actually genuinely pushing yourself going to networking events, hey, maybe doing that first speaking event, maybe reaching out to that person you were not sure. And then you realize when it doesn't go right, you know, when you first, again, using the gym analogy, when you first fail a bench or something, you're like, you know, you're so scared of failing it, but then you fail it and you're like, oh, that wasn't so bad. And you fail your first speaking event. Oh, that wasn't so bad. No one really cared that much. It was all up in here. It was all up in my head. I cared a lot, but I think, and this is going to sound bad, But the more shit you are at more things and the more you fail, the less you care. If you just fail so often, you don't even remember how often you're failing. You know, I remember when I was younger, I used to, you know, I think everyone has this moment, you like, you're going to sleep and then your brain remembers a really embarrassing memory, right? I can't remember the last time that's happened to me, probably because I've got so many embarrassing memories. My brain's just like, ah, he doesn't even care at this point. So you just kind of flex that muscle. And push through it.

Doing the reps.

Doing the reps, doing the reps.

But Harry, you mentioned about that presentation you've done at 18, and you kind of softened a little bit afterwards. My question is, do you feel that perhaps you've judged your younger self sometimes too harshly?

Look, I, I look at my younger self. Look, I was a rat in a corner. Right. I didn't do the presentation because I wanted to do the presentation. You know, I wouldn't have done that presentation if I wasn't desperate. And I use the word desperate like deliberately. I only did that because I was absolutely desperate, like a rat in a corner. I wouldn't have done that otherwise. Nowadays, I like to think that I would still do that because not because I'm desperate anymore, but because I love learning. I love stretching myself. I love becoming a better version of myself. Now I'm not saying that, you know, younger me was bad in that way. And I'm incredibly grateful for the younger me for where I am today. But I wouldn't say it was because I had any deeper, you know, desire of like stretching or learning. It was purely a desperation play.

And it had to run its course to be where you are today.

Yeah. Yeah. And look, I genuinely wouldn't, I don't believe I would be where I was today if I didn't go through the circumstances I went through as awful as they are.

And is that why you've donated serious money and time to youth homelessness causes as well?

Yeah, I think, um, look, you know, given the story, I'm incredibly passionate about youth homelessness. I'm an ambassador for the Lighthouse Foundation in Australia. I speak about my story and all the money I raise goes directly to charity. I also work and directly donate Studio Hook funds to houses, homes, kids, individual development programs. I just think it's the right thing to do. I mean, I was incredibly lucky to have, you know, St. Vincent's, which are an organization, support me with Carla. And, you know, I fund now the Getting Down to Business program. The government pulled their support, as governments like to do, uh, and now we privately fund it. I, I don't know if these are anything— it, it— I don't think there's anything remarkable. It's just the right thing to do. I think about how many young kids there are on the street that are in worse situations than I were, and I think about, like, if we had more people that were aware of youth homelessness, and I don't think it'd be be an issue. And so that's why I get so involved.

You say that it feels natural to you, but what many others would do, at least performatively on social media, instead of donating money, they'll just get maybe another Rolex or go towards the Lambo fund, something like that. But you didn't.

Yeah, those things have just never excited me, to be perfectly honest. Like, I'm not a Rolex guy. I'm not a Lamborghini guy. Great cars to drive, fun, very impractical.

I don't know.

It's just not, you know, you have to think about what brings you deep enjoyment. And a lot of the time, I think people— and I don't mean this in a bad way— a lot of my friends have nice watches and nice cars, but a lot of the time, not always, but a lot of the time, it's to mask insecurity. It's not actually bringing them happiness. Another thing that Graham told me is you've got to do something for the heart, the mind, and for the soul, right? They're the three parts of you that will give you fulfillment and happiness. And so, you know, obviously Studio Hawk's very, you know, driven, heavy, and like, I love, I love it. But, you know, you've got to do things for the soul. Like, you know, what are you giving back to? What do you want to be remembered more. You know, I can die and Studio Hawk will give a nice speech, I'm sure, about me and the company, and they'll go on and continue and forget about me in a year. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's great. That's how the company should be. But I want to be remembered not so much for that, but I want to be remembered for the people that help, um, that I help bring it forward for. Like, I always shout out Graham and Carla and the people that help me. So yeah, I think that brings me a lot more happiness and meaning than a Rolex. And that's not to say I don't buy dumb shit. I buy a lot of dumb shit. But you know, it's not like Rolexes and cars.

Just not show-off stuff.

Not show-offy stuff. It's just not my thing.

Now, Harry, let's go back to SEO because you mentioned something big earlier and everyone is saying AI will kill SEO, that the days are numbered for a range of industries and You seem to think that it's just evolving. So what's your take on what's really happening under the hood? What's the change that the chatbots have brought and how it's changing how people search, but also your own industry?

Yeah, so I can definitely answer the first part of that. Like, obviously days are numbered for all these industries. I don't know. I mean, maybe, who knows, but I can talk to you about the SEO industry.

Those are the doomsayers or the AI hypers, whichever way you want to look at it.

Yeah. The AI hypers don't love me. Look, I've been doing SEO for 15 years. SEO has died 8 times. There's been the Penguin update, the Penguin update, the EAT update, the helpful content update. I mean, there's been everything and every time people have been saying SEO has been dead and every time you see the, um, you know, the market size of SEO grow. So you might think, well, why, you know, AI mode's different and it is, it's very different. It's a whole evolution in the way we search, but there's a few core facts that the AI hypers don't want you to believe. The first is the technology that underpins AI search, ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI mode, is all founded and rooted in SEO, right? It uses the way brands rank and where they come up with to found, to give a foundation of where they rank in AI. So that in itself should tell you like, so there's still a lot of merit to doing SEO. In fact, there's a little hack you can do in ChatGPT. You can right-click and press on the network graph and it will tell you what queries it's doing and searching in Google. The difference, and where people get it confused, they're like, well, okay, well, I put something in ChatGPT and it was different than what came up in Google. Yes. And the difference is it does what's called a fan-out query. So a fan-out query is something, so if I search best makeup for dry skin, Google would just do that one query and see who's ranking for that, right? Who's got the expertise, the authority, and the trust, and they're going to show those people. IMODE will go, oh, sorry, or ChatGPT or IMODE or any of these searches will all do the same thing. They will perform multiple searches. So they'll do that search. They'll do a search of most popular skincare brands. They'll be like reviews, everything, and they'll collate all that into an answer they give you. So it's very handy. It's very amazing. It's actually amazing. But it is fundamentally SEO, just evolved. Now what we're seeing that no one predicted or expected, me included, is AI search is powering conversational. Like people are using it very conversationally. If you look at the data that OpenAI just released, only 6% of people are using it for like transactional, you know, searches. Most of it is informational and stuff like that. So I'd be very scared if I had a website that was ranking for how tall is the Empire State Building. I'd be very scared because why would I click on that website ever? It is no need. The same with most informational queries. I don't believe that people are going to Google informational queries. I think that is done. And I don't think there's any point. That said, people are still using traditional search for both navigational and for transactional queries. And we're not seeing any decrease, any decrease in traditional search engines. And it's almost as if people are using, because it was, we very much thought it was going to be everyone migrates over, but it's very much people are using ChatGPT and Google for different things.

I do that, but I'm wondering if you can spell out this difference between the transactional and the informational queries that people are doing within each system, because one impacts businesses more than the other. Yeah.

And so this is really the meat and bones of the issues. An informational search, what might be, you know, best skincare for oily skin, whatever. A transactional search will be a better— let's make it simple. An informational search will be like, how should you apply skincare on oily skin, right? And you're looking for something clearly informational. A transactional might be skincare for oily skin, right? Just very simple. And you're looking to purchase something. So that's the difference. Transactional is there's a purchase intent. Informational is there's no real purchase intent. I'm just looking to, to learn more. Maybe there's a purchase intent down the line. Previously, people would optimize SEO for the informational stuff because they would land on the website. Let's say you own skincare.com, they'll land on skincare.com, read your article, and then you can serve them remarketing ads, or maybe they just purchase one of your products that you mentioned in the article. All very good. But in this new world, people are separating out the two things. So they're going, I'm going to ask ChatGPT for this, and it's going to give me some sources, but people aren't clicking the sources in there. And then they might go and research or research the brands that come up there, or Google those brands that come up there, or then just do a normal transactional search or use Google Shopping. To purchase. So for B2C, to break it down, B2C is seeing about 2% of all conversions are taking place within ChatGPT AI Bot of Perplexity. Very, very small. And you might go, well, that's, you know, it's just starting out. Well, it was 2.1% earlier in the year. It's now 2%. It's dropped in terms of commercial or transactional purchase intent in B2C. That's slightly different in high-ticket items. In high-ticket items, there's more research that people do. In B2B, it's very different. In B2B, there's a lot of people using ChatGPT to search, you know, a variety of different things, but very interesting. And SEO is our biggest channel for Studio Hawk. It gives us hundreds of leads a month. We're seeing our SEO channel maintain and we're seeing a new channel of people that are finding us through ChatGPT and AI mode, which we didn't expect at all. So it's almost on top of what we're doing. And a lot of brands are seeing this as well. So it has been very exciting. Unfortunately, the downside is, you know, all the AI bros and all the hype people are saying, you know, there's hacks to rank on AI that you, you know, because it's very hard to rank in SEO. There's no real hacks. In AI, we've got these hacks. No, unfortunately, if you want to rank in AI, you need to rank in SEO. That's a fundamental pillar of how to get there.

I'll come to this one in a second, Harry. My question before that was, you're right. I, for example, I was looking the other week for what are the tools to create a free landing page for a lead magnet. For example. I put that query into Google, I get 7 sponsored ads, then I get pretty much the same services coming down on my first page, but nothing. And then I asked ChatGPT, what tools can I use to do this? What's free? What's under this budget, et cetera? It gave me 20 other different tools that weren't in those first few lines. Of research, and it highlighted to me products that otherwise I wouldn't have discovered.

Yeah, that's true.

And the question is then, how would a new brand, a startup, somebody creating a new product who doesn't want to go necessarily for virality, be able to appear in these queries for AI engines, not necessarily with SEO because they're at the beginning, Do they, do you have more of a chance of being recommended by AI if you're a new brand than through the traditional Google route and paying thousands and thousands of dollars every month just to have your name protected from others who are buying, for example, keywords against your brand?

Yeah, I mean, it's a, it's a, it's a loaded question to be honest. So it is, do you have more of a chance? Maybe, maybe is the answer. It's not a clear definitive yes or no. So those, so the, so back to like, how does it come up with those 20? It does those fan out queries earlier. So those brands that you hadn't heard of are ranking, but they're ranking for terms that you weren't searching. So they might've been free or new or, you know, whatever term that Google used as a fan out query, or sorry, ChatGPT or whatever uses a fan out query. So they are ranking in SEO. Do they have more of a chance of coming up? Yeah, you're like, maybe if users are looking for different things, how do they get there? Still SEO principles. They still need to have good content. They still need to have good technical. They need to, if anything, the biggest hack right now is digital PR, like really getting quality links using data-led stories, which is a whole thing, but that makes a big difference in, in, but if you do, if you are—

PR is back in fashion or it never fell out of fashion.

I gotta say it's back. It hasn't really fallen out of fashion, but digital PR has become like the hot new version of PR, which is like data-led stories to journalists. But yeah, so if you come out of the gates, I think it's just good business advice. Like if I, if I, let's say I wanted to outrank Studio Hawk, I had a new business with Daniel Ionescu and I started a new SEO company tomorrow and we're like, how do we freaking beat those Studio Hawk guys? I would go, okay, we need to niche down, right? We need to go, we're the best SEO company for SaaS. And that's how we might come up in AI because people might search best SEO for SaaS. And if we do the basics, we're more likely to come up for that. Whereas we're probably still not going to come up for best SEO. But that's how I would look at that. Yeah.

So if you have a tech product, so something for SaaS, just like you gave a perfect example, then you would be looking into those fan-out queries where you are niching down, even though you would serve not only B2B, but you could just work your, do your SEO work in that field. Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, so there's two quick tricks to do that in AI. Again, you still need to have an SEO base, but you can use— yeah, just two quick ones. Perplexity will tell you, if you do a search in Perplexity, it will tell you what sources it pulls to come up with its answer, which is very useful because you can then reach out to those sources and try and get listed. And in ChatGPT, you can right-click, it's probably a little bit more development heavy, you can right-click and press inspect on Google Chrome. If you go to the network tab and refresh the page, you can refresh it. And if you click on the— if you filter it out down to queries, you can see the exact queries that ChatGPT is calling and exactly the fan-out queries it's doing. I've got a— there's an Instagram video that I've done that I can link if people want that in more detail. But yeah, that's, um, that's a really quick hack to see those fan-out queries in its entirety.

I'll link your Instagram in the show notes for people to check it out. And also in ChatGPT, if you're on the ChatGPT Mac app, especially with GPT-5, you can click on the dot, dot, dot and see the thinking, so to speak, and the steps that it does rather than going through the browser trick that you mentioned, which was the—

Yeah, it doesn't give you all the queries it does though.

So it's more detailed. It's more detailed.

Oh yeah. So it gives you the exact queries it's done. It gives you like all 12 of them that it's done to come up with that answer. So all the 12 searches and yes, ChatGPT does use Google. So much you can Google that and research that yourself. But yes.

For anybody starting out, what's the best way to find out if you would be recommended by AI engines in a particular field? How do you find out? Because everybody gets different answers.

Yeah, it is very personalized. You want to create, so again, to keep it high level, you want to create a new we call it like a virgin instance of ChatGPT. So it's got no personalization data, like a new account on a new IP address. It's tricky to set up, or you can use a service like TryProfound or something, but they're quite expensive that do that for you. And then that will do a seed phrase to kind of come up with all the variants that you might be ranking for in AI. But again, if you're not ranking in SEO, there's a good chance you're not ranking in AI anyway. So focus on building that pillar and then start going up the AI.

Yeah, because with SEO, say you spin up Ahrefs or any other service, Semrush, you name it, and then you see where you rank and that kind of like changes, but you can easily verify it. You just go and Google it yourself. While if I want to find out how Millennial Masters pings, if anybody asks about it in AI chatbots, mine will be fully biased with everything it knows from my chats, and there's no chance that it would give me an accurate description. But I've seen it on other people. They, for example, typed it into Google and they had an AI overview of it. But I don't know if I Google that, I don't get that AI overview of Millennial Masters. So how can you check.

So Semrush and Ahrefs actually have a feature now that allows you to do that and check because Semrush and Ahrefs also, those search results, you know, where it tells you where you're normally ranking in the SEO or the SERPs is, you know, they call them virgin instances. They're like not depersonalized. Cause if you search something in Google and I search something in Google, we're still going to see different things based on our personalization. So it's not that different in Google. But yeah, Semrush and Ahrefs kind of have a high level list of phrases, but I would do a domain overview in Semrush or Ahrefs. It doesn't really matter what tool you use. They're pretty similar. And then it will tell you what you're ranking for. And it'll also tell you if you have any AI visibility. If you're not ranking for anything organically, please don't bother trying to find where you're ranking in AI. You're probably not. And you're just wasting your time. Focus on, again, building out, get some initial keywords that show up in Semrush and Ahrefs, and then you'll start coming up in AI mode.

And Harry, you speaking of SEO and GEO is, I've seen the term coined now for it. If somebody comes to you and says, I just want to show up in the AI engines, will you turn them down if they don't have the good SEO? Because I know you said you turned down up to 60% of your potential clients because you can't guarantee their ROI. Which is quite unusual in agency land.

Yeah. So look, we turn down anyone that we don't think we're a good fit for. We've got resources. So we've got a whole training portal called Hawk Academy, which is getting relaunched in about a week. It might be live by the time this is there. And it's a totally free platform of learning everything about SEO. It's all our playbooks, all our everything. And so we send people there. We say, hey, you're not maybe ready for an SEO campaign with us, but go and do some of these things, these basics, these fundamentals, and you'll get to a point where you are ready to engage an agency. If a company came to me and they had no SEO traffic and they said, I want to come in AI mode, yeah, I would turn them down and I would say, hey, look, it's fantastic that you're thinking about this. I wouldn't hire us. I wouldn't hire any agency to do this. I would start building out these foundations. You can learn them through Hawk Academy completely free. We don't charge you a thing. There's quizzes, there's courses, there's everything. And you can use that to get to a point where you can hire an agency. But yeah, you would need to. So in Hawk Academy, we talk about all the different AI training modules and all the stuff in there. But yeah, fundamentally, To answer your question, no, we wouldn't take them on. We'll tell them that they need to build a foundation.

So how do you stay so patient when everybody else is just chasing the quick wins and they would land on those clients like a hawk, just to use a sleight of hand here?

Look, I think a big part of what I do is education. You know, even the people listening to this, you know, there's a lot of education at what has to happen around what is AI search and what's going on. And you have to be patient to educate people because because if you're impatient, then no one's going to learn and no one's going to get any better. But why do we turn down these clients and why are we so patient about it? Look, it's reputation. We're not going to squander— we've got a really incredible global reputation for doing the right thing. We don't do locking contracts. So if we have a customer that comes on with us and isn't seeing results, they're going to leave us anyway. And that's not going to be good for either of us. We would much rather be a partner to a client and say, hey, you know, you're going to get some wins here, we're going to get paid a retainer, we're all going to be happy, then we're just going to try and milk this client for as long as we can. Like, if a client's with us for 2, 3 months, we're not making any money. Like, that's terrible. By the time we've onboarded them, assigned people, and done all this stuff, that's a disaster of a campaign. That's gone awfully. So we'd much rather be patient and take on clients that we are a good fit for and provide education because it just comes back. Like, the amount of clients that we've sent away and said, go do this, and they've said, why don't you want to take our money? It's like, it's just not the right thing to do. But if you get it to a point, then we could work together and same with talent.

Like, you know, and do they come back? Do they get to that point and come back to you and appreciate that you've done them a service that you haven't charged them or taken their money when you shouldn't have, but obviously somebody else did.

Yeah, look, a quarter of them will probably go through Hawke Academy and do the things and get to a point, maybe even less. Some of them will just work with another agency. They won't listen to us or they won't listen to whoever they're talking to. I mean, that's unfortunate. I mean, I have nothing to gain from turning down a client. I would hope that they would listen to me, especially if I said I gave them some recommendations, I gave them some stuff to do, and they went and hired someone else. Like, at that point, that's on you. Like, that's on you because you, you should have known better than to, than to spend that money because you thought this, this agency was going to promise you a lifeboat or whatever. But I really think that we're in an age of the world where You know, knowledge is everywhere. You can go on ChatGPT and learn about anything. And you know, you've got to, you shouldn't be gatekeeping your education. Like you should be telling people freely if they're a good fit for you or not a good fit for you. And that's why we have Hawke Academy for free. People are like, well, why don't you charge for this? It's like, well, we want to educate the audience because if more people know about AI search and SEO, then more people will understand that we're a good option to hire. And there'll be more talent in the industry because we do a few thousand students every year that go through that. They're getting for free, but then it means that there's more talent for us to hire. I mean, people complain about the ecosystem they're in, but they're not feeding it. They're just taking from it, right? So if you're a fisherman always just fishing and eating everything and you're not like putting the small fish back, I see this as like putting the small fish back. We're not going to reel in every fish. It's like too small. It's like, let it go out, let it have babies, let it grow. So it grows the ecosystem rather than just take, take, take, take, take, and then complaining that there's no talent or clients because you've just ruined the ecosystem. System.

That's a good point to move into some rapid-fire questions, Harry, because we're getting close to wrap-up. So let's do some quick ones. GPT Plus, GPT Pro, or Claude?

Claude for coding, GPT Pro for pretty much everything else if you can, or else GPT Plus if you can't afford Pro.

One SEO myth that still needs to die in 2025?

The AI one at the moment is killing me. People going like, oh, AI is completely different than SEO. Well, no, they're not.

Next, what's one belief that changed your life?

One belief that changed my life.

Hmm.

That's a tough one. One belief that changed my life. I think the belief that I held onto, it's actually overcoming a belief. The belief that it's the belief that holding onto a view is strong or strength. What changed my life is realizing that you become much more approachable and intelligent to the right people when you're willing to let go of beliefs in light of new information and you're willing to admit you're wrong. That's very powerful and very important. That's changed my life.

That's a good one, Harry. Now, a failure that turned out to be a blessing.

Failure that turned out to be a blessing. Well, this is a little known fact, but when we set up in the UK 5 years ago, we had set up the company structure in a way that was just honestly the shit show is the only way to describe it, right? But it turned out to be a blessing because we'd separated the company entities, which made doing the US and reconciling the accounts much better. One thing has probably saved me hundreds of thousands or maybe a million bucks at this point in terms of tax and things that we've been able to optimize because we set it up wrong.

Next, what's something founders or people building businesses should stop pretending to care about?

Stop pretending to care about. Founders need to stop caring about ideas, right? Like, frankly, no business fails because there's not enough ideas. It fails because so many founders are coming in every day. I've got this idea. I've got this idea. I want to do this thing. We should do this thing. And it's just chaos, right? You can write down all your ideas. And then when you're at a point, when the team's at a point where they're like, oh, I actually feel like we're breathing for once. That's when you bust out only your favorite one or two ideas out of that list. Otherwise, you just overwhelm them with one.

And you can ruminate them as well and think better about which would fit better.

Guilt. Every idea you have, every idea you have, you sit on for a week. You never go to the team with an idea you just had. You sit on for a week, you consolidate your ideas. Yeah, it's hard. It's discipline, but otherwise you're just, you think you're helping, but you're actually hindering.

Makes sense. And last but not least, Harry. What's the biggest sacrifice you had to make to be where you are today?

I think just sacrificing my late teens, early 20s. And I think it's something that, you know, you can look at entrepreneurship now and you look at where I am and I'm traveling the world. I've got, you know, money and great friends and everything like that. But you don't see the first 5 years of the business. The first 5 years of the business were me working 100-hour weeks, busting my ass. I didn't go out to bars. I didn't go to clubs, lost relationships. They're sacrifices. I would make them again in a heartbeat. But if you think for a second, you're going to start this business, you're going to scale it, and you're going to also live this life of going to Thailand and Bali and Mexico and doing all this stuff. No, no, no, no. Your first years, you sit the hell down and you work and you grind through it. Then and only then, if you've done a good job, can you relax a little bit and start doing other things. But that was the biggest sacrifice for me. I didn't, I don't think I had a choice, but I'm glad I did it. But yeah, there are times where I'm like, man, I would have liked to have been a kid, you know, like never went through a clubbing phase or anything like that. But again, I don't think anyone goes— everyone's like, well, you didn't miss much.

Actually, it's a bit fun later on when you can hold your liquor and also be a bit better behaved than in your teenage years.

Yeah. Yeah.

My reflection, but I've done both, so, you know, I can speak from experience when it comes to that. Thank you, Harry, for this great reflection and for sharing your journey and learnings on Millennial Masters. And I can't wait to see what you're gonna do next with Studio.

Thanks, Daniel.

Thanks for tuning in all the way to the end of this episode. If you enjoyed it, please share it with someone you think would get value from it. And don't forget to subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode. For the best way to stay in the loop, head to millennialmasters.net. That's where you'll get all the latest features and new episodes straight to your inbox every week. Catch you next week.