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In this episode, Matt Stauffer sits down with Kayla Helmick to talk about her journey from traditional virtual assistant work to leveraging AI for automations, podcast editing, and app development — and how she turned an early existential threat into the biggest boost her business has ever had.

They get specific about the practical stuff: building reusable Claude skills to process podcasts, fixing stuck Zapier and Tally form automations, and going from playing around in Lovable to building and deploying a full Laravel app with Claude Code — her first being a memorial website for a friend.

The conversation also widens out to the harder questions: keeping a human in the loop for quality, how AI is reshaping the future of virtual assistance and the work itself, and what it even means to call yourself a "virtual assistant" when you're shipping internal tools.

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/

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