Excerpt Talks Episode #1 – Tom Fanelli of Convesio

Transcript

Lawrence Ladomery

Okay, so in our first episode of the Excerpt Talks, we’re talking to Tom Fanelli. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Convesio – a business that now is much more than a hosting platform, but I’ll let Tom explain what Convesio is and who it’s for. I should also share that I worked for Convesio for a couple of years, before COVID, so I do know Tom quite well, and the brand, of course.

But as I mentioned, Convesio has changed and I’m keen to discuss how it has changed. I’ll kick off with an interesting fact – not quite related to what we’ll be talking about, interesting nevertheless. Convesio originally raised $1 million from an equity crowdfunding exercise. Exactly. So there were 800 people who invested in Convesio at the very start.

Tom Fanelli

Equity crowdfunding, yes.

Lawrence Ladomery

Before you even had a product. And I don’t think that’s a common way for businesses, particularly in the WordPress ecosystem, to raise funds.

Tom Fanelli

Yeah, that is. And thanks for having me, Lawrence. It’s great to reconnect with you. I’m always reminded – I love how you say my last name with an Italian accent. It reminds me of home, you know? Yeah, so we did start in a bit of an unconventional way. I mean, we bootstrapped ourselves for the initial MVP and then decided we wanted to get a little bit more serious about it. And we went out to raise an equity crowdfunding round, which, at the time, had only existed for maybe a handful of years, maybe three to six years. It was really part of the JOBS Act that Obama enacted, where he allowed this notion of non-accredited investors to be able to invest small amounts of money into a startup. That gave birth to platforms similar to what a Kickstarter would be, but you actually get equity in the company. You’re not just pre-buying a product that they’re building and sort of pre-funding it.

We felt it was a more legitimate way. And the other thing that I loved was bringing people along in the community. We’ve all watched in the WordPress space as hosting companies have grown to be behemoths and they have huge exits and go public and all of that. I loved the idea of being able to bring along some of the WordPress community. Wouldn’t it be an awesome story if this was a community-backed company instead of just a venture-backed one or something bootstrapped – and the community could share in the success of Convesio when we have a meaningful exit?

As luck would have it, during that time, we launched our crowdfunding campaign and, I think a week or two later, WP Engine announced that they were acquiring Flywheel. That gave us a ton of rocket fuel, if you will. I think in one week we raised six or seven hundred thousand dollars. It was an exciting start.

Lawrence Ladomery

Yeah, and I think I invested $100 as well. At some point, I’m hoping that I’ll… no doubt.

Tom Fanelli

Awesome. We’re glad to have you. I’m sure it’s going to turn into millions. So, the idea of what we started as – we really, I mean, you know this from working with me – part of my DNA is I love to innovate. I had become a little bothered by the fact that much of the hosting space was the same products and services in different data centers with different twists, but nothing really super innovative. In fact, shout-out to the two companies that were probably the most innovative at the time: Pagely and Pantheon. At the time, Pantheon only worked on Drupal, and they had a true containerized system, but not for WordPress in the early days.

So I was like: is there a way we can rethink hosting WordPress in a completely scalable manner that addresses performance and scaling? That gave birth to what we became. I use this analogy: we kind of built a Ferrari – and we learned very quickly that much of the market wanted a better Toyota than what they had, and maybe not a Ferrari. That learning over the first couple of years of us being in market led us to shift toward what we think of as the mid-market.

The real superpower of scaling that we created led us to understand that e-commerce sites – and we define that very broadly at Convesio: your typical WooCommerce stores, but also LearnDash, MemberPress, publishers selling large subscriptions – what I would call mission-critical sites where the site is the product, if you will. That led us to gravitate toward the mid-market, where the set of solutions becomes much more narrow. The entry-level market is extremely crowded with solutions, and there’s very entrenched “build my own on Google Cloud or AWS with DevOps” at the enterprise level. But that mid-market – the amount of solutions there is quite sparse. We found success focusing on this segment.

And that really led us to this idea: everyone was transacting online, so we got into payments. Since everyone’s transacting online, they all have abandoned carts, checkout optimization problems, the need to get more visitors to transact and become customers. We had the opportunity to acquire a marketing automation solution. Today, when we think of Convesio, it’s Host, Convert, and Pay – our hosting platform; our Convert platform, which we acquired (it used to be called Growmatik); and our Payments platform, which we built in-house and which allows customers to transact – it’s a competitor to Stripe.

Lawrence Ladomery

That’s quite an interesting evolution. And going back to the analogy: I think you did build a Ferrari, but you also built a Ferrari that could downgrade to a Toyota when needed. You were paying Toyota prices until you needed to race and needed all the power – and that’s your auto-scaling, right? That really set you apart at the time. Even now, I don’t think there are many hosting companies specifically positioned as scalable hosting providers.

Going back to the Convesio journey: I think originally you were serving agencies and then you broadened focus to more segments for these mission-critical use cases. But now you are much more focused on e-commerce, right? You’ve narrowed back into e-commerce and then broadened your offering with Pay and Convert. This is a unique approach – I hadn’t seen any other hosting provider start offering that. Do you think maybe we will? Do you think hosting platforms/infrastructure companies are going to broaden their offerings? We’ve seen them adopt services more and more, but not what you’ve done.

Tom Fanelli

Yeah. We like to think about our customers in the sense of how can we sell the trifecta, right? A client who’s interested in all three products. Our pitch is: if you look at every statistic known, e-commerce is significantly harder today than it was 10 years ago.

There’s been a 300% increase in ADA accessibility lawsuits. The number one target for accessibility lawsuits is e-commerce sites, because if you’re denying a disabled individual the ability to have a good or service, that becomes a problem – and they are first on the targeting list for that. Cost to acquire customers has skyrocketed. Chargebacks and fraud are at record levels. Cybersecurity is more complicated than ever. PCI compliance, and compliance in specialty industries like nutraceuticals and HIPAA compliance – these are all really hard things.

What they do is place a burden on a small business or store owner to go find experts and solutions for all these different things. It’s one of the biggest barriers to successfully running an e-commerce store. We’ve all seen the stats – the average number of plugins or add-ons that a Shopify store uses is like 12 or 15. It’s really high. You just can’t run a site anymore with just a store. You need a solution set supported by a team of experts experienced in all these areas. That’s what we’re trying to become: focused on the use case of commerce.

And, by the way, not just WordPress and WooCommerce. We’re partnered with BigCommerce. We host multiple workloads; Laravel has some commerce solutions. There are great open-source solutions like Medusa. People are doing headless commerce – that’s another big deal. Commerce can mean a lot of different things: memberships, online learning courses. Our definition of commerce isn’t just what you think of with Shopify.

I’d argue that’s actually the most competitive space, because we do feel like WooCommerce is losing a bit of ground to Shopify. But we’re firmly entrenched in the WordPress ecosystem for LearnDash, MemberPress, LifterLMS, and the online education space is blowing up. So it’s not dire for WooCommerce; Shopify is crushing it, but we have a broader use case than Shopify has.

Interesting news: our Convert product actually has a Shopify integration. We see ourselves as more platform-agnostic. We want to help merchants succeed – whether they’re on Shopify or another open-source system. In about 45 to 60 days, we’ll probably have our Convert integration live on the Shopify marketplace. We’ll start working with Shopify merchants on the Convert product, and maybe eventually we’ll get our Payments product into the Shopify ecosystem as well. Our focus is helping merchants be successful in all shapes and sizes, on whatever platform they’re on.

Lawrence Ladomery

So is the lesson here – for a smaller WordPress product business or agency – to think a little more broadly than just the product, explore other opportunities in terms of a portfolio where it makes sense and there is alignment, even beyond the WordPress ecosystem? And to tie this to the next question: are these the kind of discussions you’re having with partners who come to you perhaps for the technology but end up getting a lot of your insights shared on Slack? Because I know you do a lot of your conversations on Slack.

Tom Fanelli

That’s right. If I could just figure out how to get all my Slack information into AI, I’m pretty confident I can clone myself. So, here’s the interesting thing. In terms of product companies, you have to have an eye to the future. You need to be firmly entrenched in what’s going to move the needle and grow the company today, but you also have to look into the future.

I feel e-commerce is one of those spaces – like compliance, privacy, accessibility – where it’s really just getting started. We’re seeing more merchants grow into this mid-market. There are still a lot of what we call dreamers, and Shopify markets heavily to those: “get online, start selling, and you’ll have the business of your dreams,” maybe with no revenue at the moment. There’s a lot of people graduating from dreamers into the mid-market with more substantial businesses and needs.

Spotting that trend in your industry and preparing to service those people when the timing is right is important. If you’re too early, there’s not enough of a mid-market base. In our case, we sort of stumbled into this and it evolved with us – happy timing. I think it’s only going to grow.

I also think AI is changing things really rapidly. If you’re a small WordPress product company or developer, one area you can almost certainly innovate and be disruptive is with AI. But you’ve got to be ready to go at breakneck speeds. There’s this new notion – people call it 9-9-6 – that came out of China and is labeled abusive, but a lot of AI startups are following it: 9am to 9pm, six days a week. What I’m hearing from many people in the Bay Area and startup world: everyone’s working weekends in this space. Things are evolving so fast. If you jump into AI, it’s highly competitive but very green-field. There’s a level playing field – when you hear about the next new thing, I’m hearing about it at the same time. No one has a 10-year entrenched advantage. It’s all so new; every day there are announcements changing things radically.

Lawrence Ladomery

That’s interesting and a little bit scary as well. Most of us are trying to predict the future as everything evolves at the speed of light around us. In terms of your partner program at Convesio, who is it for primarily and what are the ultimate benefits beyond the numbers?

Tom Fanelli

You mentioned we started with agencies and then pivoted to direct brands. I’d say the DNA of Convesio – our hearts – are very much with agencies. I ran my own agency for seven years, and I get it.

When we introduced Payments, I felt there’s been a bit of taking advantage in the payment space. Companies like Stripe replaced a lot of the old merchant-account pain with a great DIY sign-up platform. Back in the day, that didn’t exist – it was a pain to get a merchant account. In that process, there was an organization making money off the sales process when you signed up. Stripe cut them out by building DIY tools – but they’ve leveraged, unknowingly, agencies who build the sites and set up the stores. Agencies implement Stripe but get $0 for it.

Good for Stripe – they cut out a huge cost segment – but the agencies functioning as the sales rep aren’t getting revenue back. We wanted to make a passive, highly profitable revenue stream for agencies that was highly sticky. In the agency grind, if you’re lucky, you might have low double-digit net profit margins. Many successful agencies I know are at 15% net profit. If you’ve got a $1M agency, that’s $150K a year. If you’ve got half that – $500K – we wanted to see if we could meaningfully move that by introducing Payments. Instead of recommending Stripe, they’d recommend Convesio Pay and get a cut of the payment fees.

We built that into the partner program. Same thinking with Convert. Same thinking on Hosting, where we offer ongoing revenue share for the life of the client. It’s about building a highly net-profit, recurring, completely passive revenue stream for agencies. If the agency owner wants to go to the beach, they’re still getting their check every month. That’s who we gear our partner program for.

Lawrence Ladomery

That’s quite interesting. Again, it’s not something seen often out there. I can’t think of a hosting provider doing this across such an extended offering. I’ve got a question about –

Tom Fanelli

I will tell you one thing to interject there: it’s not easy. And here’s why. For Convesio Pay, we built a ton of enterprise payments infrastructure. We have a shared risk model with our PSP on the backend – today we use Adyen. We just launched crypto, by the way, so now you can process crypto payments. But we didn’t just do a Stripe integration – that’s the easy route. The problem is if you go that route, you don’t have margins to pay anyone anything because Stripe doesn’t give anyone much of anything.

We took on the burden of building payments infrastructure and risk processes. We probably invested close to a million dollars building this payments infrastructure. That’s what enables us to unlock the revenue shares we can pay to agencies on payments.

Lawrence Ladomery

Yeah, that makes sense. I want to ask you about your affiliate program because I worked on it when I was at Convesio and at the time it didn’t really work for us. It was difficult to get traction. It was actually difficult to explain Convesio to a lot of these affiliates. Has that changed? Have you been able to make the affiliate program work?

Tom Fanelli

In short: not at scale. Our best affiliates are agencies that host with us and want to deploy Payments or Convert into their customer base. These are not pure-play affiliate partners; when you think of a pure affiliate, they’re lead aggregation. Honestly, our product doesn’t lend itself well to that, and here’s why: we are very much a considered purchase because we’re not at the entry level of the market.

If you want to convert the most units as a blogger writing “how to get started with your own website,” you’re going to send them to the Bluehosts of the world for 99-cent hosting or GoDaddy. You’re not going to send them to Convesio where it might be $150/month to start. And if you did, the conversion rate is probably going to be low. So our messaging doesn’t work for the pure affiliate model.

Where it works great is when we win over agencies and they’re like, “I can sell more of Convesio’s products to our customers and increase revenue from our partnership.” Especially with our white-glove support. If they come to us: “Hey, we have a membership site, we want to move to Convesio Pay” – we do the token migrations for you. We handle it white-glove. We tell you exactly what needs to happen between Stripe and us to migrate tokens so subscriptions run seamlessly. We migrate all your subscriptions to use our checkout method. We do a lot to help people have a seamless experience when moving their payment processor to us.

Lawrence Ladomery

So when you speak to agencies and partners, are you talking more in terms of revenue share than “affiliates”? I’m being semantic here – just curious about the language.

Tom Fanelli

I don’t usually use the term “rev share,” but I like it, so I might steal that – because that’s really what it is. We’re truly partnered together. When you get on Convesio as an agency, you still own all your customers. You want them to be successful. When you bring Convesio into the mix – whether the customer knows it or you’re reselling our hosting – most people tell clients they’re working with Convesio. It’s usually a boost, because we’re positioned as a premium provider, which helps the agency justify a premium solution.

It’s very much a partnership where we’re working in tandem with the client and the agency, because we both have ongoing revenue. If things go sideways, we lose revenue and the agency loses revenue and face. So we work together to make sure agencies and their customers have a really good, hands-on experience. We share in the revenue of that. It really is a rev-share model.

Lawrence Ladomery

The next question, Tom – I’m going to skip it. I’m going to skip a couple of questions because this is a good segue to show what that model can look like. Also, you’ve talked about the Payments solution. What I’m going to do now is attempt to share my screen… Okay, I trust that you can see this slide.

Tom Fanelli

Perfect.

Lawrence Ladomery

We’ve put together an example of what a single agency using your Pay product, your Convert product, and Hosting can potentially generate each month. The scenario: they’re helping a WooCommerce store generating about $250,000 a month in revenue through about a thousand transactions. Do you mind going through these numbers and explaining what they are?

Tom Fanelli

Yeah, for sure. Our rack rate on payment processing is the same as Stripe’s – 2.9% and 30 cents a transaction. A typical merchant doing $250,000 a month will be paying somewhere around $7,250 in payment processing fees. The bulk of those fees go to the credit card interchange and the bank, but what’s left over, we split with the agency.

From the agency’s perspective – there’s variance – but think of it as 20 basis points (0.20%) as what an agency can make. This depends on a variety of factors. If you have a B2B site, you might earn less because business credit cards have very high fees, so there’s much less left over after the split. If you have a customer doing a lot of debit card transactions, maybe the rate will be higher because debit has lower fees. We also introduced our new cryptocurrency solution, which has very high rev-share fees as well – so that’s a great alternative method.

And that’s only one part. You actually have the opportunity to earn much more than this – say the $500 example – if you’re in highly regulated industries. We do a lot with peptides and nutraceuticals. Those are regulated industries where the transaction percentage fees are not 2.9% – they can go north of 5%. Those have higher regulatory burdens, so higher percentage fees from processors – but we make more money there, and those are richer opportunities for agencies to share in.

On Convesio Convert: we do a 20% rev share across most products at Convesio. On Convert and Hosting you get a flat 20% rev-share. With Convert, the awesome thing is you can sell a number of additional services that our team will help you implement – or you can tool up internally. Think full automation workflows: email, pop-ups, abandoned-cart sequences. The customer will need someone to implement that. There’s work-for-hire you can charge for – to implement, monitor, and manage these Convert campaigns.

Our team is very hands-on with support, so you as the agency get basically unlimited support with these products. There’s additional billable work you can charge for – writing, creative, setting up automations. We think Convert actually unlocks additional service revenue for agencies. Compared to something like Klaviyo, we’re far less expensive. We can typically save your end customer a large fee they might be paying Klaviyo, so they have more money to spend with you to optimize campaigns. It’s a win-win.

Lawrence Ladomery

I just wanted to comment that you’ve nailed product-market fit from a hosting perspective. You’re a platform that’s scalable – beautifully suited for B2C e-commerce stores doing a lot of volume. The more transactions, the larger the volume, the more revenue you get. It’s also interesting what you said about regulated industries. I suppose that was a conscious strategy – even two years ago. I remember seeing a landing page on your site about some regulated industries. Did you already have in mind that this would tie in nicely with a future Pay product, and that these types of industries see higher payment costs?

Tom Fanelli

Yes, absolutely. We tend to gravitate toward places – this is part of who Convesio is – where in a really competitive landscape like hosting, we can compete and win in niches. Early on, many hosting companies wouldn’t touch cannabis or nutraceuticals. They wouldn’t touch dispensaries or even companies selling marijuana in states where it’s legalized. These folks needed a home because they were being deplatformed. We’ve always been open to taking those types of businesses on.

That’s played nicely into the direction we’re going with payments. We’re still not a good fit for all high-risk regulated industries, but we’ve taken special steps to get approved to do nutraceuticals with our payment processor. We’ve gone through additional compliance processes to do that. We still can’t do things like firearms – that’s another big vertical we work in – but because of how we’ve architected our payments platform, we’re agnostic on the processor on the backend. Our plan is to bring on processors who are firearms-friendly, cannabis-friendly, etc. Cannabis laws are changing quickly in the US, so maybe it won’t be as big an issue in a year or two. Right now it’s extremely hard for those businesses to process credit cards.

So yes, there was thoughtfulness, because we saw underserved, harder markets. Another business insight: if you’re willing to step up and do the work no one else wants to do, you can compete and charge higher prices. It’s not uncommon for people in nutraceuticals to be paying 8% for credit card processing. If you’re doing a million dollars a month in revenue, that’s a lot of money.

Lawrence Ladomery

I think one takeaway for me today is to look up what “nutraceutical” means and maybe try some – whatever that is. I’m going to tell my kids today to have their nutraceuticals with breakfast.

Tom Fanelli

That’s any of your vitamins – your health supplements. Tell them that, yes.

Lawrence Ladomery

In the WordPress space, there are tons of agencies – tons of WooCommerce agencies. What does it take for, say, a smaller agency to get to a point where they can attract that business – a WooCommerce store generating a quarter of a million dollars in sales each month? Because this whole proposition looks really good for them, but they might have to step up – or even psychologically change their mindset a little bit.

Tom Fanelli

Yes. This is really important. We introduced new plans called Express Plans. Express is a new product offering we have, and we partnered with Automattic on this – we use the WP Cloud infrastructure. We have Express Plans, Business Plans, and Enterprise Plans.

Express plans are very attractive to agencies with a portfolio of sites that are maybe not there yet – more in-the-box, a little more cookie-cutter, your standard sites. Business and Enterprise plans at Convesio are for when you’re scaling up with really large LMSs, doing millions a month, hundreds of thousands of orders a month, or many tens of thousands of orders a month on WooCommerce. You graduate into those plans. So we have this spectrum and we’ve made it easier for agencies to start at Convesio with a lower price but still a really awesome product, and then combine that with one or two sites that need Business or Enterprise. We’ve tried to lower the financial barrier.

With that said, you’ve got to do some soul-searching. Most agencies that don’t touch e-commerce are frightened. It’s a lot of complexity they’re not used to: shipping, inventory, taxes, security. “Is this customer going to call me on a Saturday morning during a sale because the site is down or slow?” E-commerce is a more complicated beast: more plugins, more third-party tools to integrate with. There are real ramifications if things go down. You have to be there very quickly.

If you’re an agency doing that yourself, it is scary and daunting – and you’ve got to think hard whether it’s worth it. This is where Convesio comes in. We are on Slack with you 24/7. We monitor all your sites 24/7 in one-minute intervals. If a site has a hiccup, our team is there. We give you a safety net. There’s nothing in e-commerce with WooCommerce we haven’t seen at this point. We give you confidence that your clients’ stores are running, monitored, managed, secure – and if you have a problem, we have your back. That’s what it takes: a company having your back to convince agencies it’s worth entering this more complicated space.

Lawrence Ladomery

That’s super interesting. I think there’ll be a lot of soul-searching among agencies when they learn about the challenges and opportunities. Moving on to getting on board with your partner program: who do you like to work with, what does the onboarding process look like, and how do you support agency partners?

Tom Fanelli

One of the things agencies like most – it’s an unexpected delight – is we bring them into our Slack organization. They have a range of 10 to 20 different individuals in that Slack channel they can rely on: performance optimization, security, support, migrations, use-case questions – you name it. One of the biggest benefits of partnering with Convesio, in my opinion, is the availability of experts to tackle whatever problem they may have with their portfolio. I don’t know any other company that does what we do. We feel like an extension of an agency’s team.

If you’re a one-man show or a five-person agency, imagine getting a membership for, like, $150 a month – our express package for your first 10 sites – and you get access to a private Slack with a team whose job is to help you become more successful. That’s a powerful value prop.

Once you come on board, we do all the migrations for you. Agencies ask, “Do I have to migrate all my sites?” No. Our team prefers to do the migrations. We plan them out with you. Are these downtime-sensitive sites where we need to do it after hours with a maintenance window? When you migrate a really large e-commerce site, we rehearse the migration first, then pick a low-traffic time, do syncing, and follow a coordinated process with a prescribed maintenance window. I think we’re excellent at these go-live processes.

Sometimes agencies say, “I just have a bunch of local service companies – they’re 9 to 5; as long as it’s not more than 15 minutes of downtime, we can do it anytime.” We work with you to understand what type of clients we’re migrating. It’s all coordinated through Slack with an onboarding manager. Really, everything is done within Slack – support, conversations, whatever you need.

Lawrence Ladomery

I like the analogy you made: what you offer in terms of knowledge and insight is like one of those membership sites where you’re signing up to a guru – and peers as well. Conscious of time, we’ve only got about five minutes left, and I think it’s great to close with some thoughts about WordPress and where WordPress is going – and also Convesio. Thinking three years out, where do you think WordPress will be, and where will Convesio be?

Tom Fanelli

We’re working on some very exciting new AI features, which are going to come out very soon – possibly in our platform as soon as next week for some early-access requests. I think AI is going to play a really big part in what we’re doing. Running a store is very manual. In the WordPress space, we all hate that we have to do plugin updates constantly and security updates, and we have to test the plugin updates if you’re doing them right. It’s very labor-intensive to run a store on WordPress. We feel AI is going to radically transform that – much can be done via AI agents. We’re working on some really cool stuff around that.

AI will empower people to create on the web more than ever. Where I want Convesio to be: with a rich set of AI features across Host, Convert, and Pay. We’ll be more diversified, not just WordPress but also open-source stacks. We’ll make it easy to get insights and deploy changes to your performance and infrastructure. I see us embracing more headless checkout technology, becoming more autonomous across commerce platforms, and being a layer of tools and services people can layer on top of whatever store they’re running.

As for WordPress – I don’t know. I think about this a lot because I did a little project where I vibe-coded a plugin for myself – and it was so easy. It makes me wonder about the future of the plugin space when people can vibe-code any little feature in a plugin eventually. There will be naysayers about security and readiness, but it’s going to get there. When it does, and you need a new feature, you’re not going to go purchase plugins with a hundred features for the one you want. You’ll realize the one feature you need, you might vibe-code as a small utility. That represents a fundamental shift in WordPress. I’m concerned slightly about what that’s going to do to the WordPress economy. We’ll be here with a front-row seat. People need to start thinking about how AI will impact the ecosystem over the next two to five years.

Lawrence Ladomery

I’m glad the WordPress project is starting to invest time and resources in AI. I think they quite recently formed a team, and I think they’ve had everyone in a room somewhere in New York as well – not even remote – to work closely. One angle: because of open source and how WordPress is effectively more of an operating system, more of a framework, we may be better positioned than proprietary tech that isn’t as open or adaptable. I’m trying to envisage Wix pivoting its platform structure and roadmap to accommodate all the changes AI will bring. That might be a good position for WordPress to be in because of that.

Tom Fanelli

I agree. I’ve long thought WordPress could be the operating system people vibe-code on. You have the framework or scaffolding of a site with WordPress, then vibe-code or AI-code the features you need. Maybe you’ve got some utilities and tools – and the foundation is WordPress – and you build upon that.

I don’t know – my mind changes on this weekly. But I will agree on this: I don’t see why anyone would do the vendor lock-in of a proprietary system anymore. Today, sure, there are reasons. In the future, I can’t see it. Today, Squarespace can build beautiful websites. I can’t build a website with AI from a design perspective that’s as good as Squarespace – yet. It’s beautiful and does a lot of awesome stuff. But I believe eventually AI will design better than these tools.

That’s a gap today: design in AI isn’t quite there; you have to do a lot of coaxing to get decent output. From a development perspective – modifying sites, changing features, small patches – it’s very much there today. So I agree: unless these platforms do something so unique that it draws people to them, I don’t see the Wix’s of the world winning the AI battle based on closed architecture.

Lawrence Ladomery

Just to conclude – where can people learn more about Convesio and your partner program, and even connect with you?

Tom Fanelli

The fastest, best way is to come to convesio.com and chat with us. We have a chat widget – you can talk to anyone. We’ll happily tell you more about our plans, products, and partner programs. Just come chat with us and we’ll get you an invite into Slack and help you crush your objectives. So yeah – reach out via our website.

Lawrence Ladomery

Thank you, Tom, for being super generous with your time and, as always, extremely interesting. This was episode one of our Excerpt Talks, and I think we’ve got a really good one. Thank you again, Tom, for your time.

Tom Fanelli

All right – episode one. Thanks, Lawrence. I appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Lawrence Ladomery

No worries, bye.