He Built an AI Agent That Replaces Your Sales Team | From Trainer to Tech Founder (Charlie AI Story)

What's going on? What's going on, everybody who's actually listening to this podcast? Once again, back with another amazing guest. Welcome to the Nikhil Sai Show. Today we have an interesting guest. I mean, we have seen AI taking over, especially the appointment setting space, managing your leads, working your leads, and, you know, booking more calls. And the guy I'm bringing on today is an interesting connection. We met probably in some mastermind, and this was back in 2023. He was working on an interesting AI project. And he was creating this cool AI booking bot called Charlie. And I remember him naming it in a very cute manner. I was like so curious and we jumped on and we had some fun chat. And from there he's been helping a lot of other entrepreneurs use AI in their businesses to book a lot of appointments for their high-ticket business, to get more qualified appointments and whatnot. He has a very interesting journey of going from struggling entrepreneur to making multi, multi-eight figures, running his successful coaching empire. and now he's helping other people do the same through Charlie AI. And let's not waste any time and actually let's welcome Iggy. Hey Iggy.

What is going on, my man? Appreciate you having me on the show. Yeah, I mean, it was a warm introduction. Thank you.

Yeah, it is. It is. I mean, we had many chats before, if you remember briefly talking about AI and how it's changing. I think back in 2023 when it's still the new thing and you were one of the first few people I remember who were playing with it. I was not super optimistic back then about the ability it has, but you're one of those people who kind of shown like, Nick, like this actually works. Then you were showing me the calendars and the systems you had. I was like, ooh, like that's interesting. So before we get into like the AI and appointment setting and all the marketing jazz, tell us who Iggy is. What's been your story? How did you enter or discover entrepreneurship? Why did you get into fitness and coaching and now Charlie AI?

That is a loaded question. But, uh, for me, I'm a God-fearing man. I'm a father, a husband. Uh, those are the things, and an entrepreneur. Those are like really who I am at the core. I started my entrepreneurship journey pretty late. All right. So I was about, I got into the game maybe around like when I was 24 years old and started my first business as an in-person trainer because I love fitness. I was an athlete prior to that. And before getting injured. So I enjoyed studying fitness, I enjoy studying nutrition, and I got in pretty damn good shape, right? And people always stop me like, dude, like, you look incredible, how do I get to look like you? And sometimes I'd be like, hey, you know, I just don't think it's in the cards for you genetically, but I can help make the most of what you've got that you can work with, right? So that's how that first business started and then transitioned into online because I I just discovered that building an in-person training business just wasn't as efficient as I would like it to be. My income was too tied to hours and to a geographic location. So discovered online training, transitioned online in 2018, um, and started building my online fitness business, um, and grew that to, I think by like 2019, where we're close to doing 7 figures in 2020. So when we crossed that mark and then the pandemic happened right before we were packaging our systems and because we had so many people reaching out to me wanting to know like what we were doing, right? Um, 2020 we launched our consulting to license our systems that we're using to build our online fitness business. And then the pandemic hit and that business like blew up. Right. So it was just like great timing. Like you can't make that up. It was hilarious. And so that took off and so did our online fitness businesses. So those took off too. So now we have like 2 businesses that are like blowing up at the same time. And we were, I was fortunate enough to, we were able to get a bunch of people great results in that consulting company. Like we produced 20 7-figure online fitness business owners, like 0 to 7 figures and in less than, less than 8 months of us launching that, that business.

Geez.

So we built a really good reputation. We got a bunch of referrals and it just became difficult to run both businesses. So we ended up shutting down the mastermind and our partners went on to focus on the fitness businesses. And then I eventually decided I wanted to focus on like the systems and I really enjoyed building out the systems for our businesses. And then we got into, I discovered AI back in 2021. Started building out a couple ideas for how I wanted to utilize it and then eventually launched our first product, Charlie, in 2023. And I've just been doing that and obsessed with that ever since and have not entertained doing anything else.

I mean, I love the laser focus. So you, I think it's been 2 years once, you know, since we met and you were talking about building that, I think the first few versions of it, you're testing a couple of beta clients back then you're like, Nick, you won't believe what I have. Like we figured out this AI thing. I was like, okay, whatever. Let's see where it goes. And you know, here we are having a conversation again, 2 years later. And the good thing is you just stuck with it and you know, you're just making it happen. So tell me, how was the, like, what was the initial product like? What was your vision for Charlie and where do you see it coming to life right now?

Yeah, I mean, the vision for Charlie is to replace or augment SDRs. Like I want to make building a sales team fun and inefficient. I want to give entrepreneurs leverage because the biggest challenge when I was building my coaching businesses, it was so hard to find good people to work our leads and take calls. So finding good people to work our leads was really, really difficult.

Yeah.

The vision for Charlie is to be an end-to-end lead management system powered by AI, and it's a true autonomous AI sales agent, like the first of its kind is what we're building. You train it on your sales process, you give it your scripts, you give it your marketing collateral, and then Charlie will learn how to work the leads in a way that matches your best reps or even could possibly be better than your best reps. And then you just set and forget it, right? Like the vision is like Charlie becomes a very integral part of your team, not just like a software, it's like an actual employee of your team. That you can employ, put to work, train it once, clone and deploy it as many times as you need throughout your entire business.

Makes sense. That's quite interesting. I've had the founder of CloseBot, ZappyChat, Matt, HL Pro Tools on my show, and they were talking about how their technologies are evolving and the easy bot builders and stuff like that. And they're purely trying to build like a software business. I know you have, if I'm not mistaken, a consulting edge to it and some implementation support to your clients to give the best support. How are you structuring your business right now? Like, are you trying to build like a full-blown SaaS, like B2B SaaS, or is it more like a consulting model with SaaS as a backend? What's like the business model of Charlie AI?

It's, it's a hybrid. So it's focused on the software, but we surround our users with an actual team of people to help them implement the product, to train it, and to deploy throughout the entire sales process. We're not just like giving you a software and then telling you to like figure out how to use it on your own. But a lot of our users are running sales teams. They're not like, they're not typically, they're not using the software just for their clients, which a lot of those other products is for agency owners to be able to kind of use to deploy for their clients and resell. But like the difference with Charlie is the focus is it being fully integrated into your actual sales process. So in order to do that and do it successfully, you need support from people who are just focused on learning the product in and out and understanding like, how does it integrate into a sales process? So what we do is we surround our users with a team that helps them build, train, and deploy the agent. And then once it's deployed and it's trained, then we hand it off to the user and our client to actually manage it ongoing.

Makes sense.

So they're not having to figure out how to set it up on their own. They're not having to figure out how to train it on their own. We're doing a lot of that grunt work for them upfront. And then once it's dialed in, then we're essentially like, here is your fully trained employee. Like now you can really put it to work and it's self, self-optimizing.

Sure. I mean, all of us in the high ticket space have gone through that pain of hammering the closers and setters to work their leads and then disappointing that they're not doing their numbers right and whatnot. How would you compare Charlie AI, the current version of it, to an average SDR out there? And where would you believe the biggest value comes in? Because there's still business owners who still kind of think that, oh, it's human connection. Like it's different when people send text messages with their fingers. I'm kind of curious, how would you compare both like an average SDR versus Charlie AI?

I mean, you wouldn't, it's hard to compare the two because Charlie typically runs circle around SDRs that are average. So on average, I mean, if fully trained Charlie, I mean, can handle an unlimited number of leads, simultaneous conversation, it follow-ups with people indefinitely. Like we've closed several deals just in the last month from Charlie following up with leads in our pipeline for 2.5 years. Like these people opted into our funnel in 2023 and Charlie was still following up with them. And then they were like, all right, I'm ready to book a demo. and then they sign up, right? You just don't get that kind of laser focus from a human being, you know?

Yeah. Jeez.

So that's the difference there is like Charlie has his own autonomous engine and when Elite is assigned to it, it's following up with them.

Sure.

Until they buy or CRM die.

Makes sense.

And if you do have a team of really good SDRs, Charlie becomes their best friends, right? So it does a lot of like the low priority tasks. It'll work leads for them, reactivate leads for them, and book triages onto their calendar. But if you have like, most teams have 80% of their salespeople just not performing at the level that they need, Charlie's going to replace those 80% and make your 20% more efficient, increase their capacity, and make it easier for them to continue to produce results without you having to worry about replacing or hiring new reps.

Makes a lot of sense. I'm assuming you have a lot of data. That you have seen which is building the muscle for you on what it takes and what kind of angles and messaging does it take to get older leads to respond? And this is probably the biggest pain point the high-ticket space have, that they've paid for the leads, the leads are now dead, waiting in the CRM, they don't get any responses to their email newsletters, so-called the value letters. So we need a way to react to it. What's been the best strategy that you've seen working? Because it's getting noisier every day. So what's been the best strategy you've seen working well to reactivate the old leads? Like you're talking about like 2.5 old lead, 2.5 years old lead, but still they raise their hand and say, yep, I'll talk to, you know, you, I'm interested in a demo.

It's value. Providing value is the most important thing, like staying relevant, right? So if you can be relevant to your prospect and give them info and resources that it's top of mind for them, it creates a value and it creates an excuse for you to follow up with them. Which gives you the opportunity to have many more at-bats at getting them on a call. All right. So that's the biggest thing is like, how can you stay relevant to your prospect? Right. And you got to understand their problems. You got to understand their pains. And then you got to be creating real value for them that's going to get them to start to build some type of rapport with you and build trust. And then from there, once you've built, I call it 3 levels of trust, you got trust in You got trust in your brand or the expert, you got trust in your company and then trust in your methodology, right? Do I trust you? Do I trust the company? Do I trust how you guys do things? If we get it like an 8 out of 10 on all 3 levels, they're typically going to jump on a call. And so just figuring out how do we create that value that builds trust, right? Every incremental email, SMS blast, videos that are created is all designed to build one of those 3 levels of trust. And that's the same kind of like engine that we're programming and training Charlie with.

Makes sense. I'm kind of curious, especially with ChatGPT becoming so smart and like coaching is kind of getting it, it's getting, I would say a little tricky because you have the best coach in the world at your fingertips. Like from an IQ standpoint, it might not be the best personalized coach either, but I'm kind of curious, Where do you see the integration of AI in like a typical coaching business and how would it impact an online education business, especially when you power up the business with AI?

Yeah, I mean, it's going to be for those, it's going to be the specificity of the agent, right? So ChatGPT is a general AI language model. You can start to prompt it to produce results. The info space is going to dramatically shift to experts and thought leaders who are utilizing utilizing some type of AI assistant within their product, right? Within their coaching or services, things like that. Where I'm already starting to see that shift in a lot of, uh, businesses where if you have a mastermind, you're gonna want a fully trained AI agent that understands your course materials, your curriculums, your methodology, your philosophies, and be able to assist your clients in reducing speed to value. Right. That's the biggest thing that will shift that we'll need to make in order for those types of businesses to stay in business. Right. So as people are becoming more and more aware of AI, those who are, who are running masterminds, coaching offers, info products, you gotta have some type of AI that has, that's trained on everything that it needs to know about your course, product, or service. And then it should be able to help your clients or your customers or your users shorten that time to value. right? So what used to take a user a week to figure out their offer, their messaging, their hooks, they just have a little chat with your AI inside of your program and then it spits out their offer messaging and hooks. And now they're like, wow, okay, I'm, I have everything I need to go to the next step, right?

Is that, is that how you're onboarding your clients right now? I'm curious, do they have just an AI bot that they can talk to and the AI splits out All the marketing, I think that's a cool idea.

Yeah. So for us, we have a ScriptGenie that will create their scripts that Charlie will use to manage their leads. Right. So a lot of our clients, when they come on board or gathering all their material, we're giving it to our ScriptGenie, training it on it, and then having it generate those scripts, those follow-ups, those nurture campaigns and things like that. And then we're programming Charlie with those materials. So what used to take our team, you know, it used to take our team like 14 days to fully build an agent and deploy it for a client.

Yeah.

Now it's taking them like to have everything built that used to take 14 days. They can have it done in like, in like an hour. Right. Which is massive. So it is.

Yeah. And think about that. That's like tremendous efficiency improvement. I do remember the time when we were talking, this was back in 2023 where you're talking about like takes 2 weeks to implement a system and now you're talking about 1 hour an hour worth of work could take a solution live. We did talk about the lead reactivation side of things on how AI could be powerful. I mean, you and I have been pretty active in marketing. What do you observe from a lead generation standpoint? What strategies and what tactics you think are actually still relevant in 2025 and beyond when you're marketing your high-ticket business?

You know, it's funny, people say a lot has changed. But I have not observed that change fundamentally, right? The fundamentals and the first principles of marketing have not changed.

I agree.

Problem, pain, desire, solution. Knowing all those for your target market like the back of your hand. What has changed in terms of like, so the strategy, right? The big arching strategy is how do we get a lead, build trust, get them to schedule a sales call, and then get them to purchase our product and get onboarded as a client. Big picture strategy. That hasn't changed fundamentally, but tactically how you're accomplishing that with ads, right, has changed from, you know, 2020, even 2023 when we're talking, right? The way that we generate leads is very targeted ads, right? A lot of the focus was on the targeting of our campaigns, right? And then now it's 100% of the focus is on like the creative and the messaging of the campaign. Right. We can have like a decent— honestly, we can have mediocre copy messaging in our ads with really laser-targeted copy targeting and we get great results. Right now it's kind of flipped. You can have mediocre targeting with your ads, but really laser copy and dialed-in messaging and you're going to get great results. So tactically, that's been the biggest thing that's changed is the focus of the campaigns and where you need to spend your time and energy. Right. We spend 80% of our time on the targeting and campaign structure and 20% on like the copy and the messaging in the beginning. And now it's like we spend like 20% of the time on the targeting and like 80% of the time on the copy messaging and the creative.

Yeah. I love that. I love that observation. I think that's 100% true. I do remember those days where we have to turn off 64 campaigns and turn on 72 ad sets of like the right ad sets, which are actually performing. Now it's all Advantage+. And just like let it run, just change the creative and test. It's so interesting how the space changed. Now there are a few things, this is my observation and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, which is most high-ticket gurus, right? Like they had an inversion funnel, like they were selling ultra-premium at the front end trying to book appointments. Now they have shifted the game. They're trying to do like school communities or like paid communities in the front end and shifting it into like a different perspective. What do you think changed in the industry and how would you respond? Do you think like, Everybody should start a community, or do you think that they could be like small businesses could still, you know, people are doing less than a million a year could still go after and be like, nope, I'm only going after my high-ticket clients and still be fine. How would you look at that?

The VSL funnel, like the high-ticket book a call funnel requires more skill to get going now, right? So for me it's like anything that reduces the amount of skill that's required to convert is definitely worth considering if you're a beginner, right? If you're a beginner, uh, even back today when I first started my business, uh, and transitioned it online, I had a really hard time selling people online. But if I got people in a room and I got to meet them, their ass was gonna buy my, my fitness programs, right? So if I got them in a room, I got a room with business owners, like 80% of the room were getting closed, right? So for me, the way that I was able to build my first online fitness business was figuring out how to create that environment where people were getting in a room with me, right? And so that was a community funnel. It's funny that like somehow it's making a resurgence. That's always been the easiest way for, for a beginner to build an online business. Is bring leads into a community where they can get into a room with you, where you can provide value for free or provide some type of value ahead of time or deliver some type of results in advance before you ask them for money. Right. And people are acting like now, like such a novel idea. That's like the playbook 2018. It's just making a resurgence.

I remember just hammering all the clients just from Facebook groups back when, back, you know, when I was getting started. And it still works. I know people who still just do Facebook groups and they crush it. They do millions a year completely organically just from communities that they don't even own. So that's, that's a better perspective. I'm glad we can talk about it now.

Yeah. And it doesn't necessarily even have to be in a community, right? The principle, the first principle of the community funnel is you're delivering some type of value in advance, right? You're delivering value in advance. That value is just being delivered in a group, in a community. Right? So if you're going to take the same principle and apply it, you don't have to start a school group. You can deliver value in advance and go live once a week, right? Eliminate the need for the group entirely. Go live once a week. Or you can publish a playbook and make it available to your audience once a week. You can write some type of in-depth, comprehensive blog article once a week. You can record a video. That's extremely in-depth that goes through what you do and delivers some type of value or result to your, to your audience once a week. It's just like figuring out how do you essentially deliver value ahead of time before you try and get them to make a purchase. That's all it is. So for me, I don't care to run a group. All right. So I'll deliver value publicly on just my Facebook, Instagram, YouTube channels, on our website. People can go to our website and consume really valuable information because I know I'm building those 3 levels of trust, our expertise, our brand, and our methodology, right? How you go about doing that, that's just like your own personal preference as far as like execution.

Yeah, I think the message matters more than the platform. As long as you're sharing the right message and you're adding value to the market, I think the market rewards it. That's pretty cool. Now you and I are big fans of high ticket. and we are not the cheapest solutions on the market. We are not the cheapest guys. So I'm, I'm curious if you have to share a few fundamental beliefs you have about high-ticket sales and maybe if somebody is struggling with imposter syndrome to charge high, or maybe they haven't figured out high-ticket sales yet, how would you, how would you go about giving them some suggestions?

I mean, honestly, I don't even understand imposter syndrome, right? For me, like imposter syndrome means that you're trying to sell something that you, that you shouldn't be selling, right? When I started in person, all right, I knew how to get people in shape. I've got myself in shape and I've helped a few of my friends get in shape, but I didn't know how to convey that to another person. So what I would do is I'd be like, hey, I'm going to give you a free— I'm going to give you a couple free sessions. Let me train you for a couple, for a week, and if you like it We can continue. These are my rates if you want to continue. If you don't, don't continue. Right. I never felt like an imposter getting somebody into shape because I knew what I was doing.

Sure.

Right. Somebody asked me questions even now about how to transform their— put on muscle, lose fat. Like, I'm gonna be able to give them very good coaching because I've studied the damn thing for like 10 years. All right.

Yeah.

So for me, imposter syndrome just stems from trying to portray yourself as something you don't really believe believe yourself to be, right? It's like me never working out a day in my life and then trying to help somebody get in shape. It's like, dude, like, you don't know what you're doing. So admit you don't know what you're doing and just be like, I'm learning on the job, right? So if you're having imposter syndrome, take a step back and ask yourself, do you actually know what you're doing? Do you know how to provide the results that you're trying to charge people high ticket for? If the answer is no, Then mother effer, reduce your price. Yeah. Like reduce your prices and deliver the value and figure out how to deliver results so you can confidently charge high ticket.

Yeah.

All right.

I agree. I think there is also a better strategy, which is they could always start with free, just like you did with like a sample service, you know, in exchange of experience and testimonials and everybody starts. There's nothing wrong with it. You gotta, you gotta get some clients somehow.

Yeah. You just gotta be willing to work with what you have. Right. When I first started, anytime I'm starting anything, if I want to learn it, I'm going to figure it out and I'm just going to offer to do it for free. Right. So that means Ubering. That means probably doing some DoorDash. That means selling shit on eBay and figuring out a different way to make money while I'm learning how to deliver the result of the service that I want to provide. People just aren't willing to do that.

Yeah, you know, I agree. If you ignore the work, nothing else works. Let's just put it that way. So the work just needs doing. I love that. When you look at an average charter client, what do you see are the misconceptions they have and how would you like to make suggestions to everybody else who might have similar opinions about AI or working leads or call booking systems and whatnot?

Yeah, I think we're beyond the point where anyone can doubt if AI works. It's clear, right? 2023, you can doubt that AI— if AI works now, if you're still doubting, it's like you're an idiot. Like, how much, how much evidence do you need? Yeah. So AI works. It's just a matter of like, how do we get it to work for me? All right. And one of the biggest misconceptions that people have is they treat it like software. AI is the first piece of technology that does— that doesn't work in a linear fashion. I don't get to just put in some code and then expect this outcome every time, right? So AI requires some refinement. It requires iterations. It requires some fine-tuning. It requires some feedback to really get right. So that's where people come in and they'll think like, oh, because it's software, it's AI, it should be able to do everything. It's like, no, you have to put in the time to actually clearly define What do you want it to do? And then give it feedback as it learns how to do the thing that you want it to do. And that's the thing that a lot of people miss is they think that it should just be phenomenal out the gate. And that's not the case, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. There's some unrealistic expectations for sure. And it's, it's really interesting, but I do believe there's not a lot of people who still have those perspectives. It used to be like the shiny, you know, like they said, like blockchain and now it's AI, but no, like this this technology has real use case and it's evolving and it's actually contributing to the world. I've seen Charlie AI booking like up to 52% of the leads into appointment. The key factors of success of this type of campaign and what do you think other systems, people who are trying to reactivate their leads are missing from what Charlie's about to do?

I mean, Charlie's very like objective driven. So you can, you can, You don't have to prompt it, right? You tell it what your, your objective is, you give it an example, and then you provide instructions, right? The most important thing with a successful messaging campaign, right? Number one, it's got to be relevant, right? It's got to be relevant and congruent to what the prospect communicated to you that they want, right? If they're on your list because you said you provide lead generation service, and then you're sending them a database reactivation saying, I can help you with client fulfillment. That's not congruent, right? It's completely out of left field, which a lot of people do, right? So they'll run ads for one hook, one type of offer, and then start randomly offering their leads random stuff to try and see who's going to respond. Like, you got to stay congruent. So you got to be relevant to what the prospect came onto your list for, right? Make sure the messaging is relevant to them and is congruent with what they— what you said you could help them with, right? Once they respond, then you essentially want to validate their interest in your thing. Ask them a few qualifying questions. And by qualifying questions, like, it has to be— the questions have to be relevant to what you're actually doing and the thing that they said they're interested in, right? So you don't want to just ask them random questions for the sake of asking them random questions. That if you're asking them questions inside of your reactivation campaign, those questions better make sense, right? If I'm coming in for lead generation and you're asking me about, you know, where I live, I'm not, I'm not answering that. If you're not asking me anything other than something that's relevant to the thing that I'm interested in, then I just believe you're wasting my time. So we take that same kind of approach. And then what we do is we always frame, once we know like what they're interested in, We validate their interests. We figure out like their current situations or circumstances or whatever it is that's relevant to the thing that they want. Then we take that and we frame the next step as a next logical step that's in their best interest. Right. And if you don't have your, your sales process mapped out, mapped out in a way where like them getting on an actual sales call is truly in their best interest, then you're going to have a hard time getting people to book call, right?

Yeah.

So if, if it's clear that I'm not going to get any value from the sales call, I'm not booking a sales call.

Right.

So in this day and age, before you could get away with it. Now the prospects have to believe like getting on a call is actually in their best interest and it makes sense for them as the next logical step to get the next piece of value from you. Right. And then what you have to do is make sure that when they do book a call, you're providing real value on that call regardless of whether or not they buy, right? And that's the thing that I've— that's the principle I've always followed since the very beginning, is like, if people get on a call with me, even when I have my fitness offers, I wanted them to walk away from that call like, wow, that was actually very, very valuable. I got some really good insights. And then oftentimes even people that didn't buy would refer us business. Like we even had that recently. Somebody jumped on a call with us. They're like, man, that was a really awesome call. They didn't buy, but then got an email, 3-way email thread where they were inviting, referring us somebody else.

Right.

And that's really what you, what needs to be happening inside of a sales process is it needs to deliver real value independent of whether or not the prospect buys. And that's what a lot of, a lot of high ticket businesses are missing. And that's why. A lot of our clients' campaigns perform so well is because we get them aligned from the messaging and we make sure their sales process is aligned with the value that they're delivering. And then everything works. You get the invisible hand working, working in your favor.

Yeah, I could relate a lot because I've seen clients who just spend a lot of money on ads and complain that the leads are not converting. But once we dig into the details, like you mentioned, what was promised in the ad is not as what's being sold to them in the first place. And all the follow-up sequences has stories which are completely irrelevant that does not carry any relative evidence of what they actually opted in for. So it's kind of a mismatched solution trying to cure an inexisting disease, you know, which is just kind of very tricky when you're trying to sell info. Now you've done in-person closing for your fitness offers. You've done online coaching for your own clients, but then also helping other people do the same. And now you're doing Charlie demos, basically. How would you, like, if you have to give us a playbook, a successful playbook that's actually working for you to convert successful demos into successful paying clients, what success metrics would you distill down to? What key pieces of information needs to be exchanged on a demo call to convert into a paying client?

I mean, it follows the same kind of sales principles that are, that are out there. It's I mean, this is going to be like pretty much the same thing I'm iterating. You got to make sure that they're actually interested in the thing. And so the sales call is just a process of digging deeper into the problem, their situation, and why are they looking for the solution, right? And once I understand like what those things are, then the next part is figuring out what aspect of our tool is engineered to solve that problem.

Right?

And if they have a problem that we can't solve and we don't have the features and we don't have the, the, the campaign structures or the templates or whatever we need to be able to solve that problem, then we don't make an offer. Like, man, this is really insightful. I got a bunch of good stuff. Here's some resources we can give you, but this just isn't what we do. All right? So you got to do some discovery, make sure that you're getting as much information as you can about their current situation, why they're looking for a solution, what are the challenges that they're that they're facing and then tailor the product demo to actually highlight the feature stacks that are most relevant to them. And then make sure a part of that onboarding process is just kind of reinforcing that.

Hmm. Makes sense. One question for you. Are you, do you have like an internal big development team, like building this into a full-blown product, or are you using some other tools to include in your process of fulfillment? How does that look like?

Yeah, so we have a, uh, everything's in-house, right? So our team is in-house. We've got awesome in-house developers, DevOps engineer, full-stack developers, junior developers, product managers. And like our team is, I'm really proud of the team that we have in place. And then we have a great team of CX and CSMs that provide the support and deployment. And then we use our team, like everyone's using AI, right? So I'll build custom AI agents for different. People on my team just because it's fun. So I'll do it as a hobby, right? I'll find things that people are doing manually that's really inefficient or processes that are broken, and then I'll create an AI agent for that department that helps streamline that workflow.

Interesting. What's, what's the vision for Charlie? Are you envisioning to build a fully owned by you big software company or like a consulting slash software company? Or are you trying to raise money and like get into the game of valuations? What's like the 5 years down the line, the vision for Charlie?

Uh, we want to get the initial product roadmap done and transition from— eventually want to be able to make this software very easy for beginners to be able to use. Uh, we're just not at a point where it makes sense for us to even do that quite yet. Right. So once we're there, and then the goal is eventually kind of build towards an acquisition from a big CRM provider, right? So that'd be kind of like big picture exit is get acquired by a CRM provider that we really, really trust and respect. That makes sense.

Makes sense. And any, I know this is aspirational and like hypothetical, but any valuation that you're aiming for Charlie AI to be able to maybe say, yeah, you know, I'm good. Like now I can sell.

It depends on where, how close we are to getting our stuff done when, when the chips fall that way. but probably over $100 mil will be what makes the most sense is building towards that. And if we're able to complete our roadmap and deliver the kind of solution that I really believe we can, then that's just gonna be an inevitable outcome.

Makes sense. Let's get to the next set of questions, Iggy, if you're ready. You are one of those AI enthusiasts. You're always building stuff. I look at your stories and I'm like, I was like, man, this guy's like in the front line, like trying to try all the new AI stuff. So walk us through like what kind of tools you use on a daily basis to manage your personal productivity, your clients, your projects, your team and whatnot.

Yeah. I mean, for me personally, I'm using GPT, I'm using Claude, we're using ClickUp, the AI inside of ClickUp. I'm using Gamma. Pretty, pretty regularly. And we just started using or playing around with some— I'm also using Charlie. I'm mainly using Charlie for our sales stuff. And then we do, we have like an R&D pipeline for our roadmap. So we'll constantly researching and testing different models. And right now, like we're starting to play around with integrating Gemini into our workflow because it's been surprisingly really good. As some complex reasoning, really complex tasks that are multi-layered. Yeah, those are it.

Interesting. Yeah, I've heard the recent Gemini release was pretty dope compared to the older version of it. So I'm excited to get my hands dirty with it as well. Walk us through like an average day right now. I know you've been fixing your product extensively, but if we have to look at your average day right now, how does it look like?

My days are pretty stacked. So for me, I'm in a lot of meetings. I'm either in meetings or I'm working on building something or I'm recording content. So either I'm in product meeting with our dev team, I'm in a client meeting, I'm meeting with somebody on our team, either recording content or I'm working on building something. So like right now where I'm working on rebuilding our entire onboarding flow and building some agents that are going to streamline the onboarding process even further.

Sure.

So.

Interesting.

Yeah, those are my days. Or I'm in the mornings and spending time with my kids and then the evenings and spending time with my wife and kids. So I really, my days are like a haunted house. Like it's stacked from the time I wake up to the time I go to sleep.

I love that. I mean, you know, empty calendar is a broke calendar, I heard. So, you know, having a stacked up calendar with power tasks that are moving the business is actually pretty good. What's with the classical music?

I love classical music, man. So For me, music is the most powerful way to control state, right? So people talk about time being like your currency. Energy is the most valuable currency, right? Because if you can be locked in and focus on a task, time collapses and it becomes like an illusion, right? Where like you start working on something and you get like maybe like a month's worth of work done in like 4 hours because of just how laser focused you are, right? How do you get into that state? Music, right? For me. So there are songs that play at a very specific frequency that'll hack your ability to lock into those states where you're just really in the zone and you're able to compress time. All right. So classical music is that for me. Everyone is different, but for me, I have my classical music playlist, it's called Made to Create, and it's curated songs that are designed to keep me in that state for like 4 to 5, even 6 hours long. And once I'm in, I'm getting like a year's worth of time stuff done.

That's intriguing to me, actually. I've heard flow state and like the practices of it. I am guilty of sometimes falling out of discipline and jumping into emails and inboxes and Slack and all these tools and get distracted from the original task because It's easy to be distracted. It's hard to stay focused on one task that has a lot of work to be done. So what's your process to get yourself into flow state? If you have to break down the mechanics of you confronting like, hey, I need to fix my client onboarding experience. This is gonna be a 6 hours worth of brain jamming where I have to literally think about every possible thing I could do to make my client's life easy. It's a lot of brain work. I don't wanna do it. It's much more easy for me to scroll Reels. It's much more easy for me to listen to a podcast and get educated. But how do you build that discipline? What's your routine to get into that work and just jump in and start working on it?

I mean, today was a great example. So I knew today was going to need to be focused on getting that work done. So I silenced notifications. I let the team know I'm going to be MIA for a few hours. And we built like the process where I communicate with everyone on the team who need, who typically will have access to me. And I'll let them know, like, I'm going to be MIA. If any client issues comes up, I'll designate somebody to kind of like address it for me. Hmm. And then once the noise has been gone and notifications are silenced, then I'm playing my classical music. And the first part is mapping out what do I need to get done during this time, getting organized and figuring out what are the tools that I need to be able to do this work, getting it in front of me. And then once that's done, typically by the time I'm like, the music is playing and I'm organizing the tools that I need to use to get this task done, I'm already starting to get into flow. And then like, time is like irrelevant for me. Like, that's why I jumped into this meeting early because I was like, I know that's where I'm going to be. And if I don't have a mechanism to pull me out, like, I'm not going to show up. Right?

Yeah. That's a good thing. If you're lost in work, you know what? That's a good thing. I like that. I like that idea. You, you kind of mentioned that you started your entrepreneurship a little late than the average entrepreneur. That's what I've heard. If you have to go back and give a suggestion to the 20-year-old yourself or somebody who is in their 20s right now, what would that advice be?

I've learned lots of different things. For me, I learned a bunch of different things in my 20s and I'm really grateful for, for that. But like learn different things, like try different things and figure out the things that you just are naturally most curious about and find yourself naturally becoming most obsessed about it. All right. So in the 20s is just learning as much as you can to figure out what that thing is, what kind of gives you the itch, taking the risk without worrying about what people say or think.

Makes sense. Can you, can you save us from the biggest mistake you've made so we can learn from it and not repeat? If you would have to look at your business or personal life and be like, yep, that's the biggest mistake I've made. Don't make it, what would that be like?

Getting into partnership with somebody who did not align with my values.

Hmm. That's deep.

Like when you get into a business partnership with somebody who did not align my values and making a deal purely for profit. Biggest mistake, hands down.

Yeah.

Most expensive mistake too. So it's not just about the money. If you're going to get into a business partnership, make sure it's with somebody who aligns with your values and make sure it's for a bigger reason than just money. You know, and so that's been, that's probably the biggest business mistakes I've ever made.

Yeah, that's, that's a big one. Thanks for sharing transparently. That's, that's gonna really help a lot of people listening to have a hard conversation with themselves about maybe the partnerships they're in and the type of businesses they're doing and whatnot. If you have to mention a few biggest achievements you've achieved and give us a vision of what you're trying to achieve, what would that look like?

Ideally, I mean, I want to be able to sell, and if we can turn this into a unicorn, that'd be great. Biggest achievement to date for me, the thing that I'm most proud of is the fact that I'm a very present father and husband. My family has access to me. I get to spend 2 to 3 hours with my kids every morning, and my wife doesn't have to work. She gets to be a stay-at-home mom and be with the kids and things like that. For me, that's the biggest thing. I mean, I'm living the dream. You know, I get to raise my children, be present, and build something that's changing a lot of people's lives.

Makes sense. And what inspires you, Iggy? Like when you're waking up, what excites you to be like, okay, I'm at my desk working, this is my main reason for it. And who are the key people involved in your journey?

I mean, for me, my family, my wife, my faith, and the people that I get to serve. So I'm obsessed with the clients that we get to work with. I'm obsessed with their results. I want them to get exceptional results and I want them to be able to build a business that serves them and their families. So for me, it's like just the responsibility of what we're, what we're working on and what we're building. It's like a lot of people are depending on the work that we're doing. So yeah, it's both terrifying and, and exciting, you know?

Yeah, it is, it is terrifying to feel that, but then that's, I think that it's good because that creates the drive inside you to just show up no matter what, how you're feeling. I think that's a good drive and good, good place to be in mentally. If somebody is listening to this, Iggy, and they might want to connect with you to know more about Charlie AI, what's the best place for them to reach out to? How would they connect with you?

Yeah, if they want to connect with me, they can go to charlieai.io. Or if they want to learn about Charlie, they can go to charlieai.io. If they want to connect with me, they can just type in I-G-D-Y-O-D-I either on Facebook or Instagram and I'll be the first name that pops up. Yeah. So if they're product focused, charlieai.io, they want to connect with me and just see what I'm up to, IGG on all socials and I'll typically, I should be the first one to pop up.

Yeah. Click on the guy's profile where you see the biggest guy possible. That's probably him.

Yeah.

So. Uh, any last words for anybody who's tuning in before we conclude the whole podcast for today?

For me, the thing that I've been thinking about the most is hard now, easy later. Pain passes, but the beauty of the hard things that you do will outlast you.

I love that.

All right, so do the hard things now and you'll get the easy things later. And the beauty and the pain that you— the pain of the hard things that you do now is going to create beauty that's going to outlast you. And that's kind of been the thing that's been most top of mind.

I love that. That's pretty thoughtful. And thank you so much, Iggy, for showing us different strategies and tactics. And not just that, talk about how powerful AI is right now to book more appointments and work leads and create more conversations. And not just that, appreciate you walking us through your journey. And guys, hope you enjoyed the podcast session. Share this with any other entrepreneur who has a few hundred leads in their CRM that they haven't worked on yet. So maybe they can get their hands on Charlie AI. And if you need more help, you can connect with Iggy. He's a pretty good guy. And please stay tuned for the E-Nikhil Sai Show. I'll be back with another amazing guest just like Iggy today. And thanks for jumping on once again, my brother. Have a good day.

Appreciate you for having me, my man.