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Beyond ChatGPT: Master Advanced AI Tools for Business Growth
01:05:40
Master advanced AI tools to drive business growth, automate workflows, and gain a competitive edge. This episode explores the AI landscape beyond ChatGPT, highlighting cutting-edge tools like Claude, Cursor, and others that entrepreneurs can use to enhance decision-making, streamline operations, and unlock new opportunities.
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- [00:03]
Matt Reynolds
Are you a personal trainer or strength coach struggling to find new clients? Turnkey Coach has the free resource for you. The Business of Coaching workshop provides marketing strategies, client retention techniques and methods of leveraging social media from expert coaches to help you focus on creating and scaling a thriving coaching practice. Our next series, running in March and April, covers client acquisition. Go to Turnkey Coach Boat to register for the workshop that is Turnkey Coach BOC to learn practical actions you can take to grow your business today. Register now. You're listening to the Build your Business podcast powered by Turnkey Coach, where we help business owners find freedom over fear. I'm Matt Reynold and I'm his brother Chris Reynolds.
- [01:06]
Chris Reynolds
Join us as we help build your business and move from fear to freedom together. You're listening to the Build your Business podcast. I'm your co host Matt Reynolds, here with my side co host, little brother Chris. Welcome to the show, sir.
- [01:31]
Matt Reynolds
Thanks man. Excited to chat AI.
- [01:34]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah, last couple episodes has been fantastic. That first episode was kind of where I've been and the last episode where we started talking about letting AI help you with decisions and basically using it as sort of a wise man, at least from an IQ level, with decision support was extremely eye opening. And now we're really going to get into implementation strategies. Talking about some of your favorite tools that you're using in AI. Talking about Claude first, because you were mentioning that it is probably a little simpler to get a handle on.
- [02:09]
Matt Reynolds
Yep.
- [02:09]
Chris Reynolds
And then we'll talk about Cursor as well. There are obviously even by the time this podcast comes out, more things may have come out that you're using that you like even more. But where we're at right now, this is. We've now taken this from text based only to using it for problem solving and decision making and support and wisdom and all those sorts of things to now how do we practically implement this? How do we input our own private. We kind of left the last episode with how do we feed AI private data that's only for us, that's categorized and in a library for us and only us that's not out there for the rest of the world to see, to continue that process of decision making and all the things that it will do. So I'm excited with where this episode is going to go. So thank you all for listening again on a Friday and let's dive right in.
- [03:02]
Matt Reynolds
Awesome. Okay, so the first thing that will really start opening your mind to the possibilities here is a tool called Claude. We've talked about it a little bit on the podcast already. But this tool really sort of built around this idea from, from day one. So what you do in Claude is you set up a project. Now they've also got just like an open chat window that you can go look at. It looks a lot like ChatGPT, by the way. OpenAI has OpenAI projects now as well. I've used them a little bit. I didn't feel like they were quite as. Quite as good as Claude projects. There is some capability of this in OpenAI. I'm sure it's gotten better since I played with it. One of the hard things about this whole world is that everything has change changing so fast that you have to sort of settle in on a tool every so often and use it for a while.
- [03:57]
Chris Reynolds
But so real quick, Claude is owned by Anthropic. It is also somewhere in that 20amonth range. Is that right? Does it also have like a more expensive pro option that you're using or is everything we're talking about right now is that's, that's a dollar twenty.
- [04:12]
Matt Reynolds
In fact, that's irritating. And I'll describe why. I think that's a bit of a problem. One of the things that has happened to almost everyone that I've sent to work with Claude is that you only have so many credits that you're allowed to use on the newest models that they have and then you have to fall back to previous models. And you might think that that's not a big deal, but I actually think in the difference between Claude 37 and Claude 35, which are like the two in a row. Don't ask me why they number these the way they do. It's everything is nonsense. And then, you know, going down even further, most people, when you get real world workloads in there, start running into problems.
- [04:51]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah, you should be able to buy credits, just buy up credits, buy additional.
- [04:55]
Matt Reynolds
Credits to be used, which you can do from an API standpoint, but you can't do through the Claude interface, or at least you couldn't as of the last time I looked. Right. So just FYI, this stuff changes all the time. Your mileage may vary, you know, sure, whatever. So let's talk about what it does and how it works. So you set up a project in Claude and that project, you can name whatever you want. And Matt, let's use an example of one of the things that we talked about before. Would you prefer to do the like financials or would you prefer to do the Arnold and sop? What do you, what do you think?
- [05:27]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah, either is fine. Let's, let's say we could either. Do you choose like let's do a overarching sales SOP or a financials sop and whichever one you think would apply better, that would give us better modeling and spit out graphs and details and all that sort of stuff. Which one do you think would be better?
- [05:46]
Matt Reynolds
Why don't we do this one with the SOP model? Part of the reason that I'm saying that is for sales. For sales.
- [05:53]
Chris Reynolds
Okay.
- [05:53]
Matt Reynolds
So one of the reasons that I'm saying that is the ability to do data analytics and draw pretty charts and graphs and stuff is actually really, really good in both models. I would probably pick OpenAI for, for some of that and I'd have to test both ways as to which way that I would go. But you'll, you'll get it as we, as we go along. So let's start with sales sops. People are going to have that obviously across the board should be a pretty good example. So idea here is you go into claude, set up an account and you're going to, you can set up as many projects as you want. What's a project? Well, a project is just like a domain of an area that you want to start building out some long term documentation for yourself. That's probably the way that I would think about it. Or for your team.
- [06:40]
Chris Reynolds
Most companies have a project management system that we're. So we use Basecamp.
- [06:44]
Matt Reynolds
This is not like that.
- [06:46]
Chris Reynolds
Well, I just mean in the fact that you set up then a. So we have a project in Basecamp called Sales sop.
- [06:52]
Matt Reynolds
There you go. There you go. Yeah.
- [06:53]
Chris Reynolds
I'm foreseeing you're saying is it far better to set up the project in Claude and link to that project out of basecamp than to actually build the project itself into a project management software company? Like, like a Basecamp Claude, you can actually set up everything within the project on a specific topic like sales stop or like sales specifically in cloud.
- [07:18]
Matt Reynolds
Yeah. So what I would actually do is I would. And I think most companies will do this. Almost all companies have some kind of project management software that they're using or, or if nothing else, it's a system of folders in Microsoft SharePoint or in Google Drive. Right, Right.
- [07:32]
Chris Reynolds
Correct.
- [07:32]
Matt Reynolds
Maybe you have both. Claude anticipated the Google Drive one, which is super cool. So you can link your Google Drive to your Claude project and in doing so you can give it access to Google Documents that are in Google Drive, which is super cool for us.
- [07:48]
Chris Reynolds
That's how we started. And we still have a Barbell logic overarching systems folder with all of the systems and everything in our Google Docs. There are probably a hundred folders in there, and each one of those folders could have anywhere from three to 100 files within it. I can now link that directly to Claude. And CLAUDE will have all of that information.
- [08:12]
Matt Reynolds
Yeah. Now let me curb that a little bit so that you kind of have an idea of what the limits are when we start talking about a tool like claude. So CLAUDE projects have a limit in the amount of memory that you can use up for. For that.
- [08:26]
Chris Reynolds
Sure.
- [08:27]
Matt Reynolds
So if you have a thousand documents and you want it to know all of that in order for it to answer questions from your own knowledge base, it's only going to be able to do it for a certain set of that knowledge base. And we're going to get around that in another tool that I'm going to talk about later. But for now, these are some of the limitations you'll run into. There are. So there's two that I've talked about so far. The first one is the amount of your documents. Let's put it that, let's just use that term because everybody will get it. Your documents. It could be Excel documents or spreadsheets. They can be how much data you're feeding it. How much data you're feeding it.
- [09:06]
Chris Reynolds
So you. Essentially, for us, we would take the most important things and we build projects out of those in claude. Correct. Rather than give Claude, here's all the.
- [09:17]
Matt Reynolds
Stuff and, or, and this is, this is going to be important. We'll, we'll get to how, how to do this. You can also build up summaries of that stuff and get rid of the original context stuff after you've done it. So. Right. That's a path that makes a lot of sense. We're actually going to use that as a tool as we go. So now let's talk about a little bit around. What's it doing?
- [09:41]
Chris Reynolds
So we build this project in claude. It's called Sales sop.
- [09:45]
Matt Reynolds
Yeah. And let's say that what you've added in there is a document where you have already got a list of everything that you know that you've sort of put together for this sop. So this is the sequence of, of steps that they're supposed to go through. Go through.
- [09:59]
Chris Reynolds
Maybe it's got process and procedure, operations, whatever.
- [10:02]
Matt Reynolds
Maybe it's got screenshots too. Like it does pretty well with imaging. We'll talk about, like how to do that. So you've got this stuff in there. And let's say that you haven't maxed out the amount of space that you get. So maybe we've used up about half at this point. What you're going to do is you're going to start asking your questions. Now this leans back on last week's episode where we talked about decisioning support and all that. One of the first things that I see people do, and again, I think we talked about this. I do this all day. I talk to people all day about AI, I work with AI all day. So if that's something you're interested in, feel free to reach out. But because I do that, I see the mistakes they make and I'm going to talk about those. So here's the first one. Don't get too formal with what you're trying to prepare to prompt people think about prompts the wrong way at the beginning. Now we're going to get to where prompts are much more structured. We're going to get there, but don't start there. Just start talking to the thing. That's it. Talk to it like it's a, like it's a smart buddy. Like we talked about before, right? Like just, just start and then you're going to have a conversation and as that conversation goes along, we're going to be able to start building up new data. So Matt, we're going to use you as on this one because I want to get a good sense of, you know, you've got this SOP document and everybody can just envision this is maybe a three page document, something like that that sort of goes through a series of steps. What do you want to do? What do we want to ask? How do we want to improve the. The thing? Right. So start there. What do you want to do?
- [11:31]
Chris Reynolds
Step one would be obviously to capture awareness. We want people to know we exist. Would be. Would be number one. And then the next step would be to move people from. They know we exist, they're not a lead, they just know who we are. To qualifying them as a lead with the ultimate goal of getting them on what we call a discovery call or what we call a disco call. The sales team is very good. Once they get somebody on a call to close them and actually get them to register and sign up. Because there's a, there's very little friction in signing up. You don't have to pay anything for your first 30 days. There's no contract. So the first hurdle is one, knowing who we are and two, once they know who we are, I'm sure you're just like me. I get 80 to 100 emails a day that are just like crap sales emails. And they're better and better and better probably because of AI. Like they've actually pulled some data and they, oh, I loved your podcast about X. And you're like, oh, this is. And.
- [12:30]
Matt Reynolds
But they're not, this is, they're not full of.
- [12:33]
Chris Reynolds
So how do we go from awareness to qualifying the lead to actually getting them to sign up for a call, which we then have connected to HubSpot and reclaim that we use for our calendar app and all that sort of stuff. But let's say goal number one is going from awareness. Two, they've actually scheduled a call.
- [12:52]
Matt Reynolds
Okay, so what I heard you just say is you want to potentially improve the SOP so that we get more of the. We do a better job at getting them onto the call. Right. Like that's, that's it. Right?
- [13:05]
Chris Reynolds
Once we know who they are, once.
- [13:06]
Matt Reynolds
We know who they are, once they're.
- [13:07]
Chris Reynolds
Qualified, we have a name and an email address.
- [13:10]
Matt Reynolds
Yep.
- [13:11]
Chris Reynolds
We've qualified them as they are actually a coach. How do we get our percentage of that group of people to actually sign up for a discovery call?
- [13:19]
Matt Reynolds
Okay, so what I would do is I would actually, I would say it exactly like that in the very first prompt in the project. So when you think about a project, I'm going to make a little visual for you. On the right side of the screen is what looks like a folder and it's a folder of all the documents that you put in there. It could be the documents that you pulled in from Google Drive, it could be new stuff that you just put in there, but it would definitely be.
- [13:42]
Chris Reynolds
Like this three page document of step by step, that's definitely in there.
- [13:46]
Matt Reynolds
That's document number one. That one's got to be there. Right? And for simplicity, let's just imagine that we have that document in there and it's the only thing in there. Okay, let's say that that's the only thing. And so what we're going to do is there's a prompt window in the middle of this window and there's documentation or to the left and there's a little, little band of folders on the right or documents on the right that have all the knowledge, the knowledge of your topic, whatever it is. So what you're doing is you're going to start prompting it and as you prompt it, you can reference it. There's no magic to referencing it. You just say the document that the sop document that I put in there. It's AI is smart enough to know that. Right, right. You don't even need to be like exact in the title. Like you can be, you can just roughly reference it and it's going to know what to do. So what you're going to do is you're going to ask this question. You say, we're having some trouble getting new leads to get on the phone. So we can kind of get, we can get it qualified, we can get to this point. But getting from we've got the qualified lead to getting them on the phone has been a, has been a struggle. I need to think through a process that I can put in place to update my SOP to get better at this process. So what do you know that can, you know, let's work on this together and sort of figure out what is it that you can help me with to do this. And it's going to go, and it's going to come back and say, oh, well, I noticed in your sop, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what about X, Y and Z? Right. So it's going to put that in there. Now X and Y is not so good, but Z is kind of interesting. And you say, let's go down the Z path a little bit. I want to, I want to know more about the Z path. So here's what I want.
- [15:22]
Chris Reynolds
Back to episode one where you said, this is like we're in, like, it's a great thinking tool at this point. It's helping you think through.
- [15:28]
Matt Reynolds
You're just thinking, where are the gaps.
- [15:30]
Chris Reynolds
That I didn't know about? Because I see it through my lens and it sees it through a disinterested third party computer lens and it says this step is missing. I've noticed.
- [15:41]
Matt Reynolds
Yes. After being trained on the world's knowledge, it comes back and says, all right, let's talk about how you could implement a standard operating procedure just for a single step that takes, takes you from qualified lead to I'm on the phone with them. Right. Okay, great. So what it's going to do is you're going to say, yes, build that standard operating procedure. Now watch what we just did. We went from a standard operating procedure that was big, it's the sales pipeline. And now we're going to narrow it way down and we're going to ask Claude to create for us a standard operating procedure for a single step. For a single step. Right. Get them, get them on the phone. Okay, that's what we're going to do. The reason that this is important is you're going to find yourself breaking down problems better and better and better over time. You can even ask the AI to help you with this. You could say, look at this SOP document and break it into a series of steps that are in order and let's do separate documents. Now, at this point I have to say a technical thing because it's going to be important as we go forward. So the technical thing I'm going to say is there is a standard language that is used when we are interacting with documents inside of AI. Now, I realize that some of you may have never heard of this term, but I'm going to say it because when I do, and once you learn it, you're going to have a better ability to interact with AI in all ways. And that is. The term is called markdown. Okay? Now, markdown is a super simple, easy to read text that's not even really a language. It's just like it looks like if anybody's somewhat familiar with HTML and HTML has all these like, tags and all these kind of things. It's not like that. It's simpler than that. It's way simpler. You can read this and look at it and go, oh, that's what that is.
- [17:31]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah. A normal person can read this and know exactly what it's saying.
- [17:35]
Matt Reynolds
It has basic stuff. You use a pound sign, one pound sign to say this is a heading. You use two to say that this is a subheading. It's a very simple markup language, which is why it's called Markdown. Right? It's not, not. It's like simpler. And Markdown has been around for a really long time. The reason it's so important in this context is because it is so small in its ability to describe text and describe it hierarchically. So you know, this is the heading, this is the subheading, this is like the main point.
- [18:06]
Chris Reynolds
These are the right.
- [18:06]
Matt Reynolds
These are the bullet points. Right, Exactly.
- [18:08]
Chris Reynolds
I assume you could. There's a cheater you can go on and just, you know, you don't need.
- [18:13]
Matt Reynolds
To know anything about Markdown.
- [18:15]
Chris Reynolds
You don't have to say, you don't need to know anything. This.
- [18:18]
Matt Reynolds
Nope, nope, you don't need to do any of that. But what I want you to know is that the. That's what's happening under the hood. It's writing it in Markdown, it's showing you the pretty version, the rendered version. And when you see in ChatGPT, when you see in Claude, what you're seeing is rendered Markdown and when there's a copy button at the bottom and you say, oh, I want to copy that and go put it somewhere else and you paste it, you may not see the pretty thing, you may see the markdown. And that's good because you're going to use that markdown as context for other things going forward. Okay, so we got a little bit technical there, and that's as technical as we're going to get. So just. You don't need to go memorize markdown. If you would like to, you can make a project called Chris Learns Markdown and you, and it will literally anthropic, will walk you through, or Claude will walk you through step by step, how to learn Markdown. And it'll be amazing and you'll come out of it with a guide and it'll be great, but you don't need to do that. So back to the sop. What you would do is you would say, here's a Google Doc, that is my sop. Break this down into a series of smaller steps. Step one, step two, step three, step four. And it may already be in that, but you don't need to do the work. Don't do the copying and pasting. Let it do the work.
- [19:29]
Chris Reynolds
Right.
- [19:29]
Matt Reynolds
And tell it. Break this into logical super small steps so that we have all of our entire sales SOP broken into small documents that describe it. And what it's going to do is it's going to make out of your sop. Let's make it simple and let's say that it's going to be five steps. Yep. And in those five steps, those five steps are all going to be little markdown documents inside of your project knowledge base that you just came into.
- [19:56]
Chris Reynolds
Now, to follow up from previous weeks, what Claude is doing different than right now, say chatgpt or even Deep Research version of that, is that many or most or all of these other AI software platforms are searching the Internet as a whole wide. Claude is also doing that.
- [20:20]
Matt Reynolds
Correct.
- [20:21]
Chris Reynolds
But is putting a preference on the things that you're loading into it in the project. So it's saying, I'm taking the things that you've given me so that I can build on that. But in order to understand how to build this SOP out, I'm still going out to the Internet at large to help write that individual step.
- [20:44]
Matt Reynolds
That's right. And more than that, let's, you know, I don't want to get too technical, but I will say there's a couple of different sources of knowledge here.
- [20:51]
Chris Reynolds
There are three by the way, we have now started a drinking game for those of you listening that every time Chris says the word technical, you have to take a drink. Okay, so this is about number four.
- [21:02]
Matt Reynolds
I'm going to do my.
- [21:03]
Chris Reynolds
You're fine.
- [21:03]
Matt Reynolds
Okay. What I'm going to say here is just that these LLM models have their own knowledge which has been learned from their training. Okay? That's what they are, they are trained models. Right. So they have, inherent in the model, they have some amount of knowledge, like a lot, a lot of knowledge, like all of human history knowledge, basically. But that stops at some point. So we train the model, let's say at, I don't know, let's say we stopped training it yesterday. It doesn't know anything about today, knows nothing. Which is why when you ask a question sometimes and it's like, wait a minute, I know the problem here. The problem is you're talking about the future, which is, you know, March, whatever. And it, you're like, no, no, it's not the future. That's today.
- [21:44]
Chris Reynolds
Right.
- [21:44]
Matt Reynolds
It's because it's confused about what day it is. Right. So however smart it is, it's kind of dumb in other ways. Then there's the knowledge that it goes and gets. So it will go out to the Internet and do a super smart Internet search. And the Internet search is a tool. That's all it is. It's a tool that they've given the AI to be able to go do that on your behalf.
- [22:00]
Chris Reynolds
But it's a real time Internet search.
- [22:02]
Matt Reynolds
That's a real time Internet search.
- [22:03]
Chris Reynolds
Right. To that second whatever's come out.
- [22:06]
Matt Reynolds
It's the second source of knowledge. The third source of knowledge is your knowledge that you put in there. That's in Claude. That's the knowledge you put into the project files. It has the ability to go look at the project files and pull sections of that text back to put it into that chat window. You are never getting away from the idea of the chat window that ultimately what all these tools are doing is getting the most efficient kind of prompt in for you. Right?
- [22:35]
Chris Reynolds
Right.
- [22:36]
Matt Reynolds
So what it's doing behind the scenes is it's saying, oh, I know, he just asked me a question about this. So I'm going to take some of my answer and some of his question and put it in the chat window. You're not seeing the real chat window, you're seeing the chat window. They want you to see the pretty one. Right, the pretty one. But what's really happening behind the scenes is it's accumulating web search and all these things, and then it's using that against its knowledge base to answer the question. So that's the way that, you know, that's sort of a peek under the hood, so to speak, of what's happening. So we've asked it now to break down our sop. Our SOP is now five small documents, and we no longer need the big document. So we delete that one out of. Out of the knowledge base on purpose because we only have so much space and markdown is tiny, which means that your markdown file is smaller than your Google Doc. And now we give ourselves more memory space that we can work with. Great.
- [23:24]
Chris Reynolds
Right?
- [23:25]
Matt Reynolds
Okay. The next thing is there's one step in there that we want to fix. One step is not working. And it's the step that goes from we have a qualified lead to we get them on the phone. Now, the next thing you do could be to continue to have a conversation. And maybe Claude's knowledge of the world is so good that you don't need to do anything else and you can just have this conversation. But maybe you use last week's episode where we talk about deep research, and you go over to OpenAI, you go to ChatGPT, and you say, build me a guide on the world's best knowledge around how to convert from a qualified email account or reach out by email to getting them on a phone. Here's our context. And go build a guide. And then you walk away and go sip coffee for a while, and in 30 minutes it comes back and says, here's a report of exactly all the world's best knowledge accumulated around how to go through this step. And you go, cool. And there's a little copy button at the bottom. You go, copy.
- [24:28]
Chris Reynolds
And you put Claude.
- [24:29]
Matt Reynolds
And you go, claude, here's. Here's a new bit of knowledge you didn't have before. It's the world's best knowledge about how to convert people from email to get them on the phone. Right? Use that with all of the other knowledge I've given you to rewrite my sop, and it's gonna go, okay, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's gonna ask questions and it's gonna come back, and the SOP may be good, and the SOP may be not so good. And if it's not good, you're gonna continue the conversation and you're gonna say, okay, you've said a couple things that I have doubts about. You think we can reach out by email and actually get a response, But I Don't think we can with this email. Write an email template that we'll use that, you know, from all of this stuff that you know is gonna be successful in us at least getting a response. Also, we would like to understand, when we do outbound emails, we would like to understand the moment that it arrives in their inbox and we would like to know when they've read it. So if there's a way, if there's technology out there that allows us to see that stuff by embedding a small ping image or whatever, then, then let's get that baked in here as well.
- [25:37]
Chris Reynolds
We know our open rate and we know our open rate.
- [25:39]
Matt Reynolds
We want to know how long did.
- [25:40]
Chris Reynolds
They stay on the email.
- [25:41]
Matt Reynolds
Exactly.
- [25:41]
Chris Reynolds
And we know that exists.
- [25:43]
Matt Reynolds
Right, we know that exists, but we don't know how to do it. So tell us how to do it. Okay, cool. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. It comes back, says, all right, here it is. So here is your template you're going to use, here's your email template, and here is a little single document that will help you understand how to implement email tracking in a way that is super clear so that you both understand it and can implement it inside of HubSpot. There you go. So you're getting, you're refining this thing as you go, and by the time you get to the end, what you're going to have, we sort of scan forward. By the time you get to the end, what you're going to have is you're going to have a series of documents. Some of those documents are going to just be SOP 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4. Yeah, whatever. It's the breakdown of the SOP and your final step is going to be to put it all together in a single document. Now it will do that for you. It can summarize that it can do whatever. There are better ways to do it. We'll talk about what those are as we get into more complex tooling. But that's the gist. We're building knowled. We're putting our own knowledge in there. We're putting knowledge that we go get. And this is where it is so good to be able to go. Use the deep research tool on ChatGPT so that you can get the, the most succinct, small amount of like highly dense information about the best of effective information. Effective information. Drop it in there, drop it into Claude and build out your project in a way that you just gave it like it was sitting there. With a world expert. Right. Which is just absolutely amazing.
- [27:16]
Chris Reynolds
Let ask one follow up question before we get to your next tool which is then primarily is Claude spitting out text based only or will it also, or you know, what is its capability? If I said okay, so here's the SOP 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and they've put it together and I say okay, now put that on a timeline. I actually want to see a time like an actual time, like a graphic visual timeline so that we know time to first value is, you know, we want to keep it under 14 days. We want acquisition, you know, at seven days or less, like whatever. Does it do that as well? So is it, it's not just text, it's graphic, all of the graphic as well.
- [27:58]
Matt Reynolds
And, and what's so interesting about it is because all these tools have the ability to write code themselves and you don't need to know anything about the code, you don't need to know what languages, you don't need to know any of that. It can write a little code on your behalf, run it on your behalf. And I'm saying all this to say what it's really doing is utilizing some of the things you just asked for to generate a really good looking graph or good looking document, good looking image that it's going to be able to put and paste right into your sop. Right.
- [28:29]
Chris Reynolds
I'm going to get even a little more detailed which is probably more personal. But so then let's say we also then say love the image. Now want you to know that here is our brand guide with our logos, with our fonts, with our colors. Now take that exact image and put and brand it branded as Barbell Logic or whatever your company is. It can do that as well.
- [28:52]
Matt Reynolds
Eight times in the last two days and it does.
- [28:55]
Chris Reynolds
Awesome.
- [28:56]
Matt Reynolds
I've done it with my brand guide, I've done it with my customer's brand guides, I've done it with all of those things and it is incredible. And beyond that, I've actually utilized the next tool we're going to talk about to then say, not only do I want you to use the brand guide and not only do I want you to use their colors and their typefaces and their brand logos, but I also want you to use best practices for this kind of document. Okay, so in one case I was building an agreement, I was building a legal agreement and I was using some information that we had from our attorneys for the, for the language, but I wanted it to be branded as us. For example, Yep. And I wanted a really nice header and all that kind of stuff. But here's the thing. I'm. I'm not a graphic designer. Also, I am terrible at design. Like, the world's worst at design.
- [29:41]
Chris Reynolds
You're pure logic, no creativity.
- [29:43]
Matt Reynolds
I could spend. Honestly, I could spend 30 minutes putting together the best information that would go on a slide, but I could not make slides. And I could do that in 30 minutes. And you would be like, that's the most dense, perfect thing that we wanted to ever get. But. And then I would spend 20 hours trying to make it even remotely pretty, and it would be terrible.
- [30:02]
Chris Reynolds
Right.
- [30:02]
Matt Reynolds
And I am using AI to do that now, too. It builds all my slides. It does all the things. So. And it's branded and gorgeous and all the things. So what I actually did was I took the brand guide, branded this document, and then I said, now take that document, which is now fully branded. And I want you to produce a PDF version of this for me. And it produced a PDF version. I was. It was all already ready to go, sent it to my customer, they signed it, and it thing looked gorgeous. And I specifically guided it to say, I want this to follow best practices for this kind of document. So this is an agreement. I don't want this to be. This shouldn't look like a sales document. It's an agreement. It needs to look like a legal document. Needs to look like it came out of an attorney's office. Right, right. And so I want it to look differently than I would have it look otherwise. And it knows all this. And it's like, okay, well, the way you do that is with these kind of sizes and these kind of headers and these kind of whatever. And it was awesome. Prompted it, maybe. We went through. I think I probably went through 10 iterations to get it to be exactly the way I wanted it. So it come back and show me. And I go, I want this a little different. And I want this a little different. Absolutely amazing.
- [31:06]
Chris Reynolds
Okay, sweet. So then the next step, your favorite thing you're using right now is cursor.
- [31:12]
Matt Reynolds
That's correct.
- [31:13]
Chris Reynolds
So now we've gone from text AI to AI to voice and graphic AI to AI being able to help solve problems with decision making to now actually populating and informing the AI, not just with the Internet at large, but specifically with your business data. Again, this is a business podcast. We'll keep it to business with your business data that's safe and secure, and it's only for you and your business to see. It doesn't Immediately take that data and put it out into the Internet.
- [31:45]
Matt Reynolds
Yep.
- [31:45]
Chris Reynolds
It gives you all sorts of. It can help you write SOPs, it can help you build presentations, it can do all of these things.
- [31:51]
Matt Reynolds
Yep.
- [31:52]
Chris Reynolds
What possibly more could Cursor do? What does Cursor do?
- [31:55]
Matt Reynolds
Okay, so first of all, we'll use a different example. I'm going to switch to a different example because I've got one that is so good that I think it's. It's going to be the thing that everybody looks at and goes, oh, wow, this is. This is magical. Okay, so let me start by saying that there are other tools that do this. So just like we have ChatGPT, OpenAI, we have Claude, we have Gemini, Grok. This competition is a good thing for consumers. We love it. And so there are other tools that do this stuff. One that has emerged recently is called Windsurf. And so there's Windsurf, there's Cursor, and then the one that they all were based off of is called VS Code. And the reason this matters is, and the reason it matters for this audience is because you will have just skipped over all of this because you will have looked at it and if you go to cursor.com, you're going to see right now, actually, I had it pulled up. If you go to cursor.com, it says in huge text, the AI code editor, you'd go, that ain't for me, and move on. What I'm here to tell you is that that is the wrong headline because, I mean, it's good for them. They just. I think they raised like $20 billion. So I think. I think it's working. Okay.
- [33:07]
Chris Reynolds
Who owns them? Is that the name of the company? Cursor.
- [33:10]
Matt Reynolds
Cursor.
- [33:10]
Chris Reynolds
Just. Okay.
- [33:11]
Matt Reynolds
Yeah. They were one of the very first ones that said, we're going to take this code editor, VS Code that is wildly popular. We're going to clone it, we're going to copy it, and then we're going to make it do other stuff. Now, again, you would have looked at this and just passed over it, Matt. I know you would have. You would have looked at it and said, I'm not.
- [33:26]
Chris Reynolds
I don't know how to do it.
- [33:27]
Matt Reynolds
I don't know how to do it. So I'm moving on. What I'm here to tell you is that that's not what that is. I do use code all the time. So I was using it for code and it was amazing. And I was like, holy crap. But then I started Having new problems that emerged. And I was like, huh, I wonder if I can solve it this way. And let me tell you what I did. So I downloaded Cursor. Guess what the cost is.
- [33:49]
Chris Reynolds
What's the cost?
- [33:51]
Matt Reynolds
$20 a month.
- [33:52]
Chris Reynolds
Okay.
- [33:52]
Matt Reynolds
Everybody knows apparently what the model is for this, right?
- [33:55]
Chris Reynolds
Right.
- [33:56]
Matt Reynolds
So $20 a month and what they give you is access to a bunch of models, but the model that they work the best with are the Claude models. So just like we were just talking to Claude in the Claude website, now we're talking to an application that you have running on your computer, on your Mac, on your Windows computer, whatever. You've got this program that's running and it's nerdy looking, right? So this is another reason that you might not do much with it. You might go, oh, it's kind of nerdy looking. It'll get better. Windsurf is prettier, I've been told. So definitely I haven't had a chance yet to play with Windsurf, but the tools work the same way. So I'm going to tell you what I did. Let's go back to the example that I had of the agreement. So what I was actually putting together in this case was a services agreement for one of my customers. I already had a pretty good model that we've been using. I had a template that I was using, but we just had a bunch of brand work done. We're about to come out with a new website in the next couple of weeks and I, I had this professionally done brand guide that looked great. And I was like, I want to use that. I want to kind of brand it to us and do all this stuff. Problem was I hadn't talked to this customer in a long time. Okay. So I couldn't remember. They came out of kind of nowhere. So this is like seven months later. They're like, hey, we're ready, let's go execute a contract. And I was like, oh, oh, okay. So here's what I did. I created a new folder on my computer, brand new, in Cursor or Claude. I created a new folder on my computer, on my Mac, on my Mac.
- [35:25]
Chris Reynolds
Okay, got it.
- [35:25]
Matt Reynolds
Okay. I go to my Mac and I'm like, I just want a new folder. And the folder is going to be called, you know, name of company, whatever. Yeah, I could be Ackme, whatever, Acme, whatever. So what I do is I, I go into Acme. It's completely empty. There's nothing there. And I open it up in Cursor. So Cursor is Going to open a folder now. And it's nice and crisp and clean. Nothing in there. There's a little chat window on the right side, just like there is and most of the other things that you're used to today on the web. This is just a program that's running on your computer. And on the right side, I have the ability to talk to Claude. Okay, So I can talk to Claude or I can talk to OpenAI. ChatGPT.
- [36:02]
Chris Reynolds
Okay, hold on, hold on. So Cursor is running and open, and you've opened the folder, an empty folder on your MacBook with cursor.
- [36:11]
Matt Reynolds
Correct.
- [36:12]
Chris Reynolds
But you now have the ability to start to talk to Claude or OpenAI or whatever.
- [36:17]
Matt Reynolds
Gemini, Deepseek, all of them. Right. It gives me access to all the models. And you only get so many credits. But the difference on this one is you can buy up credits, you can give it your credit card and say, just don't stop. Which is pretty much what I do. Interestingly enough, I use this very close to 20 hours a day right now. Like it's unhealthy. Unhealthy the amount I use it. And even then I'm only using 8, 10 bucks a month, something like that.
- [36:46]
Chris Reynolds
Above Dirt cheap. Above the $20. Right.
- [36:49]
Matt Reynolds
Sometimes. Sometimes that number can well under 50.
- [36:52]
Chris Reynolds
Bucks a month on this thing.
- [36:53]
Matt Reynolds
Yeah. And like if I spent a hundred bucks, I made lots on it. Right. Like, so it's, it's totally worth it. Worth the money. Right. Okay, so I have an empty folder, I have a chat window on the right side, and in the left side is my editor. It's the editor to edit files. Basically. That's what it is. I have files that I'm going to type on and do stuff with. And these are all going to be sort of text based files. So what I'm. What I did was I said, well, I need to give this thing context. So what, how am I going to get it? I use Fireflies. You use fireflies, I think for recording meetings. Luckily, I had all the entire context of every word that we said to each other over the last six months.
- [37:33]
Chris Reynolds
You and company. Acme.
- [37:35]
Matt Reynolds
Me and Acme. Right.
- [37:36]
Chris Reynolds
So you could go and you could say, find all. You found all of the files, all of the fireflies transcripts and. Or summaries, which it does.
- [37:43]
Matt Reynolds
Both.
- [37:43]
Chris Reynolds
And I have every conversation you ever had with Acme because you're like, I don't even remember what ACME does necessarily. I don't really remember them. And so I need context. So you've got that in there. And I'm just going to guess and then correct me if I'm wrong. You've got your base draft contract that you tend to send out to new clients coming in.
- [38:03]
Matt Reynolds
That's right.
- [38:04]
Chris Reynolds
You've got your new branding guide that you've put in.
- [38:06]
Matt Reynolds
Correct.
- [38:07]
Chris Reynolds
And what else do you.
- [38:08]
Matt Reynolds
I went ahead and downloaded and I realized you all probably don't even know you can do this. But on Gmail and in Outlook, you can download your emails as dot EML files.
- [38:20]
Chris Reynolds
Right.
- [38:20]
Matt Reynolds
And they are text, but they're text in a very particular kind of format. But it's all very nerdy.
- [38:25]
Chris Reynolds
Every email from acme.com every one of them, you downloaded, and you put those in the folder as well.
- [38:32]
Matt Reynolds
Yes. And of course, I put these in subfolders. So I had a little subfolder called Correspondence, and I put it in there. And then I would take in correspondence. I would have, you know, fireflies, and I might have emails and I might have, you know, whatever. So I've got these documents. Now, the problem with my document is that it's in Word format. Okay. And these AI tools, they don't do so well with some of these types of formats. So I happen to know, because I've been doing this a lot, that Microsoft released a tool called Market Down. Remember how we talked about Markdown?
- [39:02]
Chris Reynolds
Yep.
- [39:03]
Matt Reynolds
They wrote a tool that is free called Market Down. I didn't really know how to use it, so I was like.
- [39:08]
Chris Reynolds
It was like, if you have Microsoft Office, you have access to mark it down.
- [39:12]
Matt Reynolds
Not just. Yeah, and not just Microsoft Office, but you. But it does PDFs and all kinds of other stuff, too. It does a lot of neat stuff. But I didn't know how to use the tool. It's a technical tool. Like, it's out on GitHub. And I was like, I don't know how to use this right now. So I go into my chat window and I say, hey, can you use Market down and search the Internet to go find, like, where it is? And. And the documentation on how to use it to automatically convert all of my documents that are inside of this folder. And I drag the little folder name into the window, and now the folder name's in the window. It goes, oh, yeah, I can do that. And it goes out and gets marked down. Mark it down. The. The tool, which is again, a little tool that you install on your computer. And it automatically ran it on all of my docs and it converted all of them from Word Doc format into Markdown format. And now it's done. I didn't do anything. And the whole process took me about 20 seconds. And the thing was done. Okay, Now I know that it's all in a format that works. It needs to be text based format. So it's in. I got this EML file that's text. Cool. I've got this downloaded transcript from Fireflies and what it gives you the option to do is download it in a format called JSON J S O N. Very nerdy, but still pure text. And I don't need to know anything about JSON, I don't need to know any of that stuff. I just need to know it's in text, right? So I download all that stuff and then I go into Cursor and I say, okay, cool. All of this stuff is now in a text based format. Put all of it in your context. You can literally click the files on the left, click, click, click, click, click and drag them over to the window. And it goes. And it puts them all in there. And I say, all right, here's what I want. I kind of like Agreement one. I kind of like Agreement two. I actually had two different agreements. I actually want a slightly different agreement. I want one that blends the two. So go in and do the agreement there and produce an example of what that looks like.
- [41:05]
Chris Reynolds
You say what you liked about Agreement one and agreement. I like the fact that agreement one is this and I like the fact that Agreement two is more or whatever. And then it can take that prompt.
- [41:16]
Matt Reynolds
And then and it generated a new one. And so now I have a new one that I can read. And I'm like, okay, that one looks pretty good. Now let's apply it to the customer. Go look at all of my Fireflies transcripts, go look at all my emails and give me a detailed summary of everything that we talked about, anything I promised, anything that they asked for so that I understand what all we're trying to do. And so what I'm looking for here is for you to produce a document, a new document called ACME Summary Markdown is or MD is what I call it. And it's like, cool. And it comes out and it gives me a new file.
- [41:57]
Chris Reynolds
Here's our promise to acme.
- [41:59]
Matt Reynolds
Here's the promises you made. Here's what they asked for. Here's their primary concerns.
- [42:04]
Chris Reynolds
I figured you could also even prompt even one step before this. You could even say, and also. And put it in a file, find everything you know about Acme.com, go on their website, go on whatever so that I So I have better context of the type of company I'm talking to.
- [42:20]
Matt Reynolds
That's right. And actually you could go out to ChatGPT, pull up deep research and have it do that for you. And it's great. It will find everything because it'll do 30 minutes on it. Right.
- [42:30]
Chris Reynolds
But now you're having Cursor build out an agreement from several previous agreements. Certain things you like about one, certain things you like about two, all of the promises that you've made in past emails or transcripts from conversations. It knows things already about this company and it fires off a an agreement.
- [42:54]
Matt Reynolds
And it creates an agreement and the agreement is perfect, but ugly.
- [42:59]
Chris Reynolds
So first off, on tech, on text alone.
- [43:01]
Matt Reynolds
Yeah.
- [43:02]
Chris Reynolds
On the very first spit out, it's perfect. Or was 90%. And you had to prompt it a few more times.
- [43:08]
Matt Reynolds
I had to prompt it a few more times. I probably had three prompts in that one.
- [43:11]
Chris Reynolds
So let's say is that a fairly accurate. So let's say it's 90% correct. 92% correct.
- [43:15]
Matt Reynolds
Yeah.
- [43:15]
Chris Reynolds
You prompted a little bit more. Now we're at 95. A little bit more. Now we're at 98. Last one. Yep, that's nails. That's perfect. Now I've got a perfect text agreement.
- [43:25]
Matt Reynolds
Yep.
- [43:25]
Chris Reynolds
But it's not branded and it's not pretty yet.
- [43:27]
Matt Reynolds
That's right. So what I did was I said, okay, use my brand guide. Now, I had to do a little bit of work on the brand guide because mine was all image based. And so what I did was I just went in and pulled out the colors and the typefaces, a number, 762, whatever, put it in a small file and then said, use that as the Azure guide and create a document that is appropriate for this kind of document. And so that one took. It was eight to ten prompts. I kept every version. I actually made it keep every version. Right. So it's making a new folder each time for a new version inside of this folder that I'm in, it makes a new folder and drops the new version and all the different files. Now I also knew how to prompt this, by the way, so that did the right technology stuff so that it was using the right stuff to give me a PDF document. So I'll tell you what that is.
- [44:19]
Chris Reynolds
In a minute to make sure, for clarity of listeners and also for me. So within two or three prompts you get a perfect text agreement from Cursor. But it's is. And is it specific to Acme or specific. Is it general?
- [44:34]
Matt Reynolds
No, it's general.
- [44:35]
Chris Reynolds
Okay, so it's general. So now what you're doing is now you're going from general to specific.
- [44:39]
Matt Reynolds
Correct.
- [44:40]
Chris Reynolds
And so that's where you started to prompt it to say, now take that document. Which is fantastic, but I want it to be. Can you remember some of the things that you said that are safe to say on the podcast? Like, yeah, sure. Here are some of the things I wanted to change to make it from general to specific for this type of thing.
- [44:54]
Matt Reynolds
Yeah, here's what I did. What I said was, you know, we have a list of services that we provide. We have different types of engineering that we would do different types of services. Even, you know, a lot of the AI programming stuff that we do. I wanted to make sure that I got in there. So my list of services is never quite as exhaustive as I'd like it to be. So that was one aspect. I said, okay, tell me from all the correspondence with Acme, tell me what services I would need to make sure were listed in order for them to say to find themselves in my list of services. Right, right. And they were like, oh, you need these, right? It's like, cool. Add that to it. Adds it to it. Is that okay? Look at my pricing, look at the conversations we had and tell me whether or not the pricing is right for this customer. And they were like, do, do, do, do. Yep, yep, this pricing looks good. This is gonna. This is gonna land extremely well with this customer. Anything I need to change? Like, what do I need to change about this agreement? What concerns does. Is this customer going to have you.
- [45:56]
Chris Reynolds
Tell them the goal is to get them to sign the agreement?
- [45:58]
Matt Reynolds
I did.
- [45:59]
Chris Reynolds
So I said, the goal is to assign. Is to get to.
- [46:01]
Matt Reynolds
This was literally my prompt. Something. Something like this pretty close. I said, read this agreement as though you are the customer and tell me what concerns you would have that we should address in the. In the document so that it solves the concerns. And it was like, do, do, do, do, do you need to add these things? But. And I was like, okay, I like this one. I don't like this one. I like this one. Put them in. So it puts them in when. When I get done. I. And after the branding iterations, I had.
- [46:32]
Chris Reynolds
Quite literally the cursor also does. So cursor did both the text and.
- [46:36]
Matt Reynolds
The branding and the branding and then finally converted it. Converted it to a PDF.
- [46:41]
Chris Reynolds
I'll tell you what, then to sign.
- [46:43]
Matt Reynolds
Yes. So I got done with that process and I had the best agreement I've ever seen in my Life. I look at that thing and the whole process because I've been doing this nonstop now. It would take you longer because you gotta learn, right? This is why we talk about, get in, start using the tools. I got done with that whole process in roughly 15 minutes.
- [47:00]
Chris Reynolds
It's crazy.
- [47:01]
Matt Reynolds
It's insane. It is completely, ridiculously insane. So when we talk about the different tools you could use, the reason we're using the sequence, this sequence, to help you all founders figure things out, is this tool and tools like it. Cursor, Windsurfer, Windsurf, and then VS Code is a little behind, I think, on some of these things. They just came out with a good agent. These things are called AI agents that you're actually sort of putting in your code base or whatever you're working on. These tools are so good for writing and thinking and they brand themselves as coding tools. But I'm telling you, they don't need to be coding tools. I'm now using them 20 times more for just writing and thinking and working through a hard problem. Your SOP problem we can put in here. And we have no limits to the memory. So one of the things that I didn't even mention, I think it's important is all this. The reason we opened a new empty folder is because what Cursor is doing under the hood is it's scanning everything in that folder and it's indexing it with this super easy index so that when I say I need you to go look up the conversation I had with Acme on March 3, it has the ability to do that because all of the stuff, all the documents I've added have been added to this nice little index that it has the ability to go get and reference and search on. And there is no limit to the size.
- [48:22]
Chris Reynolds
Got it.
- [48:23]
Matt Reynolds
So you can just keep going. So the process here is you're going to add documents to. To the thing, you're going to prompt it to add new documents to the thing, just like we did with Claude. Exactly the same process, except now it has new tools because it can do things that Claude can't do.
- [48:43]
Chris Reynolds
Okay, so this is the. One of the few times that I wish. Well, I always wish we were in the same studio because I miss you and I like to see it, man.
- [48:49]
Matt Reynolds
Yeah, man.
- [48:50]
Chris Reynolds
But if we're in the same studio, I would pause the podcast right now. Don't pause the podcast. Let's keep it rolling. And we would actually go into one of these AI tools and. But I'm going to just ask you the question we would then ask the question or the question that is now in my mind. And because it's in my mind, I think there are probably. It's in the mind of listeners. We go from these AI tools that are free or cheap, but you can't really put in your own data that's safely to be stored that they can pull. They only pull from the Internet at large. Once we get to Claude, we have the Internet at large and we can put data into claude. From what I've heard you say is that the biggest downside of CLAUDE is the amount of bandwidth or total data that you can give it. Right now, there's no ability to buy up. And again, I'm sure within a few months of this podcast coming out, if not even a few days, that will change. Here's the question. Compare and contrast CLAUDE and cursor. For the average person like me who doesn't understand how to code specifically what makes them different and why is it that you're not staying in CLAUDE to do those things, but that once you get what you need out of Claude, you're then taking that into cursor? What's the.
- [50:08]
Matt Reynolds
Because what I know that other people probably don't know as much about is that once you have access, once you give the AI agent access to your computer, access to run commands on the command line, which again, it's very nerdy thing to do, but once you give it that ability, it just got the ability to do everything. Because I can go, for example, I've done this, I can say, hey, Cursor, go download the documentation for the API for HubSpot. And it goes, doot, doot, doot, doot, doot. And it does it. And so you can add tools using a thing called mcp, which is again nerdy, but you can add tools and it'll go download all of that documentation. So gets done with documentation, I say write a program that goes to my HubSpot and pulls all my HubSpot data. And I don't need to know anything about it. This is, this is a whole new term. If you ever go to YouTube and you want to learn more about this, what you do is go to YouTube and type in Vibe coding on cursor. Vibe V I B E. Vibe coding. This is a bunch of people who are learning to or interacting with tech and code and all that stuff in this same way that don't know anything about the program. They're just like, does it work? I don't know. Next, next, next, next, next, right? And it'll do this thing for us. So then it goes and pulls that documentation from HubSpot. And cursor can do this because it's got access to your computer, whereas a tool like Claude cannot, because you're running through a website, it doesn't have access to your computer, doesn't have access to all that stuff.
- [51:40]
Chris Reynolds
Again, in layman's speak for Claude, I have to manually load in the information. I'm giving Claude this additional information that they don't have that's outside of the Internet, but is potentially on my computer or on my Google Doc or whatever the thing is.
- [51:56]
Matt Reynolds
Or inside HubSpot.
- [51:57]
Chris Reynolds
Or inside HubSpot, but I'm manually putting it in. And Claude does all of these amazing things we talked about in the first half of this episode.
- [52:04]
Matt Reynolds
Yeah. Because it can write and execute code.
- [52:06]
Chris Reynolds
Cursor is a program running on your computer that can go find anything on your computer, anything on your. You can give it access to your email, it can go find. It can get access to your HubSpot, to your CRM. Again, I'm sure there are people listening to this, being like, I don't know that I want to give this software, which I get. But that's the big difference is that Cursor can go out and find the things, you can actually help tweak and refine the things that it's pulling from based on what you've already done in Claude or other AI applications, deep research, whatever the thing is. And then Claude can take all of those things, go find the things it needs, and then can spit out what will eventually be a perfect, wonderful contract. By the way, we're not lawyers, so we're not telling you to do this. Please don't necessarily write your entire will and family estate on the whole thing. Probably do it, but we're not telling you to do that.
- [53:00]
Matt Reynolds
Your mileage may vary.
- [53:01]
Chris Reynolds
That's right. As well as make it beautiful, brand it, use your branding guide, et cetera, and the next thing you know, you've got a beautiful exported document. I remember several years ago, man, this is probably 10 years ago, let's say 12 years ago. I was on an airplane and I was working. And I think this was early on in the online coaching business. It might have been at the end of the gym business. And, you know, I do the best I could. I'm like you. I like. I can write text, SOPs. I wrote Grandpa's obituary. The family's like, Matt can write the obituary, which I certainly use AI to help tighten and clean up a little bit, but I'm the same way. I can see a thing and go like, that's beautiful. I can recognize beauty, but I can't create beauty. When I hear an orchestra, when I hear Beethoven, I'm like, somebody came up with that out of nothing. That doesn't even compute in my brain, right? And so what it does, it's essentially, it's like your own personal Beethoven. It's your own personal graphic designer. But not just that, it can also refine the text to exactly the way you want it and then brand it the way you want it so that you can then put something out that is incredibly unprofessional. Coming back to the story, I'm sitting, I'm sure in coach at the time, and I'm on the aisle on the left side and I'm looking across and to my right diagonally, and there is a guy working on a document that is just this like beautifully organized document. The kind of stuff that we put out today because we have graphic designers and AI and all this stuff. And I remember thinking to myself, like, I wonder what kind of business that is and like, wonder how many billions of dollars that businesses. And the answer is probably was a real big business worth billions of dollars, right? But today, and the point of the podcast, it's build your business is that anyone can do this. And it doesn't take a ton of time. It takes some time. You're gonna need to play around with it. It should be fun, I would say, like, it shouldn't be, you know, spoonful of medicine for you. This is like super exciting to be able to walk through these things and going from step one, you know, text applications and understanding large language models to figuring out text and, or figuring out graphics and audio to then moving into things like Claude, we're able to actually load private or business information in that it can also pull in and start to spit out excellent things for you. And then moving on to cursor, which is how you're using it, which is to make fully formalized documents that looks like you are a multi billion dollar company and you might be a company that is an employee of one.
- [55:33]
Matt Reynolds
That's right, Documents slides. There's a great way of doing gorgeous slides using this. And again, part of this is just like it taught me how to use the slides. One was a horrible problem and has been a problem of mine for a long time. And what I did was I just said I had all this really good context and I was like, can you make this into slides? And it said, yes, I can. We'll use a tool called MARP M A R P to stylize your Markdown and convert this into beautiful slides for you. I had never heard of MARP before, ever. Right now I'm a programmer. I did it, taught me that this tool existed, then used it. And then I was like, now I know. Now I know the way that it wants to create this. Because Markdown, remember, is the language of AI at this point. It's like every. This the medium that they use to like transfer information back and forth. So in any way that you can convert Markdown into slides, you now have a super tool for how to create slides, gorgeous stuff in use with slides. Markdown is what gets converted to PDF and there's a very specific path to do it. And so part of this process is the. It is both great at creating, it is great at thinking, at helping you think through problems. Right. But even more so, it is, it is one of the best teaching tools I've ever seen. So this the reason that it's a. An almost horrible addiction at this point for me, that I'm spending 20 hours a day on it, because it is, it is massively increasing my productivity.
- [57:12]
Chris Reynolds
Right.
- [57:13]
Matt Reynolds
And simultaneously it is teaching me at a rate I have never learned before. So I spend at the end of every day, I'm completely exhausted and fall over sideways into bed.
- [57:23]
Chris Reynolds
Right.
- [57:23]
Matt Reynolds
But it has been the next morning.
- [57:25]
Chris Reynolds
Excited to joyful. Absolutely.
- [57:27]
Matt Reynolds
That's exactly right. You got it right.
- [57:30]
Chris Reynolds
Let me ask you one last question, which you can connect to. The answer is, I know you've been using AI, ChatGPT, et cetera from the very beginning. And that's not that hard to learn. It's actually pretty fast. Right. How long? Let's not say hours. Let's just say, like, how many weeks ago, how many days ago or so did you start using Claude? How long you been using Claude?
- [57:52]
Matt Reynolds
Claude I've been using for probably three or four months.
- [57:57]
Chris Reynolds
And then how long you been using Cursor?
- [57:59]
Matt Reynolds
The podcast we did, right after my emergency situation where I was in Florida, I opened Cursor for the first time then. That was at this moment.
- [58:09]
Chris Reynolds
That was a month ago.
- [58:10]
Matt Reynolds
That was. Yeah, maybe slightly less than a month ago. Three weeks?
- [58:13]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah, because we were there. Oh, yeah, yeah. Because it was the week after Rachel and his birthday. So literally like three weeks you've been using it. So.
- [58:18]
Matt Reynolds
Yeah.
- [58:19]
Chris Reynolds
So the learning curve is pretty fast on this, knowing that most of you are not going to spend 20 hours on it. Daylight Chris is. But also you don't own dev teams and engineering teams and that sort of thing. So for that individual owner who's trying to build their business or start their business or put out things that look, I mean, I think about the ability for young owners who have some good traction in their business building out things like pitch decks. You and I, we use a software called ZEC for our board decks. One thing that I want to do for our next board meeting here, which is in a little less than two months, six weeks, somewhere in that ballpark, is let's use these tools to help build out the ZEC presentation for the board.
- [59:01]
Matt Reynolds
Right.
- [59:02]
Chris Reynolds
It also has a really nice AI interface that's part of it that will take the things that you write in the presentation and it'll actually clean up the again, because you're not as clear of a communicator as you think you are. So with all of those things, final sort of like. And by the way, thank you for listening to all three of these episodes that have made it this far. What would you say about getting started and getting real? Is there anything else that they need to know to just get up and running and testing this stuff out?
- [59:31]
Matt Reynolds
So here's what I would say. I would say work your way up this chain. It's going to take a little time. It'll start by slowing you down, and then it will get. Your productivity will go through the roof. As you get better at it, you'll understand various ways, you'll learn new ways that no one's ever done before to prompt it, which is great. What I'll say as a warning is when you start getting into the tools like Cursor, So Cursor and Windsurf and some of these other tools that are there, if you turn off all the guardrails for the agent and you give it free reign for your computer and you don't know what you're doing. This is an incredibly sharp sword that you will cut yourself with.
- [60:11]
Chris Reynolds
Right.
- [60:12]
Matt Reynolds
So, fair warning, when it has access to run commands on your computer, it can erase your entire hard drive. So just be aware that.
- [60:21]
Chris Reynolds
How do you keep the guardrails up?
- [60:23]
Matt Reynolds
Well, there are settings on Cursor and I think there are settings on Windsurf as well that basically say you can't delete anything. That's the one thing you have to always ask me for. By default, it doesn't do. There's a mode on Cursor called YOLO Mode. And YOLO Mode is where it just basically always does what it wants to do, except it'll Stop with some guardrails, and you can go and put those in. Got it. But again, it gets more technical. And so the other piece that I'll tell you is that in today's time, it is very useful. There is a huge return on investment of time spent educating yourself about the tools and a little further into the technology than you're used to. And the tools will do that for you. They will help you learn the stuff. And it's worth getting to that point. You want to kind of stop thinking along the lines of, well, because I don't know anything about code, I shouldn't use a code editor like cursor or because I don't know anything about code, you know, I shouldn't let it build stuff for me that has to do with code. No, not true. Like, go ahead and wander into it. Right. Wander into it. Make mistakes. Learn some stuff along the way. Just be sure that in that process that you've put appropriate guardrails in place. I would hate to get people that send us stuff that say, like, it erased my entire computer, because, like, fair warning, it will do that if you're not careful. So be aware that these are incredibly powerful tools that you want to master slowly over time, and be very, very careful with them at the beginning. Make sure you've got them set up appropriately. But, yeah, it's a wild world. You can do more, infinitely more than you could ever do before. And hopefully one of the things that this helps trigger in some of your minds is maybe it'll take some of the fear away of this idea that no one's ever going to have any jobs anymore because of all this stuff. I think the thing that you find the more you play with it is it opens up a hundred billion opportunities that I don't think we could get to in a millennia.
- [62:18]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah.
- [62:18]
Matt Reynolds
So there's. It's just. It's in the new opportunities that. That everything changes.
- [62:23]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah. That it exponentially increases output for those that know how to use it.
- [62:28]
Matt Reynolds
Yep.
- [62:28]
Chris Reynolds
When you're able to exponentially increase output, it opens up opportunities for new jobs, things we haven't even thought about. Between last episode and this episode, I was texting you, and I was like, dude, my mind's going nuts about all the things that we could do. Especially for a company like us who have niched down and do online coaching really well, it's like, okay, gosh, there's a million of these tools we can use to help other coaches do online coaching really, really well. And that's a relatively small tam the total addressable market of that is still not enormous. Plenty big enough for me. But I think when you start to think that way and go, like, once you've figured out some of these systems, and this is the new world where you and I have owned business for 20 years, none of this existed for the previous 19, not until this year. And so now you have business owners coming up where this is just part of the tool.
- [63:23]
Matt Reynolds
Right.
- [63:23]
Chris Reynolds
You think about, like, how many years accountants did spreadsheets on those actual accounting graph paper, spreadsheet papers, and then Excel comes out and changes their whole world. Like, that's this. So that's this for new founders, for young business owners, and for us, for those of you who have been business owners for a while, don't get scared of this stuff. Learn it, play with it, have fun with it. Again, keep the guardrails up. Make sure you put yourself in a position that, you know, you don't get yourself in trouble or delete something that you're not supposed to delete. But the key here, and I think one of the big keys of this podcast, in general, overall, we want to help founders. It's about overcoming your fear. Right. It's about giving you freedom. And along with that, it's about tremendously improving your output, effectiveness, efficiency. And these AI tools are doing that at a rate that I think what is maybe even most scary for people who are not worried about Terminator 2 occurring is that it is moving so fast. That that is what is terrifying for a lot of people. But that's exactly why you should get done listening to this podcast and immediately jump on and start playing with the stuff.
- [64:34]
Matt Reynolds
That's right.
- [64:35]
Chris Reynolds
Because it is moving that fast.
- [64:36]
Matt Reynolds
Yep.
- [64:36]
Chris Reynolds
And five years from now, we'll go back and listen to this podcast for five years from now, and we will laugh and joke about, remember how archaic AI was back in 2025. We'll listen to in 2030 and go, like, we would have never even thought that this stuff was possible.
- [64:55]
Matt Reynolds
That's right.
- [64:56]
Chris Reynolds
But if you don't start at building fire and cracking that granite and making the wheel, you don't ever get to the Tesla car.
- [65:04]
Matt Reynolds
That's what it is. That's exactly right.
- [65:06]
Chris Reynolds
Tesla's coming. We're learning how to make fire, and we're making granite wheels.
- [65:12]
Matt Reynolds
That's right.
- [65:12]
Chris Reynolds
And so if you don't know how to make a fire and don't know how to build the wheel, and then the Tesla comes out, and the Tesla's not coming out 150 years later, it's coming out two years later.
- [65:23]
Matt Reynolds
That's right.
- [65:24]
Chris Reynolds
You're going to be left behind, right? That's all there is to it. That's another episode of the Build your Business podcast. Thanks always for listening. We would love a 5 star review. Love a great review. And not just 5 stars. Like say something nice because. Or or say something not nice. I don't tell us what you think about the podcast. We read those reviews, we listen to them. We adjust the topics that we talk about here on this podcast. If there's something that you're nervous about or anxious about as an up and coming founder or business owner, that's what we're here to do. To help kind of walk you through and coach you through those things. So we would love a five star review there. Please share the podcast with a friend, family member, fellow business owner. If you're in a mastermind group or a group of business owners, it's a great place to share it and love you guys. Appreciate you and we'll see you guys next Friday.
- [66:25]
Matt Reynolds
Sa.