The Internet Is Full of Polished Turds: A Conversation with Nick Gulic

If you ask Nick Gulic what he does, he'll tell you he builds websites. Which is a bit like asking Gordon Ramsay what he does and hearing "I cook food."

Before the websites, Nick spent two decades inside businesses. He started as an accountant, helped scale one of Australia's largest bookkeeping firms, sold, coached, trained sales teams, fixed broken operations, and advised founders. So when he builds you a website, he's really diagnosing why your growth isn't working. And he's developed some very strong opinions about what founders keep getting wrong, most of which he's happy to call bullshit on publicly.

We got into all of it.

The formula for change

A lot of the people listening are stuck doing work they don't enjoy and not changing anything. Nick, who used to do business coaching, has a clean model for why.

To actually make a change, three things have to be strong enough to beat your natural resistance. First, a vision of what you actually want, the desirable outcome, made as vivid as possible. Second, real dissatisfaction with where you are now. The more dissatisfied, the more likely you move. Third, an easy first step.

That third one is where most people stall. They're vaguely unhappy but their life is fine, so the dissatisfaction isn't strong enough. Or they have the vision but the next move feels enormous ("I'd have to quit, find something, figure out money") so they freeze. His fix, using getting fit as the example: don't design the whole workout plan and diet. Just go sign up at the gym. Make the first step so small you can't be resistant to it. You're not resistant to signing up. You're resistant to when the work starts. So lower the bar to start.

Blending in is the new failure mode

Ten years ago, looking professional online was a real advantage. Entry-level people couldn't pull it off. That edge is gone.

Now someone with no idea what they're doing can ask ChatGPT to build them a website and get something polished and professional that says absolutely nothing. Empty calories. And if you, with fifteen years of expertise, are saying the same generic things, your buyers cannot tell the difference. When everyone looks the same, the visitor stops evaluating quality and starts asking one question: how much is it? Then they pick on price. And there is always someone cheaper.

Nick's line for this is the best thing I heard all episode: "The danger in a race to the bottom is you might win." The escape is not being cheaper. It's being different enough that people care about something other than your price.

The catch is that being different is scary, because it means picking someone to talk to. The moment you speak to one specific audience or one specific problem, some people resonate hard and others don't. And that's when what Nick calls your "inner coward" starts negotiating: "but what about that one client from a year ago who wouldn't have liked this?" He's watched businesses land on a bold, standout strategy and then flinch at the last second and soften the language. And when you soften, you sand down exactly the parts that made people want to work with you, just to avoid alienating the worst possible client. It makes no sense, and people do it constantly.

You're a resource, not a person

Nick has always been anti-big-company, and his reasoning stuck with me. In a large corporation you are a number. It doesn't matter how good or special you are, you get fired by algorithm. At that scale people aren't people, they're "resources," a line item on a P&L.

He's also skeptical of the tidy AI narrative around layoffs. Sometimes AI genuinely makes a role redundant. But often, he thinks, companies raise money, hire like crazy, end up oversubscribed with people, and then need to cut. "AI made your job redundant" is just a far more convenient thing to say than "I don't want to pay this much."

His counter-move was always to be a big fish in a small pond. At smaller firms he stood out, every partner knew him, and he learned everything because he wore every hat. Which leads to the thing school never teaches you: the soft skills. The ability to talk to people, to deal with people, is the actual differentiator, and it's the stuff you only pick up on the job. His whole pivot into sales happened because he was simply good at talking to people, and a small company noticed.

Polished turds, and what a website is actually for

The phrase that names the episode comes from Nick's LinkedIn. You can't polish a turd. Most AI-generated content and templated design, he argues, is exactly that: no foundation underneath, polished to look nice.

His test for why people fall for it: AI impresses you in the areas where you're weak. If you can't write, AI writing looks amazing to you. Anyone who can actually write looks at the same output and winces. Same with design. So the people most wowed by AI slop are the ones least equipped to judge it.

Which is why so many businesses spend tens of thousands on a website and get nothing back. They forget what a website is for. It has a job: to fill a stretch of the journey from "no idea who you are" to "client." Depending on your marketing, that stretch might be a tiny trust-check after a sales call, or the entire discovery-to-lead path. Either way, the site has to account for how you market, who's landing on it, and how you want to be positioned. And the copy is usually where it dies. "I build websites for small businesses who want more leads" means nothing, because everyone says it. Nick's own headline is "the cure for the common website," because what he actually does is stop you from looking like everyone else. He also points out the structural gap: designers who came up through design school and print shops know design cold but have no business or marketing background, so they make beautiful sites that don't convert.

The counterintuitive truth about scaling

Here's the one that sounds backwards. If you want to scale a web agency, knowing design too well is a liability.

If you're a brilliant designer and you hire someone, their work looks bad to you. So you lose confidence, spend all your time trying to fix them, and can't sell the service with conviction. You end up doing the work five times over and barely selling. Whereas if you don't know design that deeply, you hire someone, think "wow, this is better than what I do," and go sell with total confidence. You can't see the flaws, so nothing stops you. You close, you hire again, and again, and suddenly you're running a thirty-person agency doing multiple seven figures. Which is why, Nick notes, a lot of large agency owners genuinely don't know that much about design. It's the only way they could have scaled.

Slop was always here

Is AI making marketing easier or harder? Nick says both. It makes the activity easier and the outcome harder, if you lean on it.

He's blunt that he doesn't think AI belongs in content creation. The original promise of automation was to take the grunt work so you could do the creative stuff. His version: "I want AI to do my laundry so I can paint." Instead everyone rushed to make AI do the painting and dumped the slop everywhere. But his real point is that slop is not new. It used to be a $5 thousand-word blog post from an overseas writer paid almost nothing. Now it's $5 in tokens. Same emptiness, new delivery.

The way out is the same as it's always been: put your personality into it. Two of his core beliefs are that personality matters more than professionalism, and originality matters more than imitation. He's especially allergic to the LinkedIn-gurus-teaching-LinkedIn loop, people creating content about succeeding on LinkedIn, read by people who want to succeed on LinkedIn. Shooting fish in a barrel. Try that exact playbook talking about roofing or web design and it evaporates. And recycled templates stop working because the market adapts and has seen it before. Things work when they're novel and specific to you. You don't need to be a creative superstar. You need to say what you actually think.

Followers are not influence

Nick refuses the word influencer for himself. His reasoning: "when your following is empty, how much influence do you really have?" He calls himself a founder brand, not a personal brand or an influencer brand, because chasing a huge following means slowly sacrificing your moral compass to say things you know people will applaud. Which is why the accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers so often post the blandest, most generic stuff.

Underneath it all is a diagnosis: people chase likes because something is missing, and scrolling toward what other people have is easier than stopping to face it. Comparison is the thief of joy. He's been down the status path himself, the better-car-then-better-car cycle, and got over it fast. What actually makes him happy is freedom, doing what he wants when he wants, not public kudos. He got there through a lot of soul searching, most of it forced on him by the ups and downs of building a business. And he's candid about the trap on the other side: obsessive twelve-hour days are easy when the work is new and exciting, but the shine wears off, you burn out, and you look up to find you've neglected the friends and relationships that were the point.

Key takeaways

A few things worth holding onto.

Change needs all three ingredients. A vivid vision, real dissatisfaction, and an easy first step. If you're stuck, one of them is missing, and it's usually that the first step feels too big.

In an AI world, generic means invisible. When everyone looks polished and says the same thing, buyers default to price, and someone is always cheaper. Being specific and having a point of view is the only durable premium.

A website is a job, not a brochure. It exists to move someone along the journey to becoming a client. If it looks great but the message is generic, it doesn't work.

Personality beats professionalism. Slop has always existed. The way to stand out is to say what you actually think, aimed at the specific people you want.

An empty following is not influence. Build a founder brand around real opinions and the clients you want, not a follower count that quietly costs you your point of view.

Frameworks worth stealing

The change equation

Vision plus dissatisfaction plus an easy first step, strong enough together to overcome your resistance. Want to change something and can't? Check which of the three is weak. Most often you either aren't actually dissatisfied enough, or the next step feels so big you keep flinching. Shrink the first step until you're no longer resistant to it, then start.

Be different or compete on price

When AI makes everyone look equally polished, the buyer has nothing left to judge but cost. So give them something else to care about: a specific audience, a real opinion, your actual personality. If you find yourself softening the interesting parts to avoid alienating the worst client, you're sanding away the exact reason your best clients would choose you.

Founder brand, not influencer brand

Build authority by consistently creating and saying what you genuinely think, pointed at the clients you want, not at a follower count. Don't recycle other people's templates. The market has seen them, and novelty is what works. An empty following buys you nothing.

Quotes worth keeping

The lines I wrote down.

The danger in a race to the bottom is you might win.

You can make a website that looks amazing and says all the right things, but if the message is generic, it's not impactful.

I want AI to do my laundry so I can paint.

Personality is more important than professionalism. Originality is more important than imitation.

And the one that reframes the whole creator economy in nine words.

When your following is empty, how much influence do you really have?

Rapid fire round

Same questions every guest. No prep, no warning. Here's how Nick handled it.

Best advice you've ever received? Don't worry about other people. Do your thing.

Advice you wish you'd listened to? Create content. It's good for the soul and it forces you to think. Sitting down to write a longer piece about a topic makes you learn it better. He kept starting and stopping, always asking "what's the point?" The answer is that it doesn't need a point. If he'd started video five years ago, he figures he'd have a real channel by now. The only difference between the people who make it and the people who don't is that the first group has been in the game longer and kept showing up.

What would you tell your younger self? Nothing, because he wouldn't listen. If pressed: buy Apple stock, and stock up on hard drives and RAM.

Ongoing challenge that keeps you up at night? None. He sleeps great. His method is to read until his brain passes out. Since having kids he's perpetually tired, and he doesn't carry much stress because the business is steady. The only real challenge is time, finding room to make more content and video alongside client work, without building out a team.

Favorite meal or spot? Pasta. Endlessly versatile. Bolognese, lasagna, meatballs, a creamy sauce. He just doesn't order it out much, because you dress nice and then it gets messy.

Tool you can't live without? The ooms. Zoom for meetings, Loom for screen recordings. Those two, plus the usual email.

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Nick Gulic is the founder of Creative Click, a Sydney web design studio, and writes the IDGAF newsletter for solo founders who want to stop looking like everyone else. Find him on LinkedIn.