3: Using AI for Email Newsletter Campaigns with Joe Stolte

Join us on Using AI at Work today as we welcome Joe Stolte, a visionary entrepreneur, AI innovator, and just the prince of a guy. Joe's a former Inc. 500 entrepreneur with multiple successful tech startups, now spearheading Daily AI, which is transforming how brands and thought leaders engage with their audiences using AI driven email newsletters. With his groundbreaking work producing high open rate newsletters for top influencers, Joe is redefining content creation in the AI era. So listen in today as we hear Joe Stulte's exceptional journey and insights into AI's evolving role in communication and marketing. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Daigle. Each week we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started. Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to welcome Joe Stolte to the show today. Joe and I met earlier this year when he was, I guess, in a much different phase than you are now with Daily AI. And I was intrigued by the business model and just Joe in general. I think that you'll find that he's an extremely capable business person and not cocky about it, which is always nice. So, Joe, welcome to the show.

Chris, thanks for having me, man. Glad to be here.

Absolutely not. Again, I appreciate you coming in off the beach or wherever you were to do this. I would like for everybody who's listening to understand what Daily AI does.

Yeah, absolutely. It's super simple. So we help thought leaders and small brands make AI automated email newsletters that get 40 to 60% open rates. And we can do that in less than five minutes of time for our customers per week without them having to write a single piece of content. So we've really reimagined one of the most powerful engagement strategies in marketing with AI. And we do it in a way that's better, faster and cheaper than most small teams and humans.

That's incredible. Can you kind of give me an idea of maybe some of the clients that you're working with and some of the results or feedback that you've gotten from Daily AI?

Yeah, absolutely. So on one side of our business, we work with sort of larger thought leaders, you know, so we work with people like Dr. Peter Diamandez or Chris Voss or JJ Virgin or Joe Polish or Dan Martel or Dan Sullivan and, and, and you know, these are typically people that are, that have personality driven brands or they have great brands or they're thought leaders or their authors, New York Times Wall Street Journal bestsellers, et cetera. But we also have over 100 different customers in 20 something plus industries that have nothing to do with being kind of a thought leader or a personal brand. This is, you know, whether you're the coffee shop in Bethesda, Maryland or the venture capital group out of San Francisco, or a real estate agent, or you know, someone that works in finance, et cetera, we work with small business owners that typically have less than 100 employees. They have customers that really, really want to hear from them and they don't have the time or the capacity to be able to engage them on a regular basis. And one thing that we've found to be true in our journey as entrepreneurs soon, for myself and also for the market, is that, you know, consistency creates trust and trust creates actions and transactions. And so the more you can consistently add value to your marketplace, the more goodwill you can create, the more transactions you can get them to do with your business. And so we, we've used email to do that with small brands and we're super proud of our progress.

Nice. That's an incredible opening. It seems like a very low barrier to entry and there's no question that email and in particular well written email newsletters, they work, they've worked in every industry that's used them. So I'm glad to hear that you've had a lot of business successes. What got you to daily AI?

Yeah, that's a really good question. So, you know, for context, for those of those that don't know me, they're listening. I'm a fifth time founder, technology founder. I've had three exits, which means I've either sold or taken companies public successfully three times. Most recently I sold a company called grow flow for 62.5 million. And then prior to that, I was the number two person at a company called lottery.com, which went public for just over half a billion dollars. And so what got me here was basically I was in my last business, Grow Flow. A friend of mine came in and took over as the CEO and he asked me to kind of be co CEO. And I said, you know what, I don't really, I don't really, I'm not really into the co CEO thing, but I'll be the chief revenue officer because I really wanted to like focus on that part of the business. And we were in a regulated marketplace so, you know, we couldn't buy ads. We did compliance software in the legal cannabis industry. And even though we didn't touch the plant because we were associated with that market in any way, shape or form. We couldn't really do social media strategies, we couldn't really buy ads. So we had to get really creative. And so we did a lot of direct marketing, we did direct mail, we had a killer sales team, but we did a lot on email. And I got to realize that email is this wonderful tool, you know, it has more daily active users than any single social media platform. And I get to give these keynotes all over the country and I say, you know, hey, raise your hand if you use email in your business. And everybody raises their hand and I say, keep your hand in the air if you use TikTok in your business. And you know, most hands go down and I'm kind of picking on TikTok. But the fact of the matter is all real serious businesses in the world, they use email, they run on email. And so we said, hey, how can we make that process easier and more efficient? So we sold grow flow. And right as that was wrapping up, I was reaching out to my network and saying, hey, who do I know is doing anything cool in AI or possibly email? And it's funny what you put out in the universe because what I got back was, oh, you should meet Evan Pagan and Dr. Peter Diamandis. They have an AI email thing. But, you know, and so I met those guys and they didn't really have a market. There wasn't any really team put together yet. They just had this great idea that Evan had been iterating on for a few years that Peter Diamand has breathed some life into. And I said, great. So I joined, I became CEO, started raising some money, recruited a lot of my old teammates from my last two companies, and here we are today. That's how we got here. I said, how can we help people with this email thing? Because it's so effective, but everybody's so focused on this whiz bang, new social media, paid strategy, AI, whatever. But email, just boring. Old email continues to be highly effective. In fact, 80% of brands with less than 100 employees still use email as their primary acquisition and retention strategy as a channel. So I said, great, we have all these new cool things happening with AI. How can we, how can we combine those two things? Just make everyone's life a little bit easier. And to put a fine point on it, like, our mission as a company, Chris, is to help every small business be to market without being a marketer. Right? And we want to do that through technology so you don't have to do all the stuff that like you And I did, to study marketing and practice it. Whether that's brand marketing, direct response marketing, writing out sales letters by hand or whatever. We want to create an operating system that makes that much, much easier for smaller brands to just use and reach our customers and do what they're great at, which is producing their, and delivering their products and services.

I love it. I love it. So all small businesses listening to this program, please take note. Daily AI. So Joe, were you using AI, generative AI prior to your participation in the business now?

Yeah. So right when I, when we sold growth, I started getting really, really interested. I got access to GPT2, not Chat GP. This is two years before Chat GPT came out. It was just AI API access. And I just was kind of messing around to get, to get a feel for, hey, what's possible. And you know, I was blown away. And you know, GPT2 is pretty inferior comparatively to what we have available to us today. You know, there was no chatbot interface. There's, there wasn't a lot going on there. But I was, I was blown away by the novelty of being able to just, you know, with a few, couple of well crafted inputs, get incredible outputs fairly quickly. And so that got my brain turning. And then, you know, we actually, I took over as CEO of Daily AI back in 2021.

Were you using it for anything in particular or were you just experimenting with.

GPT2 at that time? I was just experimenting, but I think that's the important first step is to say is to just to kind of get rid of the fear of change and the fear of hey, this is something new and it sounds AI. It sounds, you know. Yeah, exactly. And so just to get rid of that and just to start playing around and then you're, you know, when you're in a state of like curiosity, it's like a higher human state than when you're in kind of fear or anxiety. I think the first step for us and is applicable to people listening to this is like, hey, like if you can get into curiosity and get out of like fear of change or fear of tech or whatever, that's like the first door you have to walk through. And then once you go through that door, everything's possible. But to answer your question specifically, then we started using it for almost everything like, like as early as 2022, you know, we were using it for crafting. We basically have two primary use cases that we've used, you know, since back then, all the way till today with GPT4 from a, you know, generative AI model perspective. The first thing is we try not to start with a. With a blank sheet of paper. You know, like in our business, we know that about half of companies spend not days or hours, but two to three weeks to make a single marketing piece or an email newsletter because they have this blank page problem. What do I put in there? What should it be about? You know, and so the first thing we do is we use tools like ChatGPT. We never start from a blank page. We just have an idea of the outcome that we want and a description of what we want to create, and we have it created for us. And even if it's totally wrong, it gets us over that blank page problem. Right?

100%.

The second thing that we do is we actually, I like to look at AI, especially generative AI, as a really, really, really good intern. And, you know, any experienced business person knows you don't ship intern work to the marketplace. You always have a more experienced person come and look at it. And the reason why is because we're so far up the experience curve, like we have enough intuition to know what's going to work and what's not, but we're smart enough to test it anyway. These generative models, they don't have any of that. So what I'll do is, you know, we don't start with the blank page, but once we get something back from them, we'll then take it through our process, whatever that is, whether that's a job description or a piece of marketing collateral or an important response to a customer. Of course, I could give you several examples. We'll write it out, and then I'll take that output and I'll feed it back into ChatGPT and I'll say, hey, you know, using something called the inversion thinking mental model, help me find ways that this communication could fail if our objective is with this person to do this. And then it'll give me ideas, basically how to make the content better. So instead of going from zero to blank page, now I'm going the other direction. Hey, poke holes in this. Help me find how I can make it better. I'll pick two or three things that I think we could make it better. And through a combination of our humans on our team or myself and some additional prompting, you know, we're able to get a far better end product than we were when we were just writing stuff on our own. I mean, it's really remarkable. And it's all fast, it's in seconds.

So what percentage is human in the loop? And most of the stuff that you would be doing, not the product that you're delivering through daily, but like for internal processes and operations.

Yeah.

If you're using Generativity, I know that you're not using it over every single piece of your business, but where it's being used, what is how much, like, because that gives me some indication of time saved or scalability.

Yeah. So we're not, we don't just, we don't just make. We make a lot of our own tools. Obviously we're an AI company. We also know we have a team of engineers and developers. You know, we're working on stuff, but both for internal tools as well as external tools. And I can give some examples. Examples, but for stuff that anyone could access, you know, we're using, first of all, we're using ChatGPT, Bard and other similar kind of chat, large language learning models for generative AI in every phase of our business. So if you just look at from the very beginning, like finding, sourcing and managing people, we use ChatGPT for everything. Job descriptions, job scorecards, performance reviews, text analysis. We use, we use it inside of our marketing, obviously that's our bread and butter, but we use it for very complex, for example, prompts to generate deep user research that then we then hand to researchers to validate and then we package and then we use that as a base to say, hey, help us write copy or help us improve our positioning or help us improve our.

Ask about that, that particular application. Are you doing that with actual data sets of existing clients or are you having the models synthesize those audiences to test?

Yeah, good. Good question. So in our product, in our email product, we do both. But basically every time someone opens a newsletter, the news, you know, newsletter gets smarter based on people are clicking on. Because we know that inputs and outputs, like it's the way that these LLMs work is it's input, process, output. You put a prompt in, it runs its process, you get an output. But we know that outcomes are more important than outputs. So we want to make sure we get the result. And the only way you can do that is through what we call adaptive learning or iterative intelligence, or put simply, testing, did it work? And so, you know, if we're writing a sales or marketing piece or changing our sales and marketing in any way, we'll start, you know, like any. Let's just say we weren't using AI. We would do the same thing. We'd have a hypothesis, we would get in, we build a marketing or sales piece, we would test that against our control or get a baseline and then we would look at the results and then we would iterate. So we're using AI for every single part of that process. We're using it to generate the first draft, beat up the final one. We then publish it, we take the data, we put it into chat GPT data analyzer. We get insights, we make iterations and we keep repeating it. So we're doing kind of a human version of that for everything that isn't like in our email space because we know that works so well in our main product, we want to replicate that. What do I mean by that? We just want to test everything and make sure that we're constantly getting that feedback loop. And for the reason why is in business most things don't work. I don't mean to be negative. It's just like when you publish a marketing piece, you know. Yeah. Like, like your if your conversion rate was 51% then you're printing money. Right. So because it's usually under 50% the majority of things you did, the majority people you put in front of didn't care. So you have to crack that code and keep trying to get that up into the right. The only way you can do that with test is with testing.

So, so the and testing is expensive by the way ladies and gentlemen. If you're not currently doing it the old way, maybe not necessarily dollar percentage because it's going to be a different answer for every business. But as far as maybe result cycle or time to complete that cycle, old way versus new way, what have you. I mean what's a ballpark estimate on time savings or talent?

Oh yeah, I mean I'll give you, I'll just compare to like so at grow flow. When I, when I came on as CRO we had about 17, 18, maybe 19 employees and we scaled to 119 employees in less than 90 days. We weren't using any AI rapid scale and that's what we do. You know it's kind of what I do as a scale up entrepreneur. Right as we split scale and we grab the market including with lots of people. At Daily AI we had a seven person team until summer. The whole time now we're at like 23 people. So we were basically doing the work of probably 50 to 80 people with less than with a team that could be fed on a couple of pizzas. Very very full on a couple of pizzas. And so now we're scaling and our team's growing much faster because we're building a whole new Part of our product that has nothing to do with email marketing. But you know, so just to give you a basis of comparison, because we were an AI first company, we were getting four 5, 6x multiples on output on a pure output basis, which I would argue in any business, speed of execution, speed of implementation is really, really important, especially in small organizations, especially in early stage tech. So I don't know how that translates to from an hours perspective. I just know that I was able to keep an insanely low burn rate being the amount of money we spend each month because I wasn't hiring people as fast as in any of my previous startups because our capabilities were just so amplified through different forms of AI.

Let me ask so when you put the team together, was their experience with using AI an important qualifier? And if not, what was the process like getting them up to speed to adapt to using these new tools?

Yeah, no, it really wasn't. You know, today we can hire someone in the Philippines to our fulfillment team for between 500 to $2,000 US a month. And through our video trainings which we use AI to update and our SOPs and various onboarding materials which are all mostly created using AI and generative AI, we can get them up to speed in 21 days now or less. So yeah, no previous AI experience required if you have it. Fantastic. The main thing is that you, you have two, two things and this is applicable whether you're hiring people or you yourself is trying to come in. First one is you've got to be curious. You got to have a growth mindset. Yeah. And the third thing is if you're hiring people, they need to feel like they're in a safe environment. If you're curious, you're in a safe environment, you have a growth mindset. You know, there's been research and really intelligent people that have said that, you know, perhaps the drive for curiosity is stronger than maybe the drive for survival or sex in our species, but we just mute it so much. So you really got to be curious. If you're curious. It's this really powerful. I found my experience shows it's a very powerful human drive. So if you have that, you don't need to know anything about AI. Like your human curiosity will just fill in the blanks. That's really kind of. Yeah, that's right. They're very easy to use. Yeah.

So it's refreshing and exciting to hear team contribution that it does. But I'm interested in your use in it strategically for ideation, for negotiation preparations for. I don't know, legal review. I'm not suggesting that, but there's a lot of uses for it. How are you as a business executive, a business owner and founder, using it for the strategic side of your business?

Yeah, well, let's kind of go in reverse order. So we do use it for legal. You know, I'm not a lawyer. I don't plan on tv, but I've been a startup founder for long enough that I've had to learn legalese a little bit, navigate contracts. I think we've engaged our lawyer maybe like seven or eight times meaningfully this year. And a lot of that was like, hey, we need to change our name, help us with some filings. The rest of it is like, hey, we have a base agreement that's already legally sound. And I'll say, you know, hey, you know, write this identity clause to be two way instead of one way, you know, and it'll rewrite it and I'll go look at another identity clause. And those look pretty good. And then if I'm really worried about it, I send it to my lawyer. I'm like, hey, man, does this look good? And instead of paying for like a full hour of the lawyer's time, I pay for five minutes. Yeah, yeah. And it's like, yeah, fine. It's totally fine. And so that's. We've had tremendous advantages. And, you know, if you know your way kind of around the legal contracts, you know how to prompt. Yeah, you know, it's great. Of course, you know, all, please check with your lawyer and, you know, do you have a legal professional look it over? Yeah, but that's, that's helped us move a lot faster. Now, strategically, what we'll do is like, here's a, like a relatively real life example. So, well, we. End of 2022, we had our 2022, we put our beta product in the market. It was a closed beta. We let maybe 30 or 50 people in a quarter. And towards the end of the year, we started having Churn. And, you know, pretty high churn. It's like 20 something percent churn, which is egregious in our world. Right. So we documented all the reasons for the churn. And I just started having a conversation with, with ChatGPT, right. You know, right as it came out at the end of last year. And I was like, hey, here's our reasons for our churn. Here's our product, here's a description, here's a copy from the website. Here's what we're trying to get accomplished. Assume that You're a startup product expert that knows how to reduce, churn and create products that people love. Give me 10 ideas of how we can improve our churn. And so through that process and some back and forth, we realized something that was sitting right in front of our face but that we weren't quite recognizing on our own. But we did through this interaction with ChatGPT was that, hey, launching an email newsletter is pretty complex. You know, there's a lot of like micro decisions you have to make, you know, and in product management, the more decisions you ask a user to make, the more you're inviting them to abandon you. So we said great. So we just reframed the whole thing as a done for you offer. They fill out a survey, they get on a phone call and then, and then our product still is doing everything in the background. But then we, you know, we had started first we had some humans doing stuff and then we prioritize that. So we made it seem very hands off and it is for the end customer perspective and that took all the fear away from using the product and you know, we did. That's a pretty big product strategy change for us. And there's a handful of other things we did like we moved from month to month annual agreements, we changed our icp, our ideal customer profile to go up market a little bit. And that was all discovered through this interaction with, with chatgpt and conversational AI.

We'll be back after a quick break.

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It'S incredible. I, I Are you at the point to where you're interacting with GPT or whatever model you're using on a, a daily basis?

Oh yeah, yeah. I mean I'll be in the middle of, I mean full transparency. I don't do that many sales calls anymore because it's really scaled our team. But you know, we have, we don't have a sales script. We have a sales methodology that we follow. It's a kind of a customer centered methodology called gap selling. And when I'm On a call with somebody, ultimately I'm trying to make sure that I'm helping them make the best decision for them. I'm not there to hard sell them or you know, so I use it in sales calls. So I'll, I'll ask you, I'll ask you Chris questions and as you're answering those questions, I'll feed answers in a chat GPT and I have a predetermined script to try to figure out like what are your gaps, what are your beliefs, what are maybe your unconscious fears I need to bring to light in the call. So you're making the best decision for you. And so, and I'm just typing these, I have copy paste things we just pump in there. And I just made that because it helps me think faster now sometimes it'll give me back a result and I'm on a call and I don't agree with it. That's fine. I still use my intuition, you know, that's why I'm a CEO slash sales professional slash entrepreneur. Because again, AI is a good intern. I want to make sure that I'm using what I know is best as the final arbitrary sort of the final arbiter of what goes out the door. But you know, and I've done enough sales calls where I can stay fully present in a call and take notes. The only difference is now I'm taking notes in chat GPT and getting a little bit of feedback so that if like need to get a distinction that's going to help me better communicate with you, then I can get that, you know, but we use it in everything. I use it, you know, with meetings and calls, coaching my staff, sales calls. I'll be lucky if a few hours goes by where I'm not using it.

Yeah, I'm the same. So this is an interesting scenario. I'm not a sales guy, but I am about 12 months behind where you were this time last year, launching with chief AI officer. And my intention like you did, is to take those initial sales consultations. Right. Because you understand who you're servicing a lot better if you, the visionary are actually interacting with them. I don't, I don't consider myself a salesperson. I'm able to just speak frankly with people and honestly I think. And that's, that's my method. However, that's a skill that I would want to improve if I'm going to be on the phone a lot more. Never heard of Gap selling in my life, but I know that if I went to GPT and said exactly what I just, hell, took the transcript from that little snippet of this interview, uploaded it and said, teach me about, you know, what do I need to know to. To be what's the 8020 on Gap selling like that. The very next call, five minutes away, I could be leveraging a skill set that, you know, without that, I would read books, listen to podcasts, audiobooks, all that stuff, and instantly I now have access to some of the best practice from any method like that. That's a great idea, 100%.

And by the way, just, just to double click on that, maybe someone's listening to this or not. They don't consider themselves a sales professional or whatever. They're not in sales. Sales has kind of a weird stigma around it in Western culture, probably because a lot of people have abused it. But I think the best sales professionals in the world are really great at one thing in particular that's active listening. So, like, you could literally just ignore everything we just said about selling and go, you know, hey, chat, GPT, tell me what, what is active listening? If I am talking, if I'm coaching a team member or talking to a customer or interviewing somebody or having a conversation with my wife or whatever, here's a scenario, here's kind of what I'd like to get out of it. How can you, what are some tips to help me become a better active listener and just do that? I mean, active listening increases empathy. It helps us relate to each other. It's, it's, you know, if every human in the world practice that, you know, at a high degree of skill, the world would literally be a better place. So that's, you know, that's something you could do that's universally applicable in almost any human interaction, is just learn to be a better active listener. You don't even have to know what that means. Go into ChatGPT, ask a few questions, and they'll start telling you what it is and how you can apply it in your life.

Let me ask you, do you have children in the house that are old enough to be using the tool?

No. My son is almost 5 years old at the time of this recording, and my daughter is like one and a half.

So would, would you, under your direction, teaching them, would you have any issues with your children using it and at what age would you see that? It's kind of off topic, but a lot of business owners have family and they juggle this situation where, you know, I've got a. Married to my business, but I'm also married to my family and, and Any. And when you introduce the active listening, one of the things you mentioned, it wasn't specifically about business. You were talking about and talking to your wife.

Right.

So I'm curious what your position would be on that, because as entrepreneurs, the more time we get back, the better. And if we're only applying these tools in our business environments, we're missing out on some opportunities to leverage it in our personal and family lives.

So, yeah, I learned many years ago from know, Jay Abraham that you should get everything you can for everything you've got. And so that's. Try to apply that. You know, if there's a resource I can use to get a better outcome, you know, then I'm going to take, try to take advantage of that. And so I would extend that same set of thinking to my kids, naturally. So, yeah, absolutely. I think, I think AI can be a powerful component. It's not, it's not, you know, with taking care of kids and educating your children, it's my belief that there's no one solution like, oh, I just send my kids to school and let them deal with it or whatever. You know, there's many, many, many components. And I think that, I think AI will certainly be a tremendous component in that example. Right. And, and so, yeah, I think that using generative AI or really any kind of AI to get an advantage in terms of getting up your learning curve, do it. And I think what's really powerful about generative AI and the intersection of that and let's say learning especially for children is, you know, our education model today, God bless it, love it or hate it, this is an endorsement for or an indictment of is pretty one size fits all right? And so like with AI, we can, we can personalize the whole experience. So it seems fairly obvious to me that at some point there'll be an AI tutor that will, that will watch what Chris did in his peewee football game and then relate that back to helping him understand algebra. Right. Because it's very personal to you. You can, you know, build on, build on the things you're already doing in your life by watching your peewee YouTube video and then going, hey, you know how in making a real life example that's meaningful to you, right. As you know Chris's personality and imagine inside of that opportunity, which to me it just seems like one of those things that's going to be inevitable. You know, it doesn't matter if you have dyslexia or a learning challenge like AI, multimodal AI meaning like voice, audio and video, along with Your physical movement of your body can cover all the ways that we learn auditory, visual, kinesthetic or otherwise. So, yeah, I'm really excited about that world. In fact, if I wasn't building daily AI, I'd be building something over there. But yeah, absolutely. I think AI is going to be like electricity. You know, when's the last time you said, oh man, you know, like utility? This seems like utility. It's like, like it'll just be anything with electricity will have intelligence inside of it where it doesn't today. And so for sure, AI is going to impact, educating and for sure, I want to make sure my kids have the best, you know, resources to learn on their terms. So answer is definitively 100% yes.

So it's obvious that you're a very comfortable user of generative AI. How long was that process of you going, oh, AI and having this idea of Skynet or the Terminator or whatever, not, not the negative side, but like some advanced stuff. How long did it take from you? And I don't know if that was your bias beforehand, but walking in, using the tool to where you had that oh moment, like, how long was that, that learning curve?

Oh, like immediately, like the first time I ever typed something and got a response back, I was like, I just, my, my entrepreneurial, opportunity seeking brain was like, oh boy, this is, this is going to change everything.

Yeah.

And thankfully this is like, for me, that was back in 2021, so I got a little bit of a head start. But boy, was I like. And you know, and I'm not. I don't write code. Like I build and sell technology companies, but I don't, I don't write code. Like, I took some like, web development class like the 90s, and I was like, oh man, this is definitely not for me, you know, so, but, but I love, but, but for me, I love, I love novelty, I love learning new things. I love, I love learning how to make things better, more efficient. And so, I mean, my God, this is such, such a powerful tool. You know, it was powerful then, even more powerful now. It'll, it'll continue to be like that as we progress, you know, so for me, it was instant. And the minute I used it instantaneously thought, wow, look at the power of this thing. This is going to change the world. Nice.

So with your team, the, let's say the Filipino outsourcers, I would imagine if you're outsourced, especially if you're offshore outsourced and doing it to feed your family, you're probably using the tool a little bit. Right. Help write the upwork reply or something like that as you're bringing them on. It's a 21 day process which is pretty incredible for you to feel comfortable enough for them to be capable of filling that service, that particular part of their contribution to your service, to the, to the clients. And I, I know you hold very high standards. Are there, is there hesitancy, resistance? Is there or, or are they having that almost immediate oh moment?

I think it's on a person by person basis but we try to make it so simple that, you know, like my 76 year old mother would be like, oh, I understand how to. This is pretty straightforward. You know, someone that, you know, there's this model that's, you know, the diffusion of technology, the innovation of technology. You've got, you know, early adopters, late adopters, laggards, etc. So we try to say, how can we make a onboarding experience or learning experience where a laggard, you know, someone that might still love their rotary telephone or whatever, be able to jump in here and get good value and use out of it in a way that's not super intimidating. So we kind of start from there. We have a couple other things working for us. You know, we're completely virtual company, everybody's virtual. And all around the world, you know, Brazil, Spain, us, Philippines, a lot like, I think like six to seven different countries, Armenia, like lots of different people are working full time for us. Even our co founders are all in different places. And so that virtual first culture also makes it super easy. So like if you have like a whole team of like people in an office and you have people working in the Philippines, it's easy to be like, oh well that's the kind of offshore resources. Like from every perspective, everyone is offshore in our business. Like we're just a big virtual team. So that also helps, right? Yeah, but, yeah, but generally speaking, we have a lot of experience with that rapid scale piece and we try and bring that to bear here. Whether you're learning generative AI or we're trying to game you up on a methodology or HubSpot. So we, you know, we've thought a lot about how do we, you know, allow people to learn quickly and to be ramped up effectively. Because you think about you're hiring a new staff member, most people don't have an architected onboarding experience. They're not measuring the progress of those individuals. They don't have clear KPIs that allow you to say, hey, I need to jump in and help this person because they're not getting it or you know, I don't need to do anything. I need to just pat them on the back or actually let them go. You know, see a very clear criteria for all that. And it's not because we want to be cutthroat. It's we want people to win. We know that when your team is intrinsically motivated, they're doing work that's meaningful to them, that matters. It's having an impact that actually means more than the money. And if they're not doing a good job or they're incapable of doing that job, then I'm actually holding them hostage from really self actualizing in their work. And so we really don't want to do that with anybody. It also, we don't have the money to spend on that. So, you know, it's, it's, it's good for the world and good for humans, but it's also profitable to not linger around people that aren't going to get the job done. So we've really thought about that process and it's actually not that difficult. You know, you just make criteria for.

I want to hear more.

Yeah, yeah, I want to pull on.

That thread because sure, onboarding is hiring. The whole hiring, firing, replacing, getting somebody back up to proficiency. It's an expensive and labor intensive and time intensive traditionally process. What you're doing, taking somebody who's never heard of your company before, who. English isn't their first language. I know it's the language of business there. But all of the time zone difference, them having to work on the graveyard shift. Over in the Philippines, most small business owners that are listening to this, if they have a physical location, they're not dealing with those constraints or those hurdles that they have to jump. And I would like for you, were you involved in the architecture of that onboarding program?

Oh yeah, absolutely. Because it's the same whether it's a $250,000 a year engineer or it's someone you know from the Philippines or sales professional. The architecture is the same. Right. We want to have, we want to. What that is. Yeah, yeah. So from, you know, we just. First of all, you want to just think about it from a process input, process output. You have, the inputs are like, you know, people and signed employment letter or offer letter or contract or whatever the case is. And then you have an onboarding process and you have, I have clear definition of what's the output. The output should be, you know, a job, a person functioning proficiently or above proficiency according to measurable criteria. So before I even make the process in the middle, I know what's coming in, I know what's coming out. So if something's broken, I either need to change the inputs or change the process. My standard is going to be the same. Most people don't have a standard. So that's like step zero is like, what's the definition of success? Think with the end in mind, what's the outcome you're trying to accomplish here? And then I like to say, what's someone that's really crushing it and exceeding my expectations? What's somebody that's right there at my expectations and what's likely to happen if they're not meeting my expectations? And how would I know that? So then I know in advance when I'm going to assess them. It's fairly objective. It's not just how I feel. It's like, hey, were you able to get through this kind of work and get this kind of output? And so then what we do is, you know, we have this whole process, but what we do is we instrument, what we call leading indicators. Right? So we want to know early if somebody's struggling, not later. Right. There's a kind of a delayed reaction to some of these things. So we try to architect their experience to be really straightforward. It's like, okay, very, very quick in the process. I need you to be able to do X. Here's an sop on how to do X. Here's a loom video that accompanies that. Please do X and then I'm going to review that output. We actually do a bit of that in the interviewing and then we just build on that as they start to onboard. But the first thing you want when someone comes in is you got to give them resources, give them access to all your tools. You know, it's boring. But do they have access to Slack? Do they have access to whatever Google and all the tools our product like? So there's a list of everything they need access to and people responsible for giving them that access. Okay, fantastic. Now they need to be trained. What does that look like? Do they get on a zoom call with you and you train each one personally? Do they watch previous recordings? Have you made like a video recording of what of their expectations? They got to get oriented and acclimated to your world. And so we have taken through that experience and then from there really bifurcates, depending on the job. But we start to get them in doing the work as fast as possible. Because if we're trying to train them and so they can learn. The way that we see the world is that learning is evidenced by behavior change. So we want them to do stuff as fast as possible, get out of their head and get into action and see if it's translating and then start to calibrate it. So again, if it's an engineer, that might be a low level coding project and looking at their quality of code, does it have bugs? Did it merge? Well, do they follow the rules that, you know, if it's a, you know, someone that's helping us with administrative tasks, it's like, okay, cool, like, did you follow the sop? Were you able to pay attention to detail, et cetera? You know, and then like I said, we have this vision of like, what does exceeding expectations look like? Well, exceeding expectations look like, hey, you can do the job, do proficiently, do it on time and get the results that we're looking for. And because we're a small organization, you come back with three, four, five ideas like, hey Chris, I just did this. I think we could improve it these three ways. Can I try this the next time I do it? And if it works, I'll update the sop. So I'm being very proactive. That's, that's a growth minded person that really wants to make improvements. So that, that's, that's the kind of people that we want to hang on to for the long run. That's kind of what we're looking for. And I, I would recommend in any business, like you want people that are thinking like that so that, that's, that's like a big picture. I could go into even more detail, but we try to set very specific dates and gates. 30, 60, 90 day reviews. Everybody is brought on contingent upon getting through the first 90 days. Whether you're, you know, like I said, a quarter million dollar a year engineer or our product manager or anybody in the business. That way at 90 days we just want to have a look in the mirror and say, hey, maybe they have a look in the mirror and we have a look into their eyes, each other and say, is this working? You know, and how do we objectively know that? And then if it works, then we have a set of incentives for them to stick around and continue doing great work.

So this is an interesting case study because as an entrepreneur, there's been times in my career where I've had to wear a lot of the hats, right? And this entire process that you talked about could be an interesting example. Use case for a listener to attempt. If you don't have an onboarding program now that can get somebody up to speed at a level of proficiency or higher within, you know, two to four weeks. If it's taking much longer, this would be a great opportunity to use Chat, GPT, Claude Bard, Bing, whatever you wanted to use and just play with it and see what you come up with. And I guarantee within a few minutes you'll have a much clearer path forward than you had prior to sitting down with the models. So Joe, thank you so much. I know that you're spending time with your family, you're working, but you're spending time with your family and that sort of thing. And I really appreciate you taking the time to do this. And this conversation further confirms that. It's no mystery why you've had the amount of success you've had in business. Your high eq, high iq, and that's not a combination that you normally see in high achievers. So I want to thank you for being on the show again. And is there a particular URL that people might want to go to to find out more about Daily AI?

Yeah, you can go to www.daily.AI learn more. Also, we're launching a whole new content series in January around AI where AI meets, you know, business, marketing, growth and influence on my Instagram channel and that's Joe Stulty Live. If you just Google my name, you should see the Instagram page pop up. So if you're into that, we'll just be trying to serve everybody with more information around that and happy to share it. And thanks for the kind words and thanks for having me, man. This has been great.

No hesitation at all with those. You'll be gaining a new follower soon. So everybody, thank you so much for tuning in. You know how to reach Joe and have fun with GPT or Bard or whatever your model is. Thanks for tuning in to Using AI at Work. Don't forget to subscribe for more conversations about how to use AI at work. And a special thank you to our sponsor, Chief AI Officer for empowering businesses with AI education and training. Visit their website for a free AI Readiness Assessment and AI Strategy Guide to help you get started using AI at work. That's www.chiefai officer.com. so thanks to our producer, Evan Desaulnier for making this episode possible. Follow us on Twitter at the handle Using AI at Work and visit www.usingaiatwork.com for free resources to help you harness AI in your role.