I Built a FREE App That Runs Your Entire Business

So there's really only one thing that's been getting me pretty fired up lately about AI these days, and that's building, building tools and workflows and little optimizers and little bespoke apps for myself, things like that. If I'm being totally honest, I'm kind of over video generators and image models and even like the latest large language models. They all kind of feel just like marginal improvements to me. They don't feel like that big of a deal. I am bored. And although I did just make a video claiming that not all industries are dead in the face of AI, the SaaS businesses, well, those are ones that might be in a little bit of trouble. In this video, I wanna show you how to make the ultimate productivity app that combines a ton of manual things that you're probably already doing every day. This is actually a dashboard that I built in my own business that is kind of the single tab that I have open all day long that's running everything for me, but I'm gonna build it Starting from scratch on this video, and I'm going to take you through each feature step by step. And at the end, I'll even share the whole like GitHub page with you so you can just like download it and run it yourself if you want. Anybody who's ever wanted to have one single dashboard where they literally manage everything in their business or even everything in their life, this one's for you. And this one's pretty insane. Let's dig in. So this is what I call my Wolfe Control Tower. I actually previewed this in a livestream that I did recently. where I went into a deep dive and showed everything this does. But here's the quick, quick overview of my current dashboard. So in my dashboard, since I make videos that break down all the latest AI news, I have, well, a news dashboard. My AI Intel section here pulls in all of the latest news from pretty much every single lab that's working on AI, plus websites like TechCrunch and The Verge and sites that cover AI a lot. I also have a newsletter tab. I basically made it so my little dashboard here is subscribed to like every AI newsletter out there. I also have my brand dashboard. This is like my Google Alerts, right? I have it watching for any mention of Future Tools, any mention of Matt Wolfe, any of my social handles. Anytime any of that is mentioned, it finds it and it brings it to me. I have this reminders tab, which is actually hooked up to a Chrome extension so I can save stuff from around the web and it brings it back to me. And I can even put notes in here. On why I saved it in the first place. And then I can organize this stuff into folders. I have an Audience tab here where I can track my audience growth across all of the social media platforms. And then I have my Sites tab here where I can get a quick snapshot of how my various websites are doing. But in this new dashboard, we're going to build one from scratch, and I'm going to even add some additional features to it. So as I walk through building this, think about the dashboard that you would build. Just Take the elements that would be useful to you and your life or business, use those, and you can ignore the other parts. So to build this, I'm going to use the ChatGPT app, and specifically I'm going to make sure I'm in Codex because it's going to be building a lot of code. I'm going to start by creating a new project, so I'll click on the plus here and we're going to create this as a local project here. I'll just call it Control Center. And then for source folders, I'll go ahead and click in this box. I have a folder on my computer called Code where I store all of my projects, so I'm going to go ahead and create a new folder here. And I'm going to call it Control Center. We'll create this new folder and we'll open that. Then I'll go ahead and create the project. I'm going to use 5.6 SOL-High because I know that's going to do a decent job building this out. But use the best model you have access to, at least for the initial build out. You can actually lower which model you're using once you start just tweaking features and making small changes. But for the initial build out, I personally like to use the best model I have access to. All right. So I'm going to go ahead and give this a prompt. And with my initial prompt, I want to sort of build the bones. We're going to lay the groundwork. We're not going to make sure every single bit of functionality is working from the very, very start. We're just going to get that rough draft going, and then we're going to go and build the functionality for each thing. I want to build a business dashboard where I can keep up to date with all the latest news in my industry. I want a reminder section where I can save stuff to that section from around the web. I want a page that has an audience tracker that tracks my social media stats I also want a newsletter page, and I also want a page that has a task list. And I want each of these to be in their own separate tabs. This app can have access to my Granola, Gmail, Google Calendar, Slack, basically anything that I've got a plugin installed for. It can have access to that to help keep this dashboard up to date. So that's my initial prompt. A lot of this stuff isn't gonna work out of the box, like the Gmail account, but I have a feeling a lot of it will work from the very beginning. And it's probably gonna take a little while to go ahead and build this out. It's gonna be a pretty big initial build out. And then once this is done, we'll start dialing in each little thing individually. A few moments later. All right, so it took about 15 minutes. It looks like most of what's here already is kind of filler content, but you can see it created a Today tab. We've got our Industry tab. So it has an article from the information. So if I pull this open, the link doesn't work. So that's not set up yet. We've got our Mentions. Is this an actual link? No, none of these are. These links work either. All right. So reminders, right now you can save things to it manually. We've got our audience tab. Newsletters has a setup guide that is not working yet. And then we've got our task list and our task list seems to be working. So we've got the bones of our newsletter now. I'm gonna switch this back over to SOL-HI. So we're using our better model. So I'm gonna give it that additional context and have it continue to build Later. Okay, so it's been a while. I went back and forth with OpenAI quite a bit and decided let's just like skip over all of the back and forth of me saying this isn't working, fix this. I found another issue that needs to be addressed and all other wordings of that. And yeah, so several hours later, as you can see, worked for 20 minutes, worked for 23 minutes, worked for 31 minutes, worked for 2 hours and 37 minutes. And after all of this back and forth, I finally got it to work. I finally feel like I have a dashboard worth showing off. And here's what it looks like. But I just realized I need to fix one more thing. Let's add a dark mode so you can toggle between light and dark mode. And let's make dark mode the default because I'm not a psycho. I somehow skipped over like the most important feature. All right, dark mode is now the default. Civilization preserved. Perfect. All right, so let me give you a quick tour of the dashboard I built and then walk you through how you can just take this and use it yourself if you want. So the first screen you're gonna see is the Today screen. This is like a customizable screen where you can add your task lists and a daily brief of what you wanna see on this homepage here. Quite honestly, on my dashboard, I almost never look at my daily brief, but it's there. I kind of like to go through the individual modules. So we have an Industry module here and we can see that it surfaced 22 things that it thinks are important now for me to review. If I look in my settings, this is based on my industry settings. I have it watching OpenAI for me, Anthropic, and DeepMind, as well as watching the internet for keywords like AI, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and neural network. Obviously, if you were to use this dashboard, you would set these sources up to whatever you want to track, and then that's what surfaces the sources you see on this page. And right now, this is sorted by what the app determines is most important, but you can sort it by newest first, and it will now show me in order of the newest articles. So this article's from 16 minutes ago, 1 hour ago, 2 hours ago. We can sort it by oldest first, and we can sort it by watched sites first. So it's gonna specifically focus on just the URLs that you plugged into the sites to watch as the sort of first order news here. We can click this little link here to open up the article in a new tab and read the news. We can click this little button here and it will save it to our reminders folder. And when we save one of these to the reminders folder, Well, it becomes something that we'll be looking at again later. Or as you go through a news review, this is something I do daily. I skim all the news it uncovers for me, and as I read the news, I archive it when I'm done reading it. Once an item has been archived, it then shows up under the archived folder. So they're not gone completely. They just no longer show up under your important now list. You've got your @mentions page. This is basically like a Google Alerts, but way better. It, it makes sure that it It is finding stuff about you or your brands and filtering out stuff that's obviously not about you. So for example, Matt Wolfe is actually kind of a common name. Like there's a golfer named Matt Wolfe. There's a real estate agent named Matt Wolfe. I run into all these other Matt Wolfs on the internet all the time. Well, this is smart enough to know which ones are me and which ones aren't, and only pulls the relevant stuff forward. And the same functionality works here. There's this podcast, Everyone Sounds Like ChatGPT Now, Including You. And it's got a high confidence that it's actually about me. I can open this in a new tab here and see this podcast that I did with Joe Fear on his podcast. Once I've reviewed this, I can click the archive button and then it shows up in the archive and history section. So now on a daily basis, I'm keeping up with all of the industry news that's going on in the AI world. Plus I'm watching for any mentions of me, my brand, my website, whatever. It's not just looking for Matt Wolfe, it's also looking for mentions of futuretools.io. We can see this page here is showing the builtwith.com for futuretools.io, and it shows all of the various scripts that are running on Future Tools. But now that I've reviewed it, let's go ahead and archive it. And then we have our reminders tab where anything that I wanted to remember from the industry or mentions page will get popped into the reminders tab so I can review it again later. But I can also manually add stuff to the reminders. So save another thing. Let's say I come across a tweet that I really want to remember. I could type in the URL of the tweet here, a little note about why I saved it, and it will save it right here as a reminder. And I could come back and view my reminders whenever I want. I also created an audience tab. This audience tab is based on another setting. So if I jump back to my settings here, go to audience, you can see that you can plug in a YouTube profile, X profile, Instagram profile, Facebook, LinkedIn, Threads, or TikTok. And you can even add multiple of these profiles if you want. It's gonna watch all of those profiles, tell you the audience size of each, and then show you the growth. Now, Right now it's waiting for a baseline, and then in 24 hours it's going to show the growth from the baseline that was there previously. And then of course it's going to total up all of your social media subscribers across all platforms here. We also have the Newsletters tab, which I'm going to skip past for a second. We'll come back to that. And we have the Tasks tab, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's a task list app, but we can add a task and let's just say, you know, review industry news. And let's say I want to do that every day. I can make that due today, but make it a daily recurring task. Add my task here. When I check it off, we can see one task is complete for the day, but it added a new one with a due date of tomorrow. It doesn't have to be a recurring task. I can just say, review the contract that Dave sent over and add it as a one-time task. And when I check that one off, we could see it removes it from our task list, adds it to our list of completed tasks. And we can see that we've done 100% of the tasks that we've added for today. Very, very simple task list, something I'll probably build out more in the future. And then we've got the newsletters tab, and this is something that's really cool that I built for myself in my original dashboard that's been really, really helpful. Pretty much every AI newsletter you've ever heard of, I am subscribed to, but this tool reads the newsletters for me and pulls all the news to me so I don't actually have to click through every single email, but it does take some setup. So I'm going to go ahead and click on Open Settings. And the first time you do this, you will have to set this up, but it only needs to be done once. You need to set up a Google OAuth client secret. So click on Open Google OAuth Credentials to grab our client secret here. So click on this little link, it'll open this credentials page in a new tab. We're going to click on Create Credentials, click on OAuth client ID here. Application ID is a web application. We can call this Control Center. Now for this, you could skip over the authorized JavaScript origins, but under authorized redirect URIs here, click on Add URI and then jump back to the Control Center. And here's the URL you want to copy and paste right here. I know it's very small on my screen, but go ahead and copy this URL right here, and then you'll paste that into your authorized redirect URI and then click Create. And then right here it will give you a client secret. Go ahead and copy that client secret, click OK, jump back to your Control Tower, and we're going to paste that client secret right here. We also need the client ID that's showing up right here, so we'll go ahead and copy that. We'll paste that into our Google OAuth client ID. And once you have your secret and your OAuth client ID connected, go ahead and click Save and Choose Gmail Account, and it'll bring you to this page where it asks which Gmail account you want to connect to watch for news from. Now I actually created a Gmail account just for opting into newsletters. So nothing else goes to those Gmail accounts but the newsletters I opt into. So I'm going to select that newsletter inbox that I created, and you'll probably get this screen that says Google hasn't verified this app yet. Don't worry about it, it's safe. Just click Advanced, go to Dashboard Newsletter Watcher. You'll get this screen, and then we'll click Continue, click Continue on the next page, and now your Newsletter Watcher is set up. If I click on Newsletters now, it's going to check those inboxes for any emails that have come across and it found a security alert because we just connected a new app to it. But then you can also see it found these newsletters, the AI Pulse, Byte Byte Go, TLDR AI, Alpha Signal, Superhuman, Ben's Bytes, etc. And it's going to watch these newsletters for me. I can add it to my reminders page or I can directly open one of these emails inside of Gmail itself. But I don't want this to just be a secondary inbox for me. I actually want it to read the emails for me and bring the news to my attention that it sees in the emails. So I'm actually going to fix that real quick. And after a quick prompt here, and by quick prompt, I mean a prompt that ran for another 41 minutes, it's actually now reading all of the emails for us and deduplicating any of the news. Now we can see there is 48 newsletters that it's watching. That's actually 48 newsletter issues. The inbox probably had multiple days worth of newsletters in it that it was watching. So some of the newsletters we might have gotten multiple issues from, and it found 156 active stories. And this is after deduplication. So if multiple newsletters reported on the same story, it deduplicated them and only shows them as one story here. But we can see here that, you know, Anthropic releases Claude Academy online learning platform. This one looks like it was mentioned in the AI Pulse, Ben's Bytes, and Superhuman. I can send it to my reminders or I can open the source of this news, which is the academy.claude site here. So we can actually see which newsletters it came from. We can remind ourselves of them. We can archive them after we've reviewed them. We can open the source, and this little newsletter evidence here will open the original email that this came from. Now there's a few settings I want to show you. So when I jump into the settings page here, here's how you really get this dialed in. Under General, you can name it whatever you want. Right now it's currently named Control Center, but obviously name it whatever you want. Under the Industry page, you can give it some details about what matters in the industry, so you can kind of explain, I want news about this. The stuff that's important to me is this. So for example, when I do AI news, I like to say AI news that allows us to do new things that we couldn't do before and major technical advancements. Those are the things that are important to me. You can tell it how many target articles you want it to find. I have it set on 30. You can track specific sources. These are my examples, OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind. You'll probably have a lot more. In your industry. You can give it some tags you want it to look for, so it will try to find news that includes these tags outside of these tracked sources. And you can also add excluded topics that you're not interested in following. Now under the Mentions tab, this is where you're going to add things that you want your mentions or Google Alerts kind of thing to alert you of. So for me, I put Matt Wolfe, Future Tools, and Mr. Eflow, which is my social media handle. Under Official Websites, I've got futuretools.io and mattwolfe.com. I'll also add ucbench.com to make sure it Yeah! You can also make sure it excludes mentions that are not related to you. So for me, there's a new show where David Harbour is playing a character named Matt Wolfe. I can make sure that it ignores anything related to David Harbour. It's also got identity-aware filtering, so it will reject things that it doesn't think are correlated with you and exclude your own website. So if you add new blog posts or anything like that, it's not going to find them and say, look, this is what we found that's new about you. For the newsletters tab, we've already set that up. For your audience tab, again, you can set up all of these social media accounts, but you can also add multiple. So if you do have multiple X accounts, multiple YouTube accounts, multiple Instagram accounts, you can add them all and it will track all of them. And if you want this to do an even better job at filtering and finding more and more relevant news, you can actually give it an AI API key. Now you do not need to connect this to OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini or any of the AI models, and it will do everything I just showed you. The current version that I showed you is not connected to an AI model. However, if you do give it an API key to one of these models, it will work even better. It will work better at filtering and making sure that the news is very, very relevant to you and what you're looking for specifically. So if you're comfortable giving it an API key, you can do that. I'm going to go to my OpenAI API keys here. You can see you go to platform.openai.com/api-keys Create a new secret key, and I'm going to call this one Control Center Demo. Leave it on all permissions and create a secret key. Now I am going to delete this key after I demo this, but we'll copy this key, jump back to our Control Center, paste this in, and we'll have OpenAI be selected as our active provider. Now if I save my settings, we can see our OpenAI key is configured. And now when I click back to my industry tab here, you can actually see it says OpenAI Assisted. Now the AI model is actually helping us decide what is most important on the list. We're getting a better ranking of importance and we're getting a little AI summary here of each thing. So Stability AI raised $76 million, blah, blah, blah. And we can just see why it decided to pull that forward for us. And that's the full tour of the Control Center dashboard that I built. Now, again, I built this so anybody can use it and install it. It's completely free. If you go over to GitHub, you can actually find this. It's at github.com/mattwoelfel. Mr. Eflow's Control Center here, and here's the easiest way to install it. Literally grab this URL, just copy this URL to the Mr. Eflow slash Control Center. It will also be down in the description of this video. Open up the Codex app or Claude Code or whatever your sort of harness of choice is. Create a new project, make it a local project, name it whatever you want. I'm going to call it Control Center Demo, and then click Add Folders Codex Can Read and Edit. Save it wherever you want on your computer. I'm going to create a new folder called Control Center Demo. Click Create, and then we'll open this folder. Yes, it's going to be empty. That's totally fine. So I'll create the project. You don't need to use our particularly strong model. So if you use even like 5.6 Luna here, I can say clone this repo for me and then paste in the URL to the GitHub, hit Enter, and it's going to copy all of the files on your computer locally for you. It took 7 seconds to clone it. And then what I want to do is I want to make sure it's actually going to be able to run. So I'll say install any necessary dependencies to make sure this runs properly, then start my localhost and open it in my browser. It's going to make sure it has everything it needs to run. It took about 2 and a half minutes to do everything that it needed to, and it opened it in our browser here. You can see this is a fresh install with no settings dialed in yet. So now you go to your settings page and start dialing in your industry, the mentions you want to follow, Set up your newsletter, your audience, decide if you want AI curation or not, and you'll be ready to go. It's that simple to set up. Okay, so after I finished recording, I've kind of been continuing to improve and update, and I wanted to show just a couple more quick updates that I built onto this. So on the Today page, I made it so the Daily Brief automatically pulls in the 5 things it thinks are most important from the Industry tab, the 5 things it thinks are most important from your mentions, and the 5 things it thinks are most important from the newsletters. So the daily brief makes a little more sense to just see like the main things you should pay attention to right now. On the mentions page, I updated it. So if you do add your AI API key, like an OpenAI API key or something like that, it now uses AI to summarize each of the things. So instead of just giving you like the title of the thing that it found, it gives you like a quick AI summary of the thing it found. And it also gives it a ranking of like how important it thinks it is for you. So you can actually sort by the priority. You can sort by the newest thing it found, the oldest thing it found, but I like leaving it on priority because it sort of determines the importance of each thing that it found for you. And then I overhauled the audience page. I thought the audience page was a little too boring. So I added some charts and graphs. You've got a little pie chart that shows like which percentage of your audience comes from which section. You could see which audience here is growing the fastest among all of them. You've got like a little mini graph for each audience to see the growth over time for each audience. And you've got that original view that I had in there in the first place. So it's just like a cooler, cleaner looking audience page. On the newsletter page, I updated some features here where you can actually search for headlines, but it's now also using AI if you did add an API key. So you can sort stories by priority, newest or And the priority is basically the AI reads through these news stories and then gives it a priority sort of score. You could also filter by specific newsletters if you want. So let's say you wanna see just what The Rundown newsletter found for you. You can select The Rundown and it filters it down to just 18 stories that were pulled from The Rundown specifically. Maybe you learn over time that that's the newsletter that you get the most value out of and you can filter down to just those and look at just those topics if you want. And then when I jumped into settings for the AI, originally just had OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Gemini. Well, now I added the ability to use Groq if you want. But if you want to use a local model and keep this completely offline, I'm giving you those options as well. You can connect it directly to LM Studio or Ollama if you have one of those set up to run local models. So you don't even need to connect to a cloud provider to run this whole system if you don't want anymore. And I updated this model section here So if you do have OpenAI set as your cloud provider, you can pick which model you want to use specifically to have it run the AI automation. GPT-5 Mini is the default because it's sort of like the best balance between doing its job and cost. But I mean, if you really, really want to be using like the state-of-the-art GPT-5.6 Sol, you can, and it will do it for any of these. So if you plug in Anthropic, Google Gemini, or an xAI API key, it will show you those models as well. So just wanted to make some cool quality of life updates that make this control center even better. And even after this video is live, I'm going to keep on improving it and building on it and making an even cooler control center. So the version that you download off of GitHub and install after watching this video may even end up being better than the version you saw in the video, because this is just too much fun for me. Okay. One more bonus tip. As we built it right now, you have to run it on your localhost and you need to fire up the localhost every time you want to use it, and you have to use it only from the one computer that you installed it on. If you're using ChatGPT and you have one of the existing paid Pro plans, you can host it on ChatGPT's servers for no extra charge, and then you can actually access this dashboard from anywhere you want, like not just the computer that you originally installed it on. So if you give a prompt inside of ChatGPT, make sure you're in the same project and say build this entire project on and then tag @sites and then hit enter, it'll build the whole thing on ChatGPT servers for you. And you can see it did take about 21 minutes, but it gave us a URL. So if I copy this URL, I'm actually going to open it inside of Chrome here, paste it in here, and it's going to ask me to log in through ChatGPT. So I'm the only one who can access it because I have to log in with my ChatGPT to access it. But you can see I now have a URL that's online that I can go to, so I can actually check out this site from mobile or from my laptop in a hotel room and stay on top of everything. Now I do have to None of my settings are dialed in on this new version, but I have a fully online version that I can use of this dashboard now. So just wanted to share that bonus tip if you're a ChatGPT paid customer. But that's what I got for you today. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you like videos like this and you want to learn really cool ways to use AI, or if you want to stay up with all of the latest AI advancements, every Friday I put out a video where I break down everything that's happened in the world of AI. I'll drink from that fire hose all week long, find all the news that I think is important, and share it with you. with you in just one video, so you don't need to try to keep up with it on a daily basis. I keep myself overwhelmed so you don't have to. That's kind of what I do with this channel. If that's something that you think will be interesting to you, maybe consider liking this video and subscribing to this channel. As of the release of this video, I think I'm hitting like a million subscribers like right now, probably like the day this is coming out. So I really, really appreciate everybody who subscribed to this channel and helped me like make my dream come true of Being able to create content and play with tech for a living. This has just been the most exciting thing in the world and just a wild ride. So thank you, thank you so much to everybody who tunes in and watches these videos and comments and interacts and who's clicked that like button and clicked that subscribe button. It has been such a cool ride and I can't thank you enough. And thanks again for watching this video and nerding out with me once again. I really, really appreciate you and hopefully I'll see you in the next one. Bye-bye. Bye.