Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Talking to Claude about your business is actually pretty dangerous.
I do it a lot and I've done it enough now to see that you think about AI's job like its job is to like give you an answer and be decisive. But the job of a coach is to ask you questions and help you think through a problem.
You don't need a coach to tell you how to do a thing anymore. And that's where I would, I would guess like cool courses are, are just getting decimated.
Hey guys. Today I'm joined by Colin Gray. Colin, how's it going?
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Good, thanks Craig. Yeah, excited to be here. How you getting on today?
[00:00:39] Speaker A: Good. I started running again. I know you're a big runner. I started running again and signed up for the half marathon here in Newport in October. So we're like 12 weeks out today. So like things are getting real, including like the aches and pains of my 46 year old body. Um, but it's good.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: 12 weeks is almost the kind of standard training plan, isn't it? So yeah, you've got, that's good, that's plenty of time to, to get fast. Have you got a goal? Do you have, do you get competitive about these things?
[00:01:09] Speaker A: I do. I'm ultra competitive with this kind of stuff. So I've done a lot of this like in the past. I was the kind of fat kid in high school. In college I got a little more fit and then after college I started doing like triathlon, ultramarathons, all this kind of stuff.
I've run and done a ton of like cardio stuff. I would love to break two hours. I'm pretty out of shape, like running shape right now, so if I could break two hours, that would be pretty cool. I've done it twice I think before, but when I was like 35, not 45. So like I think actually it was before kids, near a decade ago. So My son turned 14 today. So yeah, 16 or 17 years ago.
[00:01:47] Speaker B: Yeah. Crazy. Yeah.
[00:01:49] Speaker A: How about you? You run a lot, right?
[00:01:51] Speaker B: I do, yeah. I'm mostly hills though. So. Do you know what? I started running in the hills primarily because I get too competitive about the time. I worry too much about pace and it puts me off.
It just kind of stresses me out and stops me going out because I always feel I have to go hard or nothing and therefore I generally hate it.
So I started running in the hills because pace doesn't matter because it's completely pointless when it comes to ups and downs. And, and I love it now actually. Yeah, just go and I Just try and explore. Just try and go somewhere new at least every two or three runs and see something brand new. So yeah, that's how I do it these days. But I'm keen on doing a couple of events sometime soon actually. It'd be good to get back and do a couple of hill running events. So yeah, I could update that when I bitcoin.
[00:02:34] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Cool, cool. You and I are going to be podcast buddies here for a while, I think.
We're given the old like dating try here on you being, you know, kind of coke, a regular co host of the show. And you've been on the show, what, a few times and you and I have known each other for a long time, I guess for folks who don't know you, what's the story and kind of what have you been up to lately?
[00:02:59] Speaker B: Yeah, the super short story I guess is I did astrophysics at uni. Hated it, too much maths, sounds interesting, space and all that, but you just have to add up too many things. Quit that, did web design and animation and video and things like that. Multimedia and interactive systems it was called.
Really enjoyed that and ended up doing that freelance for a while, just making websites for people. Ended up teaching that at university.
So I taught lecturers how to use that kind of tech to teach students.
And during that time I found podcasting. So that's kind of how we know each other. Because I ended up in the podcasting world as well. I started a website called the Podcast host back in 2010, basically teaching people how to podcast.
That evolved into doing production work for people, doing education, doing coaching, YouTube channel, podcast, the blog, all of the rest. And then in around 2017, 2018, we started developing a software product around it too. Because just too many people were asking me how to make editing easier and I was like, well, maybe I can try and actually make it easier. So we built Alitu, which was initially a podcast editing app.
It evolved into an all in one and it was podcast editing, call recording, transcriptions, hosting as well.
And yeah, so that's what I ran for the last, what, 10 years since 2015 really. It was kind of a proper business since then and sold it start this year. So we got acquired by a company over in the us they took it over and they're now running that whole company, the content and the software company. So I'm out and try to figure out the next thing now. But yeah, that's my kind of. I suppose my background is really content strategy, audience building morphed into software products and product Design and all that kind of stuff and kind of a whole thing around digital marketing and digital growth, online business as a kind of over overriding thread I guess.
[00:04:55] Speaker A: Well, congratulations on the exit. I know like you and I have chatted several times over the past few months and after that was all done, I know, probably hugely stressful but very rewarding in the end.
[00:05:07] Speaker B: Yeah. Yes.
Yeah, I'm still kind of processing it to be honest. I can't quite believe how stressful it was, like how much of a job it was. I mean I know you kind of expect it wouldn't be an easy thing to go through but yeah, happy to dig into that in a future episode if you wanted to Craig. But yeah, so much in that. Yeah, for sure. But yeah, for a future one for sure.
[00:05:28] Speaker A: Yeah. It's like a whole topic probably.
I know you have a few things that you wanted to chat about. You want to go first?
[00:05:35] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm really looking forward to this because we always have great conversations. It's one of those classic. I wish we'd recorded that and put it out as a podcast episode whenever we chat anyway. And I've always enjoyed rogue startups as well. I've always listened to long even while we knew each other. So yeah, so there's a bunch of stuff I'd love to dig into with you over the next. I think we're saying six to eight weeks to test out. We'll see how we go. But yeah, one you brought up. Let's get into the coaching side of things. We've both done a fair bit of coaching over the last five, ten years, longer even. I think you do quite a lot now with a few different organizations, don't you? As well as kind of personal coaching. And I've done everything from group coaching to community coaching to individual stuff too.
You mentioned just before we got on the call around the kind of the current tension, isn't it, whereby a lot of people are using AI for self coaching and the competition that brings to to our coaching practice. But equally I've been looking a lot at how to use AI more as an assistant to my coaching, how to use it to make me even better at that. So I'd love to dig into that a bit like this state of coaching and business just now because I suppose anyone out there listening, either they'll do a bit of coaching or they'll be getting coaching. So it's kind of a topic from both sides. So yeah. Does that sound a good starting point?
[00:06:49] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean I think that one thing that definitely has happened is and it affects our marketing for our businesses is the how to is is kind of gone, right? Like you don't need a coach to tell you how to do a thing anymore. And that's where I would, I would guess like courses are just getting decimated and I see a lot of those folks moving to communities instead because that's kind of the value or the thing that people want now.
And when it comes to coaching, I think it's the same. So it's not how do I run a business or how do I run Facebook ads or how do I use AI.
It's kind of helped me think through this thing that I'm doing and more like at a strategy level is how I see like my value.
And yeah, sure enough like I coach kind of two different groups. One is I have like a handful of, you know, private clients and we do one on one coaching every other week for an hour. That's great. Super fulfilling for me and I think helpful for them because like especially they are all solo founders and so you and I both are or you were.
It sucks, it's hard, it's lonely.
And so I think that the value I bring is just like almost being that co founder relationship for these folks and they don't have to give up equity. Actually in one of the situations I work for straight equity and not cash and that's pretty interesting. So got like a small share of the company working for, for free and the company's doing really well, which is, which is cool. Talking to Claude about your business is actually pretty dangerous.
I think I do it a lot and I've done it enough now to see that like you think about AI's job like its job is to give you an answer and be decisive. But the job of a coach is to ask you questions and help you think through a problem.
And so yeah, I just don't think that it's that helpful. Maybe the way I'm using it and I haven't done the thing you're doing. I'd love to hear how you're doing it where like I don't like feed transcripts back into Claude to how, you know, to help me improve, how I can be a better coach. I should, but I just haven't done that.
[00:09:00] Speaker B: I do, I'll be honest, I use it a lot for talking about my business and talking through ideas. I coach it up. Funnily enough, I create projects for just about everything.
So I'll be in Claude and I'll create a project for it and I'LL I'll fill in a bunch of context and I'll. I'll put in that context. Like this is a space for using you as a thinking partner. Like this, saying this to Claude. So you are here, your goal is to act as a coach. I always say that like, so that always gets the impression that it should be, you know, coaching me through it should be asking questions, it shouldn't just be giving me straight up answers. But I do put in that I'm happy to take suggestions for answers as well. Like, I think this is a whole separate, interesting topic we could jump into today too, which is there's a whole range of different types of coaches, isn't there? Like there's coaches who are pure coaches who never really answer anything. It's always just questioning and guiding and helping you find your own path through. And on the other end, it's maybe more of a. Maybe you would call it a mentor more. Who actually do more just tell you what they would do. This is, here's a problem, here's what I would do with it. And then they'll do a bit of coaching. But actually it's a lot more telling you what to do. And I find I prefer a mentor. I'm quite good at thinking through questions myself. I've found it always quite frustrating. This is maybe a personal thing and I maybe don't use the right type of coaches, but I always find it quite frustrating working with coaches who are purely just questioners and refuse almost to give you their opinion and their answers and their experience.
So my coaching approach is always a midway. I will always ask the questions, I will help kind of refine answers. I will ask what people think, but I'll also give my experience and I'll give my ideas. And I treat it more as a conversation than just pure coaching. Does it like how does that reflect with you or how do you go about.
[00:10:45] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that, that's exactly. You know, if it's a, if it's a percentage or a spectrum, I'm probably 75% coach and 25% prescriptive, I think. And I would be curious to hear your perspective. I think it's because the people I coach are just like me, basically.
[00:11:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:04] Speaker A: And so I have direct experience in the thing they're doing.
I think if I.
So one of my coaching clients, they're doing like 20 million a year and I can't relate to them as much. You know, they're hiring VPs of sales and talking to private equity and all this kind of stuff. And in that I am a little. I'm tactical when I can and need to be, but less probably than talking to the guy doing 50 grand a month.
[00:11:28] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Where you can actually just say, well, this is what I tried last week. This might apply directly to you.
[00:11:33] Speaker A: Right? Yeah, absolutely.
[00:11:34] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:11:35] Speaker A: What kind of coaching are you doing right now?
[00:11:37] Speaker B: It's mostly creators, so most recently, I was doing a fair bit of coaching in our community. So when I was still running the podcast host, we had a community whereby it was all podcasters and helping them grow their shows, helping them, you know, content strategy, audience definement, all that kind of stuff. Monetization, that was always quite good fun because it was kind of little. And often, you know, you just get a quick question and you'd write a quick answer and you can kind of see the progress as you go.
About start this year, though, I put a call for a wider group. I said in our newsletter, like, I've got a few spaces for coaching just now. I'd quite like to actually start working with people who are trying to grow a wider creator business. And the kind of classifier was doing similar to what I did and what you've done, Craig, which is like actually grow something which isn't just based around one piece of media. So it's not just like growing a podcast and getting sponsorship around it, but it's growing a.
A business around that. So you're trying in newsletters, you're trying in brand deals, you're growing a team around it, you're creating workflows to create all of the different media. It's a media company as opposed to just a media property, I guess. And I got some really interesting people for that. So right now, yeah, I've got a few people who are all running creator businesses and really just trying to figure out that kind of web of how does the podcast contribute to the newsletter? Then the newsletter leads to this product that I'm developing, whether it's a software, an info product or a community. And it's that kind of whole web. That's the stuff I love doing, actually. It's been really interesting doing that. So, yeah, it's that type of person.
[00:13:08] Speaker A: I saw a thing from Andrew Lieberman. You know Andrew, he was like, morning Brew, one of the guys at Morning Brew and is now doing 10x like this AI consulting company saw a thing from him the other day and he said 75% of their deals come through his content, his and his team's content. Really?
[00:13:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:31] Speaker A: On socials, I want to get your perspective on this because I think a lot of us, you and I, come from the SEO and I know our businesses are about podcasting, but I would say, like, very little of my business value and customers comes from podcasting. Most of it, you know, came from SEO, which is like, whatever, very different. Now as you look at, we'll call it a media brand because to me, like, a media brand is like the formalized, like professional version of being a creator. Do you think that's a viable strategy for most businesses and most people? Things are. Most things people are selling.
[00:14:13] Speaker B: I remember there was a whole meme around this, wasn't there maybe four, five, six years ago where there were people shouting to the rooftops, like every company as a media company. Really now? Yeah, it was like, yeah, I think Red Bull were the first kind of big one, weren't they? They were like, they suddenly became a. They were, they were a drinks brand and then suddenly they became a media company. But that obviously sells way more drinks. Although I think they probably make just as much money out of their media now as. I'm not sure. Never looked at their statements, but I could imagine. But yeah, I think so. Is that what you're talking about? Like, doesn't matter what you're selling, whether it's a physical product, a digital product, a service, whatever it is, you can be a media company?
[00:14:50] Speaker A: Yeah, I guess, like. Well, I think. I think the skeptical thing that I would hear a lot of times is I'm selling B2B SaaS.
Me being, you know, spouting out on LinkedIn or having a podcast or having a YouTube channel is not. Is not an effective or proper way to acquire customers. We need to do traditional B2B things like going to conferences and sending cold emails. Do you think that's true?
[00:15:17] Speaker B: No, no, no.
Well, tell me what you think. But I don't think I ever came across in my whole 10 years of running our podcast company, a company that I couldn't think of a good way to use a podcast. There's certainly gradations of it. Some it's more valuable for than others, but I think there's almost always a way that a company could use media in some way, whether it's a blog, whether it's a video, whether it's a podcast, some kind of social media to use it. Like right down to the. The ones that completely doubted it when I first started talking to them, like, you know, like a B2B employment legal firm, you know, employment law legal firm that's actually a client. We ended up working with, like, they do employment law. Yeah, totally. So did you find any, like, any company that you just literally couldn't find a use for content?
[00:16:06] Speaker A: Well, I will say the best. By far the best. I actually have a buddy here in town who is.
Does, like, coaching and consulting. I think they're the best. It's the best use case for podcasting in particular.
[00:16:18] Speaker B: It's the personal thing, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:16:21] Speaker A: And then that's an interesting thing, because I think that. I'll say the reason I think that works well is people are buying that person. They're not buying that person's company. They're buying. I want to talk to Jonathan. I want to work with Jonathan. And so him having content online from himself about the topic, he's talking directly to the buyer. You used a term which I actually think is, like, the villain here, which is a personal brand.
Okay, I hope that's not what I'm talking about because, like, what I don't want to do is be, you know, I'm 46. Like, I don't want to be shaking my ass, like, to get views. I want, you know, like.
[00:17:00] Speaker B: Craig, come on.
[00:17:01] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I want, like, the way I think about it, and this might be a helpful mindset shift for folks who kind of struggle with this is we're not talking about a personal brand. We're talking about a channel to publish content to our ideal customers. And, like, a blog used to be that, but I kind of think now that's also like a YouTube channel, and that's Instagram, and that's a podcast.
[00:17:26] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:17:27] Speaker A: And that. That's been a healthy mindset shift to me because, like, what I don't want to do is be.
I don't want to be the business. You know, if I'm, like, amplifying the business by creating content, that's cool. But, like, I can't be the whole thing, because that's daunting to me.
[00:17:42] Speaker B: Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. That's what I did with my company, for sure. Yeah. I kind of started out being the personal brand, or it used to be a personal brand of me. I was the podcast host. It was like Colin Gray, the podcast host. But I shifted away from that entirely because I wanted to be able to sell it in future, and that's. That was beneficial over time.
But the downside of that certainly was the fact that I think, in my opinion, there's no denying that a personal brand tends to be more engaging than a business brand.
So an individual person like, you Talked about it before. They are coaching, like as a coach, a teacher, a mentor. They're buying you, they're buying your.
They need trust in your specific, you know, experience, ethos, approach, culture, personality, all of those things. And that's all part of your personal brand. That's the trouble. Like, it's. I think it's more.
It's much more easy to get people to buy into a personal brand than a company brand in that way, because you're just putting it yourself. It goes back to the very overused, like, be authentic stuff. You know, a personal brand is just you. A good personal brand is you being yourself and being that authentic, whatever the hell that means these days. But, you know, it's just you being normal and people actually seeing a bit of yourself in there. And people buy, buy and trust that. And that's the power of podcasting, isn't it, Craig? Like the fact that people listen to 60 Minutes of you chatting away and you can't help but expose yourself like your actual true self when you're speaking for that long. And so I think it's easier to build a personal brand. It's easier to build a personal brand and get people to trust it than a business one. But you're absolutely right. There's big disadvantages in terms of it's then just you.
And you have to find a way to extricate yourself from it, for sure.
[00:19:27] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
How do you see coaching? I don't see the value of it, but kind of like where it fits in the current business owner's mental space. Right now, I feel like AI is consuming so much of all of our mental space. Where do you feel like coaching fits in to that relative to other stuff that we all are worrying about?
[00:19:47] Speaker B: Certainly the way I'm looking at it personally and I think the people that I work with and people I talk to, it is going away, as you said earlier, like, the how to is kind of disappearing. Like, we don't need to tell people how to do this, how to do that. It's a big part of it is that thinking partner side of things, but a bigger part potentially, is actually just the accountability. I think it always has been, hasn't it, with coaching? It's just actually, it's like personal trainer. You don't need somebody to tell you to do three reps of bicep curls at the gym, whatever it might be, but you need somebody to make sure you turn up and actually do the thing you know you're supposed to do.
And I think that's A huge part of it. I think that's why like group cohort programs, you know, challenges, things like that are all becoming so much more prevalent now too, because it's a lot of. It's just about the outcome, isn't it? Like actually you can, you can find out how to do something. You can even use Claude or ChatGPT as a thinking partner and figure out what you want to do, how you want to do it, but it's actually making you do the damn thing.
I don't know. Are you finding that with yours?
[00:20:50] Speaker A: I guess within coaching there's a pretty, pretty clear divide to me between like one on one coaching, which is super valuable. Like I think to my clients, super valuable. And to the tiny seed folks where I serve as advisor in residence, I do a bit of group stuff, but I'm definitely available. One on one Chatted with two or three founders yesterday and yeah, I mean they come in with how they're thinking, we talk and at the end almost entirely they have like, I feel really good about the direction we're going. And I think like I've been, I've been a part of a lot of group coaching. I think that's a lot harder to get out of group coaching as an,
[00:21:24] Speaker B: as an individual, you mean? So like for one person in that group to really feel confident they've been heard and confirmed on.
[00:21:30] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think from a business model perspective, you know, probably group coaching or community, you know, cohort style is probably one of the best business models out there because it solves the scalability of like one on one coaching. And so probably to me, like the answer is a bit of both. Like I would love to have a handful or a dozen individuals that I coach and then a group program to kind of supplement that.
[00:21:56] Speaker B: Does that come down to trusting a person to give you a.
It's feedback? Is that what it is? Is that what you're talking about? It's being able to turn up to a session, have half an hour with somebody who, you know, knows what they're talking about, has perhaps done a lot of what you're trying to do, being able to outline your plans and just for them, Tyler, say yes or no and hopefully maybe even give you a couple of suggestions to refine or improve or even just ask some questions that help you refine or improve it. Is that what it's about?
[00:22:23] Speaker A: Hopefully. The last part that you mentioned to me, probably my best coaching client right now said like, I interviewed a bunch of people and you were the only one who Asked me a bunch of questions about myself and my business and what I want to do.
That's like, okay, that's terrifying for everyone else. But that. That, to me, that should be how it is. Like, I've had a lot of individual coaching, and the reason I like it is I want to be selfish. And, like, this is the only time I can just talk about myself and somebody is hopefully fully committed to hearing and understanding me.
[00:22:59] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:23:00] Speaker A: I think we as founders, like, just don't give ourselves that.
[00:23:05] Speaker B: Yeah. And especially we give that to our employees.
[00:23:08] Speaker A: Right. But nobody's doing that to us.
[00:23:10] Speaker B: And especially, as you said earlier, solo founders, because there's just no one else in your company who you can tell the total unvarnished truth to.
So paying somebody who is at that kind of level, that kind of knowledge, experience level is so valuable in that sense. Yeah.
Agree with that.
[00:23:28] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:23:30] Speaker B: Are you using.
So, I don't know. You said you maybe weren't using AI very much to kind of improve your coaching practice there. Are you doing anything with it just now to help with your. Even the service? Like, even stuff like note taking and being able to send summaries and stuff like that. Are you using AI for anything around delivering that coaching service just now?
[00:23:49] Speaker A: I don't, but I should. Yeah, I recorded some calls, but often I don't. Some of my clients record their own. But yeah, I don't like what. I'd love to hear what you're doing.
[00:24:00] Speaker B: I use granola to record my calls, so I get a transcript of that and I built a system that took in those transcripts and builds a database for every client that I work with. And I use that to generate the summaries. So it's the equivalent of just using the granola summaries or fathom or, you know, whatever you do. Like, most of these services will give you a summary of your meeting. That's totally standard. But the thing I wanted to build into it, which I'm finding really useful, actually, is memory. So knowing what the previous meeting was talking about and the previous one, and the previous one. So my system now pulls out trends quite nicely, like, really effectively, actually. So we'll have. Here's what we talked about in this session. Here's the actions for you. That's standard stuff. But then at the bottom it'll say, here's a few things that I'm noticing right now. We've come up against this barrier three or four times in the last six months. So this is a repeating thing. And I try and do that as a coach, obviously, and I do do that in sessions, but there's inevitably plenty of that kind of stuff I forget about. I forget she mentioned this thing or that thing back then, or he mentioned this thing or that thing back then. And I kind of. Some stuff I don't tie together either. And so I'm finding it really useful to have this prompt for.
Here's something to maybe be aware of because, you know, it's come up again and again. Here's. Here's two variations of the same thing. And that's been really useful to me in one sense. So that's. That's one side of it. The other side that I built in more for me personally, but I find it is actually helping with my coaching too, is I've got another system which then reads those transcripts and actually analyzes my side of it. So like I said, I don't pretend to be a pure, full coach.
I do give my own experience. I do a bit of teaching on there as well. And I like. I talk to my clients around that, like how much they want and make sure it's all balanced towards them. But it reads out the stuff that I give, like my opinions, my thoughts, the way I think about business, the way I think about marketing, all of those things. And it actually assembles all that into ideas and concepts. And one that helps me write, it suggests content. So I write newsletters, I write 10 posts, I write all sorts of stuff and podcast episodes based on those insights. Things that I maybe wouldn't have even remembered that I said afterwards. So I'm finding it's a really good content workflow kind of instigator.
But the other side that I think is actually helping my coaching is it's making me kind of realize. It's making me realize where my more unique points of view are, where my. It's kind of silly to say this, but, you know, it's kind of almost hard to tell where your controversial opinions are or your, you know, the things where you're a little bit different from others, things where you're unique. And it's helping me pull those out, it's helping me refine those, it's helping me make them more coherent as well. So things that I kind of are vaguely thinking about, I maybe say once or twice in a couple of coaching sessions, it brings those up and I can kind of write about it, think about it, and actually turn it into something that's a bit more useful, maybe a framework, even, something like that. But I'm finding That actually really useful to just have a log and a process around bringing out these insights and trying to turn them into something more actionable, useful, refined.
[00:26:59] Speaker A: Yeah, I use granola as well. I like it because it's transparent. It's not another bot that joins a meeting.
[00:27:06] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:27:08] Speaker A: I know. There was a thing about it previously where they were walling off. Does it have an mcp? Are you doing this manually or what?
[00:27:15] Speaker B: No, it's got an API so you can pull out the transcripts.
You can only pull the full transcript with a paid account, so I had to upgrade from the free account to the paid. But that's fine because it's actually really useful. But yeah, you can pull it out automatically that way.
[00:27:29] Speaker A: Yeah, that's nice. That's nice.
[00:27:31] Speaker B: My process after I get off a call is I just load up Claude code. I load up that project Client Assist or something like that. I call it and I just say, just pull the latest transcript from X name and give me my summary, please. And then once it's done that skill or whatever.
[00:27:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:27:47] Speaker B: And then once I finish that, I say, right, do chat mine now, which is a skill I've created to mine the chat for like insights and nuggets and stuff like that. And yeah, so that's. That just all runs.
[00:27:58] Speaker A: Yeah, I think at a high level that's the best kind of use case for AI right now.
One of the things I was just recording, relaunch episode, which at this point will be two episodes ago because the podcast has taken a pretty big break. I was talking about in that I've done some consulting for companies around AI and one of them is a $2 billion company helping their marketing group.
And you know, they're mo. They're moving from like version one, which is like we have like ChatGPT and we just like ping pong back and forth to like, we have GPTs maybe, which are like, you know, a little better to. We're moving them to like, I'll call it agents, but like a thing with skills. I mean, the reason I've kind of gotten off of the like AI news product hype cycle bandwagon is I kind of think, like for now, like, that's the local maximum. Yeah, I just like, I don't think we've seen a product in the past few months that has taken us significantly past what you're talking about. Or you could put it into Hermes and it happens automatically and it runs every day. Or you could do the same with Claude Cowork and put it on a schedule. Or whatever. But like using AI to amplify the work you could do by yourself and have it happen automatically so you open up more of your mental space to other more valuable stuff is kind of like the high level plan from my perspective. And it's interesting, man, I'd love to be wrong. I don't see that for knowledge work. It has progressed much past that in the past few months.
[00:29:38] Speaker B: There's definitely been a tip off the kind of constant growth and constant expansion side of things, hasn't there? In terms of. Yeah, it feels almost like starting to consolidate into. Right. What's this actually useful for? You know, it's all the kind of pushback on the cost of tokens and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, it's really interesting. But I mean do you think. I think you work with more coaching clients than I do and especially across the tiny seed cohort as well. You've got a bunch of obviously early stage, ish aspiring people there who've just taken funding. Like how do you. What is the future feeling, the insight, the stage that they're all at in terms of using it and building it into everything or whether it's building it into the product or whether it's using it to actually just build a business.
[00:30:20] Speaker A: Yeah. So building it into the product. Like all of the tiny seed companies recently are AI SaaS. We need a better term for it probably. But they're not company like you and I built where like there's some AI aspect to it but like everything is AI native. So AI native, RFP winning platform, like this platform like just goes, finds RFPs, generates proposals and submits them for you, like that kind of stuff. Or analyzes a bunch of financial data.
So they're all AI native from a product perspective a lot. And I guess this is where I feel like things are cooling off a little. A lot of what people still talk about are around development and product and it's getting pretty crazy. Like these kind of autonomous loops are amazing, man. Like I hear, like it just watches Sentry. It creates an issue. It sees shit that we're talking about in Slack. It creates an issue. It does this thing, it goes and codecs and PRs and auto checks them and just deploys it. I guess. Like the way I see all that is cool but like that's not the problem anymore, you know, like that's.
[00:31:32] Speaker B: It's.
[00:31:32] Speaker A: It's never been.
It's never been the limitation probably and even more so now as that gets easier and easier and easier. The problem or the opportunity is like freaking marketing. Like, so I look at all that and just say, like, I just don't. I hate to say I don't think that's valuable. I don't think that's as valuable as if all those folks were to put all that time and mental energy into marketing.
[00:31:54] Speaker B: Well, I'd love to dig into that next. Next episode, because that's. Yeah, absolutely. That's kind of the core of what I'm thinking about just now, is how to build a marketing machine workflow that is. I'm not planning to automate everything by any means, but I'm building a whole bunch of systems that give me superpowers and a lot of the stuff we used to do. So.
[00:32:12] Speaker A: Yeah, likewise. Yeah, sounds good. And a good tease for the next episode.
[00:32:17] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:32:18] Speaker A: Yeah. Cool. So, yeah, folks, we'll be back next week.
[00:32:23] Speaker B: Colin.
[00:32:23] Speaker A: It's good to catch up. And I guess if folks have comments or want to chat about this, the best place is for you. Colin.
[00:32:33] Speaker B: It's probably LinkedIn, actually. Yeah. So LinkedIn's about the only social media I've ever done in much work on. So, yeah, just find me Colin Gray. If you type Colin Gray podcast, it usually shows up.
[00:32:43] Speaker A: Cool. Sounds good for me. You can find me there. I hang out on Twitter a little more. I'm the Craig Hewitt there. But yeah, Colin, good to catch up. Thank you.
[00:32:51] Speaker B: Yeah, you too, Craig. Cheers.
