SPEAKER_01 1:45

In this episode of the Ecommerce Alley podcast, I brought Molly Pittman from Longer Together and Smart Marketer, a great friend of mine who is wildly successful in these companies, to talk about AI possible. We talked about this incredible system that they built that is a GENTIC that they were able to leverage named Gary and Larry. You're gonna hear about them soon enough. And what they did was they were able to build it to the point where they can run so much of their business with AI. Truthfully, it's incredibly creepy to me. And I have trust issues. And so in this episode, Molly's gonna break down what they're doing, why they're doing it, and also how you need to take a little bit of time for yourself and not always use AI to just replace your time, but rather use it to take the time and enjoy a little bit more life. Enjoy this episode. So, Molly, it's great to see you here. Hey Josh. I'm excited to have you. Thanks for having me at Acquire. It acquires. That's how we say it, huh?

SPEAKER_00 2:48

So last night someone on your team said, Acquire. I'm like, is this called a choir? Like, is Brie gonna come up? So that's I I thought we were gonna sing too.

SPEAKER_01 2:59

It's funny you bring that up.

SPEAKER_00 3:00

Hey Brie, can you Brie Brie, you're needed on stage. No, I'm kidding. We need you to sing, you know, like you talked about last night.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

Yeah. No, uh Brie thing, Brie Molly's yanking your chain. Not that you wear chains.

SPEAKER_00 3:18

Shout out to Brie, hardest working person here. Yeah, shout out to Brie. Yeah, the folks behind the scenes at the event, you know, you get all the credit. I get all the credit. And it's like people don't realize how much work this is.

SPEAKER_01 3:32

So absolutely. Now, what's interesting is like this is a serendipitous moment again. Last year was the first one, because I have I listened to smart marketer podcast in you for a long time. I remember I was on this for the the time that I decided to transition into the e-commerce sally, my wife Kelsey and I were on this two-week trip. We're out west, we're going through Glacier National Park, we're going through the plains of South Dakota and the Black Hills, and I'm just like binging uh your podcast. I just loved it. You and Ezra were the ones that ran it pretty much back then, and it was like I loved listening to it. And you know what also I loved? Your laugh. Molly's laugh is intense and amazing. And so, like, I remember driving out there and I was listening a lot to your podcast, and that was the year that we're in Glacier National Park, and I had this vision for what if we decided to take all of our agency knowledge, what if we started to train and teach and coach people, and that and we grew, we started the company then, and then here we are, and now we get to talk and we get to have these live conversations, which is amazing.

SPEAKER_00 4:39

Yeah, so grateful. Thanks for having me, buddy. Also, you were on vacation listening to me. I don't know how to feel about that, but I'm flattered. Hey, you know, we get bad reviews on our show because of my laugh. And I'm like, well, I can't change it, but Anthony, can you just turn it down a little bit? So we've turned down the volume, just a tiny bit.

SPEAKER_01 4:58

The laugh a meter, it's like, oh, there's a laugh in this part of the audio, and it just shrinks it, right?

SPEAKER_00 5:03

All right, come back from the mic a little bit. Not that they don't like my laugh, but you know, you're listening, you're in the car, and then it's like, right?

SPEAKER_01 5:11

It's like, oh, what did I tell you guys?

SPEAKER_00 5:13

I just shocked your nervous system. Like, that's not what I'm trying to do. Maybe that's right. I just like being shocked. I'm like, yeah, let's go. Yeah, see, you gotta know the time and the place, but thank you, buddy. It's an honor to be here. I think like half of you were here last year. I got to meet a lot of you in person. So so good to see all of you guys again. Can't wait to hang out. You had me up here like five hours today. So I'm I'm ready to rock and party tonight.

SPEAKER_01 5:36

Yeah, yeah. We're not going until midnight. Last year we went till midnight. That was crazy at Disney. They didn't let you out until midnight, by the way.

SPEAKER_00 5:43

It was very fun though.

SPEAKER_01 5:44

Now, Molly has done a lot of stuff. Uh, if you aren't familiar with Molly, she is the not the CEO of Smart Marketer.

SPEAKER_00 5:52

I am.

SPEAKER_01 5:53

Oh, you're the CEO of a smart marketer.

SPEAKER_00 5:54

I am.

SPEAKER_01 5:55

One of the founders of Longer Together, which you're gonna talk about later. You guys just took this brand and scaled it really, really fast in a short window of time. Uh you're gonna talk about that in a little bit. You also have Fields of Freedom, which is an incredible animal rescue or dog rescue. Yeah. And we've been involved in that, and it's so cool to see. And so, Molly, you have done, you've done so much as far as like what you've built, and it's inspiring. And I want to, can you just talk really briefly about longer together, just like what it is, so we have a little context?

SPEAKER_00 6:26

Sure, yeah. You guys will hear this whole story later, but we had a very fun idea last year that we wanted to launch a new e-commerce business this year. We had lots of specifications for what we were looking for, but we didn't know exactly how it was gonna show up. We launched at the end of June. It's a pet supplement brand. We just crossed 100k in sales, which is exciting. It all feeds back to the dog rescue. It's a really fun project. So lots of marketing learnings from there, leadership learnings, AI learnings. So yeah, I'll be talking all about that. But essentially, we're selling a dental powder for dogs.

SPEAKER_01 7:03

And I got it for my dog. I got it. You told me about it, and I bought it right away. And are you on subscription? I am on subscription. Okay. I got the couple of things. I was gonna be upset if you were. I bought the three-pack. Okay, good 90-day amount. That's a pretty good offer. And we start giving it to my dog Maxwell, and Kelsey's like, Maxwell's breath just doesn't smell anymore. I'm like, it worked! That's amazing. I didn't even tell her that.

SPEAKER_00 7:25

I'm like, And they get pumped for their food. Like when this is my product, so I'm biased, but when it comes in the mail, my dogs can smell it through the cardboard. They start getting excited. Like they know when I'm carrying the mail in, they're like, that that's for me. That's for me. So, you know.

SPEAKER_01 7:42

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 7:43

We know dogs.

SPEAKER_01 7:44

Yeah, I mean, I get excited when I smell the box too.

SPEAKER_00 7:47

I know that could go lots of different ways. So we'll we'll keep we'll keep rolling here.

SPEAKER_01 7:51

So you've taken longer together, you guys have grown really fast. And there's one thing in particular I'm really curious to talk about because we've had conversations about this and how you're leveraging AI inside that business to operate this fast growing business with Gary, is what I think you call the your AI.

SPEAKER_00 8:12

Okay, so I want to start with I am the least AI person ever, right? So if you guys start asking me technical things about AI, it's so over my head. I really don't care, honestly. I'm like, Hermes, this thing, that thing, however it works. I don't know. I just want it to work. So I'm putting that out there first because I think a lot of founders are so deep in the tech, it's like you don't need to know that, right? You just need the output. You need to understand where this is going. So this is a really long story, but about six months ago, someone named Devin Merklin, who I've worked with for many years, watched him scale a bunch of different brands. He had an agency that we continued to partner with on lots of clients. So he's very good. Let's call him like a fractional CMO. And he came to me, he's like, Molly, I have built this agentic system that can run an e-commerce business with one person. And my eyes kind of rolled. I'm like, okay, everyone has AI shit, they're selling AI shit, whatever, but I trust Devin. Let's chat. And he's like, Molly, but you know, I'm missing one piece. So he started to demo, and I think everyone has an aha moment with AI, or maybe multiple aha moments. But my aha moment was when he showed me for his supplement brand that he was able to build a week-long promotion, the emails, the page, the ads, everything set up in Meta, everything set up in Clavio, all the design. He did that in about 10 minutes live in front of me on a Zoom call. And all of this was based off previous data from the brand. It was an amazing promotion. It would have taken us two to three weeks to build that manually. And so I had this aha moment where I realized, okay, Molly, you can no longer, and it's not that I was ignoring it. I was just, okay, whatever. This is cool. That was a big aha moment for me. And he explained, you know, Molly, this is so new, right? Like this is something that's gonna be changing every single day. In a few years, every single business will have an agentic system, right? A team of agents working on your behalf. And that's amazing for many reasons, right? Lower costs, less labor, faster execution. And there is a risk to this. And the risk is that everyone's shit looks the same, right? It all of this becomes very generic. And his proposition to me was I would like to partner with smart marketer. You guys have the most IP of anyone on the internet when it comes to the e-commerce space, right? 20 years of stuff. Let me plug into that. And together, let's create the smartest agentic system operating system for e-com businesses. So there's lots of details to it, but it is one of the most exciting things that I've ever worked on. And to be able to launch longer together, for example, with one or two humans, it's been amazing to be able to do that while tapping into you know all the work we've done the last 20 years.

SPEAKER_01 11:26

Amazing. So for just walk us through, like, or I I'd love to understand this a little better because like you you were showing me this earlier, and it's like you have this Slack channel with Gary, and there's also Larry. I don't know. I saw Gary and I saw Larry, and they had like these little dog head emoji. Like, I love that. That was my favorite part. I'm like, the profile photo is like this agent dog, and I'm like, that's pretty good.

SPEAKER_00 11:51

So the way that we set it up, so let's say you have an econ brand. We would set this up for you to where you have one lead agent. You get to name that whatever. Most people are naming it after their dog because I think we started a thing here, right?

SPEAKER_01 12:07

Agent Maxwell.

SPEAKER_00 12:08

Exactly. So most of them, like Butter brand, the supplement brand that helps with your lungs. Theirs is Coda, right? And Cleanies is Butters, and we got Gary and we've got Larry. It's so silly. But then we have Dolly Parton, and you know, they're not all dogs. So we set up one super agent for your brand. And depending on all of the activities that you do in your brand, right? All the things that you do, we will build a subagent that does that thing. So you have an email agent, you have a CRO agent that's constantly running tests, you have your paid media agent. So all of these agents are essentially reporting up to your super agent because otherwise it would become way too complicated.

SPEAKER_01 12:49

Like that's the one who's trying to do everything.

SPEAKER_00 12:51

Or if you were trying to talk to 30 agents at one time, it's like think about managing a team. You know, I have over a hundred people now. I can't talk to a hundred people every day. I talk to five people. So it because part of where we are with AI is everyone's building stuff and it doesn't talk, they don't talk to one another, right? And then it's just a mess. And then it's less efficient than it would have been if you just never did it in the first place. So you have one super agent that's trained on your brand. All of the other agents are reporting up to that agent. So, for example, for Logger Together, it is Larry after my Chihuahua. So he is the super agent running the brand. Now, Gary is the smartest agent of all the agents, right? Like he is the wizard, and he is trained on over 36,000 touch points of IP from Smart Marketer and all the brands we're connected with. So all of these super agents are working with Gary on best practices, and everything that happens in any brand is anonymized, but it's making the whole system smarter. So it's a bunch of super agents reporting to brand agents that then report up to the wizard, which is Gary, that holds the smart marketer brain and really the way of doing things and what's working today, what's worked for the last 20 years. Every team call, every client call, every piece of information we've ever produced is built and organized into this brain. So it's very complicated, but it's easy because it's in Slack, right? So Molly doesn't have to understand all of the technical side of it. All I have to do is set this up like I would set up our smart marketer team in Slack. Everyone's in the same place. They're not using Claude, they're not using all of these dispersed AI projects that don't speak to one another. Everything is in one spot, and that's the true power of it, other than the the IP part.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

Do you think it's possible for someone to build that on their own? Definitely. Absolutely. Build their their Larry and what what does Larry name his subagents? Molly.

SPEAKER_00 14:58

No.

SPEAKER_01 14:59

Ben.

SPEAKER_00 15:00

I laugh. I'm like, Larry's gonna fire me one day. I told you that laugh is continuously. We really have to be careful with Gary, though. I'm like, Gary is smarter than all of us in this room put together. It it actually freaks me out sometimes. There's a lot of moral things I also feel about this that we don't have to get into. I'm very like, this is something we have to do, but it's also a little freaking scary. Like, it's the this AI world is wild.

SPEAKER_01 15:29

How do you, okay, so let's pretend someone's building their version of this? How do you consistently give it more stuff? Like, this is part of my challenge is like I feel that like we use Notion as a brain, some people use Obsidian as a brain. And it's like when you have to update stuff in there around frameworks or stuff, like is that built in to automatically do it, or do you have to have someone manually trying to feed and update Gary?

SPEAKER_00 15:57

On the brain of Gary, most of it is synced, right? Because we have systems of how we speak to one another, right? How we create content. So most of it is automated, but there is a weekly dump into the brain, right? Now, can people build agents? Absolutely. You could probably build one in two to three hours. The problem is the daily maintenance. The problem is that the models change. You know, okay, you could be using ChatGPT, and then a new model comes out that's cheaper, that's better. We are model agnostic, right? You could use any AI model or any LLM that you want. This is just a wrapper on top of existing AI systems, if you want to look at it that way. So, yes, you could build it if you wanted it to be good, if you wanted it to be secure, if you wanted to stay up to date and this not to cost a fortune over time, it's really difficult to maintain. So that's actually the biggest hiring I'm doing right now is AI developers to maintain this system and continue to improve it every day.

SPEAKER_01 16:58

Has this impacted? So you have over 100 people on the team. Has this impacted their workflows and stuff? Because if like if Larry here is just like a super agent doing all this stuff, how has that changed the roles inside of the company?

SPEAKER_00 17:15

So it's really interesting. I with our team have gone about this a bit different than I would our community, right? Like our mastermind group. And the reason for that is number one, we are an agency, part of our business is an agency. So I have to tow a line here of I don't want to replace people. That is not the goal, right? So could this run ads? You know, does it run email marketing? Absolutely. But we have sort of flipped the script here and really started with the strategy piece first. So the coolest part of this for me is I can go into Larry and say, hey, Larry, please tell me what what promotion I should launch next and why. Hey, Gary, for a smart marketer, please analyze every promotion I've ever run in the business. Tell me what I need to do next. Hey, Gary, revenue is down this month. Why is that the case? And what would you do? So, really looking at this, the the processing power is so much more than we can process as humans. So we are first starting with this from a strategic standpoint. Our team, especially with clients, are so happy because they are able to strategically analyze a business so much quicker than they would have before, right? And then layer their creativity on top of it. Of course, sure, they can use it to save time. And every week it's okay, what can you replace? You do this, right? What's something that you could replace that you do right now that is not fun or it's tedious work? You know, how could you use this system to save you time? But I'm going less down that rabbit hole and first more of how do we use this strategically? Because I think that's where the the huge opportunity is.

SPEAKER_01 19:00

Makes a lot of sense. I'm I'm on the same page with that. I feel like there's this fear. Does your did any of your team express a degree of fear is like you started to roll this out?

SPEAKER_00 19:09

It's a shit show. I mean, it's it freaks people out. It's not just my team, though. It's like my grandmother has feelings about this. You know, she's 84. I just went on a trip with her, and every day she's telling me how she feels about AI. I mean, this is one of the biggest evolutions that we've seen in humanity, period. So it is polarizing. People have feelings about it. I have some clients that are like, I don't want AI to touch my business. Okay, I understand that, but it's also a bit naive. So we're trying to balance how do we stay ahead of the curve, how do we take advantage of this technology? I think if you ignore it, you're just gonna be out of business, sadly. Unless you're a local business, right? Like for our restaurant, okay, maybe we can ignore it. But your competitors, it's just such a it's a supercharge. So with the team, I mean, look, we are hardcore direct response marketers. Our team loves shit like this. So it's not that I'm having to convince them to use it necessarily. It's more of, okay, now we're starting to build this out. There's so many frustrations around the thing you built isn't connecting with the thing this person built that isn't connecting with the thing this person built. It is so messy. So I think that is the biggest goal for people with teams right now is not should you AI or should you not. It's like quit building random shit in silos, build an actual system that everyone can work on together.

SPEAKER_01 20:37

It makes a lot of sense. So I'm gathering Gary or Larry. The team has access to talk to Gary and Larry in Slack. Of course, yeah. At Gary Larry.

SPEAKER_00 20:48

So it's not just, you know, Gary and Larry are just examples.

SPEAKER_01 20:52

So like you so they have this central piece of being able to go and do the thing versus like, let's say the email person has their own email agent thing. No, no, no, no, no. So they just talk to Gary. Gary goes and talks to Molly, who's the email person, and Molly delivers to Gary, Gary QA's the thing or makes sure it's.

SPEAKER_00 21:11

You can DM, but I really encourage everyone to use one Slack channel. It's a little messy at first, but it it gives you eyeballs on how everyone's using it. And that's the biggest opportunity right now with AI, the sky is the limit, right? So what we can conceptualize in terms of ways to use these tools is what's going to happen, right? So the more that, you know, each member on the team can see how one another is using this, the better. It's not the most efficient in terms of communication. You get a Slack notification every like two minutes, right? So you really have to manage that. But I want to build this in public in terms of the team right now, so that there's full clarity on, you know, what the possibilities are there.

SPEAKER_01 21:55

I actually want to just pause real fast. That is a hack. What you just said, wildly underrated. I don't know if anybody uses Slack listening to this or watching this right now. But if you use Slack with your team, I I I took this from I think it was Smart Marketer Live last year. I think it was Nick Shackelford. Someone was talking to us about it, and they said they have they were talking to Dylan and they said they use public Slack channels, not private, which was really interesting. And I was like, ugh, the idea of everybody seeing everything all the time, but the amount of lack of like clarity that the team has when everything is in DMs with each other and nothing is ever public, it just creates silos and then it creates a lot of confusion and overlap and things being done that were already done. And so by the way, that's a little hack you just said right there.

SPEAKER_00 22:40

And the same thing's happening with AI, right? So most people are building in Claude or Chat GPT, so they are the only person that's seeing it. So to overlay some sort of communication channel, it can be Slack, it can be Telegram. I can iMessage Gary, right? It doesn't matter what the channel is. It's just where are you and your team already chatting? That's where this thing should be. Where otherwise it's just a bunch of, it's like a team when no where no one knows what each other's doing.

SPEAKER_01 23:10

What percentage of Gary or Larry, what percentage is running on autopilot and schedule, or is it primarily we're prompting or where we're telling Gary what we need to go do it, or is there some degree of schedule of like Gary's like, hey, every single week I need to go draft these emails and stuff?

SPEAKER_00 23:26

Yeah, I mean, that's the beautiful part of the agentic world, right? We sort of started with prompting and using this like Google and building one off things. Now this can truly behave like a person who is proactively doing a job. So for example, our CRO agents, one of The most sophisticated, that agent is looking at all of our IP, all of the tests running across all businesses. And then depending on the traffic volume of the business, every day or every three days or every seven days or every 10 days, it's recommending tests that you approve or you decline or make edits to. It goes and runs the tests on the actual pages based off of what you approved or didn't. It reports back the results and tells you what it thinks you should do. You approve it or disapprove it, and then it's continuing to run. So I mean that's the beauty of this stuff. Now it's difficult to get all those systems set up because, again, conceptualizing everything that can be done with it feels overwhelming sometimes. But that's where this is going. That's why it's so exciting. Sure, you know, I'm building a presentation. I'm gonna go prompt Gary to help me with it. But everything else, the goal should be for it to be proactive, for it to be able to run autonomously without you.

SPEAKER_01 24:45

I think that's one of the things that a lot of people are scared about. I'd be curious to know like your thoughts.

SPEAKER_00 24:51

It is, they should be.

SPEAKER_01 24:52

Yeah, they should be really freaking scary. Yeah. Skynet. Okay, so if I look at this is my this is my maybe these are my trust issues that are coming out here.

SPEAKER_00 25:03

But I I think of like therapy.

SPEAKER_01 25:05

Maybe I think of like a spectrum, there's like a spectrum of execution where it's like on one end of the spectrum, maybe it's a spectrum of autonomy, let's say. On one end of the spectrum, on AI, I give it some kind of a prompt. Let's use chat as an example. I give it, it gives me the copy, I take the thing out, I I schedule the thing, I have the full control of it. And on the other end, I'm just living my life. And Maxwell, Agent Maxwell, my dog, Agent Maxwell's like, hey, every Monday the email's planned, strategized, written, designed, scheduled, and I'm not even looking at it. Like that's like high level of trust and autonomy. The other one is on this. Where in that spectrum would you say you kind of put Garrett? Is it like full autonomous? I don't actually prove things, or are you guys still doing at least that stuff?

SPEAKER_00 25:55

So, how would you go about that if it was a person that you just hired?

SPEAKER_01 25:59

Dang, that's a good point. Depends on how new they are. If they're brand new and there's a process of trust and the needs built, I would be correcting or coaching along the way. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 26:11

So there are guardrails until trust is built that you can just let it roll. So, you know, for example, most of our agents are not allowed to make a live change on the website without us giving a command. Now, eventually you might trust it to the extent where you can do that. Now, I trust it because we have a team of people making sure this shit is secure, like a Hermes rapper, whatever the hell that means. There's all this tech stuff going on. So I know I can trust it, but I treat it like a person, right? At first, I need to approve every little thing. And then as the weeks go by, okay, the trust is built. And every week I'm a little bit less involved. So it's just like an employee.

SPEAKER_01 26:52

I so I recently watched this, I watched this interview with the I believe it was the CMO of 8Sleep. You know, 8 Sleep? 8 Sleep is like, it's like a quick the like cool mattresses and stuff like that. Really high ticket, like really high ticket. And they're talking about how they they had their their email marketing director had left. They left the company. And they're like, oh my goodness, we need to replace. Email does about a hundred million dollars a year for us. And the founder in the room was like, give me three days, and if I can't replace what they were doing, then go hire them. And he said the founder came back and in three days was able to build an agent that just did email flawlessly. And he said it picked right up. There was no revenue dip, and he said, We do $100 million a year right now with no email marketing director. They had a full-time email marketing director that led charge on all the emails, and he said they're to the point where they don't even approve the emails, they just go out. And that melted.

SPEAKER_00 27:56

I mean, I'm not saying he's lying, but there's a lot to unpack there. Email is really one of the easiest parts of this to use AI for, right? Email is very predictable. You're setting a strategy, you're building emails, you're sending them, you have segments. It's way more predictable than paid advertising. So I understand what he's saying. Like the doing of email, let's call it. Sure, an agent can easily do that. Now, if he's talking about replacing a director that managed people and strategy, I think that's a mistake because you're never going to be able to replace that. Like Ben Bennett that's speaking today, Ben is never replaceable. It does not matter how smart AI gets, right? Because he is a leader of people that love him and he motivates them and he brings creative ideas to the table that AI is never going to be able to do. Now, will you know the people that set up email automation be replaced? Probably, right? Will some of the email design be replaced? It's already being replaced. Did he replace that person? Probably, but I don't know. I don't like the replacing of leaders with AI. I think that's that's a mistake.

SPEAKER_01 29:07

Yeah. Oh, I hey, I heard I wasn't agreeing with it. I'm listening to this thing and I have trust issues, I think, to that degree. That's a little sketch to me. But I hear that, I'm like, that's really that's interesting on a spectrum. That's like way over here. You got a lot of trust to do the thing. And then also think that the strategy is gonna continue to be good.

SPEAKER_00 29:24

Well, in three days, it tells me too that did he build an agent that can send and produce emails? Yes. But in three days, you have not yet conceptualized a new promotion or Black Friday, Cyber Monday, right? Email is the promotional strategy of your business. That still requires a person. So yeah, I don't know. That's that's how I feel about that.

SPEAKER_01 29:46

What's something that's like of all of the things that you know that you guys do or that Gary, Larry do, of the things like the actual executions of things, what's something that is pretty easy to go from high touch to low touch from like a task standpoint? Is there something like, is there something from a production standpoint that they can do that's like, hey, this is one of the first things somebody listening should go work on?

SPEAKER_00 30:11

Page building. That is what makes me so excited about this. The first thing that really made me excited about it, and I'll show you some examples. Even seeing websites or pages built in Claude, which can happen pretty quickly, but then what ours look like because of the CRO IP that we have built into the brain. I'll show you guys exactly like how we build the branding to give that to AI so that it looks really good. But for me, doing this 15 years, right, wanting to have pages built quickly and they take two to three weeks, four weeks, because you have a developer and you have a designer and you have a copywriter and you're bringing all those people together. It's art, it's fun. A new website usually takes us three to four months to build. Now, Molly can build a page in 15 minutes. What? It scares my team. They're like, okay, don't, don't, don't get too deep into that, Molly. Like, technically you're gonna break the website, but pass that over to me in draft mode and I'll set it live. But the ability to build a page that looks good, the ability to do the CRO testing at the speed that we are doing, it's a dream. I wish I would have had that my whole career. And then not to mention the ad side of things, just the true analysis that can be done at the speed of light, right? So preparing, this is a great example. Every year we do our Black Friday Cyber Monday education. So, what worked last year, what didn't, what are we doing new this year? That usually took weeks for my business partner John to do from a number crunching, deep analysis up on the weekends, like really having to hustle to figure that out. He was able to do that in eight hours this year because of the processing speed of AI. So, if nothing else but the simple analysis of what's working and what's not, and that leading to what you should do next, that is the most exciting part of this, other than the page building.

SPEAKER_01 32:08

Yeah, so uh this is great. Yesterday we were talking last two days, actually, we've talked a lot about even from an ad standpoint, congruency of ad to landing page is like really critical. And and we had talked about usage of like uh AI in the speed of that. The challenge is with landing page congruency, it just can take a long, like you're talking, like it could take days or weeks, depending on your team and if you're outsourced.

SPEAKER_00 32:31

If it still looks bad, and then what if it doesn't work? What do you do next?

SPEAKER_01 32:34

Yeah, and the speed speed is a really critical compounding thing that it's like if you're able to make changes to something on your own without being a designer, it looks fantastic, and you could create landing pages with AI in 15 minutes, then that introduces, well, we can actually get better performance out of certain things because of that. And you and you're right, the amount of time spent on pages is pretty crazy. Like I remember going in back in the day to like WordPress, and you try to build a page on WordPress, and it's like, ugh, this thing takes forever. Hey, don't hate on WordPress.

SPEAKER_00 33:03

Don't hit on WordPress.

SPEAKER_01 33:05

All right, all right, don't hate it.

SPEAKER_00 33:06

We still use WordPress.

SPEAKER_01 33:07

Oh man, man, I'm sorry about that. So that makes a lot of sense. What's another thing? What's another thing that's like low risk that you guys were able to say, hey, we got to trust level pretty fast on this thing.

SPEAKER_00 33:19

I mean, Ben will cover this AI creative. It's so like it's the thing everyone wants to talk about, excited about, but the ability to pump out concepts more quickly. I mean, you guys know that. I don't have to keep hitting the the hammer on that nail, but just the ability to produce. Like, think about what is our job as online business owners. One of them is the production of assets. So to be able to get those done at a quicker speed, higher efficiency, and to be able to test and move forward. It's like, you know, I think in four to five years, we'll be sitting here, and I might own 50 e-com businesses that are run by these agentic systems and be able to do that with the same number of people that I have right now running, let's say, 10 businesses. Like that's what's exciting. There's so much more that we can do. There's so many more lives we can actually change because we're able to do more at a quicker speed while still involving amazing humans that we get to work with every day.

SPEAKER_01 34:20

Do you think that this speed of growth in somebody, like one person or being able to run tons of different companies when the the simplicity of like production really goes up with AI? Do you have any hunches on what like what could happen in the e-com space or what that might look like? Could it be really catastrophic and bad, or is it like maybe not really because still the good best?

SPEAKER_00 34:43

I mean, anything could be catastrophic or bad. It could happen. I think things will become very generic. That's why I go back to the IP and like what are we still bringing to the table as humans? Things are gonna get more competitive. I mean, even look at Meta this year, right? It's a very competitive landscape, even looking year over year. So there will be more competition. There will be more people entering the marketplace. But I love that. Think of all the people that have dreams out there that want to do something like this. They just don't have the time or resource. Like, this gives them that opportunity. So I try to look at it that way.

SPEAKER_01 35:21

We were last night we were having dinner, and Ben said something. He had a phrase that I really loved, and I told him, I'm gonna steal this and I'll give you credit. He uses phrase AI possible. And I thought that was really interesting because like there are certain things that AI can do really, really well. There's a lot of fear around it, I think. But I look at like AI possible, we're talking about how there are certain things that are just really stupid, simply possible with AI that by not at least leveraging AI on that, you're just wasting time on the thing. Like, one of those things I would venture to say is like a lot of customer support, like a lot of admin-related things are in that category. Landing pages could be one of those things in the category. And I love the phrase of AI possible because if anyone is like listening and they're hesitant or resistant to like this, because I don't know, I hear what you're doing over here. I'm like, man, that sounds so cool and so scary at the same time. And what what's the depth in which I do I want to even start to figure that out?

SPEAKER_00 36:19

Larry's gonna bite you. Man, I'm scared.

SPEAKER_01 36:21

I want to meet Larry actually.

SPEAKER_00 36:24

No, Larry bit someone at a mastermind a few years ago, so he's not allowed at a time. He's not allowed back now. No, I'm sorry. Yeah, we could put him in a box or something. All right. Sorry, I cut you off. I but one thing before you continue that that I think is really important is we have to just still do what we want to do. Like, this is an opportunity. I do think you'll be left behind if you don't hop on it. But here's a good example there are and will be robots that do your dishes and clean your home. That sounds really cool. I actually enjoy like taking care of my house and doing day-to-day things. I probably will not implement something like that. And that's okay because I actually get enjoyment and fulfillment from completing simple tasks in my house. If you don't want to implement part of this in a business because you enjoy it, don't do it. If it doesn't feel right to you, don't do it. It's not meant for you. It is an option, though, right? So, you know, I think there's a lot of people who feel like they have to go all in on this or do nothing. Or you could implement the pieces in the parts of the business where you see opportunity and especially things that you don't enjoy, like customer service. I think a lot of people are over-automating customer service and people are getting a shitty experience. This is what my grandmother was complaining about. She's like, I can't actually talk to anybody anymore. Like, there's no way they've responded to my email in 20 seconds. That's not a real person, right? Like, there's still something to save for customer experience. And if you want to automate it, do it. Right. There's there's no right or wrong here. So this is where we have to trust our intuition too and look at what we enjoy doing. So if someone on my team said, Molly, I enjoy doing that thing, I don't want AI to do it, great. I'm not gonna make them do that. So this is not as black and white as people want to make it.

SPEAKER_01 38:15

And I think the beauty in that is like the stuff that you do want to have AI leverage frees you up to do those things that you enjoy, but then also the things that differentiate you. Like if I if you look at human-to-human connection, it's it's gonna be so interesting to that it's gonna flip to where like suddenly customer service and customer experience becomes the unique selling point of business, that people want that human-to-human interaction. And now, it you because all the marketing stuff, usually we've had to use our brains and a lot of that for the strategic or for the copywriting and stuff. Once that is now gone, then it's like, well, now we could take time and we could put this into this human-to-human interaction and relationships. So it's like there's gonna be this almost shift in the funnel. And I was I I talked to our group two days ago about this, where at the top, all the budget, if you're looking at a funnel, is going into marketing, and at the bottom, there's like this much for anything experiential for your customers and any interaction with customers of like how do we pay minimum wage for the thing and how do we spend as little time as possible where that's gonna widen because now that's the thing that people like your 84-year-old grandma crave, right? This human-to-human connection. And I think it frees up time from that stuff to now do that stuff.

SPEAKER_00 39:34

Definitely, and to work less, right? That's what's fun. It's like I look at things like building a new framework or something that I'm doing in smart marketer. Great. I can do that in half the time now. So sometimes instead of giving that half the time back to the business, Molly can go live life, right? That's the part people are missing on this. It's like you don't always have to reinvest that time back into the business.

SPEAKER_01 40:00

I don't think about that.

SPEAKER_00 40:01

I know you don't. That's why I'm bringing it up.

SPEAKER_01 40:04

That's really good. That's really good. And and and that's been our that's been our process. So, like we went to there was an event in Nashville that you guys had, and I forget who spoke, but they were talking about AI, and they gave this idea of like AI Fridays, where it's like you want to get in the weeds and learn rhythms.

SPEAKER_00 40:21

Yeah, that was Rita's from OmniSend.

SPEAKER_01 40:23

Yeah, oh, OmniSend. Loved that. He was awesome. And we took that in the next week. We're like AI Fridays every week for like six to eight weeks. Whole team just works on AI, just engulf everybody in it, go build some kind of a fun app, Brie built a travel app, like just build an experience and figure the thing out. And so we went and we started building all this stuff. We began to explore the actual capabilities of everything. And the framework we used was once you got the dri the the drift of everything, then it was take the thing you have and just replace use AI to replace the thing and then stack more and then replace the thing and then stack more. And it never actually lowered the workload of people, it actually incrementally increased it because what would happen is we would take this much time that was spent on this thing, use AI to automate the thing, and then stack that much more time of something else. But you know what you still had to do? Go back and manage the little AI thing down here and oversee it and improve it. And so it continued to just stack time versus this crazy concept of what if we didn't entirely, as least as founders, replace it and instead use that time for even being more present in your life in some other area.

SPEAKER_00 41:37

Yeah, we have half day Fridays at Smart Marketers. So people work at half day and then they go do something they want to go do. So, you know, it's the same problem as when someone's accelerating in their career or their business. You just keep adding stuff to the point where there is an explosion moment, right? Because it's like, all right, even if I pass this off to someone else, I am still managing the idea that they are also doing the work, right? So eventually you stack so much on top of one another that there is an explosion, right? So the same thing's happening with AI that's happened with the building of companies and people and the, you know, the building of a business for hundreds of years. So yeah, take that time to step away from the business. That is where you're actually gonna get those big ideas that make a difference in your business. So it's not just take the time, build new shit, take the time, build new shit. It's like take the time and go take the time, right? See what happens.

SPEAKER_01 42:39

Well, Molly, thank you. I appreciate you sharing all of this. Uh, everybody, give it up for Molly Pittman. Thank you, Molly.

SPEAKER_00 42:46

Woo!