7 Experiments I Tried This Summer (you can steal for yourself)!

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories, it's about the grit it takes to get there.

Hi everyone, this is Julie. Welcome back to another episode of Million Dollar Grit. Today I am kicking off the fall season by talking about some things I tried this summer that I thought were interesting that you may be interested to try yourself. So I'm just going to go through some experiments, some tools, all these various things that I had sort of head down working on this summer, and maybe you'll give a couple of them a shot. So the first experiment that I did this summer was I created my own coaching clone. I hired Brittany Long, who is a cloning expert, and we used a tool called Delphi, and she trained it on about a million and a half of my trainings, frameworks, emails, blogs, etc. And we put that coaching clone in action with my private clients. It's important to know that my private clients have access to me via Voxer, so they don't really need a coaching clone unless they want to talk all day long or maybe on the weekends when I'm not available. So adoption has been slow. I would say probably 5 to 10 of my clients use it on a regular basis and they use it for, you know, trying to get more ideas for copy and angles and things like that. I did do the full plan of Delphi. That means unlimited people. I also was able to create a phone number so people can text me via, just via phone and talk to me that way. And so far I'm pretty impressed with how it operates. I'm, I'm still a little curious about the difference between like a full coaching clone trained on, you know, a million words versus just using specific custom GPTs that I've created. But so far I'm happy I did it. And I think that for people who don't have private access to me, if they get access to Delphi, I think it'll be really valuable. And of course it gets better over time as it gets trained on. So that cost me about $6,000 to get going between the cost of the software and the cost of the implementation, because I was not going to train my coaching clone on a million words. Like, I didn't have the time to do that. So, uh, that's experiment number 1. Experiment number 2, I've been talking about a little bit on social media. We did 12 weekly webinars this summer for FG Funnels, and we have learned so much. One of the biggest takeaways that I can say is that if you are not doing a weekly webinar, you are missing out. They are not easy, but they are incredibly high leverage, meaning, you know, you spend 2 hours a week on a webinar, and 2 hours is generous because that webinar is usually only an hour. Maybe you go over for Q&A, you have 15, 20 minutes where you have to change out the timers and the dates for the following week, but Other than that, it's 2 hours and you can make anywhere from, you know, $3,000 to $15,000 in that 2 hours. So it's 100% worth it, but it takes a lot of patience. And in the world of passive income and making money while you sleep, I think a lot of people, when they hear this idea of a weekly live webinar, they go, well, why not just do an on-demand webinar? And we did do an on-demand webinar for about 9 months. And did it work? Yes. Was it harder? Yes. Was the conversion lower? Absolutely. And, but aside from that, even if you can get the numbers to work in an on-demand, the amount that I've learned by engaging with customers about their objections, about the things that activate people to buy, I couldn't learn any other way. And I do believe that webinars are the highest leverage activity any online business owner can do right now in this market. They are 100% not dead. They are still very effective, but there's a lot of like little details. In fact, I think I have an episode a couple weeks back called the 14 Leverage Points of a Webinar. You might want to go and listen to that if you're going to try that experiment. Also, you may want to hire help, which leads me to experiment number 3, which is not really an experiment because I've done it many times before, but I will say hiring help for hard things. I have been working on my book for years at this point. Probably close to 3 years. It was a very difficult book to write, not because the information is so complex, but because I was blending my story as well as business advice, and I was trying to do it in chronological order, and I was also trying to make it something that would last throughout the years. So it was really difficult, and I decided to hire a developmental editor. And for those of you who know, my book launches October 26th. It's going to be free, and so plunking down $8,000 for editing services seemed a little crazy at the time until I did it. And then I thought, I'm never doing this without help again. And it's just a reminder that when you are doing hard things that take a lot of energy and bandwidth from you and you feel like, well, is it really worth it? The answer is yes. Yes, it's worth it to get expert help. I cannot tell you how different the editing process was with someone there. Not only just feeling like I had an expert's eyes on it to say, this is good and this is not good, I was just no longer operating in a vacuum. And so this is true for books, this is true for webinars, this is true for your business. Really important, hire help for hard things. Okay, number 4, a little experiment we tried over at Funnel Gorgeous. We took a break from podcasting, and I know that might sound funny. How is that an experiment? But when you're on content hamster wheel. It can feel a little like once you start, you can never stop. And we've had multiple people ask us, "When is The Gorgeous Effect coming back?" So that felt really good. It means that people missed it, they want to see it back in their podcast lineup every week, and had we not stopped, number one, we wouldn't have realized that, and number two, it just creates demand. So if you ever feel like you need a break, Take it because it's important and it will actually prove whether or not something is just busywork or whether something's worth doing. And if we took a break from The Gorgeous Effect and no one cared, no one messaged us, you know, no one seemed to miss it or talk about it, it's not that we wouldn't continue doing it, but it also, there's information. So the fact that we took a break and heard from people means, wow, this really matters and we're excited to get this back into our queue. Okay, 5th experiment I tried, which I've done a few times before but worked really well, is when I go away on vacation, I have AI write emails for me. And I know there's a lot of weird feelings about AI doing our writing these days. You know, you can see it on both sides of the fence. People are like, "Yes, AI writes everything for me." Other people are like, "Oh my gosh, all I see is ChatGPT everywhere and the internet is becoming AI slop." And I relate to that. I relate more to that, I think, than the other. I actually don't use AI to do my writing for me anymore. I use it as a brainstorming tool, but then I actually sit down and write myself. However, when I go away and I have a bunch of emails or things that I need to queue up, it's really nice to have AI produce it for me. So before I go on vacation, I'll go into ChatGPT, I'll brainstorm some ideas, and then I'll ask it to write in its voice. And I think that's the key difference. When you are writing from your own voice and using AI, that's where the dissonance happens. But if you're writing using AI and it's very obvious that it's AI, people are somehow okay with it. So I wrote a couple of emails and I said, "This is Julie's AI assistant overseeing the inbox while Julie is away." There was no tricking, there was no sense that I was there. I was not. I was away. I was at the beach. And I actually I got so many responses from that email. I got at least 25 to 30 responses of people who wanted more information about my coaching, and that just goes to show that AI is handy, but I think it's the pretending that we do, like, "This is my voice and this is my thoughts," when it's clearly not. So if you're trying to think, like, "How do I use AI?" Use AI and make it clear it's AI. People will accept that faster than they will accept you pretending it's you when it's really AI. A personal thing I did this summer that was a little tricky, and obviously this is a personal thing, but I changed up my morning routine, and I have been a diehard proponent of scrapping your morning routine for deep work because I noticed that in my life, especially when my children were younger, that my best time to write and have thoughts was early morning. And so I have been rekindling my faith and my relationship with God. And so I felt a pretty strong stirring to begin my day by spending it with God through reading the Bible or praying. And this was incredibly difficult to do because I had trained myself for basically 10 years to give the first fruits of my day to my writing and deep work. The funny thing is, is that by doing this, it's usually only about 20 or 30 minutes. I actually have gotten more done this summer and more things produced than ever before, and I'm not really sure how that is. So it could be a combination of AI, could be that my kids are getting older. It also could just be that, you know, maybe God is honoring the fact that I'm giving him the first 30 minutes of my day and making me more productive. So that is another thing that I've tried that I will continue. And number 7, My last one, I have been dabbling more and more in Gemini, and Gemini is a competing AI, you know, so you've got OpenAI, which is ChatGPT, you've got Grok, which is, you know, associated with X, and then Gemini, which is associated with Google. And it definitely has some limitations that ChatGPT doesn't have, specifically around memory and also project folders. So ChatGPT is still my number one. Gemini has a bigger window. Like, so if you have a Google Workspace account, you have access to Gemini. It has, it can hold more text without losing the plot, if you will. And so when I was doing book editing, I noticed that I could feed it 25,000 words and it would handle it versus ChatGPT, which seems to get lazy after about 3,000. I also noticed that Gemini has a couple of cool features. So if you're working in a chat and you like the answer, you can actually share it and it will automatically create it as a Google Doc, or it'll create it as an email that you can send, which is super handy. Also, when it creates those tables, you know how if you ask it to create a table, it says export to Google Sheets? And so, uh, I'm really liking it. The custom gems, which are the equivalent of custom GPTs, are not shareable, so you can't share them with other people. So that's a limitation. But one thing that's interesting about the Gemini gems is that when you upload knowledge. So you know how when you give a GPT like instructions, you can upload files as its knowledge? You can actually sync it with a Google Doc or Google Sheet, and every time you update that doc or sheet, it will pull in the latest. And so that's also a cool feature. Gemini 2.5 Pro, which you can have on certain plans of Google Workspace, is also a fantastic writer. So if you need some writing that doesn't sound like ChatGPT, that's more professional, I would give Gemini a try. So those are the 7 things I did this summer. I hope 1 or 2 of them are helpful, and I'm excited to kick off this fall 2025 with you all. As always, thanks for listening. Talk to you soon.

And there you have it, folks, another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.