How Lars Maat Built an AI-Driven Agency: Tools, Workflows, Team Adoption, and Risks | PPC TH 126 - PPC Town Hall

Loading summary

Transcript39 lines

[00:01]
A
Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Valleis. I'm your host. I'm also CEO and co founder at Optimizer, a PPC management company. So for today's episode, we're bringing in another of the top 50 most influential PPC experts. And this one is based in the Netherlands. He's been in the industry for quite a long time and the reason that I brought him onto the show today is because he's a another big fan like myself, of AI Vibe coding and just figuring out new ways to do things with all of this cool technology that we have. So our guest today is Lars Matt. I don't know how you say that in English because I originally speak Dutch as well. So Lars Matt from Math Work Online and also the co founder of the Social Club. So can't wait to hear what Lawrence has to share with us. And with that, let's get rolling with that, this episode of PPC Town Hall. Thanks for having me. Yes,
[01:08]
B
it was a good intro. You pronounced the name right?
[01:11]
A
Oh good, good. How do people in English say it? Your last name, mate?
[01:18]
B
Mat. I think when I'm at an event and they are announcing me as a speaker, I think everybody just gets. Gets fine along with. With Mat.
[01:28]
A
Okay, yeah, it's not that hard to say. Right. But then that also leads into your company name, which is matwork Online. That probably doesn't make a lot of sense to our English listeners. So maybe explain that one a bit.
[01:41]
B
Yeah, so I'm not sure what the the English word is for. For Madwareck, but it basically means that we are a digital agency based in Rotterdam in the Netherlands and we don't work with like standard packages for every company. We try to make a plan based on the needs of the company. So it's not like, hey, if you want us to run your PPC campaigns, it will cost you X euros a month. Every company has its own price plan, strategy and in the Netherlands that's what we call Maatwerk. So that's basically where the name comes from.
[02:17]
A
Yeah, so yeah, I like custom basically. Right. As would be the translation that I would think of. Yeah, that's great. So how long is Mathmark Online being business?
[02:31]
B
Well, actually, funny story, I worked at an AC before, but it was not like the standards of the AC were not like my standards anymore. And at that time, and I'm talking around 2012, 2013, a lot of people were asking me questions from, hey, you know you are working in digital marketing. Is this something you can do for us. Could you help us with that? And it basically was the reason that I decided to start working for myself as a freelancer and I never intended to have like staff or like a real agency. And here we are in 2026, I'm sitting in a big office in Rotterdam and we got 33 people working at the AC. So it's kind of like a hobby gone wrong.
[03:20]
A
Well, congratulations on the success of your hobby gone wrong. But it's. We're in interesting times now, right, because obviously you went from being a freelancer to hiring all of these people because presumably you couldn't do the work of 33 people by yourself. But say that you had started the agency or the freelancing company today. How do you see AI as an enabler in that?
[03:51]
B
Well, it's difficult because when you start to think of how I did it in the early days and how high, how I would do it now, it's, it's completely different. There are so many more opportunities to do stuff way better, faster, more precise, with not only AI but also automations, because I think a lot of people are using the word AI while they are working with automations. So there's, there's obviously a difference between them. But, but yeah, I would probably get more work done, work for more clients and probably make more money as well and maybe the same amount or even less amount of time that I used to do back in the days.
[04:34]
A
Yeah, well, and to me, this is interesting because some people talk about AI doing things faster, right? So you can do what you normally would have done in a normal workday, in one or two hours. But then the question is, do you take these extra six hours or if you have a long workday, these extra 10 hours, and do you just enjoy some leisure time, time with the family, or do you end up just doing more things? Do you take on more clients? Do you do more projects? And for me, where it's been exciting is that it's just enabled me to bite off projects that in the past I would have shelved because it just would have taken too long. I would have had to talk to too many people to get it done. I would have had frustrations about maybe they don't understand my vision. And then it's, it's like the back and forth is just endless. But I find myself more excited but also more stressed out than I've ever been and stressed out just because there's more things I end up doing. The excitement is in being able to do these things. And like, for you where does it fall in terms of the AI? Like are you taking less time off or are you just doing new things altogether?
[05:42]
B
I think the excitement is also the main reason of the increasement of the stress because I see myself as like an idiot in the business. I want to know everything what's possible and I find everything interesting and I find, think you are probably quite alike. So the problem for me is as soon as Gemini or Cloud is releasing something new or Google Ads is releasing something new, I want to dive into it right away. And nowadays with all the information that is available and all the possibilities that are available in terms of vibe coding, for example, you start testing it right away and before you know it it's like 1 or 2am in the night and you're supposed to go to bed because you know I've got some, some little kids as well who comes, who tend to come a couple times in the night. But because it's that interesting and you are so enthusiastic about the possibilities, you are, you start working with it and yeah, you don't want to stop actually at least that's what I'm experiencing.
[06:49]
A
Yeah, totally the same here. I mean the number of times I've been up unusually late, past midnight at work, it's a lot more than it used to be. But it's exciting.
[06:59]
B
Right?
[06:59]
A
So, but talk to me about like what is the current project that's keeping you up at night and programming throughout the day?
[07:09]
B
Yeah, so what, what we currently are doing at the company is we are looking into every subscription, every software that we, that we are using for stuff and we just try to vibe code it ourselves and we try to make like one big environment called a portal, for example where every piece of software and equipment that we are using third party supplies for now come into the portal Vibe coding it ourselves. And it's really amazing not only what is possible but also the amount of money you can save by building your own programs. And at the same time you can custom made those programs for your company. So for example, we've got a software we are using for, how do you say it? Staff engagement and staff happiness between the company and you know, it's totally anonymized but we can ask questions and people at the office are responding to it but we don't know who is responding. But as soon as somebody fills in a negative answer we want to dig deeper into that answer. You know, okay, why is this? Do you have examples and stuff like that? And the supplier is basically telling us that's not possible in our software. And I'm like, how is that not possible? So, you know, we build it ourselves, and I'm sorry for that supplier, but, yeah, we have to cut you loose. And we are using our own program nowadays, and that is what's really exciting. And I know that it's not like a PPC example, but. Yeah, the possibility is that with all the things you can do nowadays with terms of Vibe coding and using AI, it's amazing.
[08:57]
A
Yeah. Let me give a marketing example maybe on this, but I totally get what you're saying, right? So you look at the status quo, and you rebuild a little bit of the status quo in Vibe code. And then it's like this blank canvas where you can just prompt to do one, one more thing. And what sometimes frustrates me is that I see people being stuck in the status quo. So they're like, oh, my God, I just vibe coded like a version of, say, PowerPoint. Great. But what was it about PowerPoint that frustrated you in the first place that you wanted to do more with? Right. And so the marketing example of what I vibe coded last night was it's. It's a. It's a calendar of four fun holidays. So like national donut Day or National Pizza Day or national, like, scratch your back Day. That. And then an image generator that takes a character. So it could be either a picture of you or it could be a character that you generated, like a yeti or a dog. And then some. Some things. And then the AI puts together what could that character be doing on National Pizza Day? And. And then it starts generating the image for that. It puts together the character with some accessories using the nano banana model. And then it writes a little description of, like, what could you put on social media that this character is doing that's related to that special fun holiday event? Okay. And so then I got that, and I'm like, oh, the next cool thing would be, let's make this into videos. Right. And so you just. One more prompt. And now the. So yesterday I actually made a yeti for Earth Day who had a recycling can on his head. And then he was, like, juggling the. The soda cans and the crumpled pieces of recycling paper. And so it was a beautiful image. I was like, okay, one more thing. Make it into a video. Now he's actually juggling these things. And that's what's so exciting to me, is that this is a thing that the idea came about two weeks ago when I was talking to some friends. And. And these friends, they told me I was looking at their Facebook campaign. And there was one ad that stood out as having had much higher engagement. And I was like, well, what was it about that ad? And my friend was like, well, it was just, it was related to a special holiday. And just for some reason that resonated with a whole different group of people that were usually targeted. And they didn't care about the jewelry that she was selling, but they cared about the fact that it was about this special fun holiday. And I was like, oh, I should do something with this. And so that's what that became. It became an evening of vibe coding and saying, let's do one more thing, one more thing. And now I have an image generator that's far better than what you get in platform, in Meta or in Google or in any of these other places. Nice.
[11:43]
B
I've got a marketing example as well. So we are working for an e commerce store who is selling herbs and spices and they are in the business for quite a while now. So if you are looking like SEO wise, when you start searching, at least in the Netherlands for some of the herbs and spices they are selling, they are constantly number one, number two, number three in, in the organic results. But the problem is we are like, it's not, it's not decreasing, but it's not increasing anymore as well. You know, they are like on a platform. So we thought about, okay, what can we do to increase sales, get new people to the website and stuff like that. So what we did is we vibe coded a structured template, an HTML template where recipes for each of the herbs and spices they are selling could be placed. We used AI to come up with recipes for all of the products that they are selling. We used AI to come up with an image generator for, for the recipe that they were talking about. And then we pushed everything into the HTML templates. We used AI to generate the structured data for the SEO results. And all of a sudden we've got this herbs and spices website which had like 450 products on it. But now they have like 400 recipes online as well. And within a couple of weeks, months, all of a sudden they were generating a lot of more people to the website. And you know, the conversion rate for those people is way lower because they are not searching specifically to buy the herbs, they are searching for a recipe for that herb. But you know, when you are looking at the recipe at the website, obviously we made sure that the products that they are using in the recipe, you can buy them directly from that page. So it's generating new people who are Getting familiar with the brand new. It's generating sales, obviously, it is generating a remarketing audience for our Google Ads and it's all built with AI and it's just mind blowing that we could do this ourselves. We didn't need like a developer. We had the plan and the execution was in like two weeks. It's amazing.
[13:56]
A
Yeah, I love that I had a similar one. So when it was the holiday season, Christmas, the Advent calendar, which surprisingly actually a lot of people in the United States don't know Advent calendars. But I was like,
[14:11]
B
I know the example you're going to tell me. I saw the Advent calendar and I knew right away he Vibe coded this. The look and feel was totally Vibe coded.
[14:19]
A
Exactly. Well, it's funny how like anything that's vibe coded usually starts with the color purple. And I was talking to some people who work at OpenAI and they were like, yeah, chat GPT and have it writes code. It really loves purple. So just like you can pick up on like a AI written articles, you can really pick up on AI generated Vibe coded projects as well. But, but yeah, so with, with, with this Advent calendar, obviously I wanted to make it a very quick project. So there was still that sense. Like you're saying you could tell that it was vibe coded, but how do you think about that? Do you think that we will eventually spend more time vibe coding to get rid of that AI, those AI signatures or do you think it's good enough and people like it? Or where do you stand on that? Because my concern is that eventually we end up spending way more time to get rid of those AI signatures to make it look like it was built by a human and we end up eating up all of the time that we initially saved.
[15:24]
B
I think it depends on the case. You know, in this example of your advanced calendar, you just wanted to do something fun for the holidays, you wanted to use Vibe coding and you come up with it. And I know probably once you're going like to an event and you want to build something in order to introduce your company to potential clients, you will probably just do way more in terms of look and feel of what you Vibe coded to make sure it stands out. It's more like connected to the brand. And I think that that's the case for every example. You know, if you are using your first project, if you are building your first project while Vibe coding, as soon as the system builds something that you are okay with, you are probably so enthusiastic and you're going to share it. And once you are at your 50 project, you will probably say, okay, it's working fine, but look and feel is not that nice, so let's adjust that. And I think that that's the case at this point.
[16:21]
A
Yeah. Okay. So I run a software company and my customers are certainly asking me questions. It's like, why should we pay for an Optimizer subscription when presumably you can Vibe code? So I've got an answer and I want to run it by you and see what you think. So I think there's two categories. There's more than two, but let's just break it down to two categories of software. There's one software that's just kind of like a UI layer on top of Google Ads. And so when we've seen a lot of our competitors at Optimizer come out, we see that they just kind of reskin the capability that Google Ads natively has. But their whole pitch was like, well, the Google Ads interface is complicated. It's hard to find the thing you need to do. So here's maybe a simpler version with just exactly the buttons that you need, but fundamentally it still does the thing that you could have gone to Google Ads and just done right there as well. Okay. And then there's another category of tools which is maybe a little bit more like Optimizer where it's like, well, we're not reskinning a pig. We are actually doing very deep analysis that's a bit more complicated, which tends to involve, for an agency, a lot of pulling data, putting it in spreadsheets, doing vlookups, comparing it to other sources of data. Right. So it's this back end work, but then how you present that, it's like sometimes it's a little clunky, right, because there's so much going on that it is difficult to put a really nice user interface on that. And so for many years we struggled because it was people looking at these beautiful UIs and saying, oh well, why can't Optimizer be exactly like that? But now I think it's shifting because now the UI layer, the presentation layer is really going to way that that's what you Vibe code. And why even vibe code? Why not just tell the AI what it is you want to do that is your user interface to specifying how things should be. But then it needs to go and do the work, which is deep down in the ad system and it could connect to the Ads API. But there's a lot of nuance, right? Like, okay, if you said we need to remove a duplicate keyword well, what is a duplicate keyword? Is that just looking at the text of the keyword or do we need to look at the targeting, look at different campaigns and the day parting and the budget exhaustion at certain times a day. So there's all these things that go in and that's where we think we are, a business intelligence layer where we've spent over a decade coding up what that actually means. Like, okay, you want to do this thing, here's the very sophisticated analysis and manipulation of the data that gets you to that thing that you wanted to do. And it's deterministic. And deterministic is very important because, because AI code is not deterministic. It's going to make slightly different decisions every time you run it. But when you're dealing with million dollar ad budgets, you want deterministic. You want to know that if you said, oh, do this keyword optimization, right, it's fine to deploy one of Optimizer's tools to do that because that gives you guard rails. And so that's where I think software is going to start distinguishing itself. Right? And it's the software that has your history of knowledge, your data repo, basically, or it has this business intelligence layer that's really hard to replicate. So as you are building things, as you are making decisions about what software to keep, like talk me through, does that map to how you think about it or are there other things you look at?
[19:47]
B
Yeah, yeah, I can, I can totally agree with what you are saying. And specifically looking on the Optimizer tool, I think the differences, you know, there are probably a couple of guys and girls out there who are so keen on Vibe coding and are so like geeks in a good sense of the word, and they are like, I want to do this myself. And okay, you may lose those people as a client, but on the other hand, I think a lot of people are basically using you too because of the fact that you guys have so much data and you guys are pushing in so many updates. I think you updated yesterday or the day before something new as well, if I'm correct. And as a customer of Optimizer, you know, as soon as some, something new is being released, you guys are working with that. And the fact that everything is in place for me and it's like convenient. I don't have to worry about stuff, you know, it's all there. And I think at least at this time, like the majority of the people out there wants that, you know, we as geeks are talking about Vibe coding and doing things ourselves, but like 80 or maybe even 90% of the marketers out there aren't using it at the moment. Well, at least not at a so sophisticated way that we are using it and the possibilities that are already available. So in terms of what we are doing when we are looking at software, it's not only like a budget thing, of course, it's mainly a thing. Okay, this is what the software is doing, but we actually want it to do this and it's like two or three steps further. And the software isn't able to do that at this moment because the way it is built in the past or whatsoever, why can't we just do it ourselves? And if the software is able to do what we want and it will cost us like a couple of euros more each month, it's also okay, you know, so that's one reason, and another reason is we want to show our clients that we are able to build those kind of stuff and build APIs together, automate stuff. Because if we can do it for ourselves, we could do it for our clients as well. And they benefit from of those steps as well. So that's, that's mainly the reason why we are looking at this.
[22:09]
A
Yeah. And it's actually brilliant, right, because your company named matamark, like custom, we are headed into an era where software is custom. And like Sam Altman is saying, it's on demand software. And what that really implies is that it is software for the exact thing that you need at that exact moment in time. And it'll just build the thing that is necessary right there. And when you look at so many softwares, they are all bloated because they need to satisfy the needs of millions of people. And so they have all of these features. But honestly, like what do you use in the average software suite that you deploy? Right. And so you only use a fraction of what they offer, but then you need all of these extra things that they don't offer. And that's where the frustration. Yeah. Comes into play now as I think about this scenario as well. So I've made similar decisions as yours about software that we no longer need to invest in, not because they're bad, but just because they can't move fast enough at the speed that we want to move. But let's talk about MCPS and like data connectors, right? Because again, there is things that these companies are doing well. So if I can build on top of what they are doing, but do it, have it, do just a little bit more, that is actually useful. Right. So for that there's the, the notion of an mcp, which is kind of like for listeners who don't know what an MCP is. It's kind of like an API application programming interface, but for modern AI web. So it's a model context protocol. Basically, it enables an API to understand your data layer and interact with your tool in some sort of a programmatic AI way. And this is where Optimizer then has, say, an mcp and then, so now you can talk to Claude Code and you can say, enable the Optimizer mcp, because that's enabling the Optimizer skill. So now you're not asking Claude to figure out how to do a keyword manipulation or a budget forecast for that. It can look at optimizer and the 10 plus years of knowledge that we built into how those tools work correctly within guardrails. Right. But Claude, your AI can start to focus more on, oh, well, what is it that Fred needs today? Like, what is he trying to achieve for his business or his client? Oh, okay. And there's a tool from optimizr that we can connect with and actually get that done faster. So that's where I'm excited about these MCPs. Talk to me a little bit about how you've been thinking and using mcps.
[24:39]
B
I think you're totally correct. And the beauty is you as an owner of the company are so involved in the possibilities and you, you know that as soon as MCPS arrives, you probably knew instantly we need to have an mcp. And there are still a lot of softwares out there who doesn't have an MCP or even an API call. I was literally in a call like two or three hours before this meeting where a client was showing me like a reporting deck in Excel. And I was like, okay, I need to have access to this because I want to know. It was like the sales reporting, I want to know how sales is going, because based on that we can adjust campaigns. And he was like, yeah, but I have to type it manually over from the reporting tool. And I was like, are you kidding me? You know, it doesn't have an msp, it doesn't have an API, it doesn't even have an export function. And I'm like, you know, if you are a software company and you don't have those kind of things, I can't really understand how is that still possible at this moment? And do you still believe that you are a company in like one or two years? So, yeah, I think as soon as, as long as you work with Companies who are evolving and evolving in the speed of, like the speed of AI at the moment, and comes up with a thing as an mcp, then you are working with the right software, I think.
[26:06]
A
Yeah. Now, okay, that's okay. Mind blown this example that you just gave. But. But luckily there are solutions. Right, so let's talk about maybe Claude Cowork or cloud code. Is that something that you've used me? Because the way that I see that is somebody says, okay, here's a spreadsheet that we can export it or just like move data from one place to another and no API exists. Well, that's where I've been using Claude code and maybe the API even does exist, but I'm just like, hey, Claude, I've got these files in this place. Can you open them up? Can you look at what's in there them and put them in a spreadsheet and do some sort of a classification? And it literally runs on my computer, takes control of my computer, opens these files, puts it in the Google sheet, does whatever I need. So to me, this is brilliant. Right, because we're no longer dependent on what someone has decided to expose through an API. Right. If, if there is a presentation UI layer that my computer can go and click, they can do that. Now, historically there have been tools that you know are button clickers, but they've been very complicated because you always have to specify exactly, like, what is the button name? Where is it on the screen? AI is flexible. It can just take a screenshot of your computer monitor and be like, oh, it looks like the button. It's not exactly the text we thought, but it looks like it might be that one. So let me try. And that's what's brilliant. Right. So, but I want to hear from you, like, have you used cowork or cloud code or any of these like. Or click multiple LED systems?
[27:33]
B
Yeah. So that's, that's also the problem that I'm having with AI. If you're talking about being enthusiastic and getting stressed out. There are so many tools out there, and every time a tool gets a new update, you know, you are like, hey, this is the tool I'm fine with. And then, oh, but on the other hand, this tool got like this update. I need to start using that. So that's why I'm. I'm constantly switching tools. So I was really a fan of Cursor. Then I actually made a switch to AI Studio from Google, which I think was way more. How do you say, was more convenient for me at that time. But the problem was obviously that, you know, Cursor can take over your computer while AI Studio is not able to do that. And then you got class code. Obviously I haven't used it the way you just described it, but I know that some of my colleagues are actually using it to build the portal. I was just mentioning in the, in the beginning where we are connecting all kinds of software together, for example, reporting purposes, but yet, you know, it's so amazing that you could just basically tell the computer, you know, you're not even. Well, at least I'm not typing it anymore. I'm using whisper flow to just tell the system, this is what I, what I want. And you see the screen flickering and changing and pop ups are popping up anywhere, everywhere, and then all of a sudden you get something in your screen and it's done. And whether that's using cloud code or another tool, it doesn't matter as long as you are using it and try to get better at it.
[29:11]
A
Yeah, that's great. So super useful. And then how do you think about your team's usage of AI? Like do, do you put limitations in place and how do you think about that as a business in terms of potential liability and mistakes happening?
[29:30]
B
That's a good question. At the beginning, the problem I was having was the fact that nobody was using it. I was seeing so many potential things that we could do not only in terms of efficiency, but also in terms of creativity for our clients. And I was being really enthusiastic and I was sharing screen videos of what I was doing in Cursor, for example, for a couple of clients and what I did and what the outcome was. But I was constantly demotivated because nobody else was picking up. And then we came up with a 12 week course, internal course, in which we said, okay, everybody needs to follow this course. It's something we built ourselves. And it's mainly just like a guidance through AI and the cursor and those kind of stuff and everything that is possible. And each team, so for example, the SEO team, the SEA team, social advertising team, we gave them homework. Come up with things that you do repeatedly, every day, every week or every month. Come up with things you hate to do in your work. Come up with things that you think we could do faster or better. So every team came up with a list. And then we just said, okay, you now had this course, you saw what's possible with all the toolings. Get your list and start working with number one, try to fix it using AI. And that was like the thing that, that Was like the moment everything switched, all of a sudden everybody was using it or at least start thinking about the possibilities. And they came up with some great tools, internal tools we could use. But again, that was the point that we saw. We were growing in the uses of the credits. We came up with questions like, hey, I've got this data file for my client I want to analyze, can I just upload it? Or how does it work? Stuff like that. So now we have like, how do you call it in English, A guidance document on, okay, what can we do with AI? What can we not do with AI? How do we think about these kind of things and how do we proceed from here? But that's obviously really important. But that's basically how our journey was here at maaswalk Online in terms of using AI. And now we are doing like amazing things. For example, I already told the herbs and spices example, I've got another great example for. It's, it's for a company who are running parking lots. So they've got like 48 parking lots in, I don't know, 25 cities in, in the Netherlands. And the thing is, if you start searching for parking lot Rotterdam for example, they are going to be found. But there are a lot of things you can do in Rotterdam. So when you start searching for a parking lot or parking place for this specific museum, you won't gonna find that client. So we were like, okay, how can we change that? And we used AI to come up with a Python script. We didn't have any Python knowledge whatsoever, but we knew we had to use Python and we used AI to come up with a Python script. And the Python script used all these kinds of APIs to not only scrape the things to do API from Google to see, okay, what is all the things you could do in for example Rotterdam, but also use the Google Maps API to see. Okay, there were like hundred things you could do in Rotterdam. We've got three parking lots in Rotterdam. Use the Maps API to see which of the things you can do are in like a radius of the, of the parking lot, you know, because you're not going to park over here to walk 10 miles over there. And then we used another Python script to push all the information into a spreadsheet. So all of a sudden we've got this database saying, okay, these are the things you could do. These are the things you could do within a, I don't know, 10 minute walking distance parking lot. We use the AHREFS API to see if they are search volumes for those Things to do. And then we used AI agents to come up with text, SEO optimized text we could place on the website. And all of a sudden we've got SEO friendly text on the website, completely built with Python scripts and API connections where we only used AI. And you know, those are all kind of things that we couldn't come up with ourselves like a couple of years before. And even if it did, we wouldn't have it online within one or two weeks. And yeah, I think that that's really amazing if you could come up with just those kind of things.
[34:23]
A
Yeah, I love it. And so my mind immediately then goes to, oh, do you now have structured data? Like, why not feed that into Optimizer's campaign automator? And now you can also have automatically dynamically generated ads for those parking lot locations near museums.
[34:36]
B
That's what we're doing right now.
[34:38]
A
Exactly. Yeah. And that's what's so fun, right? Is like the thing that would have been shelved as a project that will do at some point now you can actually get it done within the quarter. But maybe it's a little scary too because like, once the client picks up on the fact that, oh, we asked for this and they did it in two weeks and at a reasonable cost, like, what else can we ask them? Right, you're gonna have to hire more people.
[35:07]
B
You know, that's, that's a funny discussion. And I'm having that discussion with other AC owners as well. You know, what do we need to do with our pricing? But to be honest, as an agency or as a freelancer as well, if you are still using pricing like an hourly fee model, it's not going to work anymore, you know, so we are working like we call it a value based model. You know, this is what you want. You, you pay this amount and this is what you get. And we are not talking about how many hours of work are in there because of the fact that we could do it in two weeks or in one week or whatsoever. It's because of the knowledge that we have or the experience that we have. And you are paying for that knowledge and experience as well. But to be honest, we are actually really upfront with our clients telling them, okay, x percent of the fee that you are paying us is being used for internal innovation time. And that is where we come up with those kind of things. And you know, of course you are paying for that, but you are getting the benefits of that as well. And that also enables me to, to talk to the staff and saying, okay, X percent of the time you are working at the office is purely for innovation and come up with new kind of things. And I think that in, in this era that we are living in right now, that's really important.
[36:32]
A
Yeah. And that makes me think here. So I find that I play a lot of the innovator role at Optimizer, trying the various tools and sort of like then pushing the team to use one or another. But you're right, because I'm mostly coding on Lovable. But then yesterday I see something about Replit or I tried Google AI Studio and sort of it's that PPC Dr. Role that I described in one of my books, which is, you know, listen, we understand what the client needs or what the problem is we're trying to solve, but what are the different medications or solutions that we could deploy for them? Right. Which one is best for each scenario? What are the side effects? There's a lot of time that goes into that. And you're right, that is valuable. And that is something that, as an agency or a software vendor, whoever you are, like, there is time that needs to go into that. But then I also wonder to what degree do the individuals end up being the innovators themselves versus me saying, okay, here's the thing that I know is now possible, and then I just have someone go and implement it. And it sounds like you give a lot of that creative freedom to your team as well, so that they individually become innovators rather than being centrally driven from one person.
[37:47]
B
Yeah, but at the same time, and I think that's, that's something that is in every company the same. There are like maybe 80 or 90% of the people doesn't want to be an innovator. They just know they want to show up, do their work, talk with colleagues, fix the problems for the clients. And that's fine as long as you've got a couple of people in your team who are really enthusiastic about this and are willing to do the extra mile in terms of learning these things and try to be innovative and make sure that that knowledge is being passed on to the other members of the team, I think that's okay. You know, in the beginning, I wanted everybody to have the same mindset as I was having. You know, this is really exciting. Why are you not testing with this? And they're like, it's not that exciting for me. And at the beginning I found that really hard. But now I know as long as you've got four or five people in the room who are excited about this and testing with this, then the other 30 people will be fine as well.
[38:50]
A
Yeah, makes total sense. Hey. Well, this has been fantastic stuff. I feel like we're going to have to bring you on again in a couple of weeks as I'm sure all of the AI tools will have had new updates and new things we can do with them. So I'd love to keep this conversation going and hear what you're up to. So thanks for sharing everything so far. But for people who want to hear more and more, find out about what they can do with you, where should they go?
[39:17]
B
Probably follow me on LinkedIn. I'm most active on LinkedIn. I'm speaking at a lot of events as well, so probably you will find me at some of those events as well. But yeah, feel free to to give me a message on LinkedIn.
[39:31]
A
Great. Yeah, and we see each other on the speaking circuit once in a while, so can't wait to see you in person again. Hey, but Lars, thank you so much for sharing all your knowledge and thanks everyone for watching. Hopefully you'll give a thumbs up to the show, start following us, subscribe, give a review, and there's also the comment section. So if there's anything you want to get the link to something that Lars or I mentioned, we're happy to reply to those. But with that, thanks for watching PPC Town hall and we'll see you for the next episode.

Summary8 min read

PPC Town Hall Episode 126 Summary
"How Lars Maat Built an AI-Driven Agency: Tools, Workflows, Team Adoption, and Risks"
Date: April 8, 2026
Host: Frederick Vallaeys
Guest: Lars Maat, Founder of Maatwerk Online

Episode Overview

In this enlightening episode, Frederick Vallaeys (Fred) sits down with Lars Maat, founder of Maatwerk Online, a digital agency based in the Netherlands, to discuss the practicalities, risks, and cultural shifts involved in transforming a digital marketing agency with AI and low-code/no-code (“Vibe coding”) tools. Through real agency scenarios, they explore how building custom solutions in-house, automating workflows, and nurturing team involvement have supercharged their operations and client success.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins and Philosophy of Maatwerk Online

Custom Approach: The Dutch word “Maatwerk” translates roughly to “custom work.” Lars explains that his agency builds tailored marketing solutions for each client, as opposed to standardized package deals.
- [01:40] Lars: “Every company has its own price plan, strategy, and in the Netherlands that’s what we call Maatwerk.”
Growth Journey: Lars started as a freelancer who never intended to run a large agency—now he leads a 33-person team in Rotterdam, which he humorously refers to as his “hobby gone wrong.”
- [02:30] Lars: “…here we are in 2026, I’m sitting in a big office in Rotterdam … So it’s kind of like a hobby gone wrong.”

2. Impact of AI on Agency Workflows

AI vs. Automation: Lars identifies a crucial distinction between true AI and basic automations, noting that many in the industry conflate the two.
- [03:50] Lars: “…there are so many more opportunities to do stuff way better, faster, more precise, with not only AI but also automations…”
Productivity vs. Project Explosion: Both Fred and Lars describe how AI “vibe coding” enables them to complete more projects—leading to both excitement and a new form of stress.
- [05:41] Lars: “I see myself as like an idiot in the business. I want to know everything … before you know it, it’s like 1 or 2 am in the night…”
Enjoying Work vs. Overworking: The hosts discuss their increased workload due to the excitement of limitless possibilities unlocked by AI.

3. Building Custom Internal Tools with AI

Replacing Off-the-Shelf Software: Lars’s agency now reevaluates every third-party tool, asking if it can be replaced or improved with their own custom AI-driven workflow, reducing costs and increasing flexibility.
- [07:09] Lars: “We just try to vibe code it ourselves … the amount of money you can save by building your own programs … it’s really amazing.”
Examples:
- Staff engagement platform created in-house after reaching limitations with commercial software.
- [08:56] Fred shares a fun “vibe coded” marketing tool for generating images and videos around quirky holidays for campaign engagement.

4. Marketing AI Examples & Real Client Wins

SEO & Content at Scale: Lars recounts how his agency created hundreds of AI-generated recipe pages for an e-commerce client, driving new organic traffic.
- [11:43] Lars: “We used AI to come up with recipes for all of the products … push everything into the HTML templates … all built with AI and it’s just mind blowing.”
Parking Lot Business Case: Automated mapping and SEO targeting for parking lots near local attractions, leveraging multiple APIs and AI agents:
- [29:29] Lars: “…used AI to come up with a Python script … used the Maps API to see which … attractions are in a radius of the parking lot … then we used another Python script to push all the information into a spreadsheet …”

5. AI “Signatures” & Quality of Output

AI’s Distinct Style: Fred and Lars joke about AI-generated projects having recognizable traits, like the prominent use of the color purple.
Good Enough vs. Perfect: Discussion over whether to invest time into polishing AI-generated outputs or accept them as good-enough.
- [15:24] Lars: “…if you’re building your first project while vibe coding, as soon as the system builds something that you are okay with, you are probably so enthusiastic and you’re going to share it… at your 50th project, you adjust more.”

6. The Evolution & Future of Software in the AI Era

From Bloat to Custom, On-Demand Tools: Lars and Fred predict a move from monolithic, feature-bloated apps towards tailored, AI-built software constructed as needed.
- [22:08] Fred: “…your company named Maatwerk, like custom, we are headed into an era where software is custom … software for the exact thing that you need at that exact moment in time.”
The Importance of Determinism and Business Intelligence: Fred distinguishes between basic UI reskins and deeper BI layers that ensure accuracy and safety—critical for managing large budgets.
- [16:21] Fred: “You want deterministic … Because AI code is not deterministic. … When you're dealing with million dollar ad budgets, you want deterministic.”

7. Technical Stack: API, MCP, and Coworker AI

MCPs (Model Context Protocols): Discussed as the future for AI-integrated agency tools—enabling AI models to safely and programmatically work with trusted data layers.
- [24:39] Lars: “…there are still a lot of softwares out there who doesn’t have an MCP or an API call … As long as you work with companies who are evolving … then you’re working with the right software.”
AI ‘Coworkers’: Replacing manual processes and GUI interactions with AI agents, even when APIs aren’t available.
- [26:06] Fred: “...Claude code … literally runs on my computer, takes control of my computer, opens these files, puts it in the Google sheet, does whatever I need ...”
- Lars explains his agency experiments with cursor, AI Studio, and Claude, employing voice-driven workflows and API orchestration.
- [27:32] Lars: “…Cursor can take over your computer … But the problem was obviously that Google AI Studio is not able to do that … so I’m constantly switching tools.”

8. Team Culture, AI Adoption, and Process

Driving Teamwide AI Utilization: Initial skepticism and lack of adoption was tackled by developing a 12-week internal AI course, plus building a culture of experimentation, documenting safe AI practices.
- [29:29] Lars: “At the beginning … nobody was using it … then we came up with a 12 week course, internal course … each team … gave them homework … list things you do repeatedly … try to fix it using AI … that was like the moment everything switched.”
Balancing Innovators and Doers: Not everyone on staff becomes an innovator—Lars now sees value in having a few key AI champions whose knowledge benefits the whole team.
- [37:47] Lars: “…maybe 80 or 90% of the people doesn’t want to be an innovator … as long as you’ve got a couple of people in your team who are really enthusiastic … the other 30 people will be fine as well.”

9. Pricing Model Shifts: From Hourly to Value-Based

Agencies Must Adapt: With AI accelerating delivery, hourly models often no longer make sense. Lars is upfront with clients about “innovation time”—baked into fees—which supports ongoing R&D and passing innovations to clients.
- [35:07] Lars: “If you are still using pricing like an hourly fee model, it’s not going to work anymore … we call it a value based model … you are paying for that knowledge and experience as well.”

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Growing a Business By Accident
- Lars: “It’s kind of like a hobby gone wrong.” [02:30]
On The Joy (and Stress) of AI Experimentation
- Lars: “Before you know it, it’s like 1 or 2am in the night and you’re supposed to go to bed … but because it’s that interesting and you are so enthusiastic … you don’t want to stop actually.” [05:41]
On Building Their Own Software
- Lars: “The amount of money you can save by building your own programs. And at the same time, you can custom made those programs for your company.” [07:09]
On the “Signature” of AI-Generated Code
- Fred: “It’s funny how anything that’s vibe coded usually starts with the color purple. … you can really pick up on AI generated vibe coded projects as well.” [14:19]
On The Current State of Software
- Fred: "…software for the exact thing that you need at that exact moment in time. And it’ll just build the thing …” [22:08]
On Hourly vs. Value-Based Pricing
- Lars: “…Hourly fee model, it’s not going to work anymore. … you are paying for that knowledge and experience as well.” [35:07]
On Culture of Innovation
- Lars: “In the beginning, I wanted everybody to have the same mindset as I was having. … But now I know as long as you’ve got four or five people in the room who are excited about this…the other 30 people will be fine as well.” [37:47]

Important Segment Timestamps

[01:40] — Lars explains the meaning behind “Maatwerk Online”
[03:50] — Contrast between early start and launching today with AI
[05:41] — The excitement and stress of non-stop AI learning
[07:09] — Building internal “portal” and replacing subscriptions via in-house AI code
[08:56] — Fred’s quirky AI image/video generator for marketing
[11:43] — E-commerce case: Using AI to overcome SEO plateau with recipes/content
[16:21] — The necessity of deterministic software in advertising
[22:08] — The coming era of entirely custom/on-demand software
[24:39] — The role of MCPs, APIs, and lagging SaaS in AI integration
[27:32] — Lars on switching between AI tools and using voice inputs
[29:29] — Internal 12-week AI upskilling course, team adoption story
[29:29] — Parking lot case: Complete Python/AI-powered SEO automation
[35:07] — Shifting agency pricing model to value basis
[37:47] — Not everyone on the team needs to be an innovator

Final Takeaways

AI-powered, custom-built tools are rapidly replacing generic SaaS in advanced agencies.
Culture and structured learning are vital to widespread AI adoption within teams.
Agencies must rethink pricing and work models to align with the rapid acceleration enabled by AI.
The future is on-demand, flexible, and innovation-driven marketing technology—built as needed, by those who know what they want.

Connect with Lars Maat:

Most active on [LinkedIn]
Frequent speaker at industry events

For more episodes and updates, subscribe to PPC Town Hall and join the conversation!

Loading summary

Transcript39 lines

[00:01]
A
Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Valleis. I'm your host. I'm also CEO and co founder at Optimizer, a PPC management company. So for today's episode, we're bringing in another of the top 50 most influential PPC experts. And this one is based in the Netherlands. He's been in the industry for quite a long time and the reason that I brought him onto the show today is because he's a another big fan like myself, of AI Vibe coding and just figuring out new ways to do things with all of this cool technology that we have. So our guest today is Lars Matt. I don't know how you say that in English because I originally speak Dutch as well. So Lars Matt from Math Work Online and also the co founder of the Social Club. So can't wait to hear what Lawrence has to share with us. And with that, let's get rolling with that, this episode of PPC Town Hall. Thanks for having me. Yes,
[01:08]
B
it was a good intro. You pronounced the name right?
[01:11]
A
Oh good, good. How do people in English say it? Your last name, mate?
[01:18]
B
Mat. I think when I'm at an event and they are announcing me as a speaker, I think everybody just gets. Gets fine along with. With Mat.
[01:28]
A
Okay, yeah, it's not that hard to say. Right. But then that also leads into your company name, which is matwork Online. That probably doesn't make a lot of sense to our English listeners. So maybe explain that one a bit.
[01:41]
B
Yeah, so I'm not sure what the the English word is for. For Madwareck, but it basically means that we are a digital agency based in Rotterdam in the Netherlands and we don't work with like standard packages for every company. We try to make a plan based on the needs of the company. So it's not like, hey, if you want us to run your PPC campaigns, it will cost you X euros a month. Every company has its own price plan, strategy and in the Netherlands that's what we call Maatwerk. So that's basically where the name comes from.
[02:17]
A
Yeah, so yeah, I like custom basically. Right. As would be the translation that I would think of. Yeah, that's great. So how long is Mathmark Online being business?
[02:31]
B
Well, actually, funny story, I worked at an AC before, but it was not like the standards of the AC were not like my standards anymore. And at that time, and I'm talking around 2012, 2013, a lot of people were asking me questions from, hey, you know you are working in digital marketing. Is this something you can do for us. Could you help us with that? And it basically was the reason that I decided to start working for myself as a freelancer and I never intended to have like staff or like a real agency. And here we are in 2026, I'm sitting in a big office in Rotterdam and we got 33 people working at the AC. So it's kind of like a hobby gone wrong.
[03:20]
A
Well, congratulations on the success of your hobby gone wrong. But it's. We're in interesting times now, right, because obviously you went from being a freelancer to hiring all of these people because presumably you couldn't do the work of 33 people by yourself. But say that you had started the agency or the freelancing company today. How do you see AI as an enabler in that?
[03:51]
B
Well, it's difficult because when you start to think of how I did it in the early days and how high, how I would do it now, it's, it's completely different. There are so many more opportunities to do stuff way better, faster, more precise, with not only AI but also automations, because I think a lot of people are using the word AI while they are working with automations. So there's, there's obviously a difference between them. But, but yeah, I would probably get more work done, work for more clients and probably make more money as well and maybe the same amount or even less amount of time that I used to do back in the days.
[04:34]
A
Yeah, well, and to me, this is interesting because some people talk about AI doing things faster, right? So you can do what you normally would have done in a normal workday, in one or two hours. But then the question is, do you take these extra six hours or if you have a long workday, these extra 10 hours, and do you just enjoy some leisure time, time with the family, or do you end up just doing more things? Do you take on more clients? Do you do more projects? And for me, where it's been exciting is that it's just enabled me to bite off projects that in the past I would have shelved because it just would have taken too long. I would have had to talk to too many people to get it done. I would have had frustrations about maybe they don't understand my vision. And then it's, it's like the back and forth is just endless. But I find myself more excited but also more stressed out than I've ever been and stressed out just because there's more things I end up doing. The excitement is in being able to do these things. And like, for you where does it fall in terms of the AI? Like are you taking less time off or are you just doing new things altogether?
[05:42]
B
I think the excitement is also the main reason of the increasement of the stress because I see myself as like an idiot in the business. I want to know everything what's possible and I find everything interesting and I find, think you are probably quite alike. So the problem for me is as soon as Gemini or Cloud is releasing something new or Google Ads is releasing something new, I want to dive into it right away. And nowadays with all the information that is available and all the possibilities that are available in terms of vibe coding, for example, you start testing it right away and before you know it it's like 1 or 2am in the night and you're supposed to go to bed because you know I've got some, some little kids as well who comes, who tend to come a couple times in the night. But because it's that interesting and you are so enthusiastic about the possibilities, you are, you start working with it and yeah, you don't want to stop actually at least that's what I'm experiencing.
[06:49]
A
Yeah, totally the same here. I mean the number of times I've been up unusually late, past midnight at work, it's a lot more than it used to be. But it's exciting.
[06:59]
B
Right?
[06:59]
A
So, but talk to me about like what is the current project that's keeping you up at night and programming throughout the day?
[07:09]
B
Yeah, so what, what we currently are doing at the company is we are looking into every subscription, every software that we, that we are using for stuff and we just try to vibe code it ourselves and we try to make like one big environment called a portal, for example where every piece of software and equipment that we are using third party supplies for now come into the portal Vibe coding it ourselves. And it's really amazing not only what is possible but also the amount of money you can save by building your own programs. And at the same time you can custom made those programs for your company. So for example, we've got a software we are using for, how do you say it? Staff engagement and staff happiness between the company and you know, it's totally anonymized but we can ask questions and people at the office are responding to it but we don't know who is responding. But as soon as somebody fills in a negative answer we want to dig deeper into that answer. You know, okay, why is this? Do you have examples and stuff like that? And the supplier is basically telling us that's not possible in our software. And I'm like, how is that not possible? So, you know, we build it ourselves, and I'm sorry for that supplier, but, yeah, we have to cut you loose. And we are using our own program nowadays, and that is what's really exciting. And I know that it's not like a PPC example, but. Yeah, the possibility is that with all the things you can do nowadays with terms of Vibe coding and using AI, it's amazing.
[08:57]
A
Yeah. Let me give a marketing example maybe on this, but I totally get what you're saying, right? So you look at the status quo, and you rebuild a little bit of the status quo in Vibe code. And then it's like this blank canvas where you can just prompt to do one, one more thing. And what sometimes frustrates me is that I see people being stuck in the status quo. So they're like, oh, my God, I just vibe coded like a version of, say, PowerPoint. Great. But what was it about PowerPoint that frustrated you in the first place that you wanted to do more with? Right. And so the marketing example of what I vibe coded last night was it's. It's a. It's a calendar of four fun holidays. So like national donut Day or National Pizza Day or national, like, scratch your back Day. That. And then an image generator that takes a character. So it could be either a picture of you or it could be a character that you generated, like a yeti or a dog. And then some. Some things. And then the AI puts together what could that character be doing on National Pizza Day? And. And then it starts generating the image for that. It puts together the character with some accessories using the nano banana model. And then it writes a little description of, like, what could you put on social media that this character is doing that's related to that special fun holiday event? Okay. And so then I got that, and I'm like, oh, the next cool thing would be, let's make this into videos. Right. And so you just. One more prompt. And now the. So yesterday I actually made a yeti for Earth Day who had a recycling can on his head. And then he was, like, juggling the. The soda cans and the crumpled pieces of recycling paper. And so it was a beautiful image. I was like, okay, one more thing. Make it into a video. Now he's actually juggling these things. And that's what's so exciting to me, is that this is a thing that the idea came about two weeks ago when I was talking to some friends. And. And these friends, they told me I was looking at their Facebook campaign. And there was one ad that stood out as having had much higher engagement. And I was like, well, what was it about that ad? And my friend was like, well, it was just, it was related to a special holiday. And just for some reason that resonated with a whole different group of people that were usually targeted. And they didn't care about the jewelry that she was selling, but they cared about the fact that it was about this special fun holiday. And I was like, oh, I should do something with this. And so that's what that became. It became an evening of vibe coding and saying, let's do one more thing, one more thing. And now I have an image generator that's far better than what you get in platform, in Meta or in Google or in any of these other places. Nice.
[11:43]
B
I've got a marketing example as well. So we are working for an e commerce store who is selling herbs and spices and they are in the business for quite a while now. So if you are looking like SEO wise, when you start searching, at least in the Netherlands for some of the herbs and spices they are selling, they are constantly number one, number two, number three in, in the organic results. But the problem is we are like, it's not, it's not decreasing, but it's not increasing anymore as well. You know, they are like on a platform. So we thought about, okay, what can we do to increase sales, get new people to the website and stuff like that. So what we did is we vibe coded a structured template, an HTML template where recipes for each of the herbs and spices they are selling could be placed. We used AI to come up with recipes for all of the products that they are selling. We used AI to come up with an image generator for, for the recipe that they were talking about. And then we pushed everything into the HTML templates. We used AI to generate the structured data for the SEO results. And all of a sudden we've got this herbs and spices website which had like 450 products on it. But now they have like 400 recipes online as well. And within a couple of weeks, months, all of a sudden they were generating a lot of more people to the website. And you know, the conversion rate for those people is way lower because they are not searching specifically to buy the herbs, they are searching for a recipe for that herb. But you know, when you are looking at the recipe at the website, obviously we made sure that the products that they are using in the recipe, you can buy them directly from that page. So it's generating new people who are Getting familiar with the brand new. It's generating sales, obviously, it is generating a remarketing audience for our Google Ads and it's all built with AI and it's just mind blowing that we could do this ourselves. We didn't need like a developer. We had the plan and the execution was in like two weeks. It's amazing.
[13:56]
A
Yeah, I love that I had a similar one. So when it was the holiday season, Christmas, the Advent calendar, which surprisingly actually a lot of people in the United States don't know Advent calendars. But I was like,
[14:11]
B
I know the example you're going to tell me. I saw the Advent calendar and I knew right away he Vibe coded this. The look and feel was totally Vibe coded.
[14:19]
A
Exactly. Well, it's funny how like anything that's vibe coded usually starts with the color purple. And I was talking to some people who work at OpenAI and they were like, yeah, chat GPT and have it writes code. It really loves purple. So just like you can pick up on like a AI written articles, you can really pick up on AI generated Vibe coded projects as well. But, but yeah, so with, with, with this Advent calendar, obviously I wanted to make it a very quick project. So there was still that sense. Like you're saying you could tell that it was vibe coded, but how do you think about that? Do you think that we will eventually spend more time vibe coding to get rid of that AI, those AI signatures or do you think it's good enough and people like it? Or where do you stand on that? Because my concern is that eventually we end up spending way more time to get rid of those AI signatures to make it look like it was built by a human and we end up eating up all of the time that we initially saved.
[15:24]
B
I think it depends on the case. You know, in this example of your advanced calendar, you just wanted to do something fun for the holidays, you wanted to use Vibe coding and you come up with it. And I know probably once you're going like to an event and you want to build something in order to introduce your company to potential clients, you will probably just do way more in terms of look and feel of what you Vibe coded to make sure it stands out. It's more like connected to the brand. And I think that that's the case for every example. You know, if you are using your first project, if you are building your first project while Vibe coding, as soon as the system builds something that you are okay with, you are probably so enthusiastic and you're going to share it. And once you are at your 50 project, you will probably say, okay, it's working fine, but look and feel is not that nice, so let's adjust that. And I think that that's the case at this point.
[16:21]
A
Yeah. Okay. So I run a software company and my customers are certainly asking me questions. It's like, why should we pay for an Optimizer subscription when presumably you can Vibe code? So I've got an answer and I want to run it by you and see what you think. So I think there's two categories. There's more than two, but let's just break it down to two categories of software. There's one software that's just kind of like a UI layer on top of Google Ads. And so when we've seen a lot of our competitors at Optimizer come out, we see that they just kind of reskin the capability that Google Ads natively has. But their whole pitch was like, well, the Google Ads interface is complicated. It's hard to find the thing you need to do. So here's maybe a simpler version with just exactly the buttons that you need, but fundamentally it still does the thing that you could have gone to Google Ads and just done right there as well. Okay. And then there's another category of tools which is maybe a little bit more like Optimizer where it's like, well, we're not reskinning a pig. We are actually doing very deep analysis that's a bit more complicated, which tends to involve, for an agency, a lot of pulling data, putting it in spreadsheets, doing vlookups, comparing it to other sources of data. Right. So it's this back end work, but then how you present that, it's like sometimes it's a little clunky, right, because there's so much going on that it is difficult to put a really nice user interface on that. And so for many years we struggled because it was people looking at these beautiful UIs and saying, oh well, why can't Optimizer be exactly like that? But now I think it's shifting because now the UI layer, the presentation layer is really going to way that that's what you Vibe code. And why even vibe code? Why not just tell the AI what it is you want to do that is your user interface to specifying how things should be. But then it needs to go and do the work, which is deep down in the ad system and it could connect to the Ads API. But there's a lot of nuance, right? Like, okay, if you said we need to remove a duplicate keyword well, what is a duplicate keyword? Is that just looking at the text of the keyword or do we need to look at the targeting, look at different campaigns and the day parting and the budget exhaustion at certain times a day. So there's all these things that go in and that's where we think we are, a business intelligence layer where we've spent over a decade coding up what that actually means. Like, okay, you want to do this thing, here's the very sophisticated analysis and manipulation of the data that gets you to that thing that you wanted to do. And it's deterministic. And deterministic is very important because, because AI code is not deterministic. It's going to make slightly different decisions every time you run it. But when you're dealing with million dollar ad budgets, you want deterministic. You want to know that if you said, oh, do this keyword optimization, right, it's fine to deploy one of Optimizer's tools to do that because that gives you guard rails. And so that's where I think software is going to start distinguishing itself. Right? And it's the software that has your history of knowledge, your data repo, basically, or it has this business intelligence layer that's really hard to replicate. So as you are building things, as you are making decisions about what software to keep, like talk me through, does that map to how you think about it or are there other things you look at?
[19:47]
B
Yeah, yeah, I can, I can totally agree with what you are saying. And specifically looking on the Optimizer tool, I think the differences, you know, there are probably a couple of guys and girls out there who are so keen on Vibe coding and are so like geeks in a good sense of the word, and they are like, I want to do this myself. And okay, you may lose those people as a client, but on the other hand, I think a lot of people are basically using you too because of the fact that you guys have so much data and you guys are pushing in so many updates. I think you updated yesterday or the day before something new as well, if I'm correct. And as a customer of Optimizer, you know, as soon as some, something new is being released, you guys are working with that. And the fact that everything is in place for me and it's like convenient. I don't have to worry about stuff, you know, it's all there. And I think at least at this time, like the majority of the people out there wants that, you know, we as geeks are talking about Vibe coding and doing things ourselves, but like 80 or maybe even 90% of the marketers out there aren't using it at the moment. Well, at least not at a so sophisticated way that we are using it and the possibilities that are already available. So in terms of what we are doing when we are looking at software, it's not only like a budget thing, of course, it's mainly a thing. Okay, this is what the software is doing, but we actually want it to do this and it's like two or three steps further. And the software isn't able to do that at this moment because the way it is built in the past or whatsoever, why can't we just do it ourselves? And if the software is able to do what we want and it will cost us like a couple of euros more each month, it's also okay, you know, so that's one reason, and another reason is we want to show our clients that we are able to build those kind of stuff and build APIs together, automate stuff. Because if we can do it for ourselves, we could do it for our clients as well. And they benefit from of those steps as well. So that's, that's mainly the reason why we are looking at this.
[22:09]
A
Yeah. And it's actually brilliant, right, because your company named matamark, like custom, we are headed into an era where software is custom. And like Sam Altman is saying, it's on demand software. And what that really implies is that it is software for the exact thing that you need at that exact moment in time. And it'll just build the thing that is necessary right there. And when you look at so many softwares, they are all bloated because they need to satisfy the needs of millions of people. And so they have all of these features. But honestly, like what do you use in the average software suite that you deploy? Right. And so you only use a fraction of what they offer, but then you need all of these extra things that they don't offer. And that's where the frustration. Yeah. Comes into play now as I think about this scenario as well. So I've made similar decisions as yours about software that we no longer need to invest in, not because they're bad, but just because they can't move fast enough at the speed that we want to move. But let's talk about MCPS and like data connectors, right? Because again, there is things that these companies are doing well. So if I can build on top of what they are doing, but do it, have it, do just a little bit more, that is actually useful. Right. So for that there's the, the notion of an mcp, which is kind of like for listeners who don't know what an MCP is. It's kind of like an API application programming interface, but for modern AI web. So it's a model context protocol. Basically, it enables an API to understand your data layer and interact with your tool in some sort of a programmatic AI way. And this is where Optimizer then has, say, an mcp and then, so now you can talk to Claude Code and you can say, enable the Optimizer mcp, because that's enabling the Optimizer skill. So now you're not asking Claude to figure out how to do a keyword manipulation or a budget forecast for that. It can look at optimizer and the 10 plus years of knowledge that we built into how those tools work correctly within guardrails. Right. But Claude, your AI can start to focus more on, oh, well, what is it that Fred needs today? Like, what is he trying to achieve for his business or his client? Oh, okay. And there's a tool from optimizr that we can connect with and actually get that done faster. So that's where I'm excited about these MCPs. Talk to me a little bit about how you've been thinking and using mcps.
[24:39]
B
I think you're totally correct. And the beauty is you as an owner of the company are so involved in the possibilities and you, you know that as soon as MCPS arrives, you probably knew instantly we need to have an mcp. And there are still a lot of softwares out there who doesn't have an MCP or even an API call. I was literally in a call like two or three hours before this meeting where a client was showing me like a reporting deck in Excel. And I was like, okay, I need to have access to this because I want to know. It was like the sales reporting, I want to know how sales is going, because based on that we can adjust campaigns. And he was like, yeah, but I have to type it manually over from the reporting tool. And I was like, are you kidding me? You know, it doesn't have an msp, it doesn't have an API, it doesn't even have an export function. And I'm like, you know, if you are a software company and you don't have those kind of things, I can't really understand how is that still possible at this moment? And do you still believe that you are a company in like one or two years? So, yeah, I think as soon as, as long as you work with Companies who are evolving and evolving in the speed of, like the speed of AI at the moment, and comes up with a thing as an mcp, then you are working with the right software, I think.
[26:06]
A
Yeah. Now, okay, that's okay. Mind blown this example that you just gave. But. But luckily there are solutions. Right, so let's talk about maybe Claude Cowork or cloud code. Is that something that you've used me? Because the way that I see that is somebody says, okay, here's a spreadsheet that we can export it or just like move data from one place to another and no API exists. Well, that's where I've been using Claude code and maybe the API even does exist, but I'm just like, hey, Claude, I've got these files in this place. Can you open them up? Can you look at what's in there them and put them in a spreadsheet and do some sort of a classification? And it literally runs on my computer, takes control of my computer, opens these files, puts it in the Google sheet, does whatever I need. So to me, this is brilliant. Right, because we're no longer dependent on what someone has decided to expose through an API. Right. If, if there is a presentation UI layer that my computer can go and click, they can do that. Now, historically there have been tools that you know are button clickers, but they've been very complicated because you always have to specify exactly, like, what is the button name? Where is it on the screen? AI is flexible. It can just take a screenshot of your computer monitor and be like, oh, it looks like the button. It's not exactly the text we thought, but it looks like it might be that one. So let me try. And that's what's brilliant. Right. So, but I want to hear from you, like, have you used cowork or cloud code or any of these like. Or click multiple LED systems?
[27:33]
B
Yeah. So that's, that's also the problem that I'm having with AI. If you're talking about being enthusiastic and getting stressed out. There are so many tools out there, and every time a tool gets a new update, you know, you are like, hey, this is the tool I'm fine with. And then, oh, but on the other hand, this tool got like this update. I need to start using that. So that's why I'm. I'm constantly switching tools. So I was really a fan of Cursor. Then I actually made a switch to AI Studio from Google, which I think was way more. How do you say, was more convenient for me at that time. But the problem was obviously that, you know, Cursor can take over your computer while AI Studio is not able to do that. And then you got class code. Obviously I haven't used it the way you just described it, but I know that some of my colleagues are actually using it to build the portal. I was just mentioning in the, in the beginning where we are connecting all kinds of software together, for example, reporting purposes, but yet, you know, it's so amazing that you could just basically tell the computer, you know, you're not even. Well, at least I'm not typing it anymore. I'm using whisper flow to just tell the system, this is what I, what I want. And you see the screen flickering and changing and pop ups are popping up anywhere, everywhere, and then all of a sudden you get something in your screen and it's done. And whether that's using cloud code or another tool, it doesn't matter as long as you are using it and try to get better at it.
[29:11]
A
Yeah, that's great. So super useful. And then how do you think about your team's usage of AI? Like do, do you put limitations in place and how do you think about that as a business in terms of potential liability and mistakes happening?
[29:30]
B
That's a good question. At the beginning, the problem I was having was the fact that nobody was using it. I was seeing so many potential things that we could do not only in terms of efficiency, but also in terms of creativity for our clients. And I was being really enthusiastic and I was sharing screen videos of what I was doing in Cursor, for example, for a couple of clients and what I did and what the outcome was. But I was constantly demotivated because nobody else was picking up. And then we came up with a 12 week course, internal course, in which we said, okay, everybody needs to follow this course. It's something we built ourselves. And it's mainly just like a guidance through AI and the cursor and those kind of stuff and everything that is possible. And each team, so for example, the SEO team, the SEA team, social advertising team, we gave them homework. Come up with things that you do repeatedly, every day, every week or every month. Come up with things you hate to do in your work. Come up with things that you think we could do faster or better. So every team came up with a list. And then we just said, okay, you now had this course, you saw what's possible with all the toolings. Get your list and start working with number one, try to fix it using AI. And that was like the thing that, that Was like the moment everything switched, all of a sudden everybody was using it or at least start thinking about the possibilities. And they came up with some great tools, internal tools we could use. But again, that was the point that we saw. We were growing in the uses of the credits. We came up with questions like, hey, I've got this data file for my client I want to analyze, can I just upload it? Or how does it work? Stuff like that. So now we have like, how do you call it in English, A guidance document on, okay, what can we do with AI? What can we not do with AI? How do we think about these kind of things and how do we proceed from here? But that's obviously really important. But that's basically how our journey was here at maaswalk Online in terms of using AI. And now we are doing like amazing things. For example, I already told the herbs and spices example, I've got another great example for. It's, it's for a company who are running parking lots. So they've got like 48 parking lots in, I don't know, 25 cities in, in the Netherlands. And the thing is, if you start searching for parking lot Rotterdam for example, they are going to be found. But there are a lot of things you can do in Rotterdam. So when you start searching for a parking lot or parking place for this specific museum, you won't gonna find that client. So we were like, okay, how can we change that? And we used AI to come up with a Python script. We didn't have any Python knowledge whatsoever, but we knew we had to use Python and we used AI to come up with a Python script. And the Python script used all these kinds of APIs to not only scrape the things to do API from Google to see, okay, what is all the things you could do in for example Rotterdam, but also use the Google Maps API to see. Okay, there were like hundred things you could do in Rotterdam. We've got three parking lots in Rotterdam. Use the Maps API to see which of the things you can do are in like a radius of the, of the parking lot, you know, because you're not going to park over here to walk 10 miles over there. And then we used another Python script to push all the information into a spreadsheet. So all of a sudden we've got this database saying, okay, these are the things you could do. These are the things you could do within a, I don't know, 10 minute walking distance parking lot. We use the AHREFS API to see if they are search volumes for those Things to do. And then we used AI agents to come up with text, SEO optimized text we could place on the website. And all of a sudden we've got SEO friendly text on the website, completely built with Python scripts and API connections where we only used AI. And you know, those are all kind of things that we couldn't come up with ourselves like a couple of years before. And even if it did, we wouldn't have it online within one or two weeks. And yeah, I think that that's really amazing if you could come up with just those kind of things.
[34:23]
A
Yeah, I love it. And so my mind immediately then goes to, oh, do you now have structured data? Like, why not feed that into Optimizer's campaign automator? And now you can also have automatically dynamically generated ads for those parking lot locations near museums.
[34:36]
B
That's what we're doing right now.
[34:38]
A
Exactly. Yeah. And that's what's so fun, right? Is like the thing that would have been shelved as a project that will do at some point now you can actually get it done within the quarter. But maybe it's a little scary too because like, once the client picks up on the fact that, oh, we asked for this and they did it in two weeks and at a reasonable cost, like, what else can we ask them? Right, you're gonna have to hire more people.
[35:07]
B
You know, that's, that's a funny discussion. And I'm having that discussion with other AC owners as well. You know, what do we need to do with our pricing? But to be honest, as an agency or as a freelancer as well, if you are still using pricing like an hourly fee model, it's not going to work anymore, you know, so we are working like we call it a value based model. You know, this is what you want. You, you pay this amount and this is what you get. And we are not talking about how many hours of work are in there because of the fact that we could do it in two weeks or in one week or whatsoever. It's because of the knowledge that we have or the experience that we have. And you are paying for that knowledge and experience as well. But to be honest, we are actually really upfront with our clients telling them, okay, x percent of the fee that you are paying us is being used for internal innovation time. And that is where we come up with those kind of things. And you know, of course you are paying for that, but you are getting the benefits of that as well. And that also enables me to, to talk to the staff and saying, okay, X percent of the time you are working at the office is purely for innovation and come up with new kind of things. And I think that in, in this era that we are living in right now, that's really important.
[36:32]
A
Yeah. And that makes me think here. So I find that I play a lot of the innovator role at Optimizer, trying the various tools and sort of like then pushing the team to use one or another. But you're right, because I'm mostly coding on Lovable. But then yesterday I see something about Replit or I tried Google AI Studio and sort of it's that PPC Dr. Role that I described in one of my books, which is, you know, listen, we understand what the client needs or what the problem is we're trying to solve, but what are the different medications or solutions that we could deploy for them? Right. Which one is best for each scenario? What are the side effects? There's a lot of time that goes into that. And you're right, that is valuable. And that is something that, as an agency or a software vendor, whoever you are, like, there is time that needs to go into that. But then I also wonder to what degree do the individuals end up being the innovators themselves versus me saying, okay, here's the thing that I know is now possible, and then I just have someone go and implement it. And it sounds like you give a lot of that creative freedom to your team as well, so that they individually become innovators rather than being centrally driven from one person.
[37:47]
B
Yeah, but at the same time, and I think that's, that's something that is in every company the same. There are like maybe 80 or 90% of the people doesn't want to be an innovator. They just know they want to show up, do their work, talk with colleagues, fix the problems for the clients. And that's fine as long as you've got a couple of people in your team who are really enthusiastic about this and are willing to do the extra mile in terms of learning these things and try to be innovative and make sure that that knowledge is being passed on to the other members of the team, I think that's okay. You know, in the beginning, I wanted everybody to have the same mindset as I was having. You know, this is really exciting. Why are you not testing with this? And they're like, it's not that exciting for me. And at the beginning I found that really hard. But now I know as long as you've got four or five people in the room who are excited about this and testing with this, then the other 30 people will be fine as well.
[38:50]
A
Yeah, makes total sense. Hey. Well, this has been fantastic stuff. I feel like we're going to have to bring you on again in a couple of weeks as I'm sure all of the AI tools will have had new updates and new things we can do with them. So I'd love to keep this conversation going and hear what you're up to. So thanks for sharing everything so far. But for people who want to hear more and more, find out about what they can do with you, where should they go?
[39:17]
B
Probably follow me on LinkedIn. I'm most active on LinkedIn. I'm speaking at a lot of events as well, so probably you will find me at some of those events as well. But yeah, feel free to to give me a message on LinkedIn.
[39:31]
A
Great. Yeah, and we see each other on the speaking circuit once in a while, so can't wait to see you in person again. Hey, but Lars, thank you so much for sharing all your knowledge and thanks everyone for watching. Hopefully you'll give a thumbs up to the show, start following us, subscribe, give a review, and there's also the comment section. So if there's anything you want to get the link to something that Lars or I mentioned, we're happy to reply to those. But with that, thanks for watching PPC Town hall and we'll see you for the next episode.