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Ep 613: AI Is a Stack of Two-by-Fours. What Are You Building With It? (Plus Meet Gary and Blanche)
00:25:10
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- [00:00]
A
Before we jump into today's all killer no Filler episode, a quick word about who makes this show possible. The DTC Podcast is brought to you by Pilot House, the performance agency behind some of the fastest growing DTC brands in the world. Creative Media and Customer Journey. All under one roof. Performance and brand without the trade off. Every Friday we hand the mic to a Pilothouse operator to break down what's actually working in their space right now. Want a team that treats your growth like their own? That's Pilothouse. Head to Pilothouse Co. And now on with the show.
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B
The minute you start going deeper and learning how to start building and crafting things and making stuff, that's where the value starts to come from. I like have Claude in my Chrome extension and I was like, look at this page. Speed test results. Go through everything and come back and tell me what needs to be optimized. Higgsfield is really interesting. The cool thing that they've recently come up with is another connector to Claude. So now you can have Claude go and generate assets for you within Higgs Field. So then all of a sudden all these tools are starting to connect into the central database. This is like a secret. This is some valuable stuff.
- [01:10]
A
This episode is brought to you by Triple Whale. If you're still making decisions based on messy scattered data bouncing between ad platforms, spreadsheets and dashboards, you're not alone. Most e commerce teams are stuck piecing together a story they don't fully trust. Triple Whale changes that. It's a complete intelligence platform built for modern operators who are done guessing. Triple Whale centralizes all your data, equips you with measurement tools you can actually trust, and layers in best in class AI to turn that data into clear recommendations showing you what's driving growth, what's hurting profit, and exactly what to do next. It even takes action for you. With Triple Whale, you can quickly spot trends, catch issues before they impact revenue, and uncover opportunities you would have otherwise missed. It's about moving faster, making smarter decisions, and operating with real confidence. That's why brands like True Classic, Ouai Press, Juicery and thousands of the fastest growing DTC companies rely on Triple Whale every day. They're saving time, increasing efficiency, and unlocking insights that simply weren't possible before. If you're ready to stop guessing and start growing with clarity, now's the time to check it out. Visit triplewhale.com that's T R I P L E W-H-A-L-E.com to learn more. It's all killer. No Filler. And I am here with resident AI fanatic Braden. Welcome back to all Killer. No Filler. I wanted to start today's podcast. I just was asking my co founder, Jeff because he is doing some really interesting things with, with AI, with D2C and agency, the company we're building. And I was asking him for his thoughts before I jumped in this podcast and he gave me this like beautiful almost poem that I want to start this off. He said. Jeff said someone handed me an analogy. So someone else is. Now this is a third, fourth hand analogy, but I think it's really good. AI right now is like a giant stack of two by fours that everyone's been handed free wood stacked in your yard. Take what you need. But the thing about a stack of two by fours is by itself, you can't really use it for much. Sure, you can lean on it for a minute, but it's not a chair, it's not a T. The value of two by four shows up when someone builds something with them. One person could frame a house with it. Somebody else with the right foam and fabric builds a beautiful sofa. Someone else a tree fort for their kid. Same wood, completely different outcomes. Nobody frames a house exactly the same way. Nobody builds a sofa the same way either. The lumber is identical, but how you use the lumber is what actually makes it useful. That's where we're at with AI right now. AI is a raw input, not a finished output. I think that's worth repeating. But what you build with it is what makes it different from the next person who got the exact same shipment, which is really interesting. I think it's so tempting to use it in its raw format at times because it's so polished and so good and so persuasive. But I think it's a really great reminder that you gotta keep that human in the loop.
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B
Definitely. And that like, you can't really just be stacking or rearranging the two by fours by not really going deeper. But like the minute you start going deeper and learning how to start building and crafting things and making stuff like Jeff said, that's where the value starts to come from.
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A
Build a whole house, build a whole ecosystem. And so that's what we're talking about today. A little bit are all the exciting ways that you are integrating, I think, Claude, specifically into some of the other tools that make this industry tick. So what's, what's been the most useful integration of AI into a. An all killer no filler product?
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B
There's a great story. So it all kind of started happening once I figured out projects. So within Claude, you can create these project files. And I, and I started creating project files for each one of my clients. And some of my clients have Motion, which is a great platform. And one day I was poking around Motion and I saw something within Motion that said, like, connect your Claude. And I was like, oh, yes, I want to do that. So I quickly asked the client if that's okay. They said, absolutely. And there's like no better feeling than just like clicking on Opus 4.7 and being like, go check out Motion and come back and tell me what you think. And so that was a real opener for me because all of a sudden it came back with a lot of valuable information, one of which was it built a report on, hey, here are your top ads, and these are the landing pages that they should be going to. And it was able to like analyze and see, like there's a mismatch between the messages that your ads are saying and the landing pages that they're going to. A lot of these ads were going to landing pages that were like PDP or collections pages and stuff like that. So there was like an immediate like light bulb that went off and the conversation kind of, you know, with me and Claude just kind of evolved to this place of like, oh, well, like, what would the best ideal landing page be? Or what we're. I think it started with what were the top three landing pages that we could, we could wireframe and make. And then it evolved to like, okay, well can you just build it with HTML? And then it just all of a sudden is like, I've got this like, page that is like built. Obviously had to like understand how the folders work within project files and so that you can like drag in assets and stuff. But you know, I was dragging in like full size images and it was like breaking them down into smaller pieces to like optimize for page speed, load times and stuff like that. Just amazing. So all of a sudden it's like, I've got this pdp. It's analyzed the current pdp, it's made this new pdp. I'm like pulling like the listing images from Amazon because, like, have you ever noticed how Amazon listing images, they do a great job of like selling you the product when you like swipe through the thumbnail pictures or the carousel. So it's like I so incorporated that, have some great, like videos from TikTok, added them in, like, unreal. So I created this page and I threw it into my Chrome browser I got it launched and I threw it into my Chrome browser and I was like, oh, let's run a page speed. So I run a page speed test, right? And usually they come back. Like when we're like manually building pages, like with, with other platforms, they come back and they're not great. This one was okay, but I like have Claude in my Chrome extension and I was like, look at this page speed test results. Go through everything and like come back and tell me what needs to be optimized. And then I took all that information and gave it back to Claude. And then Claude goes in and just starts like, you know, moving the pixels around so that they load at a certain time so that it's like not slowing down your page. Like your initial paint, it's like shrink shrinking files down, creating, it's doing all this stuff. So anyways, I put the page back in and it's like phenomenal page speed. It's like 100% SEO, 100% accessibility, 100%. I think the best I could get was like 80, 88% on mobile for page speed, but it was like far better. And actually testing the client's PDP, it was like 7% for page speed, like really, really bad.
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A
So what does instapage think about this?
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B
It's tricky. Like, I think the thing that I'm finding is like it doesn't do a great job if you've got a client or if you have a brand that's very picky on design.
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A
I was going to ask about the branding and the design and it's not
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B
going to do a great job. Like the pages look HTML, they look good and they use the brand font and they use like the brand colors and stuff, but it's very HTML. It's like there's like another step that I feel like instapage and some of these other page builders can do where like, you know, like they can have like more on brand design. So that's like the one caveat. If you're an extremely brand sensitive client, maybe these pages aren't great or they can serve as like a learning opportunity where it's like, hey, let's just launch this page for a short period of time, get some page data back to see if this is outperforming our pdp and then take those learnings and then integrate into the pdp. But I mean it took me about six hours to just like vibe code this page and that would have taken a week.
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A
100%. You can get that down even in the future as you Build it more like. We've been talking about, about altering the landing page for having funnel congruency since this agency began and long before. But it appears to be a real. It has. I'm hearing it more and more in the ether of people really understanding that you've got, you know, in this age of Andromeda, you've got all these different customer archetypes you're trying to tell stories to and, you know, fill out the picture of the product experience. Yeah. That you want to be able to have funnel congruency and actually have landing pages for them. And. And so the ability that you can, you know, have spin up PDPs and different landing pages so quickly is going to be beneficial. The question is how long until it's all in the algorithm in a way. Right. Where it's like landing pages can be spun up on the fly for certain people at certain parts of the journey sort of automatically.
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B
I mean, at that point you still have the issue with assets until that kind of is fixed. Where, you know, like I said, clients are giving us just like a slew of stuff and it's like kind of up to the human in the loop to have the taste to be like, okay, like, we should put this video in the HERO and we should have this video down here or this image here. And I feel like if you can, I guess, give all the raw materials to it and you can trust it, then like, that's probably a possibility. Where like, Paige, even from like a copy perspective, if it's just like switching the headlines around or copy or just like testing it, like, like maybe Meta is just testing, that would be really cool, but I don't know how far along that is, but. And then the other cool thing is there's a CLAUDE connector. This is like a real secret. This is like, this is some valuable stuff. There's a CLAUDE connector called Microsoft Clarity, and it's free and you can. It's free heat maps and recordings for your pages. So you can put Microsoft Clarity in and then you can connect the CLAUDE to Microsoft Clarity via API. And so that then the same CLAUDE that built the page can then go in and analyze all the page data, the heat map data, the attention data, the scroll data, the scroll depth data, the heat, like the actual recordings. Like Microsoft Clarity is a part of Copilot, so it's like doing its whole AI thing. And so then you can then get it to go there and you can come back and you can say, okay, based on all the data you have. Now let's create a V2 and then let's split test this V2. And so then all of a sudden that was also a bottleneck for having just like large quantities of pages was the interpretation of the data. Like for me to go in and look at a heat map for this page and then like, you know, take the time to like digest it and then like understand where the next steps are going to be was like, it's a lot. So now all of a sudden you've got the cloud that's connected to the motion that's looking at the motion to create the pages, to the pages to the. It's like so cool, man. And then to the data then coming back and then, I mean, I don't know if there's any like split testing software out there that has a.
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A
Intelligence.
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B
Oh, really?
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A
Yeah, intelligence. We're, we're working with them potentially on an upcoming thing we're doing. But they're, they're great. And they, yeah, they, they specifically do. They're an A B testing platform. That's their whole thing. And I think so then you can
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B
do API calls from Claude to that. Then all of a sudden you've got like, hey, Claude, go check out clarity for the heat map data. Go check out this for the split test data. The only thing that's not really connected is Meta, but maybe there's still opportunity there. I know that they've kind of been changing things. I think Meta did open up their API for Claude, but I haven't looked too far into that yet.
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A
Speaking of which, we sure have. On the DTC side, my co founder has been absolutely skunk works ing on Claude's connection to Meta and it's early days, but we are now. We have our first AI team members. Claude. Sorry, not Claude, obviously Claude, but their names are Gary and Blanche. So Gary is a media buyer and Blanche is a creative strategist. And you know, we're just giving them knowledge bases. What's interesting is it's like people debate all the time about best practices and I'm not. When it comes to Andromeda and what you're supposed to do and the gem and the lattice and how, okay, this does that. So you're supposed. And so there's always an online discourse about it. It's interesting just to talk with Gary and Blanche about like, why it's doing what it's doing, like really understand its logic based on analyzing creatives. And it's really, you know, we have our creative analyst telling us which of these are too much the Same and which ones we should be testing. And it's quite an interesting experiment to, to run like we're. And we're getting so far fairly comparable results than we were getting manually. It's an interesting one for sure. It's just, it's research, right. Like as an organization, it's just, I think it's just something that behooves you to check out and figure out because even if you don't know how to do it, you just ask Claude how to do it and it tells you how to do it step by step. You have no excuse.
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B
You don't. You just take screenshots. And she's like, what do I do next? I was trying to figure out how to launch these pages with Cloudflare and it was, I was just like, oh. I just like took a screenshot and plugged it in and it was like, oh, this is what you got to do next. It was just, it explains it to you. So if you ever get stuck just screenshots.
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A
That was my number one. It's funny that, like, it's the most fundamental thing about launching a website, but it's all those like back end things that I just didn't have any idea how to do and they'd always stop me in certain ways. But it's just like, oh yeah, it's super simple when you know exactly what to do. Being told step by step.
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B
So are you. I'm just curious, is he using Claw. Is it Clawbot or like Open Claw? Or is it more Claude Desktop or
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like it's Claude Desktop running on its own laptop, basically. Multiple laptops are running. Our creative strategists and our.
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B
Yeah.
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And our media buyer at this point. Yeah, but it's just giving us. Every 15 minutes we're getting an update. We've just got it all, you know, or it. It's looking to update every 15 minutes. It gives us two daily updates. It, you know, right now it only answers to Jeff. He won't open it up. He doesn't want to muddy the water. So we, we can't talk to Gary and Blanche yet, but it's. But yeah, we've got a system now where we're just sort of dumping creative into a slack channel. It's being analyzed and that it determines whether it goes into the. It's giving us an opportunity to really just set things back to basics in a lot of ways. Just like pick our best conversion action, run as broad as we can, have a testing campaign, have a scaling campaign and have like clear rules for when one goes to the other. So far so good.
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B
Yeah, so cool. So cool. I need to get on a separate call with you guys and talk more about that.
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A
Yeah, Jeff. I'm sure Jeff will be doing some lunch and learns about it, but it's, yeah, it's interesting research. What other integrations are you having some success with?
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B
Well, I've been playing around with Claude Design. So Claude Design kind of came out since the last time we talked and I've been playing with it a little bit. I think I'm still in the infancy phases of kind of like getting valuable outputs from it, but I have played around with it and tried to create some design systems and it's pretty cool. For those of people who haven't, haven't played with it or tried it, you can go to your cloud account in your Chrome browser and there's a little design menu that you can click on and, and what you can do is you can like upload Figma files, you can upload RAW assets. So I experimented with uploading some emails. So I just went on the, to the email team, I was like, give me like your top performing emails. And I brought them in and then I created a design system based on those because those are nicely made, really well designed stuff like that. And then was able to, then, you know, it takes you through the whole thing is like, does this look good for, you know, bubbles? Does this look good for CTAs? Is this how you want your headlines? Is this how you want your sub headlines? Is this how we're going to do the backgrounds? Are these the colors you want to use? Like it, it goes through all that and, and you can, you know, you approve or deny until it kind of like works through everything and then it creates this design system and then from there you can just start creating emails, creating whatever, whatever you've like used in this design system. So pretty amazing. And it's pretty cool with like the, the connection with Figma where you can just go into Figma and download a Figma file and, and then upload it to, to cloud design. So like I said, not something I've like really gone too deep with, but I can see it as like a really fast prototyper or like a last minute, like if you need something last minute just to have your, your client's design systems all kind of set up there, you know. And then I think for me what I'd love to do is like I was saying the HTML sites that Claude's building, it would be cool to build them with Cloud design so that then all of a sudden like you can start implementing those more branded clients that are more brand sensitive. You can start actually like using Claude Design to run those. So yeah, that's been another one that's been really interesting over the last little bit.
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A
Did you mention Higgs Field there? I just, I missed. Did you mention Higgs Field or is that a separate. Separate one?
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B
That's a separate one. That's a separate one. So have you heard of Hicksfield before?
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A
I haven't, no.
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B
So Higsfield is like, it's really like a hub for creatives. It basically is like, like you can go on like VO3 and make videos or you could go to cling and make videos, but Higsfield has all the models within it. So you can like create, you can use the new Seat Dance model, you can use Nano Banana Pro, you can create 4K images. You know, for a long time I was just using Photoshop and using Generative Fill with Gemini, Nano Banana inside of Photoshop, but you don't get resolution images and it's, it's really clunky to use. But then Higsfield is a little bit better at, at, at all that stuff. So you can, I mean, they have like a marketing section where you can create like AI avatars for UGC and stuff like that. Create UGC videos. So really cool, you know, put the product in, put the image of like a UGC creator and then get like AI, you know, an AI version of a, of an influencer holding your product and stuff like that. So Higsfield is really interesting. But the cool thing that they've recently come up with is another connector to Claude. So now you can have Claude go and generate assets for you within Higsfield. So you can be a creative strategist where you're saying you've got your project file that understands your client. It's got all the branding information. You can put in ads, you can put in old ads, you can connect it to motion and stuff like that, right? Then you can have this Higgs Field connector. So then all of a sudden all these tools are starting to connect into the central database. And then you can say, okay, now I've gone and looked at motion at my ads. Now I want you to go to Hicksfield and I want you to create 10 raw assets, not ads, but just raw 4k assets with Nanobanana Pro for all the different avatars that we're trying to, to reach with Andromeda or whatever. And it will go and it will prompt all the, you know, all the image prompts and it'll have like, you can give it. You can give Claude the PNG of your. Your product image and it will go and it'll communicate with Higsfield and then it'll drop it in a folder on your computer and you can open it up and it'll have all these images in there. So like a really amazing connector. And then you can take those images and then you can have different workflows where, you know, you. It will then create big scripts and it will connect so you can storyboard things with, with video and stuff like that. It's really quite amazing. There's a lot of great videos on YouTube about it. But I think that's the next thing that I'm like, kind of, kind of like lean into a little bit is, is seeing how, you know how you can leverage the connection between Claude, your project folders and your clients and Hicksfield. But one caveat is just that you can blast through a lot of tokens pretty quickly. So. And if you don't know how to use Higsfield first and you start prompting Claude to go into Higsfield and do stuff, you can run out of credits, I think, quite quickly. So you kind of want to understand how the workflow in Higsfield works. You know, what you can get, what you can do the video side, the image generation side. And then once you kind of understand how it works, then you can start like prompting Claude. And then there's a lot of great guys on YouTube who have, have actual like, skills built. So, like, it'll keep your clot at least kind of contained and not go. Go all out wild on generating stuff.
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A
Super cool. Kudos to the branding team at Higgs Field, because the Higgs Field is the field that CERN discovered, which is the, the reason why any of us have any mass at all. It's the, it's the energy that connects the entire universe, supposedly. It's the reason that we have mass instead of nothing when our atoms are actually 99.999% nothing.
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B
Wow.
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A
Yeah. So you learned some abstract physics today. Very cool. We can close this with the closing part of Jeff speech. I didn't realize this. Also, this actually went in our agency newsletter, our agency community newsletter that you can actually sign up for soon on the agency joint agency website. But it's a good way to end it. We're talking about Gary and Blanche, our two AI media buyers and creative analysts. They live in a Slack channel and talk to each other. They actively run one of our internal met accounts for for DTC newsletter. It's early, but it's working well. The fascinating thing is that out of the box it could do things, but it didn't really run the account like I would want it to. So almost all of my time has been spent distilling that about how Pilothouse Media buys, training that into Gary and Blanche. That's been the hard part. If you're expecting AI to just work out of the box for your agency, you're probably not going to get very far. But if you actually start integrating it in a meaningful way, you've got to get the saw out, you got to get the hammer out and some nails, some connectors and you got to start building something unique for you and your business, which is, it's a very empowering human statement. Right. Like even in this world it's, you know, and if you build a system that frees you up from things, it's going to allow you to do other things and, and be more creative and innovate further.
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B
More creative.
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A
It could be a real accelerant for us.
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B
Yeah, yeah, I've found that, that I'm more creative or that I'm like focusing more on finding good ad examples or actually doing like the, the Reddit research on like new audiences and stuff like that. I'm having time to do that sort of thing as opposed to just sitting like grinding through tasks or like, you know, that sort of stuff is kind of all off boarded. And I, I heard another really great thing to echo what Jeff was saying is you have to treat it like it's an employee, like you're hiring an employee and that like an employee would come to you and you would need to teach them how to media buy a pilot house and you would need to teach them, you know, build stuff. But the cool thing with AI is that it never forgets or it's going to do it the same way every time. As opposed to an employee that might forget a principal or they might, you know, you'll get lazy and sometimes. So that's the cool thing. But I think that is the key thing is when you're, if it's not giving you what you want, maybe ask yourself, am I really teaching it? Like I would teach an employee 100%.
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A
And remember that its output really is raw input in a lot of cases. And you really have to make sure you take out those EM dashes.
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B
Yes, take out the EM dashes.
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A
Take out the EM dashes and huge red flag. It's that we are talking about this all the time, but that it and Chachi PT just can't chat. GPT cannot get out the. It's not this, it's that. It's not just this, it's really this. It cannot get it. It's out of its brain at all. Which is kind of really interesting. I wonder if it's just because it's. And I was thinking about this today, I'm like, I wonder if there's a gap because all of us techno enthusiasts are so dialed into this. But I wonder if there's a gap right now with. For the general population. It hasn't really. It's still just extra persuasive copy and those willing to embrace the EM dash during this short window until everyone realizes it might actually have an advantage because it's one of the most useful things in all of punctuation that we are banishing to the annals of history.
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B
Yeah, that's true.
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A
It is. It's a beautiful piece of punctuation. You got to use the semicolon now, which nobody knows how to use. Nobody's using it. Right. It's a real grammatic snafu that we've. That AI has put ourselves into. So. So that's one downside for sure.
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B
Yeah. And I think too like chat. I'll just say maybe ChatGPT has like an issue where so many people use it and they don't use it in like a work environment. They kind of just, you know, a lot of people are just using it on a day to day and so it's maybe like training itself on what it thinks people want. And because so many people are just using it for day to day stuff, it's not really refined in that way. Whereas like say something like Claude, it's just like so used for enterprise that it's just like a little bit better. It's training on like the positive reinforcement that it's getting. And so it's kind of like separating itself from ChatGPT in that way.
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A
It just remind all of the writing. I just hear Russell Brunson, I hear Russell Brunson writing landing pages for like he just this. It's very persuasive, just these short punctuation, declarative statements. I think there's so much like classic conversion copywriting that goes into the way it natively speaks at this point because it's that it. It is the best way to persuade people quite honestly. So I'm interested to see if that evolves or adapts or if it just continues to work well as it has for 100 years. All right, well, we will catch back up with you soon, and we'll compare notes on what we're doing with Claude. Thanks for coming on, Braden.
- [24:38]
B
Thanks, Eric. Glad to be here.
- [24:45]
A
Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you're not getting the D2C newsletter, you can subscribe for free at directtoconsumer.co. and if you want to learn more about Pilothouse's all Killer, no Filler services, this is takeofftopilothouse Co. I'm Eric Dick, and this has been the DTC podcast. We'll see you next time.