FridAI – Granola AI + LifeGPT – Business Brain 659

Business brain episode 659 for Casual Friday, June 20th World Productivity Day 2025. Greetings folks and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we crunch through a bunch of ideas so that we can each turn tune our business brains to keep on living those charmed lives. Our sponsors include eversight.com BB where you can go and sign up to get your own in house web. It's like having your own in house web team. These people have saved Shannon's bacon. We'll talk more about that in a little bit. And shopify.com businessbrain where you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period. We'll talk about that too. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire.

I'm Dave Hamilton and I'm still Shannon Jean. I'm still up in Tahoe as you can see by that blazing sun behind me if if you're watching the live stream. But yeah, glad to be here. Happy Friday man.

It's Happy Friday. I, I, I, I found a thing on threads. You know the. Yeah, yep. And it's from an account called Copy Prompts so which I like. And it says I gave Chat GPT my salary and it fixed my entire financial life. No budget apps, no spreadsheets, no finance degree. Just one prompt and full transparency with my income. It didn't judge me, it built a system I could finally stick to. And so the prompt was act like a financial planner. I make X amount per month. Create a zero based monthly budget covering essentials, savings and guilt free spending. And then based on my salary of X, how can I build a three month emergency fund in six months without sacrificing essentials? And here are my debts, listing them with interest rates. Create a repayment plan that prioritizes high interest debt but still lets me save. Design a simple automation plan using paycheck splitting. I want to automatically save for three categories, emergency fund and future. Cut hidden expenses, optimize my bills, design a paycheck ritual. They they have all the prompts here. That's cool in the thread I only read obviously the first few, but there's seven prompts that all kind of cascade together here. But what a brilliant thing. And of course as I looked at this I thought all right, well obviously you could do this for your own personal budget, but what if you took all your business finances and plugged it into ChatGPT the same way and had it analyzed not just you know how to make end make ends meet from the business standpoint, but maybe it can start looking at things and saying hey Questioning you, why are you spending X amount on this every month? And you might have a good answer for it.

Right, Right.

But it like, treat it like your cfo, right. And, and have, have it be ruthless with you. Right, Right.

Yeah. I, I, what if I uploaded my bank statement?

You, yeah.

And it tore it apart.

Right.

Okay, here's your income. Here's this. Then I wouldn't need to tell it like, here's my, you know, depending upon which account I uploaded. Like, look, here's my bank statements for the last 90 days. Look at the income, look at expenses. Give me, give me your analysis. Right. Tell me where I'm spending money that maybe I'm not aware of. Where. Right.

I have, I have. Yeah. I love this. I, I would have it start with this, with what you said, and then I would upload P and L from QuickBooks. Now, the P and L is based on all the same data that you've already shared with it, but the P and L is my decision as to how to categorize all those things. Maybe it can tell me, hey, buddy, you're doing this wrong. You should categorize this this way and you should balance these expenses and your debt service should be X. And like, like, yeah, man.

And you could use the console, right. Where you can work with it and instruct it. Yeah, no, no, that's that, that canvas.

I think they call it, but yeah, canvas.

Canvas, exactly. Yep. Oh, I love this. I think this is a really interesting idea.

Right.

I'm going to play around with that.

Yeah, same.

I think it's great because it's, I mean, it is nice to be able to ask it, you know, stuff that's going on. I'll give you. I came back from St. Lucia and I call it jungle rot. But I had some rash. You know, I touched, I'm a plant guy. I love touching plants. Okay, what does that feel like? What is it? So I, I rubbed against the wrong thing in, in the jungle as I was hiking around and talking to banana growers and everything else. And so I took a picture and I was like, I don't want to share this with anybody. I shared it with my Shannon GPT, if you will. And it was like, oh, it's not this. It couldn't tell me exactly what it was, but it says, it' not this, not this, not this. And it asked me questions about this, this. And it kind of narrowed it down to, it's some sort of plant, you know, reaction and what not to do. And as I finally had to go get Some prednisone to.

Yeah, I was just going to say that's you, but. Yeah, but it identified what it wasn't. Yeah. Yeah.

Because I was like, well, is it stress related? Is it psychosomatic stress related? Because I was gone and I was like, oh, my God, my business is going crazy and I have to. I can't. I got 500 calls when I get back and I got this. So I was thinking maybe I'm just super. Yes. You know, stressed out. But it was so, it was, it was helpful. So I like the idea of sharing your financials with it information to get that feedback. I'm going to do some more of that and I'm going to report back here if. If you've done it and shared that stuff with it. Share, let us know Feedback. Businessbrain show. We'd love to hear from you.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I have. I have some more things and I know you've got something for Friday. I here too. The next thing that I want to do, as you know, is talk about our two sponsors because, well, have you ever been online shopping late at night, tea in hand, mint or throat coat, naturally ready to impulse buy your way into happiness and then boom. The dreaded realization your wallet is not within reach. But then like a purple beacon from the heavens, you see it. That glorious shop pay button. No wallet needed, no second guessing, just tap pay done. That magical purple button, that's our sponsor, Shopify. And it doesn't just make buying easy, it makes selling a dream. I use Shopify to sell merch for one of my other podcasts and businesses because it's just flawless templates that actually look good, marketing tools that work and analytics that make you feel like a wizard of Commerce. Shopify powers 10% of all e commerce in the US and probably 99% of my productivity when it comes to online sales. Candidly, if Shopify were a person, I'd invite them to Thanksgiving and give them the seat at the head of the table. So if you want to see less carts being abandoned, it's time for you to head over to Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com businessbrain. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com businessbrain again, shopify.com businessbrain and our thanks to Shopify for sponsoring this episode. And now let's talk about websites, because having a great one isn't optional anymore. It's like showing up to a pitch meeting wearing pants. Basic, expected and crucial to Being taken seriously. And that's where Eversight comes in. For just3.99amonth, you get what feels like your own in house web team without the soul crushing upfront bill that usually comes with building. Building a website. No $10,000 invoices, no. We'll get back to you next week. Delays, Just real humans answering emails and texts the same day. Making your website work while you build your business. Need a fix? Boom. Done. Want something updated? Already handled. They proactively manage hundreds of sites so you don't have to live in WordPress purgatory praying your plugins don't rebel. And there are no long term contracts, just solid grown up service that you can walk away from any time, though you probably won't want to. So if you're ready to outsource the headaches and focus on living your charmed life, visit eversight.comb and see what real support looks like now. Shannon, Eversight isn't just a sponsor, they are a vendor because you are a customer, right?

Yeah. I had my previous site website hacked and the stuff that the hackers put up there was rather shocking. We can't share it here because we're a PG show. So I just kind of hit through up this digital SOS and Eversight just saved me. You know they put up a splash page quick just you know, rerouted everything, redirected links for like my subscriptions and all this kind of stuff and it was so quick and you know they were just super helpful and they've just remained on top of the game. I love it. I'm happy that I switched.

Amazing. Well, you can switch too folks. Eversight.com BB is where you can get started and our thanks to Eversight for sponsoring this episode. You want to tell me about. You started telling me about this thing that, that, that you're using.

So I, you know, I'm like maybe a lot of us I'm on my, my Mac or my computer most of the day I'm on calls, I'm doing things, recording all this kind of stuff. So I was on a, a group call that I facilitate of entrepreneurs and somebody mentioned this AI called Granola and you can find it at Granola AI. Okay. And yeah, and it's bas it an AI notepad for people in back to back meetings which is kind of the.

They know how to write a sales pitch that's for sure like that.

And it's what I like about it. It's kind, it's very lightweight and what I mean by that is I don't really know it's there until I want to look back on a call I had or on a conversation I jumped on, you know, something online, have a quick meeting. And it. It pulls data from everything, whether it's zoom, Google, meet teams, all that kind of stuff. If I'm jumping on a call, so.

It'S watching your screen and listening to the audio. Is that right? Okay.

Yeah.

All right.

Yep. And then it comes up and gives you a right after the call's done, it comes up and gives you a synopsis where you can ask it questions. Okay. Hey, what did we talk about here? How do we do this? And I just find it really helpful. It's. It doesn't go in as in depth, but I found. But I like that I don't need a full transcript of everything on. On this call I had this morning. It gave the backgrounds of the participants, connection and interest points, discussion of recent opportunities, strategic advice shared, and then next steps. And it was all broken down into these things. It's really nice. So check it out. Granola AI.

Fascinating. Are you. Are you a paying customer yet or.

No, I just found it Thursday. Somebody recommended it in a group. And, you know, we were, after we analyzed the. On the call, whether. Okay, how. How good is. Quote Good is it? But yeah, yeah, to me, it's. It's that again, that lightweight part of it where I don't really notice it is really handy. And I found myself jumping back to analyze it after I've been on something that I didn't think to record or. Yeah, something like that. Worked out really good, huh? I would check it out.

I liked it. Yeah. And it looks like you get 25 meetings free, so that's certainly enough to like, evaluate it. Like.

Yeah, check it out, see if it's for you and see if. See how. How accurate it might be. But for me, saving transcripts, analyzing them like, I want to become a better closer. Right. That's. That's something that I've always struggled with and just too damn nice or what, according to my coach. And so I uploaded over a hundred transcripts of meetings to my chat GPT. And I'm just like, tell me what am I doing? And this thing to give me the pros, give me the things I need to improve on. It's just super helpful to capture that data, man. Capture as much of your data as you can because we're all in the content business, as we've said.

Yeah, yeah, sure, yeah.

But you could use it in different ways to where, you know, I could Equally, ask the AI to create content based on these meetings. That would anonymize things. And hey, what advice am I giving over and over? Help me create, Help me create a one page.

Yeah. Course number two or something. Yeah, yeah.

Or help. Help me create a one page PDF when people say, well, why should I get on a call with you? Oh, here's why. Create some images around that. This. Concepts that I share. What, what advice am I giving that is getting the most positive reactions. Right. And which types of calls are lasting longer? Because I find that, you know, there's a saying, we're going to make a baseball analogy here. When they do the, the replay, when they're challenging the call.

Okay.

The announcers will say, hey, the longer it takes to review, the more likely they're going to turn it over. I think I got that right. Yeah. And in my case, the longer my discovery calls go, the more likely that person's going to hire me.

That makes sense. Sure.

Yep. Because we go beyond the allocated like 15 minute discovery call where we connect on another level. And so I've asked my AI to tell me what, what's different about those calls? What's different about that client?

Right.

What is their background? Because you're. I'm still trying to. Yeah.

It might not be you necessarily. Yeah, right.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. And what is, what type of client should I maybe prepare more for on the call so I can work on my conversions a little bit more, you know, that kind of thing. So, so any of this stuff like this, this granola AI that captures my data that I can analyze and it can advise me back, boom, that's a winner.

And I highly recommend you do it. I agree. Yeah. I want more of this in my life. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I know we keep saying this in a variety of different ways.

We're going to keep saying it.

That's why you're here. Well, but that's like, and I know that there are privacy concerns with this, like valid ones, but.

Sure.

But we need to figure that out because the.

It's so valid.

AI is so good. The one thing, one of the things it is extremely good at is taking a lot of data and synthesis and summarizing it, distilling it down. It's also good at taking lots of differently formatted data and synthesizing it all together and then summarizing. Right. That's also good. But even this just being able to, I mean, before we called it AI, if we rewound, what, three and a half years, we Called this machine learning.

That's right.

And if we rewound five years before that, we called it pattern matching. That's what's happening here. Right. It's looking at a set of data and finding the patterns that are happening there. And then that's how it knows, like when you tell it, hey, write me an email that tries to convince the IRS to refund me, whatever. It's looking at lots of emails that have been written to the IRS and finding patterns. So it's all about. And if you know that, which now you do, you realize, okay, well wait, if I can show it my life and it can find the patterns, the patterns that led to success, the patterns that led to failure, the patterns that led to unexpected outcomes, like all of that stuff gets really valuable.

Yeah. It really helps fine tune and focus you on what you should be paying attention to based on what you're trying to achieve.

Yes.

And using it that way, it's been a game changer for me.

And I'll play devil's advocate to my own privacy comment before. This is what's been going on with like targeting of ads and such over the years. They've been using the data they have about each of us.

That's right.

So find patterns and then they look at the data from all of us and say, okay, well if a person has been interested in these kinds of things, then eventually within the next two weeks they're going to be interested in this new kind of thing. And that's when they start to target you with this stuff. When people say, oh, the devices in my house are listening, I that's generally probably not the case. I don't want to say it's definitely not. But more often than not it's that Amazon knows based on your purchase history that the next thing you're going to want to buy is this. And like for years what they've been doing is putting things in the warehouse near you that they know you are likely to buy soon. And that's how they can do one and two and even same day delivery. So people are using this information about each of us to their benefit. We might as well use it for our benefit too.

It was never accessible to us.

Correct.

And now it is.

Yes.

And so, yeah, I agree with you. And you know, and anonymize stuff if you want, you know, whatever. So I think it's a good thing to do.

Yeah.

But yeah, I love it. And so, you know, if you have things you're experimenting with, how you're using it, things you're building with AI, let us know. FeedbackUsBrain show. We'd love to feature it on the show. If you're in the business of doing this for your clients or helping people figure this out, let us know. Reach out. We'd love to talk about it.

Absolutely. Like he said. Feedbackusinessbrain Show. We love hearing from you and businessbrain show review. We'll read your reviews on the air and then get entered into that drawing. Have a great one, folks. Keep living that charm. See you next week.