AI Entrepreneurship: Key Tactics

AI wave you’re listening to Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat.: Serial Entrepreneurs’ Secrets Revealed which is a live show we do on clubhouse on the club called startup club, almost 950, 000 or over 950, 000 members. Uh, on that club on that and just that platform and almost a million on all the other platforms if you haven’t already done.

So go to www. startup. club and sign up to the email list. We have so much when our newsletter comes out next week. Uh, hello, Mimi and Michelle, who are also, um, Uh, moderators who run Startup Club here. It’s interesting, but, uh, we don’t often give a lot of updates about Startup Club, and I know we’ve been working on a workbook for Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat for the Start section.

And this is something that you’ll be able to get. I believe we’re going to offer a free digital version of this. If you sign up to the email list, uh, we might only do that for the first couple of thousands, uh, who sign up, but in any case, if you haven’t already done so please sign up to that list to get free stuff.

I was also today with an author at lunch. Uh, I’m not going to let you know. Until we have the exact until it’s until we have him locked down on the date and everything, but he’ll be coming on. And he just published a bestselling book on entrepreneurship. And again, you’re not going to know about it unless you are on that list.

And the last thing about that list is. We talked about when he does come on for 24 hours only, he’s going to drop the price to 99 cents on Amazon. So this is an opportunity to be part of a mailing list that can actually get you really good books for really low prices, because that’s what we are. We are a community, and as a community together, we have volume, and with volume, we can help each other out and be strong.

Well, today’s topic is catching the AI wave, and I’m going to start. First, by talking about how to catch any wave, all right, and then we’re going to lead into AI because chapter three in the book, start, scale, exit, repeat. If you haven’t already, um, um, it’s chapter three. You can, you can refer to that chapter in regards to this particular session today.

Uh, if you haven’t already got it, uh, there are Forbes has is increasing the price today or tomorrow, uh, from 2 99 backups and 9 99 for the ebook. Um, but you know what? It’s a, it’s still very, very inexpensive, even if you’re listening to this in podcast and you missed the opportunity to get it on sale.

But I do want to talk about just sort of tee this topic up before I do that, Michelle or Mimi, did you want to? Say anything about today’s topic before I jump right into it.

I love this topic. This is one of our favorite topics here on Clubhouse. I mean, my gosh, we’re living in such a unique time, Colin. It’s, there’s so many applications and so many waves, I’m going to say, or surfs or whatever. It’s sunumis almost to catch right now. So I’m excited to hear what the members are experiencing and their thoughts on this subject.

Yeah, and AI is very advanced, and we might be all thinking that we’re uncovering the secrets of how to catch the AI wave, but there are a lot of business principles that are universal, and I want to take you back a bit here. I was going to give you a little bit of backstory. I started right out in 1993, and we launched something called.

An Internet service provider, and we did it right out of college. None of the telecoms launched it. None of the cable companies launched it. I know that that might seem strange to you all right now thinking, what are we talking about? That’s the telecoms and the cable companies. The only ones who actually pretty much offer these services.

Well, they didn’t. And so we, we decided to launch this and it grew to become the largest comfort, fastest growing company in Canada and the largest internet service provider in Canada. We literally experienced unlimited demand. The banks refused to fund us in 93 94 95 because they said Internet’s too risky.

It’s too new. You know, this is not something that we want to get behind. So we had to self fund it, uh, beg, borrow and steal, do whatever we could. Uh, and eventually, of course, the telecoms began to catch up. It took about 6 or 7 years before. They actually did catch up to us. Uh, and they already had an embedded user base.

So back in the night, uh, 1997, we did a site called two cows, the ultimate collection of windsock software. Don’t get carried away with the geeky name. It was two cows. We were five. You were five cow rated software. You could download some of you in the audience who might be a little older, might remember that.

But in any case, it became a PC Magazine top 100 website when we developed a mirror system and had the servers mirrored on internet service providers all over the world. And I’m going to tie everything together here in a minute, okay? In 2000, we launched a hosting and email company that targeted telecoms and we signed telecoms up.

Telecoms like AT& T, Vodafone, British Telecom, pretty much cornered the market on small business hosting and email services sold through telecoms in the 2000s. In 2012, we launched a company called club, club, which is an alternative to com, net, org. And that’s when ICANN had deregulated the namespace. We launched, uh, probably about a dozen different companies.

Uh, that I haven’t even touched upon here over the last, uh, 20 years, uh, companies that in some, some cases they, they don’t seem high tech are, they don’t seem to be taking advantage of a wave, but in fact are companies like our Airbnb that we have on North Captiva Island, which before Airbnb came along, uh, none of the homes had hardly rented now.

75 percent of those homes on that island are rented through a services like Airbnb. So what was it that we were doing over the last 20 years? We were identifying a paradigm shift, a technological shift. We were figuring out what it is, the, where, where this wave is going. And, Maybe it was a little bit of enthused, uh, youthful enthusiasm, quite frankly, uh, but but at a certain point, it switched in 2012.

I went to speak on this topic at M. I. T. And at that point, I was asked to speak because I had started scaled exit and repeated so many times that people want to figure out what were you doing right over and over again. And we began to look at those patterns, and one of those patterns was that we caught a wave week.

We identified a technological shift. We identified a paradigm shift. We identified a regulatory shift. See, in the early nineties, people were getting on the Internet. Millions of people in 2000 broadband was the paradigm shift. And so that’s when that’s when that’s when we launched our software. As a service or cloud computing company, uh, and then in 2012, the I can deregulated the internet namespace and we were able to apply for dot club to compete with dot com dot net dot org and then sell over a million domains before we sold to go daddy a couple of years ago.

I mean, at the first and then I’ll keep it going here a little bit more. We did. We launched e commerce companies. It’s, you know, the rise of the rise of micro brands when people began to trust using a credit card on the internet, uh, they began to trust companies outside of Amazon paw. com right now has sold over a million products and has, uh, hundreds of thousands of, of customers who shop on Amazon.

At our site every year. Uh, and then we did Airbnb and we’ve done, uh, uh, many, many other companies as well, all taking advantage of this paradigm shift. It’s sometimes you’ll see in the market, a paradigm shift that works. And sometimes you see it. It doesn’t let’s talk about one that hasn’t worked out so far.

I’m going to talk about meta the metaverse. The fact of the matter is the usage rates for meta is, are very low. The fact of the matter is there’s not a lot of. Business cases for, uh, the metaverse at this stage. Now, it’s developing and I have no, I have no doubt that someone from Roblox, someone in one of those, uh, teenagers using Roblox are going to create the real next metaverse.

And, but I do believe it’s been in a chasm for almost 15 years. We saw what happened when meta went all in on it, and the stock actually melted down. It wasn’t until they began to pull back or pull out of it. I do think there’s other paradigm shifts like augmented reality that have the ability to be a little bit more applicable, and we’ll begin to see what happens with these, these Apple glasses.

They sound very promising. But when you begin to think about catching a wave, you want to think about the wave itself, because your business relies on it. If you were. Uh, totally devoted to the metaverse and banked all of your business and time and energy and money and put it that put, put, put, put in, put yourself into that business three years ago, four years ago, you would be struggling today.

And this is what Jeffrey Moore calls a chasm. Jeffrey Moore, we were, we were lucky to interview him for the book and for the, and he come on on the show on startup club. He wrote crossing the chasm inside the tornado and we’ll talk a lot about his theories through this show today, but Jeffrey Moore. Uh, describe the chasm as a period of time where between the adoption of early innovators and the early, the pragmatic early majority.

Now, let me give you an obvious example. Dick Tracy watch. Okay, go back in time and think about that. It was out there 20 years ago. And it wasn’t until the I watch came along when, where, where you had real functions, like, you know, it, uh, monitor monitors your health and things like that, that the, the digital watch became more mainstream.

The early majority began to grab onto it. Uh, Apple actually had launched another product. It was a form of an iPad that completely crashed and burned about eight years prior. And so if you were developing, uh, applications for that. I, uh, I pad at the time. They didn’t call it the iPad. I can’t even remember the name of it right now.

Uh, but if you were, then you’d be dead in the water. So we want to think about the paradigm shifts that occur in the market. And I’ll talk about a few of those paradigm shifts, um, out there. And we have a whole list in the book, by the way, uh, because you, you can. In almost any industry to find a way to ride that wave, uh, now we are on the precipice of one of the greatest paradigm shifts in history.

And trust me, you are not too late. This is the very, very beginning where AI will mint more millionaires than any other technological shift in history. I, I, I, it’s so incredible. To see the kind of impact it’s made just on our existing startups, the efficiency, the, the, the ability to improve our profits, the ability to get more customers, the ability for a, a solopreneur.

To literally operate a business at a much higher level. I liken it to Tony Stark wearing the suit. You’re an entrepreneur. You’ve got your abilities, but you’re not a lawyer. You’re not an accountant. You’re not a marketing executive. You’re not any of those things. And yet you are every one of those things.

Now, once you strap on that suit, AI is truly going to be a paradigm shift. And there are two ways. We can look at AI to catch this wave. One is we have an existing startup. You want to use it to accelerate our startup institute elements of AI to help us accelerate it. And the other is we want to launch an AI startup here in the incubator.

Uh, we’ve very, very recently, um, launched a company called Pencilla. We invested in the company were advisers to the company, and it’s company called Pencilla dot com P. E. N. C. I. L. A. dot com. And that company is your A. I. Marketing staff for e commerce businesses for 99 a month. All right, so it’s we’ve already now begun.

That was been in development for 14 months. They finally got out to launch and yeah. They are now in a position to win in that particular market, but they’re going to need to do some things very, very carefully because there’s some rules in the tornado. And we’re going to talk about those rules and how to succeed in a tornado in a few minutes.

But if you’re in the audience. And you have an AI idea, a business, or you’ve used AI to accelerate your business, please come on stage. If you’re listening to this in podcast, just a reminder, this is a live show. It’s a little bit of a different format than you would often find in a podcast. Uh, it is a format.

That is live, and we have a live audience, and you can come on stage. We encourage people to come back week after week and come on stage and share their knowledge or ask questions of the panel. Uh, and we do have a number of guest speakers who are coming on to this, uh, to this show over the next month or two.

Some of them. Some of them are in the A. I. A lot of them Our entrepreneurs and serial entrepreneurs who we love to try to crack the code of what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur. Michelle, I’ll take a break here if you want to, uh, but I do want to talk more about the tornado and how we can capitalize on that tornado as well.

I just want to let you know, too, that this is a topic, this session, if you do come on stage, we are using the, uh, this, the notes from this episode to write an article for Forbes, which will be published over the next month or two. So just letting you know as well. Michelle, what are your thoughts? What are your, what are your AI thoughts?

I mean, I just unleashed there, didn’t I? It was quite a diatribe. I know, I know. It’s, it’s a little overwhelming. I mean, there’s so many use cases and so many opportunities. I think, um, you know, what we should discuss is how do you get started? How do you select which direction you want to go in, Colin? And, um, I know in the book, Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat.

You go over a lot of those principles that you’ve experienced successfully when trying to select even, you know, how to go about this. So kind of want to like go over a few points of that with, um, our audience here with the members of Startup Club to help us put together or think of a framework that we could work within.

Okay, so, you know, go ahead. I didn’t I thought you’re finished. Yeah. I mean, I’m just going to read out a couple of things, um, that I think is important for us to think about as we are making our plan or, like I said, just trying to figure out how we’re even going to get there. So one of them is like, you know, Timing is essential, right?

You talked about Jeffrey Moore. Um, for those that don’t know, it’s a fantastic book. It is a classic and it is called crossing the chasm. So it’s about marketing and selling disruptive products, I would say also, and, um, developing them too in a mainstream consumers. So. I think one key thing here is, you know, I, I know people like have grandiose ideas about it saving the world and like you said, Tony Stark and this and that, but there’s some very, you know, easier ways to get started and grow your idea and test your idea.

So what are your thoughts around? Selecting and getting to market. Like, are we trying to get to market with the MVP? Are we trying to raise money? What? What are we trying to do? And how do we actually get started with all of our big ideas? Colin? Yeah, so what we want to do is we want to think about what we love.

We want to think about our passions. We also want to be observant. You know, one of the best things I think you can do to be an entrepreneur is get a job in an industry you love. And you can begin to see issues and bottlenecks in that industry. You know, for instance, you may be working at a at a job right now and you see, you know what, with AI, I could do it this way, this way and that way.

If I add a little intelligence to it, prompt engineering. Maybe a little of this, a little of that, bring it all together. It could work really cool for my company. But guess what? It could also work for thousands of other companies as well. So keeping your eye open, following things that you love and also, uh, finding things in your industry.

Look, everything about entrepreneurship is not going to be all fun. We all know that. It’s a, it’s a rollercoaster. It’s a fricking rollercoaster. It’s hard. It’s very, very hard. We know that, but those are some of the things I would think about early, early on. If you’re, if you’re in the ideation phase, I will warn you not to use AI.

If you’re in the ideation space at the very beginning, but of course, there are times when you do bring AI in because there is a conventional way of thinking that the AI tends to spew out. And I think entrepreneurs were sort of unconventional as well. So let’s jump down to Justin and be, because I, but I do remind me to get back to the, the key ways to win Inner Tornado.

Okay. And, uh, we’ll have to get the CEO of Silla to listen to, uh, yeah, to listen to this episode. All right. But, but love to jump down to you Justin. Nice to see you again on stage. We really appreciate, uh, you coming on stage and sharing with us. Absolutely glad to be here. Glad to be part of the startup club.

Um, so for those that may have heard me in other rooms, I have developed an AI cold calling bot. Uh, business to business prospecting is an essential task, but it’s also like the ugliest portion of the sales process. And by being able to automate that and have it be successful on a consistent basis, which is better than most humans can do, we’re solving a problem of lead generation by either cost or effectiveness.

So that’s my thoughts on how to catch the AI wave is to just look at the same way you do any other entrepreneurial venture, find the problem and create a solution that can be marketed to solve that problem. I’m Justin with the orange beard, and that’s my time. Now, Justin, what’s your problem? I know we did, you talked about it last week, but I think everybody would love to hear it again.

What was the problem you saw, and how did you, how are you solving it? So, originally I created, I was a freelance cold caller, and I realized that the problem I solved was weak or empty sales pipelines. And in doing that, I built a successful freelance business, scaled that freelance business and had moderate success.

And then about six years ago, I saw a demonstration of Google Assistant scheduling a hair appointment. And I realized there’s not too many steps between scheduling a hair appointment and scale, scheduling a sales call. So my job was going to be automated and I decided to automate it. And I started looking at how would I automate it?

What are the benefits? And really the biggest benefit is for guys like me who do cold calling as a task, who could automate that and increase the number of people we serve while decreasing our labor and increasing our income without adding personnel, without having to scale personnel. So that’s our target market.

Knowing your target market and what their problem is, is super valuable when determining this. So I went from a very personal experience. I was a freelance cold caller. There’s 724, 000 BDRs, SDRs in the country who do cold calling full time. Okay. What if we could automate that full time labor and free you up to spend more time doing the emails, the follow ups, all of the things that’ll actually lead to closes and just keep your pipeline full all the time.

So that’s where we came at it from that angle. Yeah. And then AI comes along and that’s going to take it to a whole new level. And that’s, I mean, that’s, that’s what I’m excited about. I think, you know, you’re involved in something today and you’re working on it and you’re working on it. And then you begin to realize, Oh, I can implement AI.

With this, we use a software called rhythm systems, and there’s a feature now it does goal setting for small businesses, and there’s a feature now that they have enabled that that actually helps you write the goals and believe it or not, it’s not as easy as you think, you know, in the book, we talk about smart, specific, measurable, attainable, relevant.

And time bound, but that sometimes can be a little tricky to come up with, and they’ve already done a lot of the thinking for you. You just have to put a little bit of information in and it can make it better. Another thing that we’re seeing another project we’re working on Mimi and I met with 2 developers today of startup club AI and startup club AI is a project where we’re taking.

All of the book itself. We’re taking the podcasts, all these shows that we’ve done. We’ve done about 150 shows. Now we’re taking all of the videos we’ve done. We’ve done about 80 videos and we’re starting starting to launch shorts. Now YouTube shorts will take those as well, and, uh, we’re putting it into the A.

I. So that when you ask a question of the A. I. Uh, you know, it’s very possible six months from now, you’ll ask a question to AI and Justin’s answer is going to pop out for you in a, in a, in a audio version, or there’ll be a, an article from Forbes that talks about this or, or whatever. So we’ve been working on trying to put that together to make it very simple.

The next project is business plan AI, where it’s going to be a free business plan for anyone who’s a startup club member. And the project project after that is press release AI. And by the way, we own the domain names for her startup club. AI business plan AI and press release AI. I never actually talked about that element of catching a wave, but, uh, one thing I did notice, and this is a value of clubhouse, by the way, because clubhouse.

Really, when something big does come along, uh, it really does. It really does give you an advantage. I’m going to pull back in time here on clubhouse history. But, you know, when NFTs took off, a lot of people on clubhouse picked up on that, that shift that that wave and got in early on. I’m not suggesting that NFTs or something.

That you should be getting involved with. In fact, in the book I actually described that NFTs are in a chasm. Uh, and that, you know, again, there’s the early innovators that come on, but over time it’s gonna be in the early majority. They NFTs may take off in the early majority, but we’re not there yet. And um, but the fact of the matter is on clubhouse.

When you’re listening, you began to understood. Oh, this is, this is happening. This is, this is big. And this happened last November. It’s just exploded on clubhouse. And I registered at the time I registered about 100, you know, really cool names. A lot of artists, um, like, uh, like, uh, um, uh, Monet, Claude Monet and, uh, Leonardo da Vinci.

And I read, I registered a lot of those AI. coms and, uh, was able to get some pretty good names. Like, and now I’ve, I’m looking at an AI company we’re looking at, I’m like, can I just pick one of these hundred names that I have here? And it doesn’t cost me anything, but a lot of domain investors have been very good at identifying trends.

And when they see a trend, they managed to corner the space. People have probably made a killing on dot A. I. Domain names, something that was not popular three years ago or even two years ago. But now I’ve seen names that I’ve been looking up for one company to try to get a name. It was like 100, 000. It was a dot A.

I. So positioning yourself. You don’t always have to start an event. With Justin’s doing a complicated structure, it could sometimes just be registering a domain name. And I want to also mention that as we go forward, there’s going to be a lot of sub shifts, a lot of sub paradigm shifts. Uh, all of a sudden it’s just it’s the AI right now.

And then there’s going to be an AI that works around this particular. Industry and then another industry is you’re gonna see multiple opportunities to be able to catch an AI wave as we go forward. All right, and that’s so it’s not you’re not you’re not done yet. And again, we’re very, very early on in the shift of AI.

This is like in 2000 when. Broadband had first permeated out throughout the planet. You know, people started launching things even back when the Internet was launched. It wasn’t until a few years later than Amazon launched. It didn’t happen. So when I say the Internet, I’m going to say, because some will correct me the World Wide Web.

Okay. Of course, the Internet was around much before that, but I’m talking about wasn’t until the World Wide Web had launched for a few years that we began to see these bigger companies come or these ideas come onto the Internet and and we began to see. How it could change and evolve, you know, I’m going to go back to why were was my company in the nineties, the largest Internet service provider after seven years after the Internet started.

It’s because a lot of the big corporations are very risk averse. First of all, most of the entrepreneurs, uh, or entrepreneurial minded individuals who work at companies tend not to be appreciated for that, and they tend to go off and start their own companies. So you don’t have a lot of risk takers in big companies.

Companies are risk averse. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I worked for a Fortune 500 company at the very top of the company. Under the CEO for the three years after I sold my company, and I can tell you they were very, very risk averse, you know, so much so that when they did launch new domain extensions, I went back to the company.

I’d left the company a couple years earlier and asked them if they’d be interested in doing domain extensions. And then they just said it was too risky. And I even suggest, okay, if you’re not going to do any, just do dot bank. I won’t mention the company here, but they had already had relationships with over 50 percent of the banks in the United States.

This is what I’m talking about. These big companies move slowly. A paradigm shift occurs. We jump on it. Enter the entrepreneur. This is when we do our best. And because we take the risk, we’re nimble. We move quick and we strike. And we build I have no doubt Justin. I’m talking to a future billionaire right now.

Your idea is frickin amazing. You should, you know, and you’re gonna run with it as fast as you possibly can. This is a time when you probably do need some funding to really accelerate your growth. But, uh, but that’s what we’re talking about here. I will. Get to how to win in a tornado and based on Jeffrey Moore’s theories and some of my experiences in a few minutes, but I do want to give Jay a chance to contribute to the conversation.

And if you’re in the audience, we’re going to really open it up in a few minutes as well. So Jay. Hey, good to see you brother. It’s been a long time. Um, kind of, uh, walked away from clubhouse for a little bit, but, uh, making my way back slowly. That is understandable. That is totally understandable. Yeah, they made it very difficult, didn’t they?

But listen, I love the AI revolution. I love what we’re doing here. I love what you’re talking about. Um, you know, there’s a lot of opportunity. And I’ll just give you a, you know, a very simple concept, right? When I first saw that AI was available to all of us, I kind of ignored it. Right. We all did. I mean, there were all these different tools we can use and, and, you know, we just kind of walked away from them and one chat GPT launched all of a sudden 1 percent of the population got crazy excited and started buying it and doing everything they could to try and figure out how to make money.

With the AI wave. And I’ll tell you what I’ve found is that people are making this way more complicated than it needs to be. And not only that, but it’s the providers. That are making it more difficult than it needs to be because you know I I want to be really careful here because I heard what you said was coming and I I don’t want to you know P in anybody’s cornflakes, right?

But when you look when you look at different apps that are out there that say, you know You can do this now with ai you can do that now with ai, you know, I created a prompt about God six months ago now that has flown Off the shelves because It’s an all in one. You don’t need multiple systems to be able to accomplish simple tasks.

You know, most business owners, when they get started, they don’t know what they’re doing and it’s not their fault. They started a business because they thought, you know, well, I see somebody else doing this and they’re doing it really well. And they’re making a lot of money. I can do that. What they don’t realize is that there’s a different set of skills required to be a business owner than there are to being the highest paid employee or the best employee in the business or whatever the case might be.

What I wanted to try and do is create sort of that holy grail that all in one, it’ll do whatever you need it to do, because again, that’s what AI is. That’s what chat GPT is. That’s what all of these different tools are. When you start seeing these other providers, they’re not large language models. What they are is using the existing large language model.

So I thought, well, why not? Continue down that path and use what already exists rather than trying to create something completely new with the UX and the UI and everything else. So I ended up taking a course, you know, and you guys can all find it. It’s really simple to find go online and look for it.

It’s a course on artificial intelligence prompt engineering put on by Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. And real simple course, but it gave me the insights that I needed to be able to create this holy grail. And so now it asks one simple question, the prompt that I’ve created. It’s, it’s, and again, I’m not going to put a link up.

I’m not going to get none of that. If you want to talk about it, let me know. But the holy grail is simply a prompt. It’s a long one. But you copy and you paste it, you put it into chat GPT and it asks you one question. Tell me everything you know about your business. You can put in everything that you can.

If there’s things that you don’t know, it’s okay. I’ve trained the prompt. What it will do, it’ll act as your chief operating officer. It’ll act as the CEO of the business and say, okay, here’s some things that we should do. And so we’re going to fill in the blanks with this. It’ll create your mission statement right off the bat.

It will create your marketing. It’ll create, it’ll identify your ideal customer. It’ll identify the mediums, where you’re going to be able to find them. It’s going to help you define the message, but it’s going to go so much deeper. And, you know, Colin, you and I both know, you know, there are so many different forms and, uh, strategies and tactics and all of these different things that a business owner is going to want over time.

You know, at some point, we’re not talking about it today because it’s startup club, right? We’re not talking about exit strategy yet. Shouldn’t we have? An exit strategy. Shouldn’t we have at some point a, um, continuity plan? So if God forbid some disaster happens, we can get back to business very quickly.

Well, most business owners don’t know to write one and don’t know how to write one, even if they didn’t know that they existed. So that’s, you know, again, the, the, the program, the, the platform that I tried to create with the Holy Grail. Is simple enough for the brand new, um, brand new business owner, the brand new entrepreneur who doesn’t know what they don’t know.

Just tell me everything you can. I’ll figure out the rest on my own. And it’ll give you, Hey, does this sound right? Does this sound right? Do you want to change this? Do you want to change that? But it’ll walk you step by step by step through every document, every, everything that you’ll ever, ever, ever need.

It’s not on a separate UI. It’s not a separate UX, right? So, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s just a prompt. So let’s say, I was like, I was like, we could run three episodes just on your, this conversation and I have to sort of focus on, on a few things. Uh, one is, so you’re not a big believer in that there’s an AI for that.

I know I came up with that a few weeks ago, but, and maybe there’s an AI for that is really, it’s, it’s still pulls from three or four engines, right? Well, see, that’s, it doesn’t, it, no, I don’t think it has to. Right. So forget that TPT can do everything. Um, no, probably not. You know, well, certainly not. I mean, we know that it can’t do everything, but it is incredibly powerful.

It can do a lot more than we think it can. The problem is most people don’t know how to utilize it. They don’t know how to ask the question. If you don’t know how to ask the question. Then you’re going to have a very difficult time getting the right answer back Is it the ultimate large language model?

No, they’re getting better and they’re going to continue to get better But as entrepreneurs, I think what’s really important is that we start, not that we figure out the exact perfect every single time, but just that we start, you know, you can’t perfect something. If you don’t start, you can’t get good at it.

Sorry, I’m getting upset. Pi, for example, is specifically designed to be a friendly and approachable AI that can help people with everyday tasks, provide recommendations, and engage in casual conversations. So, while ChatGPT is great at generating text and answering questions, It’s not the only A. I. You might need or want to use.

All right. I sort of fumbled that one. I didn’t mean to cut you off. Let me get rid of her. Let me hear him. Uh, he’s just asking by his opinion of that, which is a completely different L. L. M. Uh, but in any case, I keep going, Jay. I just my biggest. Um, it’s not a complaint. My number one piece of advice to a new entrepreneur or Is to figure out how to utilize large language models, whether, I mean, whichever one you’re using, I don’t know that it matters a ton right now, as you get better, as you learn more.

And as these models continue to progress, chances are, you’re going to switch from this one to that one, from that one to this one back and forth. And, you know, we might switch 20 times before we decide, okay, this is the Google of AI. You know, this is the Microsoft of AI, and I know they’ve got their own AIs, that’s not my point, but, but, you know, they are the Kleenex, there we go, of AI, right, and once that becomes kind of well known or, or universal, then, okay, fine, somebody can, can really lead the way, but I think what’s most important is Is generative AI, large language models, all of this AI stuff, if you’re on chat GPT or any of them, pick one, whichever one you’re using, start getting to know that one, because that one is going to operate very similarly to the others.

The UX is gonna be different, right? The user interface, the user experience might be different from website to website. But if you just stick with the LLMs themselves, if you stay right there at home, you can learn a ton, you can accomplish literally, I mean, as much as you want, you can create your own problems, you can generate your own marketing, you can do all of these things that are going to make you more prepared.

They’re not going to make you smarter. They’re not going to make you more capable. They’re going to make you more ready. And that’s the thing. We’ve got to get comfortable because I’m just telling you right now, you know, nobody’s going to lose their job because of AI. You’re going to lose your job because Justin figured out how to use AI better than you did.

You’re going to lose your job because I figured out how to use AI better than you did. And we’re in competition. That’s where the loss is going to come. So rather than face that, let’s just learn how to use the tool. Let’s start at the very top. Let’s use the basic tool, figure it out. And when you get good at that, then we can start siphoning down.

And looking at, you know, more products, more services, more this, more that. That’s all. Oh, no. I think you’re onto something here and you know, let me give you a, an example. I’ve gotten pretty good now at taking contracts, inserting them into, in this particular case, they use chat GPT and learning how to ask the right questions and then keep going deeper and deeper and deeper under this scenario.

Under that scenario, under this scenario, under that scenario, It’s insane. I’ve saved so much money on legal fees and I hope, you know, there’s no lawyers here in the audience. Of course, there probably are, but the reality is it’s going to be one of the spaces that gets decimated the most. I can tell you that.

And, uh, but it’s, it’s all about learning it. I didn’t go through an app. I didn’t go through special apps. It’s about learning it. And I love that you shared that message. Jay, just please share with us. Um, you said you didn’t want to share the link or whatever, but we would be happy to hear from you if you could.

so much. Show your website or something just so we could learn more about what you’re talking about. You know what Colin? I’m gonna I’m gonna respectfully incline For two reasons, okay one. I respect this space too much It’s your space and I don’t want to do that. You just gave me permission. I can but um, I will tell you that One of the biggest issues that I think entrepreneurs have is being too reliant On service providers, and I made a massive, massive mistake in my business.

I mean, I’m, I’ve been pretty successful over the years, but I made a massive mistake this last year in not properly vetting and my entire, uh, web presence was completely. Non existent. It just all was taken away from me. I’m in the process of rebuilding. I’ve got the website up But it’s just it’s not ready to be honest with you.

Colin. I just But if you back channeled me just me don’t tell anybody else Just back channel me and I’d love to check it out and learn from it And and really i’d love for you to keep coming back on our show and talking about this kind of stuff I i’m going to do something a little unconventional laura and and julian is shadow You Had a thought, uh, related to this particular topic, uh, shadow.

You discovered something that you want to share with us. Yeah, I came across it today. Actually. It’s, um, a chrome extension called chat hub and it’ll it will allow you you to use up to 6. L. L. M. At the same time, so maybe you could post that. Can you put pop that up in the top there? The, the window, I’m not real handy on doing that on the spot.

All right. But, uh, yeah, you just click on the 3 dots and then you can switch it. Go down and says pin link, and then you cut and paste the link you sent me. Justin, you, you wanted to jump in there and then we’re going to, we got to move down to Laura, but well, I, what shadows describing is actually called a vector model.

Those are kind of the newest thing where they’re combining LLMs into a larger conglomerated database. Um, but guys, I just, the real thing I want to put out there is if you’re not on the AI train yet, uh, We are already seven months, eight months away from, uh, artificial general intelligence, AGI, which is going to change the game again.

So I would start figuring out how to use AI somewhere because when AGI hits, you’re going to need to adapt again. And if you don’t, you’re going to be two generations behind. Yeah. Can you define that a little bit? You can’t just drop it. I know you did last week too, but can you define the AGI? Can you define it for us?

Absolutely. Artificial general intelligence is. Different from the intelligence that we have now in that it actually can learn. It can continue to learn new things and modify from the interactions it has. Whereas, uh, generative AI, the current generation of artificial intelligence still is limited within the constructs that it’s set up with.

So if I create a GPT assistant and I say, you know, the stuff from these books, it can’t learn anything outside of those books. Right. It has to, you have to manually put in, you must learn this new thing, uh, for it to do that. AGI is going to do that part on its own. That’s, that’s the big difference. It’s going to be able to learn on its own.

And in the same way that AI helped to speed up the road to AGI, AGI is going to speed up the road to ASI, artificial super intelligence, which can outsmart us. So, for instance, with Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat the book, I can ask it to do an addition to, and it will just do it, because it can learn everything and go on the internet and figure out how to apply each piece and deliver a version to.

I mean, I don’t know if I’d be comfortable with that, I’m just, theoretically. Laura’s like, no, don’t do that. I know, it’s so, no, there is a reason there are humans on this planet still. There is a reason. AI will not take over. Laura, that’s a good time for you to jump in on that one. I like that thumb down, that was great.

Yeah, um, hey Colin, you’re a, you’re an epic person. You and I didn’t overlap very much. We both have spent. Thousands of hours on this app. I’m the co founder of the Pitch Club with Sohail and Sama Uh, and Edna and I, I know you’re super close with Edna, Edna and I co founded Strategic Mindset, also a major club here over 50, 000 during the heyday and we’ve all seen a a dive and tank and churn of Not just Clubhouse, but just the use case of social audio.

Um, but great. I, I look forward to reading your book. I, I am a huge user of ai. I love Jay. I know Justin from him coming on the pitch club, uh, and some of the things that he’s doing. But, um, I think that there’s a AI for everything I’ll be short and AI for, there’s an AI for that. I mean, I do think that.

There are the core engines, right? They’re the core LLM engines that are the brains and a lot of people are building off of that, which is, that’s just innovation, right? That’s part of what, when you, when you create and some are open source and some are closed source and you go to whether it’s open AI, Microsoft or Google, which was barred and now Gemini.

Um, you know, there’s a core group that have billions of dollars invested, tens of billions of dollars invested. And I think that this week I’ll put, if you want, I’ll put a link in the chat. There’s, uh, this week, Microsoft news was, they’re not putting everything into Sam Altman. I mean, there was all that, all that, uh, drama that went on and then he kept his position, but they’ve now found somebody in Europe who’s doing some incredible innovation.

And that’s, what’s so amazing about the world. Yeah. And people, and our brains, and we have, and these are tools. Yes, do we have to understand how to use them? Yeah. But the fact is, is that the millions of businesses out there, entrepreneurs, most of them don’t even have a decent website. Most of them don’t have a lead gen funnel.

Most of them don’t even have a website they still use in Facebook. Because their customers are coming in to them from walking, you know, brick and mortar. And they’re facing this whole online shift too. So I guess in a nutshell, I’d say, you know, if you want to stay on the cutting edge, you want to stay, then definitely lean into any kind of innovation.

And AI is just, uh, top of the news innovation and make sure you understand what’s going on. It’s going on with the brains. So the open AIs of the world, the Microsoft beings of the world, the Jamanese of the world, and the top other tools that people, there’s an AI for that, the pies, the X, Y, and Z, but AI is going to be built into all of these tools.

That we’re using, all of these various SAS platforms that we’re using. And just gonna make things easier and allow us to use our brains. Because the human, human beings are capable of so much. And I, that’s what I’m excited about. Being able to see the next gen of what we’re gonna be able to do. And the problems we’re gonna be able to solve.

Because some of these day to day things that, um, that are not really exciting that we do. We’re gonna let other things, other types of So robots and AI tools do back to you, Colin. And it’s an honor to be on your stage. I know, Laura, we really enjoy you coming on and appreciate it. If you wanted to pin the link up there, you mentioned you can do that as well.

Um, instead of putting it in the chat, but, uh, but I, I wanted to say that. It’s fascinating because we had Jeffrey Moore on clubhouse and he was interviewed for the book and he was on the clubhouse and we talked to him about social audio chat as a paradigm shift. And it was, by the way, it was something new and different in the pandemic really accelerated it.

And, you know, he mentioned that I had sort of thought clubhouse had one and he goes, well, no, actually, Uh, they have, they have to continue to innovate, innovate, innovate, and do what none of the competitors are going to do and what we’ve seen them to do is innovate, innovate, innovate in the wrong direction and the competitors like LinkedIn audio and, or, or LinkedIn, yeah, LinkedIn audio.

Twitter spaces and, you know, they’ve been innovating, innovating, innovating, and even on tray. I’ve been using on tray and I know it’s a small platform for entrepreneurs, but I’ve been finding it a lot of success there. And I can actually do masterclass PowerPoints. I’m doing one, I think next week on the same topic, this actual topic here, we’re doing a masterclass, uh, which is live next three, three o’clock Eastern next Friday.

And it’s the only time it’ll be free to see after this. It goes into the you have to have a pro membership in order to access any of the master classes. And this is something new. They’ve started. And this is our 5th or 6th master class session. Absolutely free next Friday at 3 o’clock on entree and I have no ownership and entree or anything like that and whatnot.

I’m just I just do all of this. Because I love it. Mimi does it because she loves it. If you’ve seen her site, Laura, she’s worked so hard for two years. Michelle has done a great job leading the club as well. And, uh, I know we’ve gone through the dark ages of Clubhouse and hopefully we’re gonna, it’s gonna come back.

Um, Jay, I know you were flashing your mic and then we’ll jump to Julian. And I, I’m sorry, we’re not following the perfect rules today, but I know Jay, you were flashing your mic. Had some comments. I’ll give you a chance to RJ or then we’ll just do your ER. Yeah. I was, I was just saying, I love you too, Laura.

Sorry. All right. We all love Laura. All right. You, Julian, is that the product is that the product? Hi there. How do you say hi there? Iver? Julian. Julian. Union. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for having me here and giving me up. Um, I, I do use, uh, AI in different terms on different, uh, points, but, uh, more and more I’m questioning myself and, uh, even I’m putting questions to others, which are quite provocative and I’m going vice versa into, into a total different direction with my question, like, uh, is.

All of generative AI, different AI tools are going to have a better or good impact into the social area. We, I know, I think we all know about ESG principles, which is, uh, environmental, social, and corporate governance. Uh, which are quite, quite controversial, but in fact, I’m questioning if AI is something good for social in general.

Uh, from, from different points of view, is AI, uh, giving us something like, uh, social stability or making better our communications or relations between people? We people, I mean, uh, it’s good when you can do something better, faster, but is this really improving? our connection as a people, as a humans or mankind.

And, uh, in this, in this point of view, I’m usually asking if the movie don’t look up, uh, isn’t this about what AI can bring to all of us and we Cannot, and we not able, we as a mankind are not able to see cause the, the AI tool is so beautiful in, in good sense of, of this world. And so poisoning for the people, but because we, we, we make next generation stupid.

Yeah. I know this is provocative, but I would like to put some fire on the conversation. Thank you. Okay, we’ll go popcorn. Who wants to take that one on?

Anyone? Anyone? Buehler? Anyone? Nah, it’s like, I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know if I could take it on. I think this is so unchartered. You know, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s gonna be very sad. I was in my car with my son about eight months ago, a year ago. He spent three years doing architectural school and my daughter AI right now.

And she was like telling him, Oh, you’re going to be your jobs going away like the architecture is going away. And I said, no, hold on, slow down. This is going to be a paradigm shift for architecture. It’s gonna be a paradigm shift for, uh, law, but it’s those architects who embrace it. Who work with it, who learn how to harness the power of it and instead of hiding from it, running from it, who can actually face it and and and thrive with it by, you know, and I gave him some examples.

I said, you know, we’ve been doing this Airbnb business and we’re now doing purpose built Airbnbs. On the North Captiva Island, and I say, but there’s no one has done any architectural work around this. You can start to begin design those architectural drawings. You could have 100. You could use the A. I. To help you complete those and you could sell those drawings and because there is some.

So there’s. There are some elements of human creativity that again, I know AI is trying to emulate, but I don’t, I do believe that there will be a purpose, a role for the human race. Anyone else want to jump in? Cause I do want three or four minutes. Yeah, I can just real quickly, 30 seconds. So it’s funny as we’re talking, I’m posting this room and the link to the replay on LinkedIn.

And, uh, and up came rewrite with AI and I hit rewrite with AI and it was crappy. So now I’m copying what I wrote. I wrote something. It’s pretty simple. The link, the, you know, join us thought of the picture, the screenshot and a little social currency. And then I’m dropping in chat GPT and I’m asking it to rewrite it.

And then I’m going to cut and paste it and maybe rewrite, or I’m going to keep what I just did myself because it was better than the AI. But back to you, Colin. Yeah. I would encourage you to keep what you did with yourself. You know, we’ve, we’ve, So I’ve been looking at the reviews for the book for Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat on Amazon, and if you do decide to do a review, by the way, and I do appreciate it, but if you just do decide, please just give me a one or two sentence.

Don’t go to ChatGPT and cut and paste your review on this book, because I swear, I swear half of the reviews are done that way. I really appreciate it. I think everybody. I think humans were actually we’re getting it. What is a Spidey sense? We’re getting an AI sense. We’re starting to figure out. Oh, that’s AI.

Oh, that’s AI. And it’s not. You don’t feel good about it when you see that, you know, when we write when we write articles, for instance, the article to be written for Forbes, it’s gonna be done 100 percent from this episode. It’ll be done 100 percent by myself and another writer. And and it’ll be we’re not even allowed to touch AI.

Okay, so it’s a very strict rules. When you do, do any writing for any, anyone else, and I’ll tell you, if you read the book, the Writing Styles, I mean, I’m not a great writer. I mean, but it’s very conversationalist and it was edited by humans, thankfully, and uh, and and whatnot. Alright, I do, I did promise that we would talk a little bit about the tornado and there are three ideas.

There’s more in the book. I know I can’t do everything in one hour. Um, but there are three keys to success when you are in a tornado and a tornado. Let’s remind you this year, Jeffrey Moore reinvented the technology adoption curve. You have tech enthusiasts, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards.

And then you have this thing called the chasm in between. Well, he talks a lot about the bowling alley strategy when you’re in the chasm. See, if you, if you, if you actually launch your technology before the wave comes, you have first mover advantage. The problem is you often are dying. And it costs money.

It’s expensive. Uh, and it could be very, very, very, um, hard to get investors to get behind you. Now, everybody wants to be part of a success after the after the thing takes off. Right? But positioning yourself prior to it gives you a huge advantage. And I call this the laser beam in the book, uh, when Pencilla, that company I mentioned earlier, the, uh, AI marketing staff for 99 a month for e commerce companies.

Originally, the founder wanted to just do it, you know, for every company. And I said, you do realize there’s a company called Canva, right? You do realize there’s other companies out there doing this. The only chance you have is if you are a laser beam. You’re focused. It’s it’s depth over breadth. This is not to say you won’t knock down other bowling pins down the road, right?

When Amazon started, they were just book delivery and they became the best in the world at that. Once they won in that space, they were able to take on more spaces. So that’s first be a laser beam. The second is, um, make it easy. Okay, somebody mentioned that earlier. I can’t remember if he was just or someone else talked about making it.

It was um, Jay Jay talked about this, you know, making it very, very easy the technology so that the early majority, the enthusiasts, the innovators, they’re willing to use the, the, uh, Doss, ms dos code or the text, whatever, or the, you know, even google ad, if you ever had a google adwords account, you’re like, oh, my gosh, this was developed by developers.

They really didn’t get the concept. Um, but steve jobs got the concept of make it easy and simple. Most. People on the planet are adverse to technology. The majority, the early majority, they’re gonna grab onto it. ’cause it’s, it’s, they’re pragmatists, they want, they want it. But those who make it the easiest are the ones who are gonna get those customers.

The third one is, and this is one that Jeffrey Moore talks about in his book as well. And I’ve used at company after company after company is whoever delivers the fastest in a tornado wins and I’m going to go back again to hear go back to a time in the 90s when we heard of a company called CompuServe and then AOL comes along and they’re late to the game compared to CompuServe, but they distributed diskettes and eventually CD ROMs.

On almost every magazine, it was so pervasive that in our office, we used to use them as coasters. But the fact of the matter is, they distribute it quickly and fastly. They distribute it very quick and very fast. With AI, it’s moving extraordinarily fast. So, for instance, let’s go back to Pencilla. This is an example, so I’m sharing live shit, and I know it’s probably not going to make some people happy.

But, um, this particular company, if it wants to succeed, It needs to distribute the fastest. So this week we partnering with a influencers in the e commerce space and we’re going to blow it out to hundreds of thousands of e commerce companies offered for free. Get them on the platform and win over that market.

And so that’s an example of what we call distribution, you know, in case with, uh, Michelle, she’s the CEO. Now she’s keep doing. Startup club, and she’s doing paw. com paw. com is a company that has, um, done very, very well three times on the inc 5, 000 fastest growing companies lists. Uh, but we realized after the pandemic, we had a post pandemic hangover.

We were relying too heavily on Facebook. This is, this is a products company and we realized we have to expand distribution. So show what she’s doing now is she’s looking at how can she expand distribution? She came on six months ago and she’s already sold about 40, 000 products through distribution, which is really good.

And that’s accelerating the growth of the company again. So you want to begin to think about distribution. We do talk a lot about these kind of strategies in the book, uh, uh, start, scale, exit, repeat and Laura. Thank you for, for thinking about that book. We spent over 10 years writing it 200 interviews, 50 of which made the book.

Uh, we have 58 chapters, 200, uh, about 180 call outs or something like that. Some high number of call outs. Uh, and the book is color coded. It is written for the ADHD entrepreneur, literally it’s, uh, we’ve tried to make it as simple as possible. It’s full of stories. It’s not a textbook. It’s all about the stories, the successes and the failures.

And we cover all of those and we’ve just been, we’re so lucky to have the community, Laura of clubhouse of startup club to be able to track the kind of speakers and authors and serial entrepreneurs. Who the club to be able to put this book together. And it’s a true testament of the community. And today, this show was a testament to the community.

And if you are listening to this in podcasts and or you’re listening to this in YouTube, uh, this is a live show. You can come on stage. This is not a traditional podcast where you know you cannot participate. You, we want you on, we want you to come here, come on stage. Ask ask challenging questions. Help us solve your problems.

Help us run your business. If you’ve done it before, share your experience, pass it on. That’s what startup club is. That’s the community. Thank you everyone for joining us this week. Michelle. If you had any last thoughts. We’ll close it out now on that. But thank you all for coming on stage. I really, really appreciate Justin, Laura, Shadow, Jay, Julian, and, uh, the others who’ve come on stage as well.

Yeah, this has been a great conversation. Um, gosh, I mean, we couldn’t do it without the members, right, Colin? We had so much valuable input, and I’ve loved every minute of that, and I’m looking forward to seeing the blog on the website. Thank you, everyone.