2026-06-22 - Andy Milligan - 1:1 (0925)

Chris LaFay: So it's not the screen sharing that was the problem. When I went to a certain website, that was the problem. That's odd, huh? Okay, let's do this instead. Gives me the basics. All right.

Andy Milligan: I think is what they.

Chris LaFay: I know I've showed you this before, but like this like guide structure, like everything has the, the same like CSS variables and all that jazz. Like so for example, like the padding in between here, like around the top left and bottom right, that card is the same as the padding around this, which is the same as the padding around this. The shadows are all the same variables. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All that being said is each of these blocks and this is not the most up to date. There's a lot of, there's a lot of better stuff than this that's out there right now that I've created. All of these could just be building blocks like they already are. They're building blocks within WordPress. I've converted them all. But like they could be a CMS would be very easy to be like. This is a block called image column. The data object attached to it is an image, a title, a description and a button that has a color. Like, why not just create like a drag and droppable interface for.

Andy Milligan: This.

Chris LaFay: Would be so simple, it would be so lightweight. It would have next to no load time, no plugins, no nothing. And it's, it's right here. And the HTML like you could then change. If all you're storing in the back end is an image, a header, a text and a button, you can actually change the HTML code entirely on a site by site basis. You're, and you're keeping the data structure exactly the same. Like, so imagine just having 15 like 20 to 30 different building blocks that are all like loaded into this very lightweight CMS where all the blocks are, are just storing of data, not HTML structure at all. You could go ham with it, man. Like it's, it's really, it's really interesting. Yeah, but everybody wants WordPress, everybody wants web flow, everybody wants the thing, right?

Andy Milligan: I know, that's the thing too. It's yeah. Interesting times, dude. I, I heard. Go ahead.

Chris LaFay: No, no, no, go ahead.

Andy Milligan: I was gonna say I listened to an Alex from the interview this weekend and. He said that, you know, anyone can make video. Like everybody has smartphones, everyone can make video. And compare that a lot to what AI is doing to tech enabled service providers. So like everyone can make a video, but not everyone's Mr. Beast. So like what does that look like, for people who can do digital services, you know, like, everything's going to be more emphasized on quality. But that analogy of, like, everyone can make video but not like, nobody else in this or Beast, like, to be the best of the best is, like, what's going to be most important, you know, I don't know.

Chris LaFay: I also, like, there's another aspect of me that's like, you know, I can literally sell these $15,000 websites on a single phone call. Like, I've done it, I think three times over now. And there's part of me that loves that because I basically spent one hour a piece. I spent three hours doing sales and made $45,000. What? But, like, is that a. Is that bubble going? Like, that bubble will eventually burst? Like, I either have to figure out. I've been saying this for the last few months. I either got to figure out how to provide so much value to keep that price point the same, same over the next year or two, or have to completely re alter everything. But there's also this point of like, everything's about to start looking exactly the same. So, like, if you actually design something that looks new and different and unique, will that actually help you stand out and be. Be different and be like, oh, I want that. Or will you basically be like, hand. Like, you know, women's handbags, you either go to Walmart and you get one for $5, or you go pay for Coach or Gucci handbags for 500. There isn't a middle ground with handbag. I'm using a stupid metaphor. Don't get me wrong.

Andy Milligan: Yeah,.

Chris LaFay: Sagan, I get what you mean.

Andy Milligan: It's not stupid.

Chris LaFay: What is that? Where web is going to go, it's either going to be highly commoditized or you're going to pay top dollar to get legit creatives.

Andy Milligan: Yeah, I don't.

Chris LaFay: I don't know. I. I just don't.

Andy Milligan: Yeah, I don't know. It's. It's a wild time, dude. But yes, the people, you are, like, making hay while the sun shines, dude. Like, that's as much as we can do to any extent. I think you're doing a great job of it. And like, I. I mean, that's why wean into hopefully the mastermind and events side and just keep building relationships, keep building a network and not be set.

Chris LaFay: On any,.

Andy Milligan: Any one version of what digital agencies could look like or what. You know, because I have, like, the scary part, I have, like, decades ahead, you know, and. Right. Keep rolling with the punches, you know, Keep taking bet.

Chris LaFay: This. What is your going back to your whole like CMO thing? What is your goal for the next few months? Because I don't know if we ever like. If you actually ever landed the plane on that.

Andy Milligan: Yeah, that's a good question. I think doing, doing an in person event would be a signal of progress for sure. I haven't done any outreach for ASS yet and I said I would. I just nervous but I need to do it and I will. So I like your idea of like having groups of matching into different groups and then doing outreach to the ones that would be good fits for each other and kind of batching those and seeing how many yeses you get. I really like that idea. Also, as a quick sidebar, I had a call with the consultant guy who exited a webflow agency and he has two connection. What's that?

Chris LaFay: No, I said go ahead. I. I interrupted you on accident.

Andy Milligan: No, you're good. And he's getting me into. You said wetflow will easily give you 5k for an event if you. Because they're webflow professional partner and he knows. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: So they'll spot. They'll basically like if since you're a partner, they'll basically sponsor an event for. And they'll just give you five grand. Yes, you can do with $5,000 for an event.

Andy Milligan: That's what I thought. Especially if the space is free. Like cohatch. So. Yeah, dude, food. Good food.

Chris LaFay: You know, good food. You could also. The giveaway. Not, not I say giveaways. It's what I don't mean by giveaways is like come and put in a raffle for AirPods. But like when I went to New York I got everybody and Legos. Like it doesn't have to be big, it just has to be unique and that's how you're memorable. It's just. Just be unique. Don't overthink it, Dude. Could you put that money toward like. Let's just say that at all. Let's say that it all happens. Are you gonna do that event with Toss Bober?

Andy Milligan: Yes, she wants to do it next year though, so.

Chris LaFay: Oh, that's right. Okay. Yeah.

Andy Milligan: Yeah, that's the thing too. It's like it's kind of a long term point. But she does. I was on her podcast last week and I introduced her and Garrett justice because they're like kind of both. Her podcast is called Marketers Exit. So it's targeted at like solos, you know, like people who are in house. I want to leave and like go out on Their own. Yeah, but she made a link to post about it. Got really good feedback in terms of. She just reposted mine that I. So it's got a lot of attention. It's just about capturing and converting attention, you know, so like connect with your wallets sort of thing. I don't know. But she did, she did a really good job with the one in Florida. Like really. So I would. She's the one that brings a lot of credibility too. Like there's no way I would be able to do this, which is myself so.

Chris LaFay: Dude, she had so many comments on that post from a few. I don't remember what it was. I just, I remember dropping, I remember seeing it and dropping a comment and being like, holy crap, there's a lot of. Yeah, there's a lot of people here in this discussion.

Andy Milligan: Would be so dope to have one in Columbus, dude, it was so cool. Yeah, but dude, like it would be so easy, dude, if webflow sponsors an event that's like that like solves the chicken and egg scenario of like, hey, we have support, so we go to cruise mother. Hey, this sponsor, this conference is sponsored by webflow. Cohabs would be like, oh yeah, you can do whatever you want and then hire a video crew obviously with some of the budget food. That would be so much fun. Yeah. Dude, what if there was like a J. Klaus's business for marketers? You know, that would be so cool. Yeah, obviously his life too and the grass is always greener. But yeah, that would be really cool.

Chris LaFay: Because once you, once you get into the like community building and you have to just continually be providing top tier value and that's just, that's hard to do at scale. Like you are always, constantly having to figure out how to level yourself up, level everybody else up so that they continue paying you a hundred bucks a month. Like I know, I know that he has a couple of tiers where it's like, you know, the big mastermind versus the small thing, blah, blah, I get, I get that. But yeah, on the flip side, like what, what I, what I will say that I haven't seen like looking at Chris Dubois. He basically started that from scratch and that was his thing. He didn't start that when he was doing other stuff. He started that cold. And it's. And the dude is a machine when it comes to like content creation and doing reach outs and all the like, he is the, the, the operations person to that Every visionary would want to have. Like if I could bring him into my own business and say all of these things that we just ideated together, go and just do them. My business would be very different than it is right now.

Andy Milligan: What was his, what was his like playbook? So he did he start doing consulting and then build his like consulting clients in a community, like introduce them to each other. Like how did. Was his.

Chris LaFay: He started with an events motion. So he started initially like with the. He hosted a, like a virtual, A virtual conference. And I actually attended the. The one that he did. That was the start of. It was the one that I attended and where I met him at and was the reason why I'm working with them today. So that first conference, you know, got him a client. It also came from a very, very warm referral of somebody who I very much trusted as well too. So that helped.

Andy Milligan: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: And so he started with an events Motion and then he. Honestly, I don't really know all the different things that he did, but I know that he's a part of a lot of the agency groups. So like he's a part of the bureau, He's a part of Garrett's. Garrett Justices. He's in exit 5 or exit 9, whatever that exit 1 is. He's a part of all of them and he provides a ton of value. And he started off his offerings with a sliding scale, which is what I'm still on, God bless him. He. He was like, I started you off at 500 bucks a month, and for every $10,000 a month of recurring revenue, my fee increases by $500 a month. So like if I add $10,000 of revenue, monthly revenue to your pipeline, I go from 500amonth to a thousand. And it's like, typically I'll cap out around $2,500 a month because at that point you probably don't need me anymore. And literally as soon as I signed him, we lost half of our recurring revenue. Not because of him, but just because of the timing of everything. Yeah, he no longer offers that model. He does more cohort based stuff, which is the cohort based up is still more expensive than me, what I pay. And his private coaching is vastly more expensive. It's like three or four thousand dollars a month. So I have offered on multiple occasions to pay that man more money because he is the only person that has ever gotten anything through my thick skull. So he wants to do an in person event up in Maine at some point and I offered to co host that with him and help him figure stuff out. So yeah, his was a slow and steady. He tried a lot of different Offers. Saw what stuck. My offer that I latched on was not the best one. And so he switched gears and all that kind of. But it was all around events.

Andy Milligan: Yes. I remember going to one of his webinars. Things was good.

Chris LaFay: He's. He is very. He is very smart. He is very, very, very smart.

Andy Milligan: Yeah, he's very. It's a very relatable dude, too, which is.

Chris LaFay: Say that again.

Andy Milligan: He's a very likable dude.

Chris LaFay: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I've also given him outs to be like, I don't want to work with you anymore. You suck. Because I told him. I was like, I know that I'm really bad at executing on small, monotonous tasks. Like, this has been the bane of my existence for years. So I was like, I know that I might frustrate you. So, like, if you want out, you're not gonna hurt my feelings. And he's like, nope, I'm good. I like you. He's like, if I wanted to fire you, I would. I have no problems with firing clients. I've done it plenty of times. But I like you and I think your head's in the right spot, so. Which is, again, is another reason why I'm considering Dropping Entrepreneurs Organization is I meet up with Chris twice a month. I meet up with you basically once a week. Not always, but pretty dang close to. We're. Now that I get that freaking meeting off my calendar, I'm gonna be meeting up with Anil more regularly. That's going to change. I'm actually going to go to D.C. at the end of July and we're gonna have two days together. And he wants to make that a regular thing where we actually get together in person.

Andy Milligan: Gosh. And see, he's the founder of Multi Dots, Right?

Chris LaFay: Co founder. But yeah. Yep.

Andy Milligan: Dude, I didn't realize how big of a company they were. Insane.

Chris LaFay: They're around the five mil mark. Yeah.

Andy Milligan: It's about as high as you can.

Chris LaFay: Get for agencies, especially with. How's that work? Hey, it worked. Especially with, like, they're very much like, you know, an Indian dev shop. So, like, that's hard. That's. That's just legitimately hard to scale. Like, because there, there's a. There's a mindset with it that happens of, like, it's cheap labor. You can't charge above a certain amount. So I think he's in the. Trying to get over that stigma as well, too.

Andy Milligan: But yeah. Dude, did you end up redesigning their sites?

Chris LaFay: Yes and no. Actually, I haven't looked at it in a while. Let me multi dots. Oh, they, They changed some of it. They didn't really so a, that did I show you the crazy one that, the crazy weird one that I did for them.

Andy Milligan: Remember we had. Yeah, I don't know the same one.

Chris LaFay: So I, I pitched him that, which I knew he wasn't gonna go for. And then I, I, I, I, I tailored it back some. But like I'm looking at their website right now and it doesn't look, it doesn't look like they took any of these. They took some of my ideas but they didn't really do, they didn't really do anything with it, which is fine. I think he also probably wanted to see what it was like working with me as well too because when you have money you can just, you can do, you can do some tests and whatnot.

Andy Milligan: So yeah, nice.

Chris LaFay: But such is life. Yeah, they definitely made some changes to their site. Kudos to them.

Andy Milligan: What do you think about like I know this was a open ended question, but what do you think about like WordPress as a platform, you know, in the future? Bullish.

Chris LaFay: I have no idea. Not to be like, not to be like stupidly vague but like, like this is, this is. We live in a tech world. We live in a world where people are building all their own tools and all their own stuff. Like we surround ourselves with, with like smart agency people, smart marketing people. And they're like, look at all these things that I built.

Andy Milligan: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: You know who's not doing that? The people like working inside of companies. Like I, this is not the right comparison, but it's not super far off from the truth. My sister in law was trying to figure out some date stuff. She's in the process of getting a divorce that's trying to figure out like what Saturdays over the next like two years is the husband gonna get the kids. And she literally pulled up a calendar and spent most of the day figuring out what is the every other weekends look like. But then you also have to take into account holidays. But then Father's day weekend, the dad automatically gets the kids on father's day weekend. And then every other summer you get two weeks with the kids and every other spring break you can get the full week with the kids if you want it. All of these conditionals and she spent like eight hours doing that where when she was telling me about it I was like, yeah, you could have given me a bulleted list of here's all your stipulations. Give me multiple options for how to do this and we could have had it done in less than an hour. Now she's a school teacher, but she's also not an idiot. But she knows nothing about this stuff. So again, not in the world. She's not an icp. I totally understand that, but there are so many people out there like her that are in their 20s and 30s that just don't, don't know. All of that being said, Everybody knows what WordPress is.

Andy Milligan: Yeah, that's true.

Chris LaFay: Everybody. It's the default. It's like, what do you want? Oh, I want a WordPress site, duh. Like, is that gonna go away? Like it's not gonna go from 50 market share to 10 in, in a year. It's not going to do that in two years. It's, it's, it's so. It probably won't do that in five years, but yeah, I don't, I don't know. I love the idea of building in like a headless solution, like going back to the whole like style guide thing that I was just talking about earlier. I love the idea of like whipping up my own very lightweight CMS for like simple marketing sites. I think that sounds fantastic. I think I could design it. Well, because I am a designer, I think I could design it really nicely. But I don't think people are gonna want it though.

Andy Milligan: It'll be interesting to see. I don't know, I, I think you're definitely right. Like it's, it's different than data makers like Google, right? Like, oh, Google is the default. You know, Google search is the default. And I don't see that's more behavior based and I don't see are there like WordPress plugins that are making any AI easy to use it? Because there's like existing infrastructure, like maybe there's like a new page footer or something that becomes default that's very AI enabled. That's then like, okay, we still use WordPress as an infrastructure and that's still kind of the branding around it. Yeah, I don't know man. It's, it just makes my brain hurt, think there are all the things that I don't know. I just the same way.

Chris LaFay: So the answer to your question is yes, but no. At the same time, like the WordPress 7.0 just dropped and you know, how little of interest, how much like how little it actually impacted things. So little. So little. All they did was they basically added in native API keys for AI for AI tools. So what they saw coming, which I agree with this mind you, there were a lot of plugins coming out that were like, this is a lightweight plugin that allows you to just put in your, you know, Claude code API key so that it'll be able to use your website as an MCP server. That's it. And so to nix all these like random plugins that all literally did exactly the same thing, all they did was like put in, hey, click this button and get your MCP codes for anything. That's it. So it nicks a lot of unnecessary plugins, which I'm grateful for. But like that's not. You're. You're letting people do what they want to do with it, which I'm not opposed to that either. I think they also, they also added multi tenant editing experiences. So now it's more like Google Docs where you can actually have multiple people on the same page editing at the same time, which is great, but it's kind of like a day late in a dollar short. Yeah, I don't, I don't know, man. Part of me is still like, yeah, go ahead.

Andy Milligan: All the sites you've been building this year, they're still built on WordPress, right? Technically. Even though there's a lot of. You've accelerated the process a lot with AI. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Yes, yes.

Andy Milligan: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Just. It's super fast now, which is. Well, most things are super fast. Not all. Most.

Andy Milligan: Of it the same way. Like their MCP is really good for like the CMS stuff, like really good. And it can't do anything design related. It's just terrible.

Chris LaFay: Yep.

Andy Milligan: But even then, like I think about the Ship Studio tool and it's just like so easy to do everything. And the hosting costs if you use cloudflare to host like pennies, you know, even with.

Chris LaFay: So I mean I host everything on Versal and it's. I have not hit my free limits yet. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not hosting these. I'm hosting all like internal applications, applications that I only use, so it's not costing them anything. But still it's free.

Andy Milligan: Right? I know that's. I just made an entire YouTube video around this I recorded yesterday. It's about. It's like the state of web and so like some of my thoughts, but like a lot of what the website builder platforms have guarded themselves around is like simply the margins of the separation between design interface or build interface and hosting and integrating that into one product. When those lines start to go away, it's no longer solving the problem, you know, and all of a sudden and you realize like hosting is actually very cheap. And once that is no longer, you know, and once that no longer you need the IP for that, it's just the value isn't there, you know, scary thing for them. And Webflow just laid off like 400 employees too. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: So you're not, with Webflow, you're not just paying for the, the hosting. I mean, yes you are, you're paying for the hosting, but you're also paying for access to their CMS. Whereas at least with WordPress you can take that code even though everybody's like, go to WordPress, you own your website, which you do, you can move it around, but you're still within the confines of WordPress in and of itself. But like WordPress, you can at least move from hosting company to hosting company. Webflow is just, you're, you're 100 stuck. And I mean, yeah, for most people it doesn't really matter, it's just, it's just interesting.

Andy Milligan: It's really, they're only, their only move is to go enterprise where the costs aren't as nearly as big as the intender or based up of security.

Chris LaFay: Yes.

Andy Milligan: It's been so greedy because it's like you have to buy a workspace, plan to use the product and host more than a couple of sites and that's like 20 some bucks a month. Then you have to play a 20 some dollar a month plan for each site inside of it. And you know, they could do that for the longest time because they were so early to market in terms of the being able to easily update and access code. And while we're moving from having to write HTML and all that and now that's just not the case anymore. You know, it'll be really interesting to see where they go, you know, those, they'll have to go enterprise, which is a really big shame because a lot of people that got webflow to where it was are like the freelancer and the people who recommended it to their clients. You know, like me, you know, when I was first starting the easy and obvious recommendation. But when it no longer makes sense to recommend a tool to your clients, the small businesses like Freelance, they're going to move away from it. So they have to start targeting marketers.

Chris LaFay: And I know that web, I know that webflow has made a lot of progress at the end of the day in becoming a legitimate cms. But also what I know about enterprise is owning the code so that you can make all these little micro adjustments and whatnot is a huge thing. And what the heck, I want to log into this thing and you, you don't like, you are 100 bound. You can't just go in and tweak the code. I know you can add in like little apps and little things and that's all true. That's all fine and dandy, but like minutes. Yeah, I don't know how you make a legit enterprise play there at all.

Andy Milligan: Yeah, that's what they. They have to go. They're stuck going up. They can only go so far. They're kind of like trapped in on both sides. Yeah, dude, Sanity, bro, it's so good. It's so easy to integrate now too, to like any, any site. Sanity is. I remember you. Sanity cms.

Chris LaFay: It's a headless cms, right? I'm literally clicking. I literally have this tab pulled up in my browser right now of Sanity. Yeah, bro.

Andy Milligan: So nice. And like free to use on one site and you have to scale it up, but it's like that's just like a gaping chink in the armor of webflow too. It's like, oh, we have the best. Sanity is so easy to use and it's so fast, adaptable. You can build it in a custom way, really user friendly, you know, like, you can literally, you can prompt it with quad code to build it the way you want. It'll say like, okay, I want to build these connections, these types of fields and you know, like, it's just so much easier. It's great.

Chris LaFay: It's like, can you. So I see one sanity. It's 15 per seat per month. Can you have multiple websites with that?

Andy Milligan: Yeah, I have the. Yes, I have the, the 15 month plan and I haven't actually. I've used the free plan for a while and it's worked on multiple small sites.

Chris LaFay: So how do you divide up the buckets of content?

Andy Milligan: Right now I'm using it on. I'm working on integrating into my personal site now, so like having all my podcast appearances. And I also did it with a. I built a tutorial website for a client, basically our tutorials website. So it's like every time I go to Sanity, I add in a video URL from Tela, a description and a link and it'll add it to their website and update it. So I just created Title field, like a title field and video URL and it'll add it to the design sequence just like as a vertical scroll. So it's like three and then you can change them to be different field types. It's a lot like webflow, honestly. Which is why the transition is pretty Easy. But you can integrate it with DNS too. So it'll have. You got like a DNS record and. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Can you add as many, like, different, like, content types as you want? So, like, projects would be one, testimonials would be one, case studies would be one, blah, blah, blah, blah. Can you add as many of those as you want? Because I see here that it's like data sets. You only have two data sets, and then it's a thousand dollars a month for an additional data set, which. That doesn't. That doesn't make sense to me.

Andy Milligan: Yeah, I, I just use the free plan and I've had no limits. I've only built both those two projects. I haven't run into any limits on the fields that I could add. I'm not sure what data sets means. That's confusing to me also, because I,.

Chris LaFay: I call that, like, I think of data sets kind of like. What do you think of, like, CMS tool? Like CMS Objects within webflow. That's interesting.

Andy Milligan: Yeah, it's fun to use. It's like, I can see Sanity being. I saw a guy on LinkedIn who built like a visual interface that integrated Sanity. So it would like. It would use the Sanity API and put the HTML, put the GitHub, take the files from the GitHub repo and combine them into a visual editor. On the right side, it would be all the fields that Sanity has, and a client would be able to go in and hover on the website and change text and then publish it to a GitHub repo. Like a visual editor of a visual CMS that you're missing. Interesting feature where they integrate that into their product too. But who knows, huh? Who knows?

Chris LaFay: I'm just curious if people are going to become CMS agnostic. I don't know. And see, I just think there's gonna. I think there's gonna be this. I think I would love to mess around with Sanity or something like that on my class B site. Obviously I'm not doing that because I have spent a bazillion hours getting it to where it's at now. I am not doing that, but I really like the idea. I wish I could find somebody that would, like, pay me $10,000 to play around with their stuff and be like, I want to build you something cool and I want to try out this new thing. You will get more than $10,000 worth of value out of this. Let me try.

Andy Milligan: You. You know, people, you can find someone.

Chris LaFay: It's after 10. We should probably go and get work done today. This is good stuff. It's good stuff.

Andy Milligan: It's. Yeah. Great job. And I'll. I'll send you some pics from the conference, and I might have to ask you for some advice on the sales pipeline issues. Not issues, but, like, specific things to say, you know, to. With this proposal and stuff that I might ask your advice on. But, yeah, I appreciate, man.

Chris LaFay: I'll catch you.

Andy Milligan: Have a great week, man. Great. One for you.

Chris LaFay: Bye. Likewise.