FridAI + New vs. Better

Business Brain, episode 625 for Casual Friday, February 21 National Sticky Bun Day 2025. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, a show where we take some ideas, some of yours, some of ours, we mix them together, we make a stew, and then we inhale the vapors of that stew while pondering on the ideas so that we can tune our business brains to keep on living those charmed lives that we love so much. Shopify.com BusinessBrain has been part of the key to my charmed life, and it is the place where you can go to sign up for a $1 per month trial period. We will talk more about them. They are our sponsor this week. We'll talk more about them a little later. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

In Lafayette, California, I'm Shannon Jean. I love stew Dave. And I love Shopify.

Same. Yeah, yeah, it's a good stew.

Stew on a cold winter day.

I have an idea to stew on here, Shannon.

Yes, it's good. Segue.

Fairly raw in that it's only been in my brain for a couple hours. We always need reasons. I have a list that we call our rfc list our reasons for contact, things to talk about, about with all of our sponsors and agency partners and all that, just to keep at the top of their inbox and top of their minds. And it's weird. Not weird, it's interesting. They ask us to do this because they don't want to forget about us, so. Which is fascinating to me. Yep. So last week we. Yeah, last week we sent out a note telling our agency partners about a new system that we put into place here at Backbeat. We changed everything with the way we vet a new sponsor against past, not against past, our shows so that we get feedback from our hosts that we can include on proposals.

Yeah, I like that.

We don't want to have. We don't want to pitch a show to a sponsor where the show is not eager to have that sponsor. And. And we especially want to pitch shows that are eager. And so we've developed this whole vetting system. It's already changed things for us and it's just going to get better as time goes on because of this data that we're massing up internally here so we can be more efficient. And so we told people, hey, we're nerdy here. We developed this thing. You've already seen the benefits of it. We wanted to tell you because we're excited. And also, hey, if you have any ideas about things we could Develop, let us know, like the ideas don't have to come from in house. You know, I like it. And we got a note back from someone who's been in the business for, in the racket, if you will, for a long time. And he said something to the effect of, you know, if you could find a way to tell, to show marketers that an ad is working, that would just be a game changer for you. And I mean, this is a super obvious thing. And I've distilled down what he said, but that's essentially what he was saying was like, if you can find a better way to tell marketers this. And I was like, okay, well, we were talking about it in our staff meeting and I was like, it's nice that he says this. He's asking the age old question, I know my advertising works. Which half, you know, which you don't know. And we routinely try things over and over and over again to prove that. And you know, we've got different attribution stuff in the podcast world that works here. And there's attribution stuff on the web and then there's what we call direct response. We've seen them. There's a reason that we all still get Valpak mailers sent to us.

Absolutely.

You know, we throw away, if there's 30 in there, we throw away 29 of them and you grab one and you use it and use a little coupon code on there and then, you know, they report that coupon code and then Valpak makes money the next year because those people want to renew, come back. Right. It's how it works. And that's why you get shopify.com businessbrain. Right. It's. That is direct response. It is Valpack. It's, it's amazing to me that people in their 20s even have a clue as to what Valpak is. Right. This predates me, but so we were talking about this and I'm like, okay, well, they want something better than Dr. Direct Response Dr. And like, I don't think, I think it's, it's still the gold standard for a reason. Like, we're not going to get anything better. Yeah. And whether that's true or not, it's true for the purposes of this conversation. And I thought, well, wait a minute, guys. And I said this to the staff as it was kind of bubbling in my head. I'm like, we don't need to create something or come up with an idea that is better than direct response. We just need to create Something that is different so that we can add it to what people already could get with Direct response doesn't have to be.

Better, but it has to be additive.

It has to be additive. That's. And so, and then I thought, well wait a minute, let's set the bar low. And I challenged our staff with this, me included. Let's come up with an idea that we know is going to be worse than direct response. Right. Set the bar there. Like forget perfect. There is no perfect with this until we put chips in people's brains that give everyone access to which I hope that day doesn't come. We might put chips in our brains but hopefully not everybody has access to the data that comes from. But you know that. Let's just come up with something else that's really all that we need. And if we are able to do that, it will change the industry because people will want to test it because it's new and shiny even though we know it sucks. And I would market it by saying we're pretty sure that this isn't as good as direct response, but it's different. And we think do you want to try, you might want to have some fun trying it out. So I already know how to market it. I already know everything. I mean we would tweak the messaging obviously, but yeah, like it. We just need to come up with the idea and that does not, that's not going to be easy because everything that's been conceived is worse than direct response.

Yeah.

And direct response is also bad. Like it's, it's, it's. Yeah, it's the best we have, but it's not good. It's terrible.

Yeah. It reminds me of. So when I was, when I owned an Apple repair business and we were repairing MacBooks and MacBook Pros and everything, Apple put, put glass, a glass cover on every screen.

Yeah. Good for business for you.

Yeah, great for business for us. But what happened is that you know, you could buy glass all over, right. It was just like a commodity. So our glass, we knew that the glass we used, it wasn't as good. We, well it, it wasn't better than Apple's glass.

Right?

Yeah, I mean it's obviously right. We're, we're, we have obviously their multi billion gazillion trillion dollar business and we'd hope they're glass but their glass still broke, right. People still broke it. So we positioned our glass to just be better than everyone else's.

There you go.

It wasn't that. And we called it diamond glass and we had videos of dropping things on it to show that it wouldn't break. And then we had some other cheap glass that somebody else sold. We didn't say who it was, but we're just like, you know, here's our competitor. So, you know, it might be that, yeah, it's not the best, but you couldn't get the Apple glass. You had to spend a thousand bucks or twelve hundred bucks to get a new, entirely new screen where you could come to us and spend $400 and get a new piece of glass or whatever it was at the time. I have no idea. Remember? So, yeah, that's interesting.

I really think this is the key to a lot of innovation in our. To unlocking innovation in our businesses, is not waiting until you come up with something that's better than what everybody else has done. It just needs to be different and then go with it along the path. You might take some left turns. You might be like, wait, this is a dumb idea. Well, yeah, we knew that going in. That's okay. You know, we gave ourselves permission to have a dumb idea and to spend some money implementing it. Great. Now we can tweak and do it and you do something different. I mean, if it's objectively horrible, maybe don't roll it out. But there's a big gap between objectively horrible and good enough to have some fun with. And that I think there's power there. All right, folks, if you're grinding to build your business, you need our sponsor, Shopify in your corner. I use Shopify for my other businesses and one of my other podcasts. And candidly, it's the MVP of selling online. I'm talking seamless setup, built in payment processing, and the kind of automation that lets you focus on growing, not just managing. It doesn't matter if you're selling merch, memberships or a revolutionary new product, Shopify handles it all, from checkout to shipping with the best conversion tools in the game. And shop pay. It's like a secret weapon, turning window shoppers into paying customers up to 50%. More often. That means more ka ching moments. You got that right. If Shopify could do my taxes, I'd probably let it. But for now, it just runs my businesses flawlessly. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout that I use. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com businessbrain. All lowercase. Go to shopify.com businessbrain to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com businessbrain and our thanks to Shopify for Sponsoring this episode. Shannon, you know what day it is, don't you?

It's Friday.

I. It is Friday. I. You got that right, man. Yep. I love it. I have something. You have something. Yes, go.

I do. I want to. Okay, so actually, I want to talk workflow with the AI, because I use it when we produce this show.

Great.

But there's a step. It's kind of backwards, so I. I want to get your feedback, and I'll also give a little behind the scenes to our listeners of how things work. So after the show, I take, you know, you've created the post and everything, and I go up and I create some images for the episode.

Right.

The artwork. I use Chat GPT to help me do that. And then I. You. We use a service called Authonic. We crew up with a title. It does everything, produces all this crazy stuff in the Background, creates the MP3 file, creates the transcript, also does a summary. And then I take that.

That.

That trans. It doesn't do a summary. It takes a transcript. I don't know why it doesn't do summary anymore. It used to.

Yeah, fair.

I put the summer the transcript into Chat GPT helps me. Look at us. Create a quick summary. What I really want is that summary before I create the image.

Yep.

Because sometimes it's a day later and I'm like, yeah, I know what we talked about, but what were the key points? That's why I'm always a stickler on, hey, what's the title of this show? Or what are we talking about? So I can get into my head, what should this image look like?

All right. Right.

Tell me the answer.

Yeah, well, you're going to be mad at me maybe, because we have that tool. We use it for my other two podcasts, and we're about to start using it here for this. Damn right. But here's the part that you're going to be bummed about is that Sadie's already using it for this show. And it's a tool called flowsend. And what we do is upload the audio file to Flowsend. It creates a transcript, we assign names to it. Oh, nope. So I gotta assign the names the right way and do that. And then once you assign names, you have it. Create the content and so go ahead.

Okay. How do I get the MP3 file? That's what I need without doing the auphonic first. See, I want the summary to help me create.

I mean, we have an audio file. Like we're recording it right now. I just need to send you that or More simply, I just need to upload the file to Flow send so that you can take it from there.

That would be. Let's try that. That would be great. And then I can come back and talk about Flow send and what I learned and.

Yes, that's it. What's cool about flowsend is it's all using AI and it's all stuff you could do on your own. But it's a series of pre built prompts, some of which they've built, some of which we've built. So it's totally customizable. Right. And so yeah, definitely want that they. Yeah. The image creation from them has not. Image creation is not something they. We've been able to make work with their system yet. But I see it coming. I mean there's no reason why not.

Yeah. But yeah, that's great.

Yeah.

That. It's a bull.

That's a pretty good thing.

Tremendously. That is what I have for today. I do have another tool that I use but I'm gonna save it for next week.

For next week.

Cause I know you have something to talk about.

You know, I get frustrated when people don't see the world exactly the way I want them to. What I know. Yeah. Yeah. And nowhere these days is that more apparent than it is with AI. And I'm specifically talking about folks who are super resistant to using it and ah, yeah. And it's super frustrating for me when I have to interface with these people and work with these people. Like I had an issue this weekend where one of my business partners actually texted our, you know, we have a group Slack chat or whatever. And he was like, hey, you know, somebody is asking about this one new policy thing and, and is it related to us? He's like, I read through it, but I don't think it is. But you know, what do you guys think? And it was something. I'd never heard of it. Like I had no knowledge of it. So when I have no knowledge of something and I want to research it.

Yep.

I ask chat GPT I say hey, I mean you know, this particular business a user is asking about this thing. What is the. You know, I generally don't lead it. I've found if I lead it, it wants to agree with me sometimes.

Yeah. Okay.

So I just say what do you think? And, and show me your reasoning, you know, and. And it will. And this one business partner is very, he was especially initially very like emotionally against all the large language models because of how the data was collected and all that stuff. This particular box of Pandora's will not close. So you kind of have done. Yeah, yep. It's. It's out there. You can either choose as an entrepreneur to use it or not. And really the choice you're making is do I want to give my competition the advantage of using this over me?

Thank you for saying that, because that's so true.

That is the choice we each are making. My competition also has access to this tool. We don't get to just keep it. It's not, you know, proprietary. So it's do I want to give my competition this leg up or not? And I do not. And so he's still resistant on that front, even though we've made a decision internally that it's okay and we're going to use this because, by golly, otherwise we'd be out of business. And so all I did was I took the thing that he wrote in our Slack. I went into ChatGPT, I copy paste and I articulated which business it was for because that was assumed in the Slack chat, not assumed because I work with so many businesses that I have in ChatGPT. So told it for this business. I pasted it in, I let it give a response. I copied the share link for that and pasted it in. And I said, here is a teach a man to fish moment and here's what this response is going to look like. I did this because I have no knowledge of the thing you're asking about. So here we are.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's good.

I like it. And I don't know how else. I have another friend that I used to work with a lot. I don't anymore. And he's. He tried chatgpt the first day it came out, or, you know, early on, maybe not the first day, and, and, and told it, you know, or asked it, tell me about me. Essentially a vanity search. And it got. It got a lot of things wrong. I'm like, okay, great, you found a bad use case for Chat GPT. And then you stopped, like, here, here's the thing, I would never use Chat GPT for that. Here's the things I use it for if you want to use it for that. Why? What's the end product supposed to be? Let's say it's a bio. Okay. You want to write a bio, that's a reason to have it do vanity searches for you. First of all, the difference between Chat GPT on the first month and in it's, you know, now 30th month or something. Life. Yeah. Now it can actually search the Web, So it's not stuck with a fixed data set, finite data set. And so I said, instead, use this query. And I said, you know, I want to write a bio for myself, put your name in. I want to collaborate on it with you using Canvas. Right. So please start this and then we can work on it together. And that's the query I gave him. And he didn't use it. He just did another straight up tell me about myself. And it was like it got everything right, except it said he had passed away.

Oh, yeah.

My answer to that is, what this means is you're not popular enough to have enough data on the Internet about you. I didn't say that to him because that comes across as mean. But that's all you're proving is that there's not enough data on the Internet for this engine to get you. Right. But that's it. Okay. But it's also a really bad use of the engine, you know, taking. Taking the audio from a podcast and creating titles about the show from that much better use case.

I want to do it, and maybe this will be a topic for next week is I want to talk about this idea of stopping after the first failure that you mentioned, because I.

It's not just about AI. Yeah.

No, it's life and everything. And I had an instance of this, and I see it all the time. Someone coming up and trying, you know, saying, that doesn't work. I tried it and I. It failed this way.

Yep.

And so I. I want to. I want to break this whole concept down and talk about how to overcome that. That feeling, if you have it, and how to respond to other people that try to paint you with that. That concept. Because it's garbage.

It's garbage. It's. It's garbage. Why? Well, I will save my thoughts.

We're going to. Yeah. Because I have a lot to say about this because I've seen it destroy a lot. So many opportunities.

I've seen it destroy people's lives. If it's the way you. If it's your default way of thinking. My goodness, yes. Let's dig into this next week. We'll help. We promise. We promise.

Yep.

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