99% of Small Businesses Will Die Without AI in Four Years! - Brad Hart

The world could be a utopia. And I'm not saying that hyperbolically. I truly believe there's a first time in history where we could create our way out of this issue and create so much abundance that every human being on the planet will have more than enough, even if they use a lot. So it's not universal basic income. It's like money doesn't have meaning anymore and everybody has a very high quality of life. All of the problems that you set out to solve are actually solvable, but it's not going to be with more people and more headcount, more burnout and more late nights. It's just not. You got to up your game and start thinking in scalable systems. If you don't have an AI robotics enabled company in four years, you're not going to be in business anymore. Full stop. You heard it here first. Sorry.

All right, Brett. So I'm kind of curious. When I look at you, you know, you've been in all the masterminds, you've been basically in everything. We'll talk them all through. But if you were to. And now you're teaching people how to build these incredible systems that build leverage that was never possible before. If you were to start all over, all over again, what's the first system you would focus on and why?

Well, it depends on what part of my career you're talking about. I guess early on I didn't have all the really cool tools that we have today. But now it's like every single problem is potentially solvable in our time that humans have dealt with forever. So let's talk about now and business owners specifically. Like, I really geek out on SMBs. I had a meeting with my team on Monday. We kind of mapped out like some of the messaging for the new platform we're rolling out. And one of the things that kept coming up is like, we're not really the 100 million person consumer app, and we're not really the $100 million enterprise app, at least not in the current iteration. But what we are really is we're serving the people who basically need us the most. Is like, they're not. I was in San Francisco recently and I got to meet the people who create the AI. Right, right. And the agentic SDKs and the MCP protocol and all this stuff. And yeah, they create that stuff and they publish it and then they donate it to a foundation and people adopt it, but it's mostly open source. There's nobody really championing it for small business. So, like, all this AI amazingness that, that business owners desperately need. They're still using chatbots that are built for consumers. There's no real great business use case. You know, to answer your question, I think I would, I would focus on the thing that works in the real world. The hard work, the smart work, the flow work. Like what, what is an actual value adding process in the real world? Whether that be a sales process, a marketing process, an operational process, a delivery process, and then finding a way to take humans out of the loop. And that's not to say that humans aren't valuable. They just shouldn't be doing repetitive crap that an AI can do. They should be humans being not humans doing right. So early in my career it was like learning that it's a real problem to cross over the 10 employee or contractor threshold in the business. And people who solve it, they tend to solve it. And then they get to 30, 50 and they go from there. But people who can't solve it, they keep getting beat back down. And it's really hard to scale your business. But now not so much anymore because now we have like actual leverage tools that can go from, you know, if you get an AI to do it, it might take you 25% more time.

Yeah.

In the initial run, but then you can leverage it times a thousand, times a million. Theoretically. Like it doesn't, it doesn't have a limit. Whereas more humans equals more complexity with humans and more drag with humans and more human beings doing human stuff.

Actually like what you started with with the whole San Francisco trip and kind of seeing where I guess the focus is with AI, Right. And like most of where the money flows and also where the attention.

I got distracted because my dog ran and she was squeaking and you can't really hear it. But I kind of lost the thread of that story. But the point of that story is somebody stood up during this. It was mostly devs. So I understood about 70% was going on. I'm a self taught full stack dev, but not like classically under worked at a big company. So they're answering questions and I was really curious. This one guy stood up, he's like, hey, if you could do X, Y and Z. And he's talking to the guy from Cloudflare, we'd give you $100 million a year in business. He says, can you do that? I says, yeah, we'll get right on it. Like, is that easy? Like, yeah, that easy. $100 million, we're going to drop everything and do it. And it made me realize, like oh shit. They're not actually incentivized to solve the problems in the middle market. It's like this trickle down thing. But the innovator's dilemma mandates that these big ass companies, it's hard to steer those big ships, you know, they're trying to solve billion dollar problems and raise tons of money to build data centers and just really go all in on their core prop. Right?

Yeah.

So the reality is like somebody needs a champion who can cross the divide. These, these small businesses need a champion who gets their pain, who's been in it for 20 years, has talked to tens of thousands of different business owners and seen what works and what doesn't. Because by the time a software solution shows up, it's no longer a competitive advantage. It's not ip, it's just now the new table stakes. Essentially once somebody has go high level, everybody has go, hello. And now it's not an advantage anymore. So that's thing one and then thing two is like the problem. The promise of SaaS was software as a solution, but really we just introduced more friction. So now you have 15 tabs open, you can't find anything, nothing talks to anything. It's a bitch to switch, everything's expensive, it's a pain in the ass. I'm just like, forget all that, let's be above your stack. Let's plug in to all the tools you already know and love and just allow you to use them all in one window and talk to it like an employee and run complex workflows and automations with natural language commands as if you're just talking to a person and set them, forget it. That's the next level of compute. That's the next level of operating your business, not just working in a job that you created for yourself.

We have so much, so many amazing opportunities right now. But yeah, speaking to these small business owners, these ones that are kind of caught in the middle, it sounds like, is, I guess what are the big advantages right now? Like so knowing that, okay, we have access to all the same tools and whatnot, where is the, where's the switch for someone listening or watching right now where they can feel like they can really carve out a competitive advantage.

Yeah, you build your own stuff, that's the best way, right? The gap between devs who understand open source and understand how to build and code and business owners who have real problems that if they could solve them, they could be billion dollar opportunities, but they just don't have the technical chops. That's getting smaller. I'm not saying tech is easy, but it's easier than it's ever been. To the point where it's like I've been telling people, stop writing nonfiction books. AI is going to ruin that market. It's not going to happen overnight. But why would you read a nonfiction book? To get two nuggets maybe or five in a great one and then 400 pages of fluff and stories that don't actually add value. And you could just ask the Internet essentially, hey, this is what I want to know. Teach me how to do this and you multiply that times thousands of hours of code it this way. Use this tool. It didn't quite work. Okay, now let's learn why. And da da da and architecture and like you just learn. I've, I've shipped, as you know, a relatively Non Technical Person, 80,000 lines of production code, working a full platform, full stack in, in less than six months by myself, mostly with, with just a few advisors and team members to help bad ideas around. But basically I've been, I'm doing it all myself and I'm a lunatic. I am absolutely a psychopath. I do not recommend that. I'm on the far end of the spectrum in a lot of different ways, but what that means is I can bring back what works and what doesn't to my lesser technically inclined people or people that just don't have time to do that even if they'd want to. And share like, okay, you know, I'll give you a real example. We have. Dr. Anthony is a dear friend, long time his client, and he had this process that was taking him three to four hours to onboard get blood work, get his, you know, results and do labs and help the people and like really actually be there for them. And he was the only person who could do it in his whole organization. Then he enrolled 30 clients at one time. So you start doing the math, that's 120 hours of work. He was going to have to just eat it, you know, and just do it. But with AI, we broke it down into four steps. We designed the prompts in the system and then I actually coded him an app that essentially could get that result better than he could more consistently in about five or six minutes. And then he could just focus on the actual human part, which is like, hey, here's all your reports. Everything that we do, I've double checked them. Now let's just go through them instead of me having to parse through every single stupid thing and 50 pages of blood results. It's crazy, right? And now any member of his team can prep that and send it to him.

Yeah, man, that's incredible. Because, like, so someone's probably listening right now. And I. I know I am. Is like 120 hours. You just condense that by using what.

You said into less than an hour of prep.

Yeah, exactly. So. And anyone can do it.

Well, and it took me about three hours total from end to end to, like, extract all the knowledge, train the AI code, the thing, and now it's not going to win any design awards, but it's a functional app that anybody in his team can use. And now that's IP that can go along with that business.

Couple things I want to, like, double click on here is like, yeah, I think now we're in this world of just build it. Like, build it quickly. We all have the tools to. To do the thing, you know, you have. I mean, we'll list out some of the tools, I guess. Like, what are the no code tools that you would typically.

I don't believe in no code. I don't think that's realistic. I think I believe in code translation. So this is what I believe in. You could take high. You could take high school Spanish for four years, go to Spain, not be able to order coffee.

True.

Or you can go with a local guide, and day one you say, hey, I want a coffee. They say, okay, great. Come to the cafe. Cafe Sito, por favor. You get a coffee. Cool. And now you're like, oh, that wasn't so hard. I could do that. Right?

Yeah.

Because you take the mystification. You take the mystification out of it, or I don't know what the right word is. You mystify the process. So with code or anything else, it's like you've been learning systems and how they work your whole life. Yeah. You know, everything that you do in your life right now is a system you had to learn, from driving to going to the store, to paying your bills, to your mortgage. Like, all this crap that you kind of didn't know and now you know. And it's like once you know it, you kind of get it right and you understand what questions ask and what's right and what's wrong and what. What makes sense and what. What doesn't. And you just get better and better at, like, asking questions. And the more I do this, the more I see the whole world as a collection of systems that were designed to quote Steve Jobs, by people who are no smarter than you.

True.

They just kind of defaults. Works at the Time and they haven't been redesigned in a while and now you get to come and redesign them if you so choose. Because there's like I said, all the physical world is really made up of, you know, physical and digital worlds really made up of problems to solve.

Yep.

And stuff that kind of works, but not 100% and not as good as it possibly could be. Especially when you consider we have new tools.

And that's why you said like we get to redefine this now and recreate.

First time in history. It's like leaps and bounds of possibilities and different. So like the world could be a utopia. And I'm not saying that hyperbolically. I truly believe there's a first time in history where we could create our way out of this issue and create so much abundance that every human being on the planet will have more than enough even if they use a lot. So it's not universal basic income. It's like money doesn't have meaning anymore and everybody has a very high quality of life because there's just so much it's like irrelevant to have.

Break that down a little bit more because your thought pattern. Because I feel like this is where.

Every economic system that's ever existed because there's been a lot. We're currently in late stage capitalism but there's been know feudalism and mercantilism and some guy invented the stock market and some guy had the tulip bulb thing and like just it was all systems that kind of at the time made sense and no longer do. Like we don't use feudalism anymore because we have a better system. I'm not saying capitalism is the last one that'll ever be invented. But they're all, every one of them to a T have been predicated on the notion of scarcity. Every one of them. There's not enough for everybody. Therefore we have to find a way to distribute this based on power, based on economics, based on value, based on means of exchange, based on what? Nepotism, Whatever the F. Right. And now like for the first time in human history, we actually have AI and robotics that could potentially create more abundance. Food, utility, shelter, education, whatever to make it as so abundant as to be near free. Stuff that we just take for granted. Like you know, you plug the thing into the wall and the electricity works and the electric bills aren't crazy. Like most people can afford them. That's why most people have electricity in most countries. I'm not saying everybody everywhere, I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that There is a world where we keep driving this down and it only gets faster. And it's deceptive to people because they think linearly and they think locally. They don't think globally and exponentially and they don't think how fast it's actually accelerating, especially as AI comes online and becomes more capable and then robots right behind it.

Oh, that's coming up like this coming year.

Yeah, I think we're two years out before robots are everywhere. Humanoid robots that are really functional. And I was in San Francisco, like I said two weeks ago, three weeks ago, and I went to a lot of meetings, just kind of get a state of affairs on, on this. And I went to one where I was in a room with a robot that could move so fast. It was this little dog robot that could move so fast I couldn't see it.

Wow. Like tiny little.

It was over there and it was over there and it was like, it was a little flit in my vision. Like if, if something flew past you and you just didn't quite recognize it. Like I didn't have a mental model for that. And it moves like a dog, right? It moves its legs and goes like brother. It's like. And it can do handstands and flips and all kinds of shit and it's so fast you can't see the damn thing. And I'm like, that's scary shit. I hope we, I really hope we use that for good because that changes the game. I mean we're creating trillion dollar aircraft carriers that won't be done for 10 years and already they're obsolete.

Oh absolutely.

I'm like, 10,000 drones could be pumped out. Any one of them could sink that thing.

Yep. Well, what's your take? Because. Yeah, that's why I asked about like the economics and it's funny, interesting you brought up robots because. Yeah. My six year old daughter saw some robots recently and talked. Yeah. And saw the humanoid stuff, what Elon was talking about and she was like, that's scary. I'm like, it can be.

Yes, it can be.

Yeah. And that's why I'm like, obviously as.

A parent, that's kind of where I keep coming back to is like we have this inflection point.

Correct.

And you can put your head on the sand, you could do the ostrich thing. You let other people decide based on their values how this is going to go. You know, you can talk about it west versus east, you talk to China versus the US but like I think there's a non zero chance that we could completely screw the world over and live in a terrible place or just end it. And there's a very good chance, actually, it's a very highly likely chance, based on the distribution of what I would call positive sum values across the world, that this ends up being a really positive thing. But you need people who have wisdom to guide this. They can't sit on the sidelines. You can't be a business owner and say, I'm in for a penny and for a pound, just say, oh, well, I make. I make my 200 grand a year and I'm good. It's like, why'd you get into business? You didn't get into business to, like, survive or just have another job that you got to manage. It's like. No, you get it got into business to thrive and solve problems and help people. It's like, all those things are more possible now than ever because you can train an AI or a robot to do something and then it can do it times a thousand, times a million. Whereas if you train a human, good luck.

Well, then you're dealing with emotions, you're dealing with egos and all this other stuff in the middle that. That muddy the waters.

Yeah, well, I just. And I don't think see it as replacing humans. I see as augmenting humans. Yeah, let's give all the humans most of their time back and let them do more human things and focus on the next version.

What's the shift? Because, yeah, it's a mental shift that we get to make for ourselves as humans during this whole phase that most people have no clue it's even happening. So I think there needs to be an awareness. You know, hopefully this is part of it. But there's other podcasts and shows starting to do that. Diary of a CEO and it was putting out a whole bunch of AI related episodes that is getting more mainstream, which is great. But what's that? Yeah, what's that mental shift? It almost sounds like more creation and value.

People think this is a topic and they think it's niche and therefore they think they can ignore it or it's somebody else's problem.

Correct.

This is, as Elon Musk put it, love him or hate them, don't bet against them. This is a supersonic tsunami that affects every industry top to bottom. People say, oh, what industries? You focus on all of them, because industries are kind of a. Kind of acute relic of a bygone era. It's like everything affects everything now, and everything's being enabled by tech, and tech's Only getting faster. And I'm talking to guys who install garage doors and work on elevator contracts and I'm talking to high tech people and all these different people that have the same problems.

Yep.

They all need an offer, they all need to sell it, they all need leads, they all need operations help. And they all are going to be affected by AI and robotics sooner or later.

It's true.

They get to choose, right? Hey, am I going to lead this shift or am I going to follow it? And following it is a sure path to death. You don't have, you have about four years. 20, 30 is the inflection point. If you don't have an AI robotics enabled company in four years, you're not going to be in business anymore. Full stop. You heard it here first. Sorry. So get on the train or don't.

But it's the thing. Yeah, we have the choice to do this right now. And yeah, I kind of want to go back to like what you said. Start building your own stuff and because. So you do this with optimus and happy, you know, I'd love for you to break that down because it's. And then also. But I also want to walk people through, I guess the mental model of like how they start to do that. Like, kind of like the doctor that you're working with 120 hours was like look and staring him in the face.

Well, and there's a thousand other doctors have that same problem that just aren't a client yet. So I could give them that playbook because we already did it for Dr. Anthony. Why not for you? And you'll have a million questions as to why and how do we, you know, make sure it's good. And yes, you can keep a human in the loop and HIPAA and all that crap, we can work through that. But yeah, the reality is like you can't ignore that he is now 99% more efficient than getting better results for his clients and able to bring on 30 clients at one time without it being a nightmare.

So yeah, like how do, how does someone, if they're listening, watching, like how do they walk through that kind of process? Maybe for themselves or their team?

It's really four steps and this is kind of going behind the curtain a little bit just to give you a sense. But you know, I do this thing so there's, there's this thing going around called vibe coding where people like, you know, go in a room and like put on some music and just like tell the AI to build stuff and you'll get kind of diminishing returns on that. I think after a while you need to get serious. But to build like a single function, one purpose app, that's, that's pretty fun and pretty cool. And I recommend you do it or just stick up a website won't be the best website, won't be the best app, but it's like something cool that you could do. Then I was like hearing all this chatter about people who are like, I'm going to vibe code a billion dollar business. I'm like, like fuck, you are. Right. Excuse my language, but like, you know, the likelihood that some dude in his mom's basement with no distribution and no business sense is going to go build the next billion dollar thing is just laughable, right? And even if it was true, it sounds lonely, boring and shitty. I' I kind of want to do with all my friends so we could all get better, faster, and keep each other sharp. Iron sharpens iron. It's kind of the point of a mastermind. So I'm like, I want to approach this from a new angle. I call it tribe coding.

Okay.

I like trademark tribe coding. Right? So, so now we're all building together. We're all learning from each other. What's the best ways to do it? We hit roadblocks, we help each other work through them. Like just recently I was, I was running. The problem of my project was getting too big for AI to keep it in context. And yeah, there's different eyes and different size context windows, but not all of them are good at code. So like, of the ones that I wanted to, I could only really focus on like a narrow subset of a particular app. And then I had a breakthrough. I'll just share one. I've had many, but I was able to design a system by which AI diagrams the system as is so that it could use less context to understand the different components of the system before it went in and made changes. So instead of having to start from scratch in every context window, which is still a problem of AI, you know, you got 200 tokens, 200,000 tokens and you're done. Now in like 10,000 tokens, it can get up to speed, know where all the components live, and not have to do any searches. It could just look at the diagram and at the end of it, it can update that diagram if there's been changes.

Smart.

Like that one little thing, I'll just share my screen real quick to give you a visual what that looks like if there's people who want to see it changed everything. It's you know, you got to look for these little bits that. That make everything different.

And this is great for vibe coding, right?

Or just any kind of coding. Yeah, hold on, let me share it right now. Can you see this screen here?

Yeah.

It's possible most people won't know what the hell all this means, but this is like a main function of my app that's like, architecture, and there's different phases, and it goes through different files, and it's just basically like a decision tree for the app to be able to be like, okay, here's what's what, and where it all lives. And then AI doesn't have to go through each time and figure it out. And I can do that for main components. Basically, it's just like, it's an innovation. I'm working within the limits of a tool. Obviously, this is not day one stuff. Like, I've been at this for a while, but it's valuable for me and then anybody else I work with, because I can't really read a Miro board. It can't really read a whiteboard the way that I could. Like, my handwriting is terrible. So, like, I just found a way for it to design its own map that is also useful for me that now we're both on the same page. And I just go to the specific part of the app that I'm working on, and I got a map. And then we update the map over time because the map is not the territory, but it's a hell of a lot better than, you know, if you have enough maps, you can approximate the territory, I guess, is the better.

And if it's made in the way that the AI can read, and of course that it's. You definitely need to organize all this information. And my brain goes to like, what do you use to organize all of these different files to make sure that it's referencing that in the most updated form.

Right. Because you're going to burn well. And then it gets it wrong and it fixes the thing that's not actually the problem.

Correct.

And then you created another problem because now you got a ghost you got to chase down later because you don't know all the cascading effects. Especially when you get to a complex app. Like, if it's a single function app, fine. It either works or it doesn't. But when you get into a platform level, it can be a nightmare. So, anyway, the reason I'm sharing that is it's a more complex example that people are going to be like, holy crap. But I don't want you to get intimidated by that. The reality is I show people very basic tools that all of a sudden now they're putting up websites and apps in minutes that they vibe coded themselves, tribe coded themselves, and then they can iterate. But it's a new paradigm that they didn't have before. The old paradigm is I got to wait for somebody who has technical knowledge and expertise. I got to find the right person who I can trust, who isn't going to cost a fortune, who actually wants to work on my problem and then finally manage that person to success. All of those things are breakpoints that don't work. That's right. And I have countless stories of business owners trying to hire devs to build whatever that it just never gets to fruition. Or they spend a ton of money and then it's a pain in the ass to maintain and more money. And it's like you would be shocked at how many people I've talked to that have spent half a million to $1 million on an idea that's never seen the light of day. That's unacceptable.

It is.

Like, why would you take a few hours and see what's possible by yourself before you go hire anybody? Cause at the very least, you build an mvp, you build a little prototype and then you bring it to the devs and say, make this nice, make this pretty, make this scalable, make this whatever. But here it is. This is the way I want it.

That's a beautiful, like what's accessible to everybody right now. And I feel like a big gap is this mental model of just start building stuff. Like you don't have to wait for anybody.

There's no.

You literally just use your voice and start.

Yeah, well, and I'm here as a Sherpa to guide people because I as. As unsexy as this is, everybody wants to know the prompt that's going to make them a million dollars. Like we do that too. Fine. But sure. You know, I think the. The fact that you can now build stuff in physical and digital space and automate stuff and physical and digital space changes the way that we're going to approach business. It's not going to be who can grind through and hustle harder. And you know, there's just. That doesn't scale. It's going to be. Or higher the most. It's going to be who can design a system that scales and then get AI to run the system. So you have to find what AI can do and what it can't. Yeah, you have to figure out the right tools in the right order, in the right sequence, and yet a little bit more work upfront. But you've already got a bunch of processes in your business that already work or you wouldn't be in business. Now it's taking those and updating them for 20, 25 with the new tools.

Back to you were saying, there's four steps where, you know, it's kind of peeling back. I don't know if you went through this for. I don't, I don't know if I got them all, but kind of like if you have, you know, a process in mind, something that's just bogging you down.

Yeah, totally. So plan, prompt, produce, polish.

Ooh, okay, Right, four piece.

So the planning is like, you know, whiteboarding. You choose your tech stack, I help people guide through this. It's basically just like, here's our best hypothesis about how this could work.

Cool, right?

And it's taking your actual SOP and it's, it's, it's mapping it to what's the new way it's going to look. Then, okay, you're the expert, so you're going to need to build the prompts. But it's pretty easy because AI can prompt itself. So really it's a function of like, what are the inputs, what are the outputs? How many examples do we have? Let's say we have five. I think five is a good number. So I know what the input looks like and I know what the output looks like of the system we're designing. And then I can give that to AI and say, here's five examples of before and after. Go make prompts as many as possible or as few as possible that allow us to transform A into B and it goes off and does that. And then you go and play with those prompts manually and you say, okay, it got it or it didn't until you're really happy with the output. That's what Dr. Anthony did. He took it for a couple weeks, he did it manually a bunch of times. He's like, okay, this is bulletproof. This works, these prompts, you know, not this, not too many, not too few. Right?

Yeah.

Because the more you give AI to do in one shot, the worse it does. You have to break it into a number of chunks that it can do very reliably, consistently. That one feeds into the next, into.

The next and hence that map. Right. Like you have. Yeah, okay.

Yeah. So it's like every single one of those. And that was more of a code specific example. This is more of like A, we're still working with Claude, we're still working with GPT. This is all stuff that you're probably familiar with already. Okay, then we're going to produce code which actually runs that process. So we're basically taking the training wheels off. We're getting past the prompts and we're saying, okay, now let's build that into a process where it can't mess it up. Because a prompt is probabilistic and code is deterministic. Although you can have probabilistic elements, a prompt allows you to have flexibility within the model and have intelligence. Pick the best thing, but it can produce hallucinations and errors. It could just decide not to do it. And that can be a problem depending on what you're doing. But code, like if I just give it a JSON script, for example, you have to execute it this way. So that's the produce phase. We're going to actually turn that transformational process that we just outlined that we know works that AI can do into code that it can't mess it up. And that could be a mix of code and prompts. And there's other ways to do that. But then we're going to polish it. So like, okay, we've built the plan based on whatever was working already, we've prompted it, we've produced it and then we polish it. Basically saying, hey, I want to have enough edge cases thought through and figured out where this is a working thing. That'll get us 95% of the way there. And then we have a human in the loop just to make sure we have high quality. But you basically took a multi hour process and turned it into a multi minute process. You took something that one person on your team can do and made it so anybody could do it. And then you've created a way for it to be consistent and scalable across your organization. And then as you get more of these processes built into little apps, if you will, then you can roll all that into one platform and that's your whole business.

I got you. Cool.

That would be like the fifth P if I was to just kind of extrapolate. Like you polish it now, you can platformatize it. So you take all of these and you start to put them into platforms. That's essentially what I did with Optimus. I built 30 different workflows and systems and tools, one of which added an additional 10 or 20k a week to a business that I worked with. Yeah, in brand new revenue that just was slipping through the cracks in about two Hours work. Right. So these, these can make a massive difference. Especially when you get really good, you know what to look for. You know, I've taken stuff like that. So like the massive amount of money made, the massive amount of time saved, and then this multiplies because now you're, you're getting more money in time. You have more time to, to focus on what else can I do? And you get excited and enlivened by this possibility and you're like, oh crap, you know, and it doesn't have to happen 0 to 1, it can happen 40% better, 50% better. Like it's all time and money that you're getting back or making more of.

That's right. And I'm assuming there's this iterative process based on feedback and all the new ideas that pop up.

You're like, well, but everybody's still in the old model of okay, I gotta go hire X, Y and Z, or let me get this agency or let me, whatever. It's like, no, start with the process that works. That's the hardest part. Find a process that works. Find something that if you did it a hundred times, it would have enough of a success rate and create enough of a profit or enough of an impact to want to do that. And then, you know, get past the idea of oh, I have to do, or a person has to do that. That's not the point. You need to find something that works first. That's the hardest thing you're going to do. That's 80% of the work. If it works. It can work at scale.

Yes.

Even if you have a 50% success rate, but you can do it 250,000 times. Well, it's going to work 125,000 times. So you got to get out of your head of like, oh, this isn't perfect. Like good enough is good enough. And then we can work on scaling it and getting it better. The better. You can get it beforehand. Great. But like, I don't want to slow anybody down because the reality is, even if you took a kind of piss poor process and just made it better by automating it and leveraging it, it would be, ultimately you get more out.

Of it, you're more consistent. Yeah. And more things show up. And having human in the loop, you know, talk about that, like, are your thoughts on that? Because that's, especially in these early processes, human somehow still have an oversight over this. Or at least during parts of it.

Yeah. If you think about it like a diagram, it would be input, output. So one side, then the other side in between is the transformation. That's like the app or the code or the prompts or whatever it is that we use to get from A to B. And then the thing that draws from output back to input is feedback. And the human is the feedback.

Got it? Yeah.

The human is saying, yeah, this is like, we're batting 30% or we're batting 70% or about 95%. Like, how do we improve that? Because every time you get feedback, it gives you new information to feed into the system or tweak the prompt or tweak the code to make it better. So you're just running this feedback loop until it's acceptably high, where you're like, okay, we can move on to something else. We're getting diminishing returns, whatever. So that's where the humans come in, is they just make the system better. So there's an old joke. The factory of the future will have two employees, a man and a dog. And the man's job is to feed the dog, and the dog's job is to make sure the man doesn't touch the machine. But that's eventually where you get to. It's like, okay, this is just all running and it all works. And that was kind of the idea for Optimus is like, We've built 30 different things. They all kind of do different things in businesses. Let's start wrapping them together into a platform that allows you to connect your entire stack of apps. So we're not asking you to switch software, we're not asking you to buy new software, take what you already know and love, anything with an API. We plug it into Optimus, then you talk to it like an employee, and you can create complex workflows and automations without ever touching a line of code.

So basically, yeah, you could speak through whatever the hell this process is. Right. Like, it's essentially what we're talking about here. We're talking about the manual way. But you've already built Optimus. This is. I've seen some of what you've showed me, some of this stuff, and it's freaking mind blowing because, yeah, it sounds like you've identified what the 30 main processes or things that most small business owners would need to know or have. And you could just speak with it and then hook in all these integrations without having to get what, N8N savvy.

And no, yeah, it alleviates a need for N8N Zapier. Make any of that crap. And. And not that. That's crap. It's a great platform. I'm just saying, like this is a new paradigm. You don't need that anymore. The, the, the idea is less menus, less things to log into, less things to think about. It's like one window through which you can run your business. You hook it up once and now it's talking to everything and it will only get more useful. And what's crazy is like I don't know anybody else who could do this, who has the small business environment, understanding the actual technical chops and the vision and taste and experience and wisdom to no do less. Just make it cleaner, make it simpler. At the end of the day we're gonna have one main menu and a couple of things like affiliate ROI and automations and that's it. It's gonna be a really simple app, but massively powerful. It's gonna be unsuspectingly powerful.

Good.

And we're three to four weeks out from beta launch.

That's what I wanted to ask about. Yeah, it's like, okay, so what's the timeline? How does that look like for that?

Yeah, so right now, currently all of what I just described is in the app. I have some other features I'll probably keep in my back pocket that I want to slow roll and just make sure they really work. But yeah, we already have it in alpha on 45 of our clients machines. They're getting crazy results with it and super happy with it. And then we have. Because I use the Mastermind as the way to fund this and fund the development. So I haven't taken any outside capital yet. I'm open to that, but it has to be the right fit. And that's another problem is like VCs don't get it. They're thinking is this 100 million person consumer app or is this a hundred million dollar enterprise app? And they don't really care if it's.

In between the big boys.

Yeah, this is a real opportunity for somebody. Really gets the pain of like 2 to 10 employees and you know, maybe up to 15. Like that's hard to get past. And if you get past it, you're not thinking about software anymore because you've already hired people that deal with that crap. You.

That's true. Well, this is what's so cool is like you said funds with the Mastermind. So I wanted to definitely highlight your Optimus mastermind because I think I'll be. Well, by the time this goes live, we will have already done some, some, you know, gone out to Phoenix and hung out with you and and the whole crew. But describe what you're doing there, because you've been a part of basically every mastermind that I know and way more. And, you know, there's a unique thing that, that you bring together that's probably not, isn't normal. It seems like you're, you're doing a transformation in the moment with people, but also doing big, good stuff for the world. Yeah.

And these are the leaders that I described earlier. It's like, I don't want to just, you know, react to AI or hope it doesn't affect me. I'm like, I'm leading this. I realize it's, it's me. If it's, if it is to be, it is going to be me. So we have 32 businesses represented, about 250 million in revenue combined. These are typically business owners that have been in the game for five plus years, some of them 25 plus years. Like, they're just all over the map. We have young folks, we have older folks. My oldest client is 72 and he's still crushing it. Yeah. My youngest people are like in their late 20s. Right. So it's kind of a, it's a mix. But the goal that we all have is like, we want to lead this, not follow it. We want to own our time, own our future, own our freedom, and realize, like, this is the first time in history where you could go from a very small portion of your tam to a very large portion of your tam in almost no time. Geez. Right. And really your only bottleneck is going to end up being distribution relationships. So we're all going to keep each other accountable to, like, get our tech out of the way so we can focus on scale.

And it's beautiful because, like, distribution's the issue. Well, that's kind of the power of masterminds. Right. So you're getting people together, networking, viewing the human thing.

You got a guy who's got 17 million emails sitting next to you in the mastermind. That's a legit person. Like, what can't you do with that?

It's tribe coding, tribe building, it's all that stuff at the tribe.

And it's fun. It's like it people, it's so hard to get them to be like, okay, I'll do it. And it's like, it just feels harder than it is. And then they start doing it like, oh, that wasn't so hard. I'll literally be talking to people and doing trainings and coding apps in the background.

Yeah, I believe it.

You know, it's like I've gotten so good at this stuff. Like I got two windows open all the time coding something, messing with something, researching something. And, and reality is like I measure twice. You know that old saying, measure twice, cut once?

Yeah.

It's really like I measure four or five times and then I cut once. Like I'm so sure about the changes I want to make before I make them because of that cascading effect I told you about. By the time I actually make it, it's like so like it just requires a different level of thinking. But once you start thinking that way, it's like anything becomes possible.

That's right.

And that's what I really want to teach is the frameworks and thinking style around that is like, okay, where's the puck going? How can we skate there? And how can we support each other in getting there?

And you know us humans, we're always so stubborn with the old way of doing things. So as long as we can break out of that old mental model. That's my big takeaway here.

I tell everybody, listen, if you're capturing 1% of your TAM, I'll shut the fuck up. If you got a, I'll shut up, right?

Yeah.

And if you're not, well, maybe you should come talk to us because we're on our way, man.

And this is like such a, it's such a perfect time for people to jump in on this mindset. Go over there, go. I'll just shout it out. Build with optimist.com so you can see everything that Brad's doing with the group and probably with Optimus as well once that goes public. But it's crazy. I, I guess to kind of wrap it up here. Well, is there anything else you'd want to shout out or ways I just.

I want to shout out to all the, the dreamers and the crazy people out there that like got into business in the first place and, and maybe you've been doing it 5, 10, 15, 20 years, whatever it is. I've been in business over 20 years myself. Like it's the hardest and most rewarding thing I've ever done. It's most spiritually enlivening and growth oriented thing I've ever done. The sense of contribution you get is insane. Like, just remind yourself why you got into this. This is the, the first time in human history that we're aware of that all of the problems that you set out to solve are actually solvable. But it's not going to be with more people and more headcount and more burnout and more late nights. It's just not. You gotta, you gotta up your game and start thinking in scalable systems. And that's literally the only difference between you and these Silicon Valley companies. They're just thinking big. That's it.

Tim Ferriss has said this many, many times before and I might not say it perfectly, but it's like the reframe is. What would this look like if it were easy?

Yeah.

And not feel like it has to be a fricking grind to do all this shit? Because it doesn't.

And the first thing people, when I show them these kind of results are like, well then what do I do? Like you work on something else. I don't know. Like you said, I work more than ever, but I'm building different things. You know, I'm excited about what I'm.

Building and you're having fun. I think that's a big takeaway and I urge everyone. It's like if you haven't made a graphic with AI, go to nanobanana, like go to Gemini, go, go test some shit out. You know, if you haven't coded something, whatever, there's all these. Just start getting some practice, some hands on experience. Do it yourself. Don't touch, talk about it or delegate it, actually do it. Because then your brain starts to do this whole rewire game, you know, and yeah, who knows where it goes from there.

And I think devs have had kind of the run of the world for a long time because it's so miss. They're almost like wizards. Like nobody understands how magic works. But code is not magic, it's just, it's just characters on a screen and when you start learning what they do and you don't have to know what every single stupid thing does when you start understanding how to think as a machine thinks you can build as a machine builds and design things like literally anything becomes possible. It's just can we figure it out or not?

It's so damn cool. Yeah, I know you've already talked about a lot of exciting things. I like to ask is it end? But it's like what's one thing that's just lighting you up for this, this year to come starting it out fresh right now?

Yeah, I mean I'm getting into the platform game, you know, I think all the most successful companies in the world are a platform of some sort. So that puts me in a possibility of creating that next platform that changes the world and empowers SMBs to, to, to compete with the biggest companies in the world solid because you take that speed and, and creativity advantage and you multiply it times millions, and all of a sudden, like, enterprises can't keep up with you because they're too slow. By. By their nature. It's like the difference between a DAO and an enterprise. You know, it's like that, that whole conversation.

Well, you're. And it's literally changing lives, like, people who will feel it, you know, the entrepreneurs in both time, wealth creation, their teams and families, all beyond.

So this is the window. Give me a messy middle. So you better lead it because. Yeah, for a minute.

Well, I'm rooting for you, brother. So thank you very much, and we'll do it again soon. Look forward to Phoenix, but.

Yes, sir. Thank you, everybody.