How to Build Trust with Your Email Subscribers with Aaron Randhawa

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

Bjork Ostrom: Aaron, welcome to the podcast.

Aaron Randhawa: Yeah, great to be here, Bjork.

Bjork Ostrom: Last time we were chatting around a dinner table, we were at a Raptive event and connected and one of the things I love about any conference, any event, is you’re able to connect with people who you normally wouldn’t when you’re kind of out and about in your daily life, even digital life. And it was fun to be able to connect with you and your wife, Jessica, to have a conversation around the great work that you guys are doing, and then to be able to share a conversation now on the podcast. So before we get into some of the specifics, some things that

Aaron Randhawa: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Even just in r reading some of the notes that you sent over, I’m gonna be learning. So I’m gonna have some questions about some email tactics that you’re using, some AI tools that you’re using. but before we get into that, talk a little bit about what your role looks like, how you guys kind of divide up the work that you’re doing. Cause I think it’s always interesting for people to hear what that looks like. So within the context of you know, the work that you two are doing together on the fork spoon, what does your role look like?

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

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s one of the things that we often see, it’s n it’s oftentimes it’s a married partnership, husband and wife, or another partner will take on the technical, whereas the other partner will take on the more creative. I’ve all we’ve also seen it with like you know, parent child, seen it with siblings, where somebody plays the role of creator.

Aaron Randhawa: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

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

Aaron Randhawa: Yeah, I would definitely focus on you know vetted lists of people. So I think a good place to start would be like for Blogger Pro. you you guys utilize or a lot of the people that you recommend are companies and individuals that that we use and have been using for years, like like Casey Marquis. We’ve had four audits with him. So he’s he’s a genius. He’s a savant. Everything he says is just Google Gold. you know, Andrew and the NerdPress team, I know they’ve been on quite a few times. yeah, it’s they’re amazing at what they do. They’re they’re on the bleeding edge of everything you need to do in Cloudflare to you know, be on top of it. So I’d definitely start with with a good resource like Food Blogger Pro.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Yeah. It it’s a it’s a really good point. And I think I think about it within the context of home stuff, which is a you know, obviously very different. But one of the thoughts I had is like, man, we have all of this stuff that we need to get done. I feel behind on stuff all the time. How am I gonna figure this out? Who am I gonna have that’s gonna be able to do that? And it’s so sounds so obvious, but the conclusion that I came to is like, I I can’t find like one person to do all this.

Aaron Randhawa: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Bjork Ostrom: I need to find the people that have an expertise that are my go-to for like plumbing and gardening and you know, like dry who’s my drywall guy. We had to like cut a we had a leak above our office and we had to like cut something a piece of the ceiling out. Now it for five months we’ve just had like this hole in our ceiling after the plumbing got fixed. But I think it also applies within the context of business where, okay.

Aaron Randhawa: Yeah. I got it.

Bjork Ostrom: If you have this issue, if you have a problem, who are you going to go to to fix that specific thing? And what you said is great, which is like we have these people that we know of that have developed businesses with this narrow expertise. SEO, you talked about Casey, site maintenance, upkeep, site speed, Andrew and the Nerdpress team, like they’re really good at that. I love that idea of kind of building out your team. It’s not necessarily W–2 or even 1099.

Aaron Randhawa: Okay.

Bjork Ostrom: type like roles, it’s more of like vendors that you can go to. And I think about us as creators and creative business owners being super routers. Okay. If something comes in about Google workspace, okay, who are you going to go to that’s going to be the person that’s going to answer that? Who’s the vendor you’re going to go to? Increasingly, and we’re going to talk about this related to some of the things you’ve been working on, I think it can be AI. Like AI is getting really good At becoming an expertise for me as an example around like some of the things we’re going to talk about with email, like DMARC and like deliverability and things like that. But I think increasingly I find it important to have a human in the loop expert who also is then using AI to be that expert. So love that. I think it’s important to point out. we’re gonna talk about some of those technical things that you’ve gotten really good at through the years in order to get

Aaron Randhawa: Nick. Mm-hmm.

Bjork Ostrom: The forkspoon to, you know, you said comfortable sharing with us, two million pages, which is amazing a month. you know, hundreds of thousands of followers across multiple platforms. you’ve launched a kind of membership component for an ad-free experience. But the thing I want to start with that was new to me is actually email. I know that you’ve been focusing on email a lot. We hear people talking about email a lot. You recently went on this long-running project, long-running journey with.

Aaron Randhawa: Mm.

Bjork Ostrom: partner of yours named ChatGPT, to figure out how to do something really unique within email around branding and logo and and and images. Tell me about what that is and even like how you discovered that this was a possibility.

Aaron Randhawa: Yeah. Yeah, so I think it probably started maybe about two years ago, maybe a year and half ago, I noticed in Gmail just on the app in my phone that I think maybe I placed an order with Best Buy. All of a sudden I noticed that they had like a blue check mark and they were verified and their logo came in on my email, but they weren’t in contact. So I was wondering why when I’m looking at my inbox, they got a logo and they had a blue check mark. So I started digging into that. and if you actually click on the blue check mark, it just kind of sent me down a rabbit hole telling me what what it is, how they got it. yeah, kind of long story short, it’s it’s a process called verified mark certification, VMC, and B-I-M-I, that’s another acronym. blanking on what it is now, but

Bjork Ostrom: Brand indicators for message identification. I can’t believe you didn’t just have that sitting in your brain.

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

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

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

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I just went through yeah, I went through process. We have like multiple different domains, and they’re all kind of scattered around in terms of where they were for SPF and DKIM and then DMARC. But I you know, a lot of acronyms, but essentially what you’re trying to do here, specifically with DMARC to paint the picture for people, is again, this is nobody will be quizzed on this after. But just for context, domain-based. So essentially pinchofyum.com, theforked spoon.com. That’s the domain. The domain-based message authentication reporting and conformance. That’s what DMARC stands for. So essentially it’s like verifying, this is how I think of it, verifying that when you send an email from any of the platforms you send email, that you are verified to send that email. So that’s what DMARC is doing. And SPF and DKIM.

Aaron Randhawa: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Are the records that allow you to verify? And so as we kind of work through that tree, DMARC is like that process, SPF and DKIM are the ways that you do that verification. and then the thing that you point out is important because there’s three levels, the policy, you know, when you’re implementing these none, then quarantine, and then reject. And I’m gonna paint the picture here. Tell me if this is how you understand it as well. That what can happen, the best case scenario is that you implement this. And anytime you send an email, it goes through and it’s fine. Whether you’re sending it from kit, whether you’re sending it as like a transactional email from your website, like if somebody comments and there’s some follow-up that happens, whether you’re sending it from like a Google Workspace account. so like bjork at pinchofyum.com. those go through okay. Let’s say somebody tries to spoof it and they try and send something on behalf of, you know, pinchofyum.com, then if it’s set to reject, it just automatically it doesn’t even it doesn’t even show up in somebody’s inbox. It doesn’t even go into spam. If it was in quarantine, it would go into spam. And so essentially what you’re doing is you’re limiting people from being able to s pretend that it’s you.

Aaron Randhawa: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: But the reason you have those different levels is because when you first start to implement it, you want to monitor it to make sure that all of the different places you’re sending email from, which are multiple different places, it’s your, you know, I just listed them off, but like kit, but maybe you have you know, some other email service provider you’re sending them from. You want to make sure that all of those are being reported. And then you can sign up to actually get reports to see.

Aaron Randhawa: Mm-hmm.

Bjork Ostrom: where emails are being sent from. Are d do you get those reports? Is that something that you get and d are you reviewing those?

Aaron Randhawa: I did and I didn’t realize how many reports I would get. so yeah, when you when you turn it on, and maybe you’ve had a similar experience, but all of a sudden, you know, if your list you have, you know, hundreds that hundreds of thousands of people on it, going from kit, then you’re gonna get a report from every single one of those servers with what happened to those emails, if they came in or not. So when when you’re first starting out, when

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Aaron Randhawa: thing you can do is you could download those reports and throw it in the chat and ask, how’s it going? but another thing that just came out pretty recently is Cloudflare has a DMARC management tool. So you can actually plug it in to have Cloudflare receive all of those reports and they put into a nice beautiful dashboard for you. So you have to receive them.

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

Aaron Randhawa: We are still on the quarantine. so yeah, goes into spam. so as of even I think like yesterday, the last time I looked, everything that we are sending is going through, but there are, you probably see it too, there’s some forwarding that happens as well. So somebody has say a Gmail account but then is going into

Bjork Ostrom: Which means it goes into spam. Yep.

Aaron Randhawa: Outlookers being forwarded to a Yahoo, and then some of those credentials can break along the way. So at the end of the day, I mean similar to you, we’re trying to get you know the most amount of eyeballs on emails as possible. So I haven’t gone fully to reject yet, but it’s definitely something I’m looking at implementing. I just want to make sure that those forwarding doesn’t yeah, break it.

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

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

Bjork Ostrom: Amazing. Yeah, the trademarks are interesting. You need a trademark if you wanna, let’s say you have a company and you want to trademark the name. You know, we’ve trademarked pinch of yum. that’s one thing, but then there’s also the category of the like the logo, which you have to go through the process separately. And so it sounds like you had gone through the process of trademarking the name, the fork spoon. So if somebody else tried to come out with

Aaron Randhawa: Mm-hmm. Right. Right.

Bjork Ostrom: a blog or a social account named the Forkspoon, they couldn’t do that. That’s been super helpful for us. One example is, I think it was on TikTok before we posted there or was on there, somebody was posting under Pinch of Yum, and we were able to use our trademark to get that specific handle, which we wouldn’t have been able to do if we didn’t have a trademark. Another important piece within that that you referenced is once you get a trademark, you have to continue to maintain it. So you get it and then it’s like

Aaron Randhawa: wow. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: five year and ten year renewals, I think, that you have to make a note of. And if you even do the trademark search online, you’ll be able to see like, you know, you’ll search for whatever word, you know, taco, and you’ll see like nine out of ten trademarks are defunct. Like they don’t exist anymore because people haven’t renewed them. And I think sometimes people d don’t know. They think they still have a trademark, but they don’t. So that’s a really important point.

Aaron Randhawa: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: You went through the process of trademarking the logo in order to then be able to use it to get this higher level. It sounds like there’s two levels. that you could there’s VMC to get this B I I certificate. There’s VMC, which is requires a trademark, and then there’s CMC, which is kind of a newer

Aaron Randhawa: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Easier to qualify where you don’t need a trademark, just proof that you’ve used the logo in public, but then Gmail shows the logo without the check mark for CMC, which it’s like go through the process, do the higher level, do VMC, but you need the trademark in order to do that. Did you have like a circle logo that worked well for that, or did you have to create a new one that would work within the context of email?

Aaron Randhawa: Yeah, so we ended up using just our why I’m blanking on it now. just our logo that shows up at the top of every tab. Why am I blanking? It’s the favicon. So we ended up using our favicon. so we use that, but there is one thing that Chat GPT pointed out to me is you don’t want to put a color on it.

Bjork Ostrom: Like yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep.

Aaron Randhawa: You want it to be gray when you trademark it because if you do it in gray, then it basically allows you to trademark every color. Yeah, instead of just that one color that you upload. So

Bjork Ostrom: interesting. Sure. Yeah, because if you do a color the idea being if you do a color, then it’s suddenly you’re locked into what that color is, supposedly. interesting. So could you then use a color in your i in your B I I application then? Okay.

Aaron Randhawa: Yeah. Yep. Correct. Yeah, I could use any color. So we ended up using the original color, which it still is. but yeah, basically you want to get the the most amount of protection just to future proof yourself. So in this case it was to do that it was just going with just a gray instead of our what is it? It’s like a blue, some kind of like off Yeah, mid-century blue that Dwayne came up with for us, so

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, love it. from WP Cultivate, Dwayne, is that who you’re yep. so the is there a was there a size that you picked for that? These are specific questions, but I’m just curious to know what you learned along the way.

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

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

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

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So this is, you know, I was just kind of doing a little bit of research here before. So it kind of works the same way where you publish a DNS record then, like a B I I DNS record. It says it points to your logo as an SFG file. And then mail brock mailbox mailbox provider show the logo only if your email authentication is solid.

Aaron Randhawa: Right. Right.

Bjork Ostrom: So is there some a th like B I I authority that you have to like apply to or how how does that work?

Aaron Randhawa: Yeah, there are there are third-party companies that specialize in these types of certifications and a whole plethora of other certifications as well. so just working with Chat GPT, it pointed us to the biggest one. I should have looked it up. blanking on the name now, but I ended up going with kind of the Biggest and well-established one out of them. And yeah, you have to pay them a yearly fee to maintain that certification. So they do the actual certification. And then I had to upload that SVG file in a specific format. I think it’s like tiny SVG 1.2. and They either give you the option to host the file on your server or they could host it on their server, and then you have to add your credentials back into your DNS, pointing to either your server or their server hosting it. So in my case, I let them host it. I figured I’ll put the burden on them and Yeah, it it was a long project with chat and it was great kinda when all of a sudden they got that blue check.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It happened. And you got an email from yourself. Yeah. You’re like it’s one of those moments where that you’re probably at home by yourself. It’s like you’ve been working on it by yourself for a year and then it comes through and then it’s like you take a sip of coffee and smile a little bit and then like go on to the next thing. Just kind of the

Aaron Randhawa: Yeah. Yeah, basically show Jessica, she’s like, great and then yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, she like even she’s not impressed. Yeah. And then you’re like, okay, all right, what’s next? was it Digisert? Was that the company? Okay. Yep. so one of the questions that I would have is like, did you have anything that you could quantify in terms of like

Aaron Randhawa: DigiSuit, yeah. Bingo, that’s the one.

Bjork Ostrom: There’s the the reality that it’s just like there’s a trust signal that exists there and who knows the benefit of that, but that I would say probably undeniable to some degree that that that’s beneficial. My question would be, did you see any like uptick in open rate or anything like that after you implemented this?

Aaron Randhawa: we actually did. So we saw quite a we saw a good uptake in opens, clicks, and less unsubscribes, especially with new subscribers. so we do have Raptiv’s was it gated print turned on and that

Bjork Ostrom: Mm-hmm.

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

Bjork Ostrom: Amazing. Yeah. so can you talk about that real quick? I think I think it’s an important thing to point out the MCP kit connection. MCP in general, I think, is important for people to know who aren’t familiar. I think people are getting more and more familiar. Just this idea of like connecting ChatGPT or Claude. It’s like a pipe from your ChatGPT or Claude to another source of data, in this case, kit. So can you talk about how you use it? Maybe a specific example prompt.

Aaron Randhawa: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: that you gave kit in order to understand the benefit that came before and after implementing this.

Aaron Randhawa: Right, so yeah, I mean just working with AI Chopbot, you can basically tell it look at data from two months before this date. I won’t tell it the date is when I implemented VMC, but look at the data before this date, look at the data after this date, and tell me what’s changed. Right? Or look at subscribers with this tag on the data before and after, right? And then all of a sudden you can get those numbers that we talked about.

Bjork Ostrom: It it’s such a great way to use to accomplish the goal that we’re trying to accomplish before, which is like data analysis, without having to become an expert in the platform. we’ve implemented MCP with clarity. If there’s any clarity users who are listening, reach out to us because we’re starting to roll this out. But essentially what we’re trying to do with clarity, and for me it’s all of essentially all the data that I have anywhere in my life.

Aaron Randhawa: Mm-hmm.

Bjork Ostrom: is like how do I build a pipe from Claude and Chat GPT or I use OpenClaw as well to that data source in order to then be able to query in natural language. So we’re not having to figure out how what do I click and what button goes where and like how do I figure out the analysis tool. You just use natural language. And for me I really like using WhisperFlow too. So I’m literally just talking and saying, you know, your example, hey, Two months before this date and two months after, how did open rate change? What did click-through rate change look like? And it’s like you can get that data really easily in a way that before would have taken a long time. So for those who aren’t familiar, it’s an important kind of 2013 for some of these AI tools. that idea of MCP, which is a really good one. So start to finish, you know, it’s about a year-long project. Most of it is the trademark. But once you get the trademark taken care of, then it’s a relatively quick process to be able to go through the verification because you’re adding some records to your DNS, you’re using this service provider. What is the cost, did you say, approximately a year for it? It’s like a thousand to two thousand range.

Aaron Randhawa: yeah, I think it’s closer to 2000. I think the price there was a rate increase from the time I started to when I actually implemented it. So I think I ended up paying probably close to 1800 for just one year of having that verified mark. and then there’s a cost of doing the patent itself. I can’t quite recall, but maybe that was like six hundred. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Six six fifty, I think, yeah. Yep.

Aaron Randhawa: So and then I obviously saved some cost doing it myself with chat, but like I said on the I think maybe I told you before the call or it was during the call. for our first patent, I did it through LegalZoom years ago in 2019 for just the fork spoon, the the words. And I think they charged me at the time maybe $7.50 on top of the other fees. or you could go to a lawyer, yeah.

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

Aaron Randhawa: Yeah, different platforms treat it differently. but I’d have to look at the specifics. I don’t have it off the top of my head. I don’t want to misquote it either, but I think the vast majority of them do show you do get some benefit from it. So it’s not It’s not a situation where there’s just no benefit from it. And then also going through the process of getting VMC, you’re also giving the all these different mail providers more reason to show your email in the process because you have to have that D mark on there. You can’t have it be set to none. You have to have it set to quarantine at a minimum. I believe to get your VMC. So just doing the process and going through it is helping get you out of spam folders or getting you into the right inbox. but yeah, in general, yeah, I can’t think off the top of my head. Maybe Yahoo and Outlook. I don’t know if you have it in front you, but

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I’m trying to I’m trying to remember what i it said. I I th I think your point though is that like going through this process, here it is. shows up Gmail with the logo shows up in Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Apple Mail, and Fastmail for those millions of fast mail followers that are subscribing to us.

Aaron Randhawa: Yeah. Right.

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

Aaron Randhawa: Yeah, I think probably one of the best stories I have with AI of a few of them, but I actually kind of opened up to AI. I don’t I don’t know if you want to do this, but I threw kind of tax ideas at it, right? So as far as trying to like get our company set up in the best way and also like on

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, for sure.

Aaron Randhawa: personal level when after we get paid, making sure that we have all the right deductions in for our situation. so during some some long chats that I had with ChatGPT this is probably during that kind of same period where I was going off the deep end into VMARC I yeah started realizing that we needed to hire a new accountant and yeah

Bjork Ostrom: What was it that made you realize that? Was it like things that Chat GPT surfaced that felt like they were missed by your accountant?

Aaron Randhawa: Yeah. that and just taking advantage of like certain deductions that were more that that were available to us now, but not like maybe two years ago that were big kind of needle movers for us, that just weren’t caught at the time. So

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

Aaron Randhawa: I think it for our situation it was more of a personal one outside of business. there was a business aspect of of one. so it was moving to an S Corp. So

Bjork Ostrom: yeah, for sure. Can you talk about why that’s helpful for people who aren’t familiar?

Aaron Randhawa: Right, so when you so when we originally started, I’d mentioned in 2019, we that’s when I filed with the state and we had that LLC. So for years after that, we were just filing as a sole proprietor. so when you’re filing as a sole proprietor, Basically you ended up having to pay more in taxes, I think, for like social security and Medicare. You kind of feed into more of those buckets, I think. Yeah.

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

Aaron Randhawa: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: But you’re also having to pay the employer portion of it. I don’t know I I don’t know what the totals are, but it’s like fourteen percent and then like so you’re having to pay z each side of the seven percent. Does that sound right?

Aaron Randhawa: Yeah, that sounds about right. So yeah, just having some conversations with ChatGPT made sense to to move it over to an S Corp. So yeah, we found a new attorney who also found some other stuff in there. sorry, yeah, new accountant, not an attorney.

Bjork Ostrom: A new accountant. Yep. Yep. it and I’m pulling up the numbers here. It’s seven point six five percent employee, seven point six five percent employer for a total of fifteen point three for the total FICA. So like you know, if you made million dollars, you’re paying fifteen point three percent tax on that. And so if you for anybody

Aaron Randhawa: Right. Right.

Bjork Ostrom: Listening, it doesn’t have to be that much, but like five hundred thousand, you know, two hundred thousand, whatever it is that your business is making. If yours to self employment, you’re paying that fifteen point five three percent. If you switch to an S Corp, my guess is this is what you did. Then you pay yourself a salary. And so technically as a self employed person, you’re still paying that because you’re paying the employee and employer portion. But then on the amount above that, you’re not paying that you’re not paying at least the that half of it. So ends up being like a pretty s by just checking a box on your tax form, it’s like one of the easiest ways to save on taxes. so super smart thing. Did you just discover that by having a conversation with Chat GPT?

Aaron Randhawa: Yeah, I mean I was familiar with it. I mean in our case, I’m I’m kind of a squirrel when it comes to savings. I I was throwing a lot of money. I was putting a lot of acorns away in retirement funds. So the savings wasn’t as maybe substantial as other people if they weren’t saving as much as we were for retirement funds. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Love it. Yeah. Sure. Because it was tax deductible savings that you had? Yeah.

Aaron Randhawa: Yeah, so yeah, so we had to kind of find the right line with our with our accountant to both maximize what we could put into basically the 401ks, whereas before it was before it was like SEP IRAs. When SEP IRAs you can have a a much higher maximum per person. But in the end, with with just the two of us being on the S-Corp and the salaries that we gave ourselves, we’re able to get it kind of right about at that same level and get some savings in the process.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It I would say maybe like if somebody’s with your site if you’re making more than a hundred thousand and you haven’t set up an S Corp, it’s I would say that that’s maybe the tipping point of when it would make sense to talk to your accountant and say, like, hey, does it make sense for me to set up an S Corp and pay myself a salary so you’re not having to pay quite as much in self employment tax? I I think you know, we’ll just go full nerd mode. on this podcast, which is great. It’s all it’s like my favorite type of conversation. You had mentioned squirreling money away. And I think one of the things that people think a lot about is like, number one, how do I get my business to a point where I’m making enough to for this to be a substantial income? Then once people are making a substantial income, the or even just like an adequate income, a salary, Then the question becomes like, how do I be strategic in saving and investing? And you mentioned SEP IRA. You know, we’ve when before we had employees, we did an I401K. but can you talk about that a little bit? Like some of the intentional decisions you’ve made about investing? Cause I think that’s a really important piece as well for people to think about.

Aaron Randhawa: yeah, with investing. so yeah, right now with the the two of us on the S Corp, we have four one K self-employed. and I personally, so I I read The Economist cover to cover every week. I’ve been doing that for probably fifteen, sixteen years now. and just one of the things you kind of hear about the economists over and over again is just it’s the market right so luckily for i’m sure a lot of your listeners in the us we we live in in the largest economy in the world so How do I say this? So with with that, the market, if you kind of conceptualize that into like the stock market as a whole, one way to track that is through like the SP 500 index. So it’s the top 500 profitable companies that are publicly traded. So one of the best ways that’s been proven to generate money when you’re saving it is putting it on the stock market and putting it on a investment ETF vehicle like IV V or VOO which are basically tracking that index and to to be on that index you have to be profitable for number of quarters in a row and be one of the those top five hundred companies. So if a company’s not profitable, they fall off after a certain amount of time and another one fills its shoes.

Bjork Ostrom: You mean in order for a company to be included in that fund, they have to be

Aaron Randhawa: in in the S P five hundred and then the index fund tracks the S P five hundred. So I’m a big fan of just investing in ETFs in like IBV so like the the rate on that is like I think it’s zero or 0.003% is like what commission they take out of it. So it costs nothing to basically invest in it. But then if you put money with a manager who’s going to actively manage your funds and where it goes into, that manager’s goal is to basically beat the market. And most managers don’t beat the market. Or at least not consistently. Maybe they’ll have one or two good years, but most can never kind of beat the market per se. so I’m definitely a big fan of just investing it in the the US economy, which is it’s SP 500 via like IVV or BOO.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s I mean, you hear Warren Buffett talking about that where it’s like, what what would be his recommendation for his like, you know, kids or wife if they had to take over their personal, this wouldn’t be within Berkshire Hathaway, but personal funds and he’s just like the S P five hundred. two two important things to point out there in that. you talked about this idea of a four solo four hundred one K. So for anybody who has a business and doesn’t have any employees, this would be a really important thing to put a pin in because you can invest if you’re under 50 up to 72,000, if that sound right. and so you can and it’s tax sheltered. And so one of the things that we’re th need to think about as business owners is just like you have a business and that business, you know, if you’re lucky enough to grow it to produce income and profit, then you get to make the decision on what to do with that. And you could squirrel it away, you could spend it on boats, you could take a trip, you know, you could do all of those things. But as we know in this world, things change quickly. And so we need to be strategic about thinking, not just like, okay, we made some money this year. How do we have a good time? Great, we can do that. But also how do you think about the future and ensure that you have money for the future? That Solo four one K that you mentioned is a really important one, especially for people who don’t have employees, because you can put a crazy amount of money in each year. And so I think that would be imp important for people to point out. And then also love the point around like low cost index funds. you know, are we VTI VTI VXUS. Like so we have a little bit of like majority US, 60% US, 40% international. It’s kind of our approach. but same idea, which is like, hey, put it to work in in the market. Like we have companies that we are working on. And when we work on those companies, they produce income. There is value in these companies that we are creating, which you can see in these marketplaces like Quiet Light Brokerage or you know, FE International. You can go and see, like, okay, people are buying and selling websites. We have the thing that we are creating is valuable. It’s like a tiny little small cap.

Aaron Randhawa: Mm-hmm.

Bjork Ostrom: company that creates value. and that value is because it’s producing a profit. If it produces a profit, what do you do with that profit? Well, one of the things that I think is best to do, and it sounds like you’re doing this as well, is taking that and putting it in other companies so it continues to work on your behalf. So I think it’s super smart and a really good point and some like really awesome takeaways for people here. as we close out, what is your advice

Aaron Randhawa: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: For people who are looking to stay competitive, who are looking to stay on top of kind of the technical considerations with their site. Things are changing, things are evolving, things are moving so quickly. As somebody who’s involved in the technical side of things day in and day out, what is your advice for people on how to stay on top of that and how to stay not I don’t I was gonna say relevant, but it’s not relevant. It’s how to stay.

Aaron Randhawa: Mm-hmm.

Bjork Ostrom: how to stay on top of it when things are moving so quickly. What would your advice be?

Aaron Randhawa: Yeah, I’d say just make sure you work with with people that are smarter than you in other areas, right? Like like I mentioned earlier, you know, Casey. I trust him completely when anything he says to SEO, I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna Yeah, I’ve had four audits with him and everything he’s ever said to do I I’ve done. I’ve implemented. And the those first audits were huge, massive checklists. but yeah, it’s you know, on the on the website maintenance side. It’s you know, going with a company like Nerdpress that is gonna maintain your website, but then they have their their what is it, every other week email and reading everything on there to make sure you kinda are

Bjork Ostrom: Mm-hmm.

Aaron Randhawa: in the loop on what’s going on in the industry and you know subscribing to your newsletter. I’ve been getting that for years now, on my personal one. so knowing kind of just what’s happening and even with You know, tools like AI, if you don’t have time to read the whole thing, you can get it to summarize right now in your your Gmail box or your workspace box. So you get your little TLDR on it. so it’s knowing what your strengths are, and knowing where you can knowing where your weaknesses are too, and maybe you know outsourcing those weaknesses to professionals who can do it better than you.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great.

Aaron Randhawa: and kinda getting more information from them so you can make better choices.

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

Aaron Randhawa: Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.