Automating Success: Aaron Steele's Revolutionary Approach to Content Marketing and AI Efficiency

Introduction and Guest Presentation

0:00

welcome ladies and gentlemen I have a fantastic guest today and I'm really excited to speak to Aaron once again

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Aaron steel coming from all the way from Australia thanks for being here how's it

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going amazing love to get a chance to chat again I felt like we've already

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done a podcast together but really good to reconnect and excited to dig in I

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love when guests have a chance to introduce themselves so why don't you

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let people know what you do yeah hi my name is Aaron I I do a lot of things

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guess the stuff that I'm probably most well known for online at least is I do a

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lot of AI and automation guides specifically around content marketing

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automations write pretty regularly on LinkedIn putting together guides basically on how to create content using

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automated platforms such as zap here and plugging chat GPT and things like that into the process beyond that I also like

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to have conversations like this I like to yeah meet new people and yeah just of

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have chats guess personal life standard old married with two kids two cats and a

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dog otherwise I'm pretty normal ordinary person outside of all this kind of stuff

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yeah and happy to jump in and have a good conversation amazing amazing let's

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let's Dive Right into what you're good at how did this all come to be I know you've been working on processes in

Aaron's Journey into AI and Automation

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general for a long time uh tell me a bit about the journey to where you are now

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yeah so it goes back quite a way back in 2013 so my wife and I had moved to CRA

The Birth of Aaron's Business

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which is the you know the capital of Australia not Sydney and which is where she's from so it wasn't a a completly

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random move we were we just come back from an overseas extended holiday and I

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was wanting to set up my own business I was 23 at the time so I didn't really

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know what I was doing not saying other 23y olds don't know what they're doing but I certainly didn't and I set up a a

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business like an online directory which seemed like a good idea at the time um

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it was for cleaning business I thought that that was made lots of sense and had it all planned out and

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obviously that didn't really eventuate like I I I set up all these different systems to to have an automated workflow

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so whenever someone submitted form on the website it would get passed through to to other systems and I pieced that

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all together like zappier was pretty new at the time so I worked through how to

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connect all that up using zap here and just figured it out as I went and ever since then I've

The Power of Automation Platforms

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always really enjoyed using automation platforms like zapia to connect things

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and just make workflow automation really easy and I moved into a career and

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business analysis not long after that and so that a lot of that has been involved with working through like Tech

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problems with people like they've got a particular business problem and they need to

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solve it with some kind of Technology solution and my my role has usually been to apply Technology Solutions to to

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business problems that's a very high level summary of the last 10 years and the last couple years it's been ramping

The Role of AI in Business Analysis

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up especially with things like chat GPT and just getting involved in that and seeing how much we can get out of it

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diving deeper than just write me a blog post kind of thing like actually seeing

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what it can be used for to extract structured data out of unstructured text

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and things like that which happy to get into that but it's yeah it's a really powerful tool which I think like where

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we feel like it's already saturated because people and I are working with it all the time but we're still

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like definitely like Front Runners like most people are not using it at all so

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yeah it's really exciting time to to be involved in this kind of thing I like to

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think that if you're spending any time with a tool you're already in the 1% and yeah if you're

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spending time automating and gluing a couple tools together using things like

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zapier then you're further down the line of probably a 1% of that group right

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yeah we find ourselves in these bubbles of everyone I know talks about Ai and is

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in the in the thick of it but for the most part these are a lot of new Concepts for people I imagine people

The Importance of Automation in Social Media

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listening let's talk about it at a high level what are some of the things the

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problems that you've been able to solve using some tools to automate things for

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people yeah sure I guess the I've primarily worked with CRM platforms

The Role of CRM in Business

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which if you're not aware is for anyone listening is customer relationship management whenever you are working with

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a business and they have more than one client they probably have a CRM where

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they keep all their customer data and usually like in I guess the not that

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long ago like all the all these systems and it's still like this today like all the different platforms that a business

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uses are not necessarily connected in like a meaningful way and so you might

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have your accounting system in one part which you does the invoicing and you've got your your marketing platform in one

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area and you got your emails in another area and your CRM and in another platform again and so all of these

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different systems are not communicating with each other and so you've got to double handle triple quadruple handle

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the work as you get the leads coming through and then you got to take that information out and put it in something

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else work I've done primarily has been streamlining that process so that when

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you say if you get a lead through your website that will automatically feed in

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through to like the CRM it will like populate a lead database with

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information about the lead it will send you know other triggers off to other parts of the business so it's taking

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that one action that was usually used to be manual and spreading the the effects

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of the automation through the other parts of the business so that it's yeah it's reducing the amount of time people

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have to spend on what they're doing and that can be things like automating reporting and um all kinds of things um

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yeah that that's the the CRM world has probably been my my biggest or rather

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longest time spent I suppose and yeah just making sure that everything is actually connected and communicating

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with each other which is which is huge yeah it makes makes a lot of sense

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I know as far as solopreneurs listening that you're either hiring someone to do it as far as a task got to get done or

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you're finding a system or process to make it happen for you

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and people are generally more expensive over time not that there aren't place

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for people in business but if someone's also having to do the same thing over and over again it's probably not the

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most exciting part of their job y I see Automation and these kinds of processes

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as really a win all around you can find

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things that are a bit more creative or unique to a person's skill set that

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maybe they're better suited for versus having them do something that a computer could do yeah that's right uh I see a

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ton of value in in what you're doing and there are some unique things that you've been able to do why don't we jump into

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some of that the last conversation we had you talked about taking a video

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input and turning it into a few different things for a business and this

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was this was extremely fascinating so maybe you want to explain what you were talking about yeah sure the process that

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I've developed basically is a framework you could look

The Power of Content Marketing Automation

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at it with would be like a Content marketing Automation and so what I mean by that

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is there is such a strong need for Content

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marketing for basically anyone who's anyone out there these days like whether

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you're an individual um whether you're a brand it is really the only way to

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differentiate yourself in the marketplace these days is with your content and so recognizing that I saw a need in the

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market um a little while ago for a way to lower or remove the barriers entry

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for how people create that content because when you think about okay there's there's Facebook there's

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Instagram real there's Tik Tok there's Pinterest there's Twitter or X there's

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YouTube and there's so many platforms out there which people are on and and

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should be on but it's overwhelming to go okay I'm just going to I just want I don't want to have to think about all

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these different platforms I just want to focus on one and develop a following on that like I network with a lot of people

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who just focus on LinkedIn and that's great but getting your organic traffic

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sources from all the different platforms with such a significantly powerful tool

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rather than just focusing on one area and the way that that i' I've done that is I've taken the transcript from one

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video so say I I upload a video to the system which called engine which I've

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developed end GN and I upload a video to that and that would take a transcription

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from the video and and send that transcription through to chat GPT utilizing zapia for the process it's not

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like a manually cutting and pasting it in and from that saying okay basically

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the Crux of what I'm doing is saying okay I want you to generate three articles based on the the written style

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of what I've just given you like the transcription like here's my style here's my unique voice and here's a

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template of a good article I want you to write three different articles based on

The Process of Content Generation

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three different templates that I'm feeding it and this is three different conversations running in tandem so it's not just one repeating itself and then

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from that article I then say okay I now want you to generate 10 like statements

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like tweet length statements based on this article that I can

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publish and then from that I refine the

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guess the syntax further to might adjust it for Facebook and Instagram and so basically from that

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video we we've gone and produce three articles which is high quality articles

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it's not just garbage because AI if it's not guided properly can certainly write some pretty crappy stuff but it's

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usually pretty good what what comes out of here basically 30 tweets and 30 seems

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like a lot but it's actually Twitter the Twitter attention span is like 30

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seconds or something so if you're not posting 30 times a day you're not getting seen basically is from what I

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understand like doing a bit of research in that area two to three Instagram and Facebook posts which is roughly the

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Cadence that apparently is the good way to be posting don't want to be flooding your feed in that in that respect as

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well as Pinterest which is interesting one which is a lot more organic and Beyond just the text I've also plugged

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in another image generation tool because like most of these image based platforms

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like Instagram Facebook even Twitter has a lot of image and especially Pinterest

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obviously and so we'd actually would take that that statement that was

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generated and generate like a a hook or something similar and actually

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automatically transpose that that hook or that statement onto an image and that

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can be an image that is templated or actually so it is templated and whether

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that is a randomly selected stock photo based on the content of the article or whether that's like a photo that I've

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already pre-selected or pretty much whatever you want to put in there and

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that basically will then generate an image and then you can send that off and you can schedule all of this stuff

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automatically as well like it just looks for the next available time and and place it so the the net result is you've

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you've recorded one video like it could be a video like this or it could be like literally just you sitting down and

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talking at a camera and answering questions about a topic and you've

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generated 30 tweets 30 Pinterest pins three articles three Facebook and

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Instagram posts and it's all been scheduled and then on top of that you also you can do

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WordPress blogs as well just as an afterthought on top of that you would also publish directly to uh a podcasting

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platform and then also take the the audio from from that recording publish that to podcasting platform and then cut

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the the actual video into smaller sections using tools like off Clips or or whatever and post that out to your

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socials as well and so you've got you're leveraging like a 20 30 minute video or

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an hour depending on how how long you want to do it and you're producing such a a mar of like High quality content

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it's an extremely powerful lever that it's it makes it so much easier to

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create engaging content and then push it out there and then you don't have to

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worry about oh have I posted to Twitter have I posted to to LinkedIn it's all just done and yeah that's that's

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basically the engine service that I've put together which is that's really exciting and I've waffled on a little

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bit there apologies but yeah I quite enjoy talking about it no worries it's it's very

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fascinating I'm curious what are the systems of checks before content goes

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out how does that work yes I built in a

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basically a Trello based QA system which is totally optional but highly

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recommended I once it come once the content is generated it comes into a

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staging list in Trello and so I would see and it sends a notification to my phone

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or the client's phone whoever is using it comes through and says okay there there's 30 cards in here which have the

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content it's got we're generating images the image will be attached to the trailer card excuse me and and you just

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you go through and you would say okay yep I I'm going to pick three of those I'm going to label them those three

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posts that I I really like like they're they're the best ones also going to label those as Instagram and Facebook

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maybe get rid of one or two occasionally some come through that like that doesn't really make sense um but it's usually

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pretty good and then just drop the rest of the list into my twitterpinterest

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list which will then automatically publish it out to Twitter and Pinterest as well as anything that was labeled as

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Facebook and Instagram goes off they on a different workflow so it does yeah it does have that QA step where it is

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important to to check and review and you can edit them as well it's not not static so you can go in and make changes

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if you need to and the Articles come through there as well I use Trello because it's got that easy sort of cand

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style just like Drop Cards into different lists but done any other platform on S just wanted to add that

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I've used Trello in the past for a similar QA for social media posts and it's super easy it's it's so easy

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probably one of the easier ways especially Trello has a really nice app

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that makes the user experience very simple so I think it's a

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good choice for QA yeah I think the uh only thing I would mention about Trello

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is I've yeah I totally agree I love the app as well and I use it on multiple

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devices but I also I use another tool which is like $5 and this is like a

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little tip I suppose called pushover it's like a a $5 app which um

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is like a push notification app which you can integrate with zapia and so once

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because usually Trello claims that they will push notifications to your phone when you get a new card but it never

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works for me I don't know why and I want to know when my content is ready for me to review and I've just I just add a

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little pushover action at the bottom of my workflows and zapia so that once the

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card is is done and is in in the list it then sends a notification to to my phone

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letting me know and I have a link to the the Trello board there so it's literally just a matter of just oh there it is and

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just open it up yeah that's if you're having troubles with Trello not sending notifications to your find that's an

18:11

easy fix I also know that you've been very generous with with sharing you've created some videos on your YouTube

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channel as well as some some lead magnets on on Instagram there with

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videos that explain how to do a lot of this stuff most business owners love the idea but don't really have the time to

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or maybe want to get into the weeds of how to do it on the benefit side what

The Impact of Automation on Business Efficiency

18:37

kind of Time Savings have you seen for businesses across some of these uh

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implementations yeah sure so it's I guess it depends what they're looking at

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at doing for example if we're we're looking at like the engine the platform where you're creating social media

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content it's something that people are not doing enough of anyway and so

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they're it's not as though they're often taking hours of their time each week to

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create content it's it's usually oh something that they're like oh I should be doing this but I'm not and I I just

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don't have the time and so that's yeah it's more that kind of thing is more like here's a way you can leverage your

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time rather than save it in another way and sure some I know some businesses are

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not like that and then they do create content in which case this does save them time but for other processes yeah

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if you're wanting to just trying to think of a recent use case that I had so

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for example if you're using something like Salesforce or which is a CRM

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platform if you're using something like that and they getting their leads into

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Sal force and then they're having to manually work through the different processes and fill it all out you can

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basically listen to get the transcription from a sales call and

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automatically pass the information from that sales call and just put it straight into the appropriate lead forms and then

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also based on the conclusion that's extracted from that you can then push

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that lead through to the right process uh sorry the right stage so rather than

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going in after the call and going okay now what did they say and is this dis closed one or is this in progress

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whatever like it it listens to the call and then we just automatically push it through based on the sentiment analysis

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of of what's happened there so it's really just you're focusing on actually

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closing the sale or nurturing the lead rather than doing all the data entry yeah like that that data entry piece

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like I I did do some some content around how to do that but yeah it's a massive time suck for a lot of people like just

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sitting down and having to input um data into their platforms but you can can use

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your voice to just talk to it and if you've got it set up properly it can

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take that voice data transcribe it and turn that into commands and information

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to automatically put into your platforms so that's that's an exponential Time

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Saver for sure if it's implemented probably yeah I'm I'm constantly wrestling with things that I should need

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to be doing administratively versus figuring out how

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to not do them administratively like the where's the time better spent on

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investing in figuring how to automate something or just hiring someone to have

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it automated or going through the same repetitive process of doing that thing

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it's I've been in Automation and this type of thing for a long time and I still get excited about businesses like

21:55

Saving Time on tasks Chach ke just made that exponentially more interesting because

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there's far more use cases do you find that a lot of the work that you're doing is more bespoke you have to build

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something custom or is engine set to uh work with most people's kind of standard

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multiple platforms and have you got it worked out where it's this is what 90% of people are going to want it for yeah

The Future of Automation and AI

22:22

uh so I mean I've got it comes down to the prompting right so it's I've I've got the prompts

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written in such a way that it will cover 80 90% of use cases like it's not going

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to misunderstand or struggle with anything really I guess if you wanted to

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refine it further I do allow like I do have customization options where I can

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write thepoke prompts for people if they want to have a very specific kind of

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content that isn't necessarily going to be generated just based on the standard inputs and yeah but like most of the

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time it's it's just a matter of here's the context and that's variable which comes from whatever input is coming in

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and here's a template which is another variable and here's what I want you to

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do which is the prompt and that typically doesn't really have to change it's yeah and it's it's always I guess

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the thing that changes is actually the tool itself like they're always releasing new versions They Don't Really

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publish it on the web version of chat GPT but when you're using the API like I

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do you can usually see like it's version 0.1 63 or something like that which

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these incremental improvements that they are always releasing which means you get more tokens you get more more speed and

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more more understanding and that kind of thing so it's always I think a matter of

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updating the tool or the way you're using the tool in order to better harness the power that it that's

23:58

constantly growing yeah like it's most people I think wouldn't need to adjust the prompts if they they might think

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they do but they they probably don't yeah that's that customization question comes up down the road right it's not

24:12

something that you really need to think about out of the gate where do people start with thinking about automating a

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process is it I guess you're it's engine so the they start with the end goal in mind is that is that where you got the

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name so it's actually engine would be like phonetically like a car engine

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drive driving the process actually I had the domain from

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originally say for something else but I was like oh this is a the it's a end

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dn.com nice a six letter.com yeah those are always great it's five even yeah GN no just GN

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GN oh five nice nice one yeah yeah so go engine yeah so yeah sorry what was the

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question again like how do they get uh what's what's the process to think about automation how do you start as a

25:11

as a business owner where do you begin I guess first thing that you were do sort

Identifying and Documenting Pain Points

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of comes back to my experience as a business analyst as well as you want to

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uncover and document the pain point yeah there's the site there might look a

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little different when when people are visiting it but here we are quick shout out yeah thanks I threw that together

25:38

last night actually so it's it was ready for today yeah

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yeah it's a bit of tongue and cheek saying I even PS I'm not cheap I so the

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the you want to be for for any kind of project you want there to be a well established a well documented pain point

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and so if you're not trying to uh if you're not spending money or

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you're not spending resources on solving a pain Point what are you doing really

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like why are you doing it and so understanding what that pain point is so if there's our financial system takes

26:15

too long or like it it it it doesn't do doesn't do this or our we don't get

26:21

enough data to to use this other system properly there there's so many potential

26:26

pain points out there but honing in on what that paino is and then building the

26:32

automation from there and like taking care to have a holistic view on how that

The Importance of Understanding the Broader Context

26:38

affects the broader organization if you're just a solo prur not just but if

26:45

you're a solo prur and you've it's it's just you and maybe one or two offshore

26:51

or resources people that help you out then you don't necessarily have to think about the broader context of the

26:57

organization but when you're working in a larger organization and you're saying okay we want to focus on fixing this

27:04

pain Point like we we don't like our recruitment processes so let's

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completely automate that and just have a laser focused on fixing that if you then

27:16

that's great but if you do that without considering the broader context of the organization and say okay if we change

27:22

the way we we do our recruitment processes here and we ignore

27:28

our HR processes we ignore our onboarding processes we're going to

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lose and I hate using the word Synergy but we're going to it's going to break

27:40

other processes in the organization so it's really we used to take them we used

27:45

to get people on this recruiting system and that had a bit of a a manual process

27:51

to transfer their information to HR but now that we've onboarded a new

27:56

recruitment system that doesn't talk to HR at all but we didn't think about that because we just saw this shine in you

28:02

software and we bought it it's yeah it's important to see the pain points not just of the individual area that you're

28:08

looking at but also how they affect the the broader organization yeah like and then piecing together what capabilities

28:16

are available every software vendor is going to say that they solve all of your

The Pitfalls of Rushing into Software Solutions

28:22

problems but they very rarely actually do solve all of your problems there's almost always gaps between what you need

28:29

and what they they say they can actually do yeah it's just it's important to just

28:34

slow down think about the problem analyze it properly and consider your

28:40

options rather than just diving in and buying the first thing off the shelf I suppose that's just saying it's someone

28:46

who's worked in countless IT projects where that's exactly what's happened and

28:51

sometimes it's hard to know uh what you're going to come across down the road exactly what I was using using Wix

The Unexpected Challenges of Subdomains

28:59

their their Studio their their Flagship product and they've got real issues with

29:04

subdomains yeah and you don't find that out till you spend a bunch of time

29:11

building something yeah fortunately you can always go back to something like WordPress and have pretty much the same

29:18

thing done pretty quick uh but to to double your costs for each additional

29:25

subdomain is um that's czy not at what I would say the market expects when you

29:32

get to that bridge it's a bit of a surprise and I understand the economics from a business model but or maybe they

29:41

should be clearer about who it's for um or I don't know that kind of stuff I

29:47

hope people find out about it sooner so that they if it's important to them they

29:53

don't waste their time yeah so the lesson that I had was was that so I can

29:58

totally relate to trying to make a decision based on all of the things

30:04

you're going to need it's often challenging on larger projects and things that maybe unknowns or not

30:10

important when you first start yeah and you often run into the sunk cost I don't

The Sunk Cost Fallacy in Problem Solving

30:16

want to it's usually called the sunk cost fallacy but you keep persisting in the problem because you're like I've

30:22

already spent so much time and energy and effort on this on making this work

30:28

that means I have to keep going and so that's not necessarily the case like you

30:33

can actually backpedal and go okay Wicks or whatever trying to pick on Wicks here

30:39

but if they yeah no I like Wix anyone uses Wix there's a lot of there's a reason why I decided to go with them in

30:45

the beginning right they do a lot of things right yeah totally It's just in

30:50

in the once you get into using more advanced features sometimes just based

30:56

on what's available it falls short and it's it's just impossible to know ahead

31:02

of time where that's going to come up for you yeah that's right and that's going to be the case with I think just

31:08

about any product like I guess it's yeah like not being so tied to a particular

31:15

product that you your entire brand rests on utilizing that particular technology

31:21

because it's just a tool at the end of the day you don't have to be married to it yeah I use car

31:27

C which is a great sort of onepage website builder and I use it like I can

31:34

build websites I just don't like to like I it's I don't know I find it yeah

31:40

emotionally taxing it's yeah and so and you can't

31:46

technically create um pages in card but you can get around that by just creating

31:52

subdomains which is what I've done on my site which you loaded up just before but if I didn't know how to do that

32:02

there would have perhaps been another solution to to the problem ra rather than just being like Oh I have to have

32:08

another page which is what I originally thought and I need multiple pages on my

32:14

site I reframed the problem and said actually what I Just Need is Another

The Power of Reframing Problems

32:19

like U ux area for my information where I want like people to progress through

32:25

to another part of my my site and that doesn't technically have to be another

32:30

page on the same domain I can create a subdomain and have the same experience

32:36

the same layout everything and yes technically it's a completely different

32:41

website on the back end but like the user doesn't know that and so the actual

32:47

the solution doesn't necessarily have to fit what you originally think the problem is yeah there's usually multiple

32:54

ways to solve a problem it's yeah just about thinking about how how to fix it rather than just hanging your head on the wall and saying I can't fix it this

33:00

particular way so I'm going to throw the tow in but yeah there's always multiple wise to address things I imagine you

33:08

come across different kinds of problems all the time what are some of your maybe

33:14

known or unknown approaches to solving problems at a high

33:20

level so I yeah there are lots of problems I Pro probably my

33:28

I'll break it into two categories if it's a a problem that

33:34

requires like just brain power and a bit of intellectual rigor

33:41

and sitting down and working out the problem and it's not something I can I necessarily expect other people to be

33:48

involved in I will just get a notepad and Pen like I

33:54

love notepads and pens like I literally if you don't know what to get me for not

34:00

you but if people don't know what to get me for Christmas on my birthday pad in pen is literally like what I ask for

34:05

because I just love I don't know if it's a tactile thing but I love writing and

34:10

using that and I've solved most of my problems that way that's a quite a grand

34:16

statement I I haven't solved all my problems but I love that all I need is a notepad and Pen I should re rephrase

34:23

that and say most of the problem solving I do is done on not p and Pen yeah just sitting there and I I talked about this

34:29

on one of my my podcasts where I like to maybe just let the the subconscious mind

34:37

activate a bit and so rather than going I have to drill down and focus on this

34:42

problem like let's like engage in another activity like whether that's

34:47

watching the NBA or something on TV and sitting there with my notepad and pen and watching the a bit of TV but then

34:54

going all right while I'm doing this I'm now going to have a bit of a think about what I'm doing rather than just focusing

35:01

everything um on trying to solve the problem because like I feel like I will

35:06

get distracted from the main task regardless of what that main task is so if I make the problem solving not my

35:13

main task I I don't know I I tend to approach it a bit better which seems a

35:19

bit counterintuitive but no I can relate to that I think that there's many times that if you're focused on one thing we

35:26

drift we're we're solving other problems while we're doing something yeah so if we know that let's not give the main

35:33

attention the main problem but keep it visible or in our uh peripheries and

35:40

then yeah all of a sudden we we're not going to let go of the problem it is

35:46

being worked on yeah but you're right about giving it all of our energy all the time but sometimes that problem

35:52

needs a break to to simmer let that problem

35:57

be solved and it may seem like a bit of a maybe a lazy way or people be like

36:03

you're not working on the problem but the mind works in mysterious ways so

36:09

yeah that's right if you've had a history of being able to solve things when you're not working on them then you've learned from that track record

36:15

that hey it's okay to mentally turn this off and have a sleep on it or do

36:21

something else so I like to go for a little rollerblade or do some physical exercise that's

36:28

yeah I I quite enjoy live on a property here and so I've got like a walking

36:34

Track that I I've modow regularly which I take the dog on so yeah like taking the dog for a walk and I'll put

36:39

headphones on and listen to something related perhaps to the problem

36:45

if it's if I'm trying to come up with a solution to an automation problem like I

36:51

might listen to someone talking about that kind of thing and that can help

36:56

prompt ideas and and things like that yeah definitely just getting out and doing something else is definitely

The Role of External Perspectives in Problem Solving

37:03

helpful and talking to other people is great as well like I've Got a Friend Nat

37:08

who I've done a few podcasts with and yeah she was saying the other day she was like what do you need to what do you

37:14

need to do I'm like I've got so many things I need to do she was no mate just close that one sale that you're working

37:20

on and everything else can happen afterwards I'm like fine yeah like she

37:26

was right that's what needed to happen it wasn't I had so so many projects

37:31

going and so many different things that I was like I have to do this I have to do that and getting distracted and just

37:37

do the one thing that actually matters and yeah getting someone else's outside perspective is always useful as well

37:44

yeah it's keeping the main thing right yeah yeah definitely last day of the

37:49

month here it should be focused on I guess for you you're you're yeah no it's

37:55

good love that love that nice and early this

38:01

has been really interesting I love talking about problem solving and automation when it comes

38:08

to these you talked a little bit about going for a walk and listening to people talking about automation what are you

38:13

listening to what what are these is it podcast is it the audibles automation

38:20

experts who's talking in your ear yes so I I tend not to listen to specifically

38:28

podcasts that often fun enough like I I'm a big YouTube consumer and so I I've

38:36

got YouTube premium so I can listen to it while my phone is in my pocket and so

38:41

I will listen to all kinds of content creators on YouTube this morning I I

38:50

before this when I took the dog for a walk for about half an hour I listened to Dave Shapiro talking about

38:57

AGI and like what that means for the medical industry and like how that's

39:03

going to revolutionize our health and minimize hospital visits and all kinds of things

39:10

he talks a lot about post labor economics as well which um is super interesting yeah that that that was what

39:15

I was listening to this morning and it guess yeah like it go through different

39:20

phases of what I'm listening to but yeah YouTube is definitely my main source of listening and I don't watch YouTube

39:27

really I just listen to it which is a bit weird but it still still helps their views yeah that don't know I'm not

39:33

watching it yeah are you listening to it what speed do you listen at yeah

39:39

normal I don't sped it up yeah I know it's not very not

39:45

very bioh hacky of me or whatever you want to call it to each their own y so

39:52

that's great do you have any books that uh you either revisit or

39:57

uh or books part of your learning so I I do listen to audio books

40:04

quite a lot I have an quite an extensive audible library because I've I've been

40:10

paying for Audible for years and I got to spend the credits on something I I go

40:15

between fiction and non-fiction and most of the time I listen to like non-fiction stuff I've I think I must have listened

40:23

to Alex H's $100 million offers And1 million leads like maybe three or four

40:29

times each I'd say how's your offering yeah it's well it's it's getting better

40:36

yeah it's yeah I really enjoy his approach and I'm usually super skeptical

40:41

about anyone in that from that kind of world I'm not not a big internet

40:47

marketing fan to say the least so I the fact that I really dig his content is is

40:54

means it must be pretty good I think if I'm not listening to to non-fiction I I will listen to either British sketch

41:03

comedy or like some of Bill Bryson's books I don't know if you're familiar with him at all he does like these

41:09

travel books which are hilarious no I Haven I haven't heard of him yeah no

41:15

it's definitely look him up yeah I I really love listening to his books and

41:22

The Pillars of the Earth series can follow it it's yeah like the is 40h hour

41:28

Masterpiece stories that you know like told as an audio book which I yeah I

41:35

love just listening to those if I'm trying to not think about work or

41:40

something yeah like I I always often listen to those going to sleep yeah it's a lot there some some good

41:47

recommendations in there I'm curious do you think in your opinion AI is helping

The Impact of AI on Time Management

41:54

you save time or because of the abundance of cool stuff you can do with it it's actually eating more of your

42:02

time yeah good question I think I'm definitely playing a lot less video

42:07

games at the moment so I'd say I'm probably got less time for that because of all this kind of thing and yeah like

42:15

it's the way I I look at it is it's whenever they invented the calculator would be like saying to the

42:21

mathematicians are you are you saving time now because you've got a calculator you don't have

42:28

to use the Abacus or whatever and they would have been like no like now that we have these

42:33

calculators we can fill in all that spare that spare time with more cool

42:39

stuff which is which we can now do with calculators which I don't know that's how it went the the concept applies

42:46

there's yeah there's so much more we can do now that used to be filled up with

42:54

doing stuff manually and by by hand I can instead of spending an hour reading

43:02

a document I can just put it through CH at GPT and say can you summarize the main takeaways that I need for this

43:08

specific use case and it does it and there like I don't need to don't need to read it now which is some would say

43:15

that's that's bad and that's a signifying the the end of the human races we know because people are not

43:21

going to not going to retain knowledge anymore or anything like that but I think it's just yeah using that time for

43:27

more leverage so yeah I definitely don't have a lot of time for myself at the

43:33

moment but that's probably my own fault and I don't know if I could blame AI for that I think part of it is Seasons right

43:40

if you're an entrepreneur and you're trying to build something then your focus may be stacked a little heavy in

43:46

One Direction and that might not be forever but for a period of time I also feel a little bit of time sensitivity

43:54

may put on myself or pressure that things are moving so quickly I really want to capitalize on what's

44:02

happening now right yeah because it'll change and the opportunities that exist

44:10

three months from now may be gone right or they may not be gone but they're going to evolve so yeah having an ear to

44:17

the ground on what's Happening and talking to a lot of people I think about

44:23

what's happening there was a guy I was talking to earlier today who mentioned that uh the editing tool

44:30

descript or descript they P they purchased a platform identical to Riverside that

44:38

we're on right now six months ago or something and during our call I went on

44:43

there and signed up and for free because I have descript I get access to this

44:50

maybe the next podcast I'm going to be doing I'm going to be using this this different platform but here is

44:56

information that it's out there it's available but without having these

45:02

sometimes you never know when you're going to come across that one tool that literally changes your

45:09

business and I was on a marketing panel yesterday we were talking about

45:15

collaboration and marketing and I mentioned to the group something called reclaim AI have you heard of it no I

45:22

haven't actually so this one is about in so it's got think of Kenly on steroids

45:30

so it has it's using AI to optimize meeting Cadence with your teams making

45:36

flexible appointments so they're not fixed prioritizing what's your to-dos

45:42

pushing them around in your calendar and doing things that would be very difficult for even the best executive

45:49

assistant those little things they and that tool for the cost of tonly you get

45:57

all this other stuff yeah so it's figuring out what uh what your goals are

46:03

what are you trying to do and then reverse engineering it as much as possible with tools leveraging

46:10

automation AI to build your own custom stack but something like zapier I think

46:17

is going to be essential to making all those things work together because as

46:23

much as those tools try they're not and it sounds like with the work that

46:28

you've been doing it can be a huge asset for a lot of companies looking to find

46:34

creative ways to solve their problems yeah definitely like it's it's

The Potential of Zapier for Prototyping

46:40

zapia is a fantastic prototyping tool as well I've used it twice now for

46:46

different basically SAS prototypes just to see if something is technically possible like

46:52

I last year like I've started work on a tool called Auto work which basically a

47:00

project management in Project risk management automation platform where you

47:05

can yeah use like the chat interface to to manage your projects like at scale

47:11

and if your the original idea came from going why is a project manager going and

47:18

booking like project meetings and asking for updates and I'm sure like a chatbot could just be programmed to to ask the

47:26

project team for updates every Monday and consolidate that into project update

47:32

to send out to the stakeholders and what else does a project manager do and so like yeah like I built a tool that was

47:39

able to do that and I'm now in the progress process of getting that turned into an actual SAS app and I did the

47:46

same exact same thing with engine like it's wanting to get that turned into an actual product as well so I don't have

47:52

to H into other platforms I can have it all in one spot which you know would

47:58

make it you know significantly more streamlined again but yeah if you're ever um wanting to build like an

48:07

application and see if something's possible see if you can do it in zapia first and if you can then like you might

48:12

be on to something yeah just a bit of advice for anyone out there great Ain this has been this has been amazing

Wrapping Up and How to Connect

48:18

we're right out the hour here tell me how can people get in touch with you

48:24

yeah sure I've got engine as you mentioned before has all my contact details on there so that's

48:31

nn.com and so that's my service platform there I've also got just Aaron J steel

48:39

so a n j SLE

48:45

e.com as that's a bit more of just my personal brand information Hub so I've

48:50

got all my links to everything there as well I'm very active on LinkedIn but

48:56

always happy to hear from pable on other platforms as well and and a growing YouTube channel so you can subscribe to

49:03

that too yes yeah subscribe to my YouTube channel and yeah that that'll be

49:08

fantastic amazing I appreciate having you on the show uh for everyone listening thank you for joining us for

49:15

this fun conversation I hope you got as much out of it as I did for shows

49:20

similar to this and for more information you can check out opening.com uh as well

49:25

as open open AI training on YouTube thanks so much my name is Mark ladimer

49:31

this has been Aaron steel and I having a back and forth on AI and automation

49:37

thanks so much for your time Aon appreciate you

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