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Cold Emails Destroying Your Focus? See how AI ‘Cold Defence’ Saves Your Inbox & Time
Cold Emails Destroying Your Focus? See how AI ‘Cold Defence’ Saves Your Inbox & Time
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- [00:00]
A
Imagine waking up to an inbox that already knows you, what matters, what's noise and what can wait. No sorting, no filtering, no overwhelm, just clarity. That's the power of Code Defense AI built by Justin Abrams, CEO of Aryo Consulting Group. It's the system that learns your habits, filters cold emails before you even see them, and gives you back the one thing you can't buy. And that's time. Let's talk about how AI is changing, how we work through your emails. Let's get into it. Welcome to lead with AI. I'm Dr. Tamara Nall. In each episode, we will take you behind the scenes with visionary leaders shaping the future of AI across public and private sectors. Join us as we explore groundbreaking projects and innovations that are transforming industries and making a real impact on people's lives. Let's dive in. Hi, everyone. How are you? This is Dr. T. And I am so excited. This week we are going to talk about something we all experience, and that's these random hundreds and thousands of cold emails that come into our inbox. So I am so happy to talk to Justin Abrams, who is the CEO of REO Consulting. Justin, welcome. How are you?
- [01:34]
B
I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. How are you?
- [01:36]
A
I'm doing amazing and I'm excited to talk about this because I definitely need it. In fact, I was looking at my inbox the other day and I have 30,000 unread emails, and I'm pretty sure 90% of those are ones I don't even want to look at. So if I had known about CO Defense before, I wouldn't be in that situation. But before we get into that, you know, our listeners want to know about who you are, who you are at your core. Tell us about the journey as you, you know, started ARIA Consulting, but specifically Code Defense, and why that of all things that you could have started, I mean, AI is powerful and I know that that's what powers CO defense. So just talk about us or talk to us about who you are at your core.
- [02:23]
B
Sure. So I run ARIA Consulting Group. It's really a consulting firm focused on growing businesses, growing small businesses. And a large part of that has kind of fallen into the AI worlds. Right. The fastest way to grow today is throw AI into your business. And that's a great business. I have no problem. But today to kind of really talk about cold defense, that was really one of the big problems I was finding was so much of my day was just getting bombarded with.
- [02:57]
A
Yeah.
- [02:57]
B
And the. And the problem is, like, many emails are Great emails from my clients or from friends or from, you know, employees. And so it's not something I can just not look at, you know, it's not like, it's not like something I can just ignore. I'm constantly on it. So I really tried to figure out, well, how can I if I'm trying to grow other people's businesses and half of my time is spent getting, you know, hey, quick question. Hey John, what are you doing? It's like very difficult for me to really remain fully focused. And so that's why I started co defense. How can I bring that really low cost AI strategy to some people just to build them back? Focus is the number one thing that customers ask for.
- [03:44]
A
Now tell us a little bit more about it. Is it just blocking kind of what we would call cold emails or, or is it also able to filter? I mean, you said you might have a customer and they might have a question and you need to read that, but maybe it's not as a big of a priority as something else. So is it just a blocker of cold emails or does it have something else tied to it?
- [04:06]
B
So a big problem with this was figuring out how do we define a cold email versus a regular human asking, hey, I have a quick question. So what we really did was we tried to pull all of the incoming emails. We don't actually read your emails. We scan them for certain keywords and then we cross filter and then we. And then basically over time we've gotten really good at figuring out what looks like a cold email versus what could be potentially a really honest question from someone or potentially a lead that says, I have a quick question. Do you do this? We filter out only the bad. Obviously cold emails, throw those into spam. So it really flags them as well. It makes it. We're really trying to make it impossible for people to cold email you and just hurt the, like the math to build out a cold email infrastructure system.
- [05:02]
A
So I know that sounds like you're killing a certain industry here.
- [05:06]
B
That's the goal.
- [05:07]
A
That's the goal. Okay, got it. So you kind of already gotten to a question I was going to ask a little bit later. So since we here, let's continue. So how does it work? You know, like if we open up the hood and look at the brain of it, you kind of talked about it scans for certain keywords. Now if I sign up for it, I'm sure you have kind of like a baseline of keywords. But can I also customize the keywords or is it so AI powered that you already, Code Defense already knows what those are.
- [05:38]
B
So. No, it's a good, very good question. What it will do is take your information from your site and try to understand like a little bit more. But you can certainly add in your own custom keywords, you can certainly add in your own thoughts and it will slowly learn over time. And then usually in the beginning I tell people like, check your spam like pretty, pretty religiously for the first week. If you find anything that is maybe flagged for no reason, if as soon as you tell it to unflag it, that'll go back to us and basically we can improve the algorithm slowly but surely.
- [06:18]
A
Okay, got it. Now I feel like if I use Google or Outlook or anything like that, it does automatically. There are some emails that automatically go to spam and I can unflag it and then in the future that doesn't do that. So how is Code Defense different? What's your competitive differentiation from my current email that does that or any other company that does that?
- [06:43]
B
Yeah, believe it or not, there's really no companies that do it that well. Google and Microsoft, which are the two largest email providers with Outlook and Gmail. While they do that like theoretically, it's really only like really bad, obvious, like clearly bad, not just spam, but like really bad, malicious. Where. Okay, okay, so just in the last, let's say month, I've probably got 10,000 spam emails that we've caught just in cold just for myself. And I'm, you know, not anything fancy. Right. If you're the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, you're going to be getting millions of people asking you, hey, can we sell your this that we don't want that. Like my, my goal is to just remove that layer and make kind of like make people meet in person or, or have more specific conversations to lead them out. I do not want cold email to waste people's time.
- [07:43]
A
That is amazing. So talk to us about that holy smokes moment. What is a jaw dropping moment where people first experience co defense and then they realize that, oh my God, this changes everything for me.
- [07:58]
B
Yeah, so the one of the first clients we had was a recruiter and that's a really hard industry to flag correctly because you get a lot of incoming people who they're not spam emails, but they are cold emails often. And so the important thing is are these people legitimate? Are they relevant to that recruiter? Because obviously if someone is trying to sell you something that can be a bit flagged. Whereas opposed to like Someone sending their resume unsolicited, that's actually useful for that person. So the AI figured this out without us ever even planning for this use case. And then we realized after a few weeks like, oh, this is working way better than we thought. Like it's just going to be a huge issue. And so that was, that was like my holy smokes moment of like AI's done this job way better than I could have thought.
- [08:49]
A
I mean that's kind of like when you're a chef, right? You bake a cake and you taste it and it's like, woo, this is good. So you know, it's good because you are the, as the creator actually was the one that says it is good. Okay, and talk to us. Give us another example where a customer came to you and said, oh my gosh, this is amazing. My life has changed.
- [09:11]
B
Yeah, a lot of them actually, they say, hey, this is amazing for email. Can you do it for LinkedIn now or can you do it? And so, so I'm seeing like a lot of people are realizing they can't live without it, but they have even more demands. Right? And if you remember years and years ago, people used to cold call you and try to sell you stuff that has since been banned under like a can spam flagging and that's not allowed anymore. I still do get some, but it's gone down quite a lot. This is something that is really hard to solve and I'm just trying to help some people focus a bit more. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have said that the most important thing for their career has been focusing. And so if I can even, yeah, a little bit more to their time and you know, focus on what matters to them.
- [10:00]
A
Yeah, yeah, no, I love that. I mean soon we're gonna have like, I don't know, co defense Facebook or marketing or co defense Linked or something. You can't do LinkedIn because that probably would get you in trouble. But you know, you will be able to help people in other areas of their digital communications. And so that's pretty fascinating. Well, kudos. That means it's actually working if people are like, yeah, but I need something more. That's good, Justin, kudos for that. Now let's talk about the ethics. I mean AI is just growing. You can, you can develop a product easily, very quickly. So but there's the ethics about, about it and behind it. And I think that for the people that I know that are petrified by AI, are a little bit nervous about a. It is around. Well, I don't want everybody to know my data or that's too scary. How are you and your co defense team thinking about ethics?
- [10:58]
B
It's probably the first thing we think about because people do not want to share their data, their private emails with us and we totally understand that. My job was never to, to see your data, to read it. That was not my intention. And as a business owner myself, I have thousands of NDAs that I've had to sign. So even if I didn't particularly care personally from a business perspective, I would have to be extremely careful of that. So what we do is, number one, we don't read the emails themselves. We just scan for certain keywords and we scan for other like basically negative keywords and we also scan like your email footer. There's a lot of information that comes just from like the details of the email itself. And then we actually don't store the data. So we're just basically recycling the keywords, figuring out if that's a fit, giving it a score. And if it is, it's sending it to spam. If it's not, it's sending it into your inbox. Other than that, we don't have any insight unless you want to like basically unflag something and give us the option to review it. But that's just for our information, to like improve the algorithm. We don't read it at all and not interested in looking at anyone's emails. And I think it's an extremely important question though.
- [12:20]
A
Right? Yeah. And then, so does it hit the email first and then it's, it kind of scans it or does it scan it first and then the email hits in the right place?
- [12:31]
B
No. Yeah. So it actually, every email that you'll get is ever so slightly delayed now, like a few seconds. So what it's doing is it's ingesting your 10 emails that you got at 1:01pm and then it's saying, okay, this looks good, this looks bad, this looks good. So then once it's approved, it will send it like a few seconds delayed. And so you're not actually getting an email and then seeing it disappear. That was a huge problem for me in the first iteration of this.
- [13:02]
A
Right. And that's the beauty of AI and building AI products is that whole development and saying, no, that's not quite what I want. You know, let's train it and build it for, for how we want. And so is it an, is it an app that's connected to my email because you're saying, you know, I have no desire. We have no desire to read your email. So is it an app? Like, if I use Microsoft 365 or even if I use Gmail, Yahoo. People are still using. How does that work? Is it an app that's connected?
- [13:29]
B
Yeah, right now it's a chrome extension. The365 we're working on, that's a little bit harder to do, but, yeah, that will ultimately be like a Microsoft Store app as well.
- [13:42]
A
Okay, got it. Perfect. Now let's talk about the future. And I used to ask, but what is, you know, five years look like from now? But the future could be in an hour. It could be tomorrow, a month from now. What does the future for code defense look like?
- [14:02]
B
You know, I think the biggest thing for me is getting, you know, a thousand people that really love our products. Everyone, like, every time I talk to people, I'm like, do you love getting cold emails? Like, do you love getting unsolicited messages to waste your day? It's like, we all have only 24 hours in the day. People are just stealing this time from you. So if I can get a thousand people that love this, I really do believe it will flourish forever because it's just such a hated thing. And I really have yet to find. It's quite difficult on the back end to get it set up. So I really haven't found anyone that's competing in this space. There are some, like, email improvers, email AI. There's like a company called Fixer, but they don't really do the spam and the cold email blocking.
- [14:55]
A
Oh, okay, that's amazing. So the future is already here for you.
- [15:01]
B
Exactly.
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A
You don't have the competition. That's good. So, you know, my listeners are very curious and sometimes they can doubt a little bit what is something that they can do today, this week to really get to know and learn and feel the power of code defense.
- [15:20]
B
Okay. Before you even download anything of my product, which, by the way, you can get a free trial 30 days. I. It's. We are, trust me, we're trying to make your life easier. But just almost think, like, meditatively. Just now that you are thinking about it, try and see how many cold emails you're getting throughout the day. Is it 1? Is it 5? Is it 10? And realize, like, how much of that is taking up your mental headspace. It's probably more than you think now. It's like once you get the car now, you start to see that car all over the place and just try to value your time. Think, like, I mean, it's $20 a month. It's not expensive. But think, like, would this make my life better if. How much more better? Like, that's. That's what I want you to think about. Don't think about the product. It just think about the problem.
- [16:09]
A
Awesome. So I always have this segment called From One Genius to Another. And our last guest has a question for you. And I love it. I love it. I couldn't wait to tell you about it and hear what you have to say. So here you go. Justin, imagine AI disappeared overnight. Which part of your daily life or work would be most disrupted, and how would you handle it? AI is gone. It's no longer here. What would be disrupted and how would you handle it?
- [16:40]
B
I think a lot of the operations of our business, from the. From the social media content to all of the things that are made significantly easier on the marketing side, I just don't know how I would live without it. I would have to hire teams of people to do this. It would probably cost me, you know, tens of thousands of dollars more a month versus just using AI and owning it myself or having one other team member. So. And. And I think it's only getting better with the video improvements and vo. And, you know, it's. It to me, the marketing stuff, because that's what I spend a lot of my time on. It's just fabulous.
- [17:21]
A
Yeah, no, that's. That's absolutely right. It's interesting because one area of research for me is human AI relationships. That's from your best friend all the way to your romantic partner, romantic lover. And people are like, oh, my gosh, a partner, romantic partner. And I tell people, if you, for instance, let's just use something simple like ChatGPT. If you use it every day in your life. And then it went down or it went to five and you got frustrated because you're not getting the same results as four. Because you're frustrated, that means that you too are in relationship with AI. So. And then people's eyes get so large. And I mean, it is.
- [17:59]
B
I.
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A
At this point in life, I am not sure what I would do if it were to disappear. It'd be more costly. I'd get less sleep, you know, so. Yeah, I love that answer. And thanks for being honest about that.
- [18:12]
B
Oh, yeah. It's a major part of my day, and I'm just glad to have it now. I wish I had it 10 years ago.
- [18:20]
A
Exactly. And I think we should embrace it. People don't want you to know that. They went and said, okay, reword this email so that it sounds friendlier. There's no shame in that. You know, people should embrace it and just realize that it just helps them with their lives. All right, Justin, here we go. Bonus rapid fire. I'm gonna ask you a question and you're going to give me a rapid response. If you want to take a little bit longer, I'll let you. But let's just see what you have to say. So what is the most overrated tech trend?
- [18:51]
B
I, I gotta be honest, it's very topical for today is the, the meta ray bans that are coming out and the VR goggles. I, I don't know if I am a believer in them. I don't know. Like they, they're not, they're too connected and I, I think humans are gonna just realize that they, they want to be like the phone. Having this phone is further, far enough away versus just being into your eyes. And I know there's a lot of really good products out there and my father in law just bought a new, the new Ravens, but I just don't see it happening.
- [19:31]
A
Got it under hyped AI Breakthrough.
- [19:36]
B
Oh, you know, I think a lot of the video marketing stuff that's coming out now is pretty phenomenal. It's still missing like one or two things. But we've seen this in the past of like these major breakthroughs have just been that, you know, you just wait three months and now they're solved. And so I think like in the next few months the number of video ads that are going to come out with AI and I'm already seeing them, but like they're still pretty rudimentary. I think in the next, you know, let's say six months to a year, 30% of ads that I'm going to see are going to be video AI.
- [20:13]
A
Awesome. Now which tools do you use for your video creation? I'm always curious.
- [20:17]
B
Yeah, so there's a few. So I've used the VO before. That's pretty good. That the audio is kind of off. Mid journey's animate is fantastic, like truly fantastic. And then there's another couple of them from China that are actually like phenomenal. They're like missing the audio. But I still think like you can tell a really good story. It's a great exercise to just try to tell a story using AI does everything else. But you still have to come up with the story itself.
- [20:47]
A
You do, you absolutely do. All right, perfect. What's one book we should all read?
- [20:54]
B
Oh man. I mean, does it have to be AI or can it be anything?
- [20:59]
A
It could be anything.
- [21:01]
B
Ah, that's a great question. So Fooled by Randomness by Nassin Taleb is a really great book. Just kind of talks about how you can use data incorrectly to kind of convince yourself of the wrong decision. And I think as AI is getting kind of like owning a lot of the relationship on our decisions, it is important to kind of understand what you're going to make a mistake on. And are you really making those mistakes or are you just being fooled by these numbers that seem. Right.
- [21:36]
A
Awesome. Okay, scare us. Your biggest, boldest AI prediction.
- [21:43]
B
I think we're gonna see a lot of robotics, robotic AI kind of interfaces in the next few years and that's, that's really scary. Jobs like right now we've seen a lot of like the white collar jobs go away and I'm particularly worried about some of that stuff. But we haven't really seen the people in the storefronts and the plumbers and the landscapers and all of these people. That's my biggest worry. I'm extremely fearful of that. I'm trying my best to stay competitive, but it's hard in this world.
- [22:19]
A
Yeah, no, I definitely get it. And you're right. Consultants really have to think about how they're going to compete with AI in a lot of areas. So I really enjoyed this discussion. I want to tell you what I tell a lot of service men and women when I see them. Thank you for your service. Because CO defense is out there on the front lines making sure that like you said, we didn't. We're not using this mental space trying to say, oh, should I read that email or even scan it? Because even if you scan it, it's taking away some mental capacity that you could be putting towards something else. So you're doing the good work, Justin. So thank you to you and the code defense team. How can we get in contact with you? How can we try cold defense? Let us know. Social media, LinkedIn, any ways that we can get in contact with you. REO Consulting and Code Defense.
- [23:06]
B
Yeah, so you can find me on LinkedIn. It's Justin Abrams. I'm based in Boston. I would love to grab coffee with any. Anyone that's listening. That sounds amazing to talk to people in person, get rid of the AI for a bit. And you know that LinkedIn's probably the best place to find me. But they can also go on my website, reocgforconsultinggroup.com or cold defense. I think it's cold-defense.com and yeah, go ahead. I will gladly give you a free trial and hopefully give you some time back.
- [23:40]
A
Awesome. Well Justin, thank you so much and we look forward to learning more about code defense and what it's going to do with your big bowl prediction. And and to everyone who's listening, take care and remember to lead with AI. Thanks for tuning in to lead with AI. I'll see you next time as we continue exploring the cutting edge innovations shaping AI across the public and private sectors. Until then, keep leading with AI.