Why we're starting a new podcast | Agency Breakthrough Ep. 1

What I want here is I want kind of the sweetened, condensed version of, hey, here's a meaty problem that I was stuck on. And we were bumping our. Our heads, and we were scraping our elbows against the wall trying to solve this, and eventually we found something that worked really well. And I want you to be able to take that as motivation and inspiration. And I also want it to be practical application of how do we. How do I learn from that? And some of these are going to be extremely applicable to your situation. You're going to say, yes, I should do what Dean and Ryan at Worth did, or I should do what Marcus at Impact did, or I should do what Michael and Nicole at Mojo Media Labs did, or whatever. Whatever those examples are. Kuba, how are you, sir?

Doing great today. We just got finished recording another, like, an episode of a different podcast. And now into another podcast. Yay for batching.

Right, here we go, Agency Breakthrough. So welcome aboard. You're listening in a little conversation Kuba and I are having. This is very, very much not rehearsed, as you can probably tell already. Kuba, let's give the backstory. Maybe, like, what is Agency Breakthrough?

So Agency Breakthrough is a new podcast we're starting in cooperation with ClickUp, and me and Gray here will be hosting. Hi, I'm Kuba Kreitzer, head of marketing at zenpilot, and this is Gray, co founder at zenpilot. Gray. Say hi.

That's me.

Okay, so what we're trying to do here is to start a new podcast for agencies, because that's never been done before, and try and tell the stories of the breakthroughs that agencies have had and to help our listeners learn from that and to kind of. Okay, I've got, like, a whole thing written out about this. Can I just read the official show intro?

You do it, and I'll give you your sarcastic undertones. Okay.

Okay. So welcome to Agency Breakthrough, where we bring you real, real gritty stories of agency operators who found the path to get past the plateau.

Great use of the word plateau.

Oh, yeah. Thank you. And the alliteration. Have you noticed?

Yeah. Get past the plateau. Love it.

Yeah, I love it. I love it because I wrote it. Whether it's hitting on a playbook for massive growth, scaling profit margins, or finding a way to have an agency and a life, we're here to share how they achieved it and laugh a little along the way. I love how we kind of signal that this is going to be funny. Please laugh.

Please, please put the laugh track in.

Yeah. Presented by Zenpilot and ClickUp. And your hosts today are Jakub Greitzer and Gray MacKenzie. And just because I'm mean, I put myself first and you second. Gray.

Excellent. Well, well written. I'm super excited for this. I mean, this all kind of stems from a conversation that Gaurav Aggarwal, who leads growth at ClickUp, and I had. We were together in San Diego at the beginning of February and just talking about, hey, here's what we're doing in terms of marketing. Here's where you guys are going and how do we, you know, one of. So ClickUp's got. Do you know about the Core 4 at ClickUp?

The Core 4? No. You should enlighten me about that.

So they've got these core four market segments who they, who kind of their biggest segments of customers are and where their focus goes. Um, and so agencies are one of the, the largest ones by. If you just looked at logos, number of unique companies, probably the largest. Actually don't know if that's true today. Let's say that it's true. We'll just make it up. It's only presented by ClickUp as well. So their, their endorsement is on this. I don't know if that's true. I would assume by head count that's not accurate or that. That it would not be the largest just because most agencies are, you know, in the SMB space. So it's not the, the big enterprise clients where they've had a ton of growth here. But anyways, we were comparing notes and we're like, hey, we should, we should produce some content together and we should do like, we're trying to target the agencies who are focused on streamlining their ops and have a heavy interest in ClickUp as go to platform from a technology perspective. And they want more thought leadership. So they picked the wrong people. But basically folks who have an inside scoop into agencies, which is the world that we've swum in, the world, the sea that we've swum in, the world that we've lived in for the last 12 years or whatever. And so anyways, that led to. That was the initial spark and you kind of took it and carried the ball from there. What was this experience like getting to the point where we're actually hitting record and we're into the first show.

Well, I remember the key point being actually coming from you because, well, we got in touch with ClickUp, we thought about what this is going to be and who we want to reach. And we want to reach kind of an agency audience here what we like to call agency operators. And at some point we should have a good piece of content to point you to about defining this agency operator Persona. Building towards that, for me, the key moment was when we actually arrived at what is going to make this podcast different. And that's the idea of this breakthrough that we're going to focus on. So it was a lot of back and forth, a lot of brainstorming between the two of us and then a lot of feedback about this intro section that you just heard, which I think is like the sixth draft of this or something. So I thought, I'm trying to think of who might be listening to this and how far do we go into definitions. But do you think gray? Before we talk about why this is called agency Breakthrough and why the breakthroughs, shall we Define ClickUp? Define ZenPilot. Just the bare basics here so people aren't lost.

Yeah, why don't. So I'll take ClickUp and you can. I'll play ClickUp, you play Zen Pilot. Hi, my name is ClickUp. I'm an incredible project management software. I've grown just with Supreme Velocity over the last five plus years. I mean, this has gone like, seriously. So I got to know Zeb, Chris Cunningham, the early team at ClickUp way back, like end of 2017, early 2018. And this is coming out of four guys moving out to a house in Palo Alto together and working together. And then to go from that to a thousand people and raising all this money and growing just incredibly fast has been unbelievable to have kind of a, you know, a courtside seat to watch their growth. But ClickUp is the fastest growing project management platform. They've probably expanded that. I should go look what's on their homepage right now. Sorry, my homepage, I forgot on ClickUp still says one after replacement, all your work, one place. So there's all these different names that, that everyone's coming up with, you know, is it work management? Is it productivity software? Is it project management? We don't want to just get bundled down into the project management space. And so ClickUp's built out this incredible product. Obviously that's got tooling around all the common project management stuff, tasks and docs and dashboards, but then around kind of the whiteboards and that's been a huge area of investment. And we'll talk about. And I think the cool thing about us getting to do this from the outside, even though we're producing this with ClickUp, is we can kind of be, you know, hey, critical of, hey, here's the parts that. That still need to be improved and need the most attention inside ClickUp. And here's the stuff that we're most excited about on the platform. We're kind of able to call out, here's cool things that other tools have done. So we'll talk about some of those later on. But that's. That's ClickUp in a nutshell. What is zenpilot?

Okay, so, I mean, first of all, to put y' all at ease, the. The podcast here is not going to be about ClickUp. Just, you know, we're working hand in hand to produce it, and I'm happy to share kind of my own story of how it happened upon ClickUp, maybe later on or in a different episode. What is zenpilot? Hello, I am zenpilot. And I saw, and previously I wanted to create my own project management software called Do Inbound. And then I realized that what agencies have a problem with primarily is not the tool itself, but the process and the people that are using the tool. So in order to kind of make that work, I, zenpilot, decided on the best project management tool for agencies and at the time decided that is ClickUp, and just decided to be the best team when it comes to implementing ClickUp for agencies and helping them get the most out of this tool and make it do things that you wouldn't have thought possible with. Yeah. And I have helped over 2,700 agencies and counting to just streamline their operations in ClickUp and get more visibility, more productivity, more done faster, and all that good stuff. How did I do?

That's amazing. First of all, I love that you take advantage of me so well. And secondly, great job. We're good to go.

Okay, we're dropping the Personas. This is getting too confusing.

That's right. All right, Kubo. Okay. Why agency breakthrough?

You're asking me? Well, okay, so here's how I am interpreting it and kind of from what you imparted on me from this idea, which I want to point to you as the person that first said the words agency breakthrough. You know, all responsibility rests on you here. Why agency breakthrough? Because sometimes what you need is that breakthrough moment that changes everything. The moment when you change one thing and it changes everything is the way I'm trying to phrase it consistently and failing. So what I mean, here is the moment when you find the lever that you can pull that just gives you outsized results or just the one framework or the one mindset or whatever change. Sometimes it might be higher, sometimes it might be Kind of refocusing, going broader, going narrower. The thing that you do that just changes your agency for the better, for good. And in a huge way. We want to tell those stories to inspire you, dear listeners, to find your own breakthrough moment. And your breakthrough moment is not going to be the same as our guests. Probably it's not about, oh, they focus on ppc, so we should focus on PPC or whichever, but just to share kind of the thinking behind what made this breakthrough possible so that you can have this thinking too. And you can also be on the lookout for the levers that you can pull and what you can take advantage of in your unique situation to have your breakthrough as well. So we're telling these stories so you can have your breakthrough. Does that sound about accurate?

That's right. So one of my breakthrough moments personally is our family started doing this thing where we do special time, is what we call it, and it's one on one time. My wife or I, one of us will take one of the four kids and we'll go on a quick date. And every Thursday morning, so we rotate through, we have four kids, so every eight weeks, each kid gets to go with my wife and with me one time. So my daughter Laurel and I went to the library because she is an avid, avid reader. She's 8 years old and we were sitting in the library. She was reading a series of books. She was on the third out of four books. And I was doodling on my sketchpad and wrote down agency Breakthrough. And that's where the idea kind of started as, hey, there's all these agency podcasts, if you want to know a podcast, if you want to listen to a podcast about agency growth or how to market or how to hire or how to do ops or whatever else, or you want to hear yet another the, you know, thousandth agency owner interview, just kind of talking about the general story. And I went to college and then I accidentally started an agency and then this happened and that happened. And now here I am 20 years later and I've got a 50 person team. That stuff's all out there. There's plenty of that. What I want here is I want kind of the sweetened condensed version of, hey, here's a meaty problem that I was stuck on. And we were bumping our, our heads and we were scraping our elbows against the wall trying to solve this. And eventually we found something that worked really well. And I want you to be able to take that as motivation and inspiration. And I also want it to be practical application of how do we. How do I learn from that? And some of these are going to be extremely applicable to your situation. You're going to say, yes, I should do what Dean and Ryan at Worth did, or I should do what Marcus at Impacted, or I should do what Michael and Nicole at Mojo Media Labs did, or whatever, whatever those examples are. You know, I can go do that thing. And then part of this is just, hey, it's just fun to hear other people's stories. The, the good is exciting. The bad is what gives it all the context. And it's the fun and the ability to kind of, hey, we're all wallowing through this together and in it together. So I, I'm super excited to be hosting this with you, Kuba, and running it together. Can we talk about the three pieces, like three core pieces of the show structure real quickly?

Yeah, you're kind of leading to that, right? So the breakthrough kind of the storytelling segment, let's say that's going to be the middle of it. And for you to be able to contextualize the story, the first segment is going to be. I mean, we're experimenting with various approaches here. Maybe we'll talk a little bit first between the two of us before we bring the guest on, but once the guest is on, we'll first ask about kind of the context. What is the scale of the agency? What are the numbers that they're willing to share, just so you understand whether you're listening to an agency of 50 or 500 or however many million in revenue. So you can kind of contextualize this in your head. So that's act one. What is the scale of this agency and kind of numbers based and just giving an idea of the scale. Act two, what Gray just discussed the breakthrough story and just in a simple chronological way, what was like before, what was the breakthrough? What is life now after the breakthrough? And also trying to help you replicate this or replicate the thinking that led to it, how might somebody else have this breakthrough as well? And what are the pitfalls kind of along the way? Like, if things had happened a different way, this breakthrough never would have happened. So that's kind of the whole second segment. And I find it funny that we're discussing this today because also one of the parts of our thinking behind this show is that we want to iterate an experiment. So I wonder if we're going to be kind of laughing at this in a few months time that we thought the show was going to be like this, but totally not. But still, the concept is first Context, second breakthrough, third, what we're calling the Crisp Cornucopia. So just a lot of rapid fire recommendations. I mean, you must have always experienced this and we want to help you as well to find new tools, new sources, new people to follow. Because everybody has that secret tool or secret weapon that they never shared about. But actually there's this agency that we use for 70% of our content and they never shared about it. So we want to uncover that as well to help you find the right people to work with, the right tools to. To work with. And that's going to be kind of the last part of the show at the end. Maybe some shout outs, maybe some thoughts about who could be the next guest and you know, interview all of the agencies that way.

Right. I think our job is really to ask the tough questions that, that people want to know. Like those second and third and fourth order questions are really where the magic comes from. Okay, it's great that you wrote a book and all of a sudden this stuff pops up. Like how accessible is that to the. Basically all the reasons as we're like. And this would be easy for me because I'm in that situation. Hey, I'm, you know, running and owning a professional services firm that's this kind of in the. In the typical size and has aggressive growth goals. But what are all the reasons that we instantly think this couldn't work for me or there's something special about you or your situation or why you're just so lucky and kind of throw that at guess and figure out. Okay, like, you know, how. How can we help people really see that as something that is practical for them and it's not. It won't be practical for everyone but. But dig into that.

Yeah, I would be happy if, you know, we asked enough questions where our guests to some of them would honestly reply that part was just luck, you know, and that's why you can't replicate every breakthrough exactly. You know, this I prepared for, you know, that other obstacle I kind of surmounted. But this other thing, if it had happened, the breakthrough wouldn't have happened and I got lucky. I think, you know, we have to be honest about these stories too.

That's a great framework because I just think of a couple example breakthroughs we'll probably have. I mentioned Worth earlier. Worth E Commerce. Um, we'll probably have Dean Dutro, Dean and Ryan. We'll grab one of them at some point and bring them on the podcast. But built email marketing agency together. Email marketing is no longer the cool way to Say it now you gotta call it retention marketing agency. So email and SMS and then, you know, whatever else that expands to the names all, all change the stuff about every 18 months or so. So you gotta, you gotta make sure that you're on the, on the cutting edge edge with that. But their big breakthrough was building the growth side of the business. So originally a ton of the work came from Upwork and they built a really cool mechanism for taking Upwork clients. And I've seen very few agencies do this, but take upwork clients through a small, very clearly scoped project and then convert them into a monthly retainer. And typically upwork fails because you've got extremely. Budget people are there to find a discount for 90% of Upwork customers and it's really hard to turn them from being the I'm here competing on cost to okay, now I'm interested in quality and I want to work with you long term at a really profitable rate for an agency. But they had a model for doing that layered in outbound and wound up exiting and selling their agency just a couple years later at over a 7x multiple on EBITDA, which is unusual as well. First kind of the early stage agencies, I love to dig into their breakthrough because the piece that is harder to replicate is they were one of the first ones to really gain traction and grow pretty big. And so their exit was at a point where the market was heating up. And I'd be curious to hear, hey, if someone else builds the exact same looking business today, did they get the same kind of multiple on an exit and an exit too? In their case, they sold the smart bug. But does someone else. Are those opportunities the same? Are they better? Are they not? I don't know.

Yeah. When you boil it down, all of these moves that you're making, they're an investment. And to get a return on an investment, you have to time the market correctly. Right. So I do wonder what the guests are going to say about that as well, which.

So we've already got kind of the first batch and we'll probably batch release the first set of episodes. Got our first handful of guests booked. Who are you most excited about?

The most excited about Marcus Sheridan.

I'm going to clip this and send this to everyone else, by the way, who don't. Sorry I stepped on you. Say it again.

I am the most excited about Marcus Sheridan of they Ask youk Answer Fame and From Impact. I don't know what to say here. I mean, Marcus's book influenced me when I was a young Marketer. I mean, still am by a lot of metrics, right? But, you know, at the beginning of my marketing journey, I followed that book like gospel. And like, having an opportunity to interview him on the show is just such a treat. I love it how you didn't even give me a chance to be cool with Markus, but you already introduced me via email as the resident fanboy. But it's like I would have gone that route anyway. You know, I couldn't sleep when I got the email where he said yes. So, yes. So we're interviewing Marcus and that's the person that I'm definitely most excited about. And he's like, also like a consummate public speaker. You know, I'm so passionate about public, public speaking. I did Toastmasters for a time and I just love to get on stage. So just having a chance to interact with somebody who's like, so much further on this path and doing keynotes and all these workshops, everything just love everything about that. And I can't wait to record that.

I had lunch two weeks ago. This rarely happens to me because we're all remote and we serve agencies all over the world. But I had lunch with a client two weeks ago. And so we're talking about kind of the whole business. We spent some time on Ops and what we're doing on top of ClickUp, which is super exciting for them. And then we were talking about marketing and how they were growing. And it's mostly referral based, but we're really leaning into content marketing. And I specifically really like this book called they Ask youk Answer by this guy named Marcus. And I was like, oh, tell me more. And so anyways, I didn't want to, you know, you just kill the conversation if you're like, my friend Marcus. And it was so cool to hear that in the wild, like, here's someone else. We never talked about this stuff before. I've never made a recommendation and. And is reading that. So I'm super excited to have Marcus and dig into his breakthrough moment as well. Maybe what we can do is we could just spend a couple minutes. Like one of the things that I like throwing at people. You said crisp cornucopia and I was laughing. But it's like, what are some of the recommendations that folks have? Maybe we could dig into some tool recommendations. Are you up for that?

Yeah, definitely. I've got some stuff listed. Mine are not necessarily tools. I've got a course slash book podcast and a book slash course. But yes, let's talk tools and other recommendation stuff. You can take away from this.

I'm going to get yours first. But so I think tool recommendations, not that unusual but doesn't happen on a ton of shows but something, you know. Tim Ferriss I think I'll popularize this book. Recommendations happens probably even more commonly. Service provider recommendations is one thing that I want to ask people about. Hey, we're all working in agencies. Who do you like for whatever accounting? What do you like for project management consulting? Who do you like for sales consulting, hiring hr? You know, like what are the best professional services providers? Who you worked with? What is. So what do you have to recommend today?

Okay, awesome. So the first thing that I have to recommend is building a second brain. I recently did a launch and learn about this at Zenpilot and it's a few things. Recently Thiago Forte, the person that kind of came up with the concept and popularized it recently turned it into a book before it was a book. I'm sorry Tiago, but I feel like the best way to get on this is the free podcast that's still out there called Building a Second Brain. I think it's around 10 bite sized episodes about the various concepts. But the concept in general is it's a comprehensive note taking system. But what I like about it is that it leaves a lot of flexibility and room and a lot of ways that you can adapt it to your own needs. So it was a minor breakthrough for me when I started my second brain and I started just collecting all of the resources and thoughts and ideas and sources that I have for various areas of what's in my first brain, starting to put that in my second brain. So in a nutshell, the way it's organized is you've got and you can adapt it to your own needs, right? But it's about capturing the stuff that you're seeing online or hearing in a podcast or you know, you're reading through a blog and something stands out to you. Put that in your second brain, map it to an area, do it for three months, six months, a year. All of a sudden when you're supposed to do a talk about like marketing for example, or leadership, you've got this whole catalog of like pre screened content or just your own original thought that you can put together a presentation about whatever area is near and dear to you in minutes instead of hours. And in a meta kind of way, when I was supposed to do the workshop about the second brain idea, I used my notes from my second brain to put that together. So that's my first recommendation. Not to go too deep into it, but you should look it up. And I recommend you start with the podcast Building a Second Brain. Second recommendation. I love to find ways to kind of recontextualize what I'm doing day to day to find more motivation to energize myself. And one book that's, I don't think, super, super popular, because I could talk about atomic habits or maybe Tony Robbins stuff. I could. But here's one that maybe you haven't heard about. It's called the Alter Ego Effect by Todd Herman. Now, I am super into comic books, Marvel superhero stuff, and I have a very active imagination. That's one of the first things that the teacher said when I was at school. He's cool, but sometimes he just gets lost in his own imagination and we can't snap him out of it anyway. The alter ego effect, the concept is that for various contexts in your life. So one context might be work, another might be sports, another might be family, another might be musicianship. For example, I play bass. So for me, that tracks for each of those, you come up with a full Persona that you embody when you're in that activity. So when you're in family mode, you imagine yourself as one kind of character. So, like, for one character that I'm kind of following when I need to be kind of tender and caring is I try to be like Keanu Reeves, for example. You know, it can be somebody real, it can be somebody fictional, it can be a character of your own invention. But just this. And there's research to back this up, actually, when you embody this different Persona, you start acting differently, you start having different thoughts, and ultimately that leads to different actions and different outcomes. So the alter ego of fact, it's a simple enough concept, but I do recommend going through the book because it goes into much more detail of how to activate the Persona. What kind of enemies the Persona is your alter ego is facing is just hugely inspirational. And it really gives you this huge boost when you need it the most to activate your alter ego. So those are my two.

I love that I've never heard of that before, but I wonder if I saw a thread on Twitter here at some point where someone had a bunch of different alarms set on their phone, and each of the names of the alarms was that kind of the personality. Does that come from the book or is that someone's spin off of the idea? So I'm going to work out at 6am so my alarm at 5:45 says, Rad dad, bod time or you know, whatever identity I want to go adopt.

Yeah, the one I saw was like 4:45 was like beast mode. And then I think around 8 or 9 when work starts, it's like full focus. And then after work it was like best dad ever.

Yeah.

You know, so. And yes, these are the kind of, you know, personalities that the Personas that we need to kind of embody. Is that related to the book? I don't know. I've seen more than one Twitter thread that seemed very heavily inspired by the alter ego effect, but not mentioning it, you know, to the point that it kind of quoted the same research like I was. I even responded to one of those like, hey, you seem to be like referring to something but not naming it by name.

Not cool.

But anyway, yes, like people catch on to this and then they share about it as well. I've shared about this on my own LinkedIn as well and on TikTok. I used to do TikTok for a spell. So I need to bring that back.

I need to find this. That's awesome. Well, I have three all minor tools. I'll keep these pretty quick. First one is Reflect Reflect app. And it is basically where my second brain winds up the stuff that's not in. So clickups, all the team, all work, all the tasks, even my personal tasks, birthday reminders. That kind of stuff is inside.

ClickUp.

Reflect is all my notes. It's got awesome bidirectional linking and is really easily searchable and super low friction to use. A tool that I love using in conjunction with it is called Super Whisper and this is one. Have you heard of this?

No, I haven't.

Super early, early on. I don't even know if this is a business versus just like someone's toying around to build it for themselves and it's out there. Superwhisper.com it's probably Mac only. I don't know. I think it is actually. I had to download it and plug it in. I wish I could screen share right now. So in my menu bar I have this little triangle and when I press the keyboard shortcut or I just tap on it, all it does is there's a little green dot that's. Or sorry, red dot that turns on and it's recording and then I press it again. I hit my keyboard shortcut and it stops it and it just copies whatever I just said to the clipboard as text. But it is crazy fast. And so it's not instant. I was gonna say instant, but it's not truly instant. It's like I don't know, half a second or a second behind, depending on how much you record. But the Transcription is like 100%. It's perfect transcription of whatever you're doing. I haven't dictated anything super, super. Like I haven't taken, you know, a five paragraph thing and dictated that out yet to see how to slice it up and punctuate it and whatever. But the text itself has been spot on every single time for me, so that's super helpful. I just want to record something and I want to paste it in, do whatever. A slack message, click up into email, into wherever else. Superwhisper.com is what I use for that.

So question about that. It transcribes word for word. It doesn't do like what AI sometimes does, like summarize or, you know, tamper with it.

That's all it does right now is just literally word for word transcription verbatim. I've used that with ChatGPT a good amount. Say my prompt out loud and then just command C, command V in the chat GPT. There we go, my last one. And you'll notice a theme here around productivity, but textexpander. Do you use a textexpander tool? And did you use one prior to zenpilot?

I haven't prior to zenpilot and actually just this week I started using it for the first time. Also related to ChatGPT, I have this whole. This is, this is a nice prompt, I hope for the listeners. I have this prompt saved that has just a lot of context about ZenPilot because I mean, go figure, I end up using ChatGPT for ZenPilot at all. A lot, right? So I don't want to have to explain kind of the target audience, the service lines, the size of the company, etc. Each time. So now I have this prepared kind of this big chunk of text that's like, here's what zenpilot is again. I have saved that as just zppront template or something and via textexpander just pastes itself right in there. So yes, I started using it recently, but that's just the first use case I found for it. You should talk about how it's used at zenpilot because it's like much more comprehensive.

So we use it for a ton of stuff. I started with textexpanders just like if I type qem. In fact, I was out at ClickUp HQ in February and I'm typing on someone else's computer and I'm putting in my email address for them. And I typed qem left it. And they were like, wait, what's your email at? I was like, what do you mean? At like my handle. Are you talking about Twitter or something? And they're like, no, what's your email like? QEM at what? I was like, no, no, it's not qem, it's grades and pilot. Oh, I typed QEM because that's my email. Like that automatically expands grandsonpilot.com Q phone Addie does my phone number Q LinkedIn does my LinkedIn or whatever profile. So there's all the really, really, really basic use cases like that. Hey, I just want to type three keys and have it expand this 20 character thing.

And the powerful thing is about this, like when you have company wide adoption of this, if you change anything about your company and everybody's using the short form for it, then you don't have to do so much work communicating because people are going to be using the same shortcut and just getting different output. Like let's say the official company address changed. You could bury that in a wiki or just update the text expander prompt and people are going to see that the output is different. Like instantly everybody gets updated on that and nobody wants to spend time digging through a wiki to find the official company address. So it's faster and it's more consistent. And that's really a rare find out.

Of Office forms, intake forms, like whatever else, URLs, all of that stuff. Well then you take it to the next level. And textexpander is one of the most powerful. It might be the most powerful text expander, I don't know. And like I use Raycast. We could talk about a bunch of different tools that probably have some of this functionality built in. But what's cool is you can have these little modals pop up that pre kind of have spaces for, hey, I need an input here. You can also have it hit characters on your keyboard. So for example, there's a form that I have to fill out a couple times every week and I type four things, four characters and it goes through and if so it fills out the first field. All these fields are sequential in order. Then it hits tab on my keyboard automatically goes to the second one, fills that and hits tab, hit tab, hit tab to tab and then enter at the end I actually have a prompt where I have to enter in something and then I have to hit tab and then it tabs through the rest and hits enter and submits it for me. So it's it's just a kind of a really simple way to automate some of life. You're exactly right. It does help keep kind of brand solidarity or consistency across the team, but mostly a productivity thing.

Yeah. So any kind of text that you find yourself grabbing from a doc, you know, in another window, on another screen, you could just be using textexpander for it. What you're mentioning here, it really is reminding me to use textexpander more because once you set it up and get that habit, it just keeps paying off in terms of seconds and minutes saved.

What do you. If anyone else is listening, I'm Sorry, is using TextExpander. Who's listening? Send us an email to BreakThroughempilot.com and let us know. What do you use as your starting key? Like for me I use Q a lot or I use a period, but primarily Q because I'm never going to type QEM for a word or anywhere else. So pick whatever you want your starting thing to be and then that allows you to keep your. What Your inputs can be extremely short, which is super nice. Have you seen go to typingmind.com typing mind.com have you ever heard of this?

I can't remember if I've ever shared.

This with you before.

Better UI for ChatGPT. I'm sold. I don't need to know anything about it.

So you can. There's a paid version. You can download this. You can use your ChatGPT API key. You can just use the web version as well. But so this guy Tony, who is awesome, he has built a bunch of these different kind of micro tools and this one is getting a ton of his attention right now. He's done a really good job with this. But one of the cool. He's got a bunch of cool features kind of on top of it. Let me see. In March he hit. Let's see, he released the MVP of this thing on March 6th. He hit 10k in revenue on March 10th. I'm trying to see if I've got. I don't have any inside scoop here on what his revenue is right now, but anyways, Typing Mind allows you to have all these. There's a whole bunch of custom prompts built into it. So you just press that and your prompt is already there. You can save your own as well. So if you weren't using textexpander, something like Typing Mind could also work for quickly plugging in your prompts and then you can dial in temperature and all the other kind of customizations on top of it that you can do, which is pretty cool.

That's great. I need to have a closer look at this off the call, but always nice to get a tool recommendation like that.

All right, we could do a million tool recommendations. Let's close this thing. Let's close this thing out. I think format wise with where we go. I'm super excited to have folks like download all the rest of them that are available. Go listen to. We're going to release here the first five of them all together. So go listen to those. Let us know. Email us breakthroughempalot.com how we can change the format. What works well for you? What do you love? Do you love the recommendations? They're really tactical. Like, oh, I can go type this in. I can buy this book on Amazon. I can go download this app. What questions do you want us to push harder on in the Breakthrough itself? We'd love to toy around with some of those things. Kubo, what else do we have here as we wrap up?

Yeah, definitely send us thoughts on BreakThroughempilot.com it's almost as if we like they ask you answer as a concept ourselves and we want to serve you our audience here. Right. So definitely share your thoughts and we'll keep that in mind as we're recording these. Even the format itself right now is we have an idea, but we'll see how it develops over time. So if you have thoughts about maybe you could do this. We have an idea, but we'll see how it develops over time. So if you have thoughts about maybe you could do a segment on this, segment on that. We're open to that. And let's discuss other things. I think it would be useful to remind the audience just who this is brought by, just so you know, to contextualize. So again, this podcast agency, Breakthrough, is a cooperation between Zenpilot and ClickUp and Zenpilot. We help agencies streamline operations and we do that by helping them implement ClickUp, but also improve their processes. Finally get those SOPs and templates in order and to train the team. So there's like a cadence of daily, weekly, monthly checks to make sure that everything is in the system and tagged right in the system. We help with all of that and more for huge productivity and profit gains and great. Two words about ClickUp.

Yeah, well, I'm ClickUp, just to remind you all, I am. Oh, yes, yeah, yeah. The go to and fastest growing project management tool for agencies. If you're listening and you're not already using ClickUp, do yourself a favor and go to ClickUp.com and check me out. I was going to say check them out, but check me out obviously. Or, or go to zenpilot.com or. And look for the click up For Agencies guide. We've got this awesome 47 page, totally free guide. There's a long 4,000 word blog post that I originally wrote a couple years ago that's been updated a number of times since then. A million resources that we're putting out to help you. For folks who, whether they want to use our services or they just want to use all the free stuff, there's not a ton of secrets. There's some really cool stuff behind the scenes, especially around reporting that we wind up doing. But there's really a lot of. This is like, hey, you just got to get the basics in place. The coolest. I mean the thing to understand about a tool like ClickUp, if you're coming from a Trello or a Basecamp or an Asana or something very simple, you can get overwhelmed by how powerful ClickUp is.

Yeah.

And you've got all these. It's the curse of freedom is really what it is. Like, oh, I'm free to set it up this way, I'm free to set it up that way. And that is exactly what we love about it is, hey, if you're a design team or a dev team and you need to see your board view and we're trying to move stuff through and statuses, that's great. And if you're a project manager or you're super detail oriented like I am and you want a long list or a table view, you've got that. And if you're creative and you want whiteboard view, but you want to all be using the same core data, we're still working with tasks and they could all be in the same place. That freedom is amazing. And people who are new to the platform figuring out how to use the hierarchy best and how to use views and dashboards best, those are the three in custom fields. Those are like the four core key features that you kind of need to wrap your head around. And so we're just trying to shortcut that learning for people and help explain, hey, here's why and here's how. So thenpilot.com, look in the header.

I have this distinct feeling, Gray, that you're extremely excited about ClickUp, maybe even enough to start a company all around. Would that be fair to say?

It might be a step too far. All right, that's. That's absolutely true. I'm. I like to think that I'm a fair fanboy, that I am 100% rooting for, for ClickUp and the whole team. And at the same time, our job and who we get paid by is our clients. And so our job, I mean, this has been our standard since the beginning. What's the best tool for most agencies? Most of the time, that's where we're go focus. And so that, that led to ClickUp. All right, anything else for you? Let's wrap this up.

Follow Zenpilot, follow ClickUp, follow me, follow Gray. And Those are the CTAs for today. We're really excited that you either listened to the very first episode of Agency Breakthrough or you went back to listen to the first episode. That puts you in a very exclusive club. So welcome, and we hope you're going to enjoy the ride as much as we're enjoying it here. We'll see you in the next one, probably with our first guest or whichever else is next up in your favorite podcast platform. This has been a blast, Gray. Thank you for the time.

Perfect. Thanks, Kuba.