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- [00:00]
A
I don't know how much of your audience will know this, but you can get agents now that emulate human behavior kind of in the browser called browser based agents. And so they can actually use websites just as people do. And so you get one of these agents and it will go to like the YouTube, I guess it's the about page. It can solve the captchas and just kind of grab the emails behind that. And so that's one way that you can get, you know, build these lists of creators at scale.
- [00:25]
B
Hey there. I'm Cody McGuffey. I'm a husband dad of three and I'm the founder of Everbee. Ever be, Ever be Everbee. We serve over a million creators across the globe, helping them grow thriving online businesses. I believe every single human is a creator and I believe every single creator should own a business, a business that gives them the freedom to build the life that they dream of. Built online is where creators, entrepreneurs and leaders get real insights, real stories and the edge to build something that actually lasts. This is where next generation builders get built. Tom, what's up man? How are you?
- [01:01]
A
I'm very well, man, how are you?
- [01:03]
B
I'm great, thank you for coming on. Super excited to have you. I'm going to be talking about agentic AI, talk about amt, all the stuff that you guys are working on over there and just talk about the future of probably online business just in general. That sound good?
- [01:18]
A
Sounds good. Let's do it.
- [01:20]
B
I think for everyone probably wondering, including myself, is like, how did you get to where you are today? Yeah, I guess the short story, how did you go about building an agentic AI marketing company? Where'd you start?
- [01:35]
A
Yeah, great question. So my background is originally on the technical side in theoretical physics and I spent some time doing machine learning research as well. And then I kind of transitioned, started exploring the world of startups first on the technical side. And I, but I quickly realized that for me the most interesting problems were actually on the marketing side thinking about how, how do you take a business that's like a system that's made out of people who care about different things and, and grow it. And so I've spent most of my career in this, like, you know, this, this role that maybe has existed now for around 10 years or so that the people call great growth. And so I spent some time at various different startups running growth and partnerships, teams and kind of applying my technical background to these systems problems made up of people. And through that I discovered that a lot of the work that you do in kind of growth and marketing is kind of just like repetitive manual tasks that you have to do again and again and again. But it's worth it because it makes money for your company. And so what I realized was with the advent of large language models and agent Ki, that there's an opportunity to build a company that kind of just automates away a lot of those manual repetitive tasks within marketing that lets like the more creative people, the founder types, focus more on strategy and the bigger picture of their businesses and pass off execution to AI agents. And so today I'm building a company called amt. It stands for Autonomous Marketing Team. And what we do is we automate all the kind of non creative work within marketing so that people like you, Cody, or people listening to this podcast can spend their time on strategy and not emailing 100 influencers or manually updating spreadsheets or any work kind of of that nature.
- [03:37]
B
It's yeah, I love what you guys are doing because it, it hits close to home and I think it hits close to home for a lot of people listening to this also because influencer marketing is a major, it's a major tactic right in the overall like strategy of one's business or at least it should be if it's not. And but the reality is influencer marketing is a challenging thing to do primarily because there's like you said, people, there's a lot of communication that needs to happen. There's actually like a lot of the searching too needs to happen. Like the headhunting, the sourcing aspect of like trying to find creators that align with your brand with your messaging. Also, are they interested in working with you? You're probably a nobody to them. You are for sure. So you need to like also establish credibility and authority with them too. And then you have to figure out a win win deal that, you know, works for everybody. You need to send them a product that needs to happen. That means you need to create an order in your store. You'll like ship it to get their shipping address. Like there's so many little n nuanced things in here. And so when someone's like, oh yeah, just go build an influencer marketing campaign. The truth is that's there's a lot of steps, micro steps into that thing.
- [04:45]
A
Everyone wants to partner with hundreds of influencers. No one wants to manually scroll on Instagram or TikTok to find them or manually reach out over email. Right? It's, there's a lot of work that goes into it and it just takes a lot of Time. Most people think what we do is.
- [05:05]
B
I'll go ahead. I want to hear what you guys do. Exactly.
- [05:08]
A
I was just going to say, what we do is we really make the whole experience seamless. And so the experience for the marketer or the founder is using something like Google Ads, but on the back end, there's thousands of simultaneous conversations happening with all these creators in parallel. And AI is handling that communication.
- [05:29]
B
Wow. Do I want to get more into the product as well? But I guess my, my first thoughts are because it's such a human relationship, influencer marketing, a lot of people probably wondering this too. How do you monitor and how do you. Because you're kind of relinquishing trust right to the AI agent to really establish these relationships and then foster these relationships in these conversations. How have you guys been able to tackle that from a product perspective?
- [05:59]
A
Yeah, it's a great question. And one of the reasons why influencer marketing works so well is because it is based on trust. So the audiences of these creators, they spend some time with them online and they trust them. And so what you want to do as a brand is you want to build direct relationships with influencers and get them to care about your brand so that they can demonstrate that care to their audience. And the paradoxical thing here, and kind of like, I guess one of our secrets, is we believe that AI can actually build stronger relationships with influencers than kind of a busy founder or a busy kind of human partnerships manager can. And the reason is simply because AI can pay more attention to the influencers. Right? Like these people, they're online, they're posting content every day because they want to be seen. But, but if, if you're, if you're kind of a busy marketer, you've got 50 threads to follow up on every day, you can't actually give these creators the care and attention in your correspondence that they. They're looking for. Maybe you can if you're talking to only one, but if you're, if you're doing a lot of partnerships, like all these people are today, because they want to scale the channel, you can't. And so some of the things that we do in the product, for example, is we personalize, like, all of the communication based on the creator's recent content. And the creators are usually like, wow, like, thanks for watching the videos. When the creators post on behalf of our customers, we send an automated thank you message, and we're like, we saw the content, like, thanks so much. Like, it was amazing partnering with you. And they love this. And so, yeah, it's pretty paradoxical, but you can actually build stronger relationships between the brand and the creator using AI and using, you know, the data that the large language models have access to.
- [08:05]
B
There's two ways to do this, right. In my head at least, is like, you embrace that this is an AI agent that you're working with that you're talking to, or there's like, is impersonating Cody. Right? You're talking to Cody. Which approach have you guys taken in this?
- [08:18]
A
We let our customers decide. So some customers are more comfortable. You know, some. Some customers feel like there's still a bit of risk to have an AI like Persona be embodying their brand. And so. And they want. They want to have someone on their team, and the AI is like an extension of that person. But some brands want to have, like, we call it Lyra, the AI partnerships manager. And so we like the name Lyra. And so some brands want Lyra to be kind of the AI employee that is an extension of their brand, and we can do both.
- [08:55]
B
I love that. What do you find that is most, I guess, successful so far? I know you guys kind of just getting going in the last 12, 12, 12 or 18 months. What have you found or what does your gut tell you? Like, what is the best thing to do?
- [09:09]
A
I feel like we're in an inflection point at the moment. And a year ago, it would have been quite unusual for someone to receive a message from, like, an. An AI employee that has, you know, that's like representing a brand that you've heard of. But I think in a year, a year from now, it will be not that unusual. And so I think over time, more and more companies will be using kind of like an AI Persona or an AI avatar as an extension of their brand. And I think when this really makes sense is when it's clear that the service level that the AI Persona can deliver is just much better than a human. And some examples, as I mentioned already, they can pay more attention to you and your content, and they remember everything. They can also reply much faster and they can speak multiple languages. And so it's like when you kind of stack all these benefits on top of each other, once you iron out the kinks, you get as a creator, a much higher level of service than you could.
- [10:23]
B
Yeah, I get it. Like, a lot of times, for example, let's just say me. Let's say that I own a fishing brand. Right. And I sell literally, like, fishing shirts, fishing apparel, all this stuff.
- [10:35]
A
Yeah.
- [10:35]
B
And right now, let's say I partner with YouTubers and Instagrammers and all this stuff that are post like creators that are posting content and I partner with them and then they post a video with my apparel in it. The reality is, is I don't watch every single creator's videos. It's just impossible for me to do that. One, two.
- [10:53]
A
But I just don't.
- [10:53]
B
Right. And so when, when, when Johnny posts, posts a fishing video with my, with my shirt in it and he shouts me out, I don't catch it. Right. So I won't always say, hey, Johnny, that was a sick video, man. Thank you for doing that. It was so cool. He doesn't get that. So with, with Lyra in this case, he'll automatically get that. Like somehow Libra will read that content because I understand her. Johnny's feed in this, in this case feed if he's on YouTube also, Will, Will he understand the content that's going on YouTube too?
- [11:26]
A
Exactly. Yeah. We do all platforms, so Instagram, TikTok and YouTube and. Yeah, exactly as you described. And Lyra watches the content. So the large language model, they can, they can watch videos now. And so it actually has some understanding of what's going on in the video and then that, you know, goes into the communication. So it really is as if it's. Well, it's better than if you had a huge person on your team doing this. Because human, humans unfortunately, we're great, but we just don't have very much time.
- [11:59]
B
I completely agree with this. I see the value in that right there. So if anybody listening to this, like that's a real use case, by the way. That's a very real use case. I'm a fish from a fishing brand. And then if you multiply Johnny by. By 50, which is like really, you know, let's say five at first and then you get the 10, but then you scale it up. Yeah, you. It's just, it's impossible to manage all those things effectively with humans at that point.
- [12:23]
A
And you can have Johnny. Yeah, 100%. I mean you can multiply Johnny by a thousand. Some of our, some of our customers are doing over a thousand partnerships with creators every month. And in order to manage that with a team of people, probably need like 20 people.
- [12:43]
B
Let's say that Johnny or let's say that Cody is a fishing brand still. And all my partnerships are on YouTube. And I also noticed when I was on yours's marketing page and going through the sign up flow and all this stuff is really cool. It seems like I was under the impression you guys will find or Lyra will find people for, for my brand. Is that correct?
- [13:01]
A
Yes.
- [13:02]
B
Amazing. So let's say they're on YouTube. YouTube, I understand that like you have to. They also. How do you, how do we connect, you know what I mean, to YouTube? Because they also have like behind a bot, they have a bot production thing where they have an email. Right, Things like this.
- [13:18]
A
Yes. How so, so is the question how do we find the channels or how do we find the emails?
- [13:24]
B
Okay, I guess it's a two part question first.
- [13:27]
A
Yeah, yeah. So. So the channels, there's many different ways of doing it. One way that's particularly good for YouTube is basically they YouTube have an open API. And so what you can do with it is you can get the AI to consume the API and it's almost as if they're watching videos. You know, when you watch a YouTube video and then around it there are like recommended videos, like hey, these are the ones we think you should watch next. Right. So there's an API, just some software that basically has that, the same data that is going into that feedback, but just kind of as raw data. And so you can get software or an agent to look at this API and you can put in videos that you think are good and then it will recommend more videos that are like those videos. And so you're using the YouTube algorithm to help surface more creators that could be a strong fit for your particular brand. So that's how we find the creators on YouTube. And then the email thing is pretty interesting. So maybe I don't know how much of your audience will know this, but you can get agents now that emulate human behavior kind of in the browser called browser based agents. And so they can actually use websites just as people do. And so you get one of these agents and it will go to like the YouTube, I guess it's the about page. It can, it can solve the, the captchas and, and just kind of grab the emails behind that. And so that's one way that you can get, you know, build these lists of creators at scale and then do.
- [15:09]
B
Is that something that you. Something that's built into AMT where they actually build a list for you? Because there's also like limit for you, for example of YouTube, there's a limit of like five per day per browser based agent probably. Right. So it's probably not agents every day.
- [15:22]
A
Yes, you need, you need like lots of different accounts. But that's the, yeah, that's the way that you solve this. But it's possible to do this at scale. It just is. Again, it's one of these manual marketing tasks that's kind of a pain, but really valuable.
- [15:37]
B
Very, very cool. If it could be solved with, with the mt. I mean, it's a really cool thing. I'm sure. So many people listening to this right now we probably have about 40, 40 to 45,000 monthly, monthly listeners onto our podcast. So like there's people in here right now that are like doing this manually right now. They're going to YouTube, going to the about page, they're clicking on it and they hit their limit of like 5 per day and they're like, okay, I guess I'll fill out the rest of the list tomorrow. And they get five more and the.
- [15:59]
A
Next day they do five more. And so check out AMT AI and we might be able to help you out.
- [16:05]
B
No, yeah, super cool. I want to kind of go back to a quote that I was reading that, that you actually wrote. And let me just pull it up here. You said, every day when I get into work, I write 10 business priorities. @ the top of a blank page, I make a list of not more than three bullets. I jot down a few ideas for how to tackle each one. Switching out of AI into productivity. And like how do you actually get things done? You built a lot of very successful things. And I think it's important for us to realize like there's, this is not a totally a luck game. There's, there's, there's ways to, to repeat the success. What did you mean by that?
- [16:49]
A
Yeah, thanks for asking. I'll answer it with something someone else wrote, which is there's a concept from Steve Jobs that I really like called signal to noise. And the way that he would think of signal to noise is this, that, that there's signal, which is the stuff that you really need to get done to move the company forward. And then the noise is all the other stuff that is stuff that you just needs to like, has to happen, but is not. Like moving the needle is not the main thing. And if you break down signal even further within a given day, say you do like a 12 hour work day, there's maybe three to five things every day that you just need to get done that move the needle for the company. And if you don't get those things done, the company is not moving at the rate that you want it to move in the direction you want it to move. And then the noise is the hundreds or thousands of other things that could be, you know, competing for your attention at any given time. And so my approach is I try and zoom out every morning and just think about like what, what are the main things today? And then I just try and ruthlessly prioritize them.
- [18:12]
B
I love that. I think it's so relevant because most people listening to this right now are solopreneurs or maybe two, three people teams max. Probably the majority of them at least. And when you're a solo founder, maybe you have two co founders or co founder two, your small team. There's a lot. It's very difficult to differentiate between signal and noise because it all seems like signal. Right. It's like, you know, right now this customer is getting, you know, it's on fire. I need to take care of this. And it's true you do. But what's the thing that's really going to move the company forward, you know, in the next three months? Is it really going to be that customer response? Well, probably not, no. Should you remove the customer response from your list? No, but it's just understand that it's, it's mostly noise. You really need to like be figuring out a marketing funnel that go, that actually works, that will scale your company and 10x your company in the next six months. Is that kind of the way you look at it as well?
- [19:12]
A
Yes, exactly. And it's, it's especially, I mean there are different ways to think about it and it depends on the stage of the company you're at. Like, I'm really fortunate now that I have a team, a really strong team and so I'm able to ask the question like which tasks give me energy and which tasks like take my energy away. This can be a useful frame. And then just try and as much as possible only do the things that only I can do and, and that are energy giving and, and, and hand off and delegate the tasks that don't. But I think like when in the early days of building AMT when it was just me and my co founder, I think the thing that I would really, the question I'd always ask myself is just like, is this the best use of my time right now? Just ask yourself that question like seven times a day. And then if it's not, then you know, you know what is. Go and do it.
- [20:16]
B
I love that there was an interesting reframe that I had. I think it was probably a year and a half ago. Maybe we've all heard about this concept of like value your. Value your time, put a dollar amount on your, on your hourly rate, things like this. I think We've all like talked about it, heard about it a couple few different times in our life at this point. And so yeah, if you value yourself at like a hundred dollars an hour or a thousand dollars an hour, maybe $10,000 an hour like it and you're actually costing, you're building the company for your time, is this the best use of your, that thousand dollars an hour and, or should you trade that off to somebody else? It's a very interesting reframe of. Wow. I feel like I'm so expensive for the tasks that I'm doing. You know what I mean?
- [21:04]
A
Yes, exactly.
- [21:06]
B
But I do think that is more of a, a stage two probably of a lot of companies. We're not saying to, for anyone listening to this that you feel like you need to go hire an executive assistant right away. You know, it took me like three years to hire an executive assistant and like. But I do feel like you should value your time and be focusing. Like Tom was mentioning on, on Signal versus versus Noise. What do you see the future of businesses and online business going when it comes to like the AI landscape, the agentic AI, the whole movement. Something that I've been saying and other people have said this too, it's not just me, is that the future of companies are going to look so much different than what the past companies. Right. Like we think about $100 million companies per year revenue. We think about like okay, well you're going to need thousands of employees for that or maybe hundreds and it's continually reduced over time. But I think there's a future, a very near future where there's that one person, like one founder is building $100 million revenue company.
- [22:09]
A
Yes.
- [22:09]
B
What do you think about this?
- [22:10]
A
Yeah, I mean I think what's going to happen is companies are going to grow faster and companies are going to get smaller and also there's going to be more of them. So like the, the, the cost like the barrier to entry of starting a company right now has never been lower. Like it's never been easier to start a business, to build a brand, to build an online business, to become a creator. I look at our customers as role models here. Like we have several customers that are, you know, getting up there like mid, mid eight figure revenue brands. And it's just like two people, it's like two people with five agencies or whatever. And, and then AMT that's doing the work of, of what used to be done by, by like seven people. And so I really see a future where there are more entrepreneurs and those Entrepreneurs can be kind of solo founders or with really small teams. And these are going to be small teams of highly creative people with. And the ones with the best ideas are going to win the biggest. And then all of the work is going to get done by AI agents or all of the execution work. And so it's going to be a pretty fun time to be an entrepreneur and put your ideas into the world. And I think success is really going to only be limited by your imagination.
- [23:39]
B
I feel that I, when you're talking about this stuff, I get just so excited about entrepreneurship because that's obviously why we do what we do is because we're, we're nerds on this stuff. It's so fun. So like the idea of starting a business and the idea of starting a business faster is always exciting to me because especially with creators, like you're a creator, I'm a creator. People listening to this are creators. We're, we're creative people. We want to create businesses. The only downside of starting a business like another business idea is because I'm like, ah, I know it's going to take a long time to get traction. I know it's going to take because I have a million ideas. My heads are exploding with ideas. But the barrier to entry is like when it reduces and when you have agents kind of doing all the like stuff you really hate doing.
- [24:21]
A
Yes.
- [24:23]
B
It's probably the future where people own like multiple businesses and agents is playing a role in being all the employees for those things. It's very interesting.
- [24:34]
A
We're already seeing this like, so I think the first place you're seeing this is within like the consumer apps space. So there's more and more founders. Like building software has gotten so much easier now with, with AI and so technical founders who used to maybe only work on one app now work on like six and they just have a portfolio and they're all kind of making money and you just see which ones do best. And I think pretty soon this is going to come to the world of E commerce as well. And so the only thing that's going to be like the limiting factor is just going to be, be like, okay, do you have a good supply chain with like some factory in China or, or wherever it is.
- [25:23]
B
Like that's actually solved. And most in most ways it's like you don't anymore either.
- [25:29]
A
Totally. And then it's just like, okay, how do you, you know it's your ideas, your taste, right? It's like how do you design the branding? Who, which, which you know, segment of, you know, the digital world. Do you really want to target and market to. And who are your people going to be like? These are going to be the big questions that I don't believe AI is really going to answer. I, I think the best answers to those questions will always come from people. But AI is going to enable the distribution and, and all of the rest of the, the work to get done.
- [26:01]
B
You're, you're totally right. It's going to amplify it. It's going to amplify the founder's brain and that's. I'm so aligned with that. Uh, one thing that with Everbee Store is we have like, we call it Brain. It's basically a feature. It's the central, central brain for your entire brand. I'm fishing if I'm a fishing brand called Fishtails, we have a brain, right. Which is literally just like a brain and it's pulling in data from. Right. You could picture it like it's, it's. It has your brand book, it has your ic, which inside the brand book has your icp, your tone of voice, all this stuff. I can add more stuff about me, I could train it on me. It's basically like a big custom GPT with data constantly pouring into it.
- [26:44]
A
That's cool.
- [26:46]
B
So that way when you're swapping out contents, eventually it's gonna be able to make content changes for you based on conversion optimization, things like this. And then eventually when we have AMT integrated, like it's gonna already be aligned with the brand and icp, it's gonna go out and hunt creators all based on the brain versus me having to tell and talk to a human all the time.
- [27:08]
A
That's so awesome. Yeah. Because the way that we think about the product, when we onboard a new customer, we're like, okay, on day one, think of it a little bit like an intern. You know, it's new to your business on day 30, you know, it's not now like kind of a marketing specialist. And on day 90 it's like a team of 10 marketing specialists that like work 247 and speak any language. But if you are able to do what you just described and like do all that upfront work of really defining the brand tone of voice and making that easy to under for an AI to understand, then you kind of skip that first part.
- [27:41]
B
Right.
- [27:41]
A
And you can go straight to, you know, T. Yeah, exactly.
- [27:45]
B
And then in theory, I mean, well, not in theory, actually in very much reality is like we're already seeing a lot of our customers forever be like, have multiple brands. Like they have three different. Completely different brands.
- [27:57]
A
Yeah.
- [27:58]
B
And then they have like a luxury, you know, jewelry and they have like a print on apparel for like moms, like totally different ICPs, different things. But somehow they're like. Because it's all centralized.
- [28:10]
A
Yep.
- [28:11]
B
Separately. That makes sense. You know, it's just really exciting future. I see. For the, for the entrepreneurship game.
- [28:18]
A
Totally. No, I'm, I'm stoked.
- [28:23]
B
It's a good time to get into the rapid fire questions. You ready?
- [28:25]
A
Let's do it.
- [28:27]
B
What is your favorite business book?
- [28:29]
A
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Romelt.
- [28:32]
B
I don't know if I've read that and I looked that up.
- [28:34]
A
It's excellent. Yeah. It's all about like just what does it take to build a tech company? And like how do you think about building. Start like building with the end in mind. Like what, what is the, you know, how do you, how do you build defensibility and things like this into your product from day one in order to make sure that you're not only like building something that creates loads of value and you're capturing some of it, but you're going to be able to keep doing that over time.
- [29:02]
B
I see it right here. How would you, how would you define a creator in 2025?
- [29:09]
A
In 2025, I think a creator is anyone who is using social media to tell their own personal, you know, personal story or like leaning into their own kind of inner authenticity with the intention of building an audience.
- [29:34]
B
So you think it has to be mostly in the content game versus. Would you consider yourself a creator? Curious.
- [29:39]
A
I would consider myself a creator for sure.
- [29:42]
B
Even though you're not making like social media content posts, like every, every minute?
- [29:46]
A
I'm not making them every minute, but I, I feel like. So, you know, I have like a, I have a substack. I've got a website. I post on LinkedIn. Like you quoted me earlier. Like I, I am. And I'm, I feel like the way that I want to be in, in the digital world is like telling like, like, like the things. If you think about AI again to zoom back out, AI is going to make. The cost of generating similar kinds of content is going to go to zero. Everyone's going to be able to make AI generated ads and stuff. So what becomes unique in this world, I think it's like authenticity and your own kind of story. And that's the thing that no one can take away from you. And so I think that's only going to become more valuable. And I've, I've, I've, I've, like, even though I don't have like a massive audience online, I've been, I benefited from, immeasurably from, from putting myself out there on social media. Like past. I got my several jobs from social media. You know, I've hired people through, through social media, found customers. Like, it's, it's an incredible, incredible way to. It's almost like a serendipity machine to find the people that, that are thinking along similar lines to you.
- [31:11]
B
Who do you think should be a business owner?
- [31:13]
A
Anyone who's willing to take responsibility for everything they do. I think being a business owner is the most rewarding thing ever. But it's, you know, the pros and cons are like the upside is you take responsibility for everything you do. You're in control, you're in charge. The downside is you're, you're responsible for everything you do. You have no one, no one else to blame but yourself. I think that's the main thing. Anyone who's willing to do that should become a business owner.
- [31:47]
B
That's a great answer. Where can people find you, Tom? Where people follow you. Learn more about amt, all the good stuff.
- [31:54]
A
Yeah, the best place is probably LinkedIn, so that would be LinkedIn.com in Thomas Hollands. You can check out AMT, our website, AMT AI and sign up for free. And we'll send you 10 creators that are a perfect fit for your brand. And you can also find me on Twitter at T. Doggyholehole.
- [32:17]
B
Love it. We will share all those links too in the show notes in the YouTube description for anyone listening and watching. Tom, thank you very much for coming on, man. I appreciate it.
- [32:26]
A
Of course. Thanks for having me, Cody.
- [32:29]
B
Awesome. Talk to you soon.
- [32:30]
A
See you later. Bye.