Automating Success: Aaron Steele's Revolutionary Approach to Content Marketing and AI Efficiency

Introduction and Guest Presentation 0:00 welcome ladies and gentlemen I have a fantastic guest today and I'm really excited to speak to Aaron once again 0:07 Aaron steel coming from all the way from Australia thanks for being here how's it 0:14 going amazing love to get a chance to chat again I felt like we've already 0:20 done a podcast together but really good to reconnect and excited to dig in I 0:26 love when guests have a chance to introduce themselves so why don't you 0:31 let people know what you do yeah hi my name is Aaron I I do a lot of things 0:37 guess the stuff that I'm probably most well known for online at least is I do a 0:44 lot of AI and automation guides specifically around content marketing 0:52 automations write pretty regularly on LinkedIn putting together guides basically on how to create content using 1:00 automated platforms such as zap here and plugging chat GPT and things like that into the process beyond that I also like 1:09 to have conversations like this I like to yeah meet new people and yeah just of 1:15 have chats guess personal life standard old married with two kids two cats and a 1:20 dog otherwise I'm pretty normal ordinary person outside of all this kind of stuff 1:26 yeah and happy to jump in and have a good conversation amazing amazing let's 1:32 let's Dive Right into what you're good at how did this all come to be I know you've been working on processes in Aaron's Journey into AI and Automation 1:38 general for a long time uh tell me a bit about the journey to where you are now 1:44 yeah so it goes back quite a way back in 2013 so my wife and I had moved to CRA The Birth of Aaron's Business 1:54 which is the you know the capital of Australia not Sydney and which is where she's from so it wasn't a a completly 2:00 random move we were we just come back from an overseas extended holiday and I 2:08 was wanting to set up my own business I was 23 at the time so I didn't really 2:14 know what I was doing not saying other 23y olds don't know what they're doing but I certainly didn't and I set up a a 2:22 business like an online directory which seemed like a good idea at the time um 2:28 it was for cleaning business I thought that that was made lots of sense and had it all planned out and 2:35 obviously that didn't really eventuate like I I I set up all these different systems to to have an automated workflow 2:43 so whenever someone submitted form on the website it would get passed through to to other systems and I pieced that 2:51 all together like zappier was pretty new at the time so I worked through how to 2:58 connect all that up using zap here and just figured it out as I went and ever since then I've The Power of Automation Platforms 3:05 always really enjoyed using automation platforms like zapia to connect things 3:10 and just make workflow automation really easy and I moved into a career and 3:16 business analysis not long after that and so that a lot of that has been involved with working through like Tech 3:24 problems with people like they've got a particular business problem and they need to 3:30 solve it with some kind of Technology solution and my my role has usually been to apply Technology Solutions to to 3:37 business problems that's a very high level summary of the last 10 years and the last couple years it's been ramping The Role of AI in Business Analysis 3:44 up especially with things like chat GPT and just getting involved in that and seeing how much we can get out of it 3:52 diving deeper than just write me a blog post kind of thing like actually seeing 3:58 what it can be used for to extract structured data out of unstructured text 4:03 and things like that which happy to get into that but it's yeah it's a really powerful tool which I think like where 4:09 we feel like it's already saturated because people and I are working with it all the time but we're still 4:16 like definitely like Front Runners like most people are not using it at all so 4:22 yeah it's really exciting time to to be involved in this kind of thing I like to 4:27 think that if you're spending any time with a tool you're already in the 1% and yeah if you're 4:35 spending time automating and gluing a couple tools together using things like 4:40 zapier then you're further down the line of probably a 1% of that group right 4:46 yeah we find ourselves in these bubbles of everyone I know talks about Ai and is 4:52 in the in the thick of it but for the most part these are a lot of new Concepts for people I imagine people The Importance of Automation in Social Media 5:00 listening let's talk about it at a high level what are some of the things the 5:06 problems that you've been able to solve using some tools to automate things for 5:13 people yeah sure I guess the I've primarily worked with CRM platforms The Role of CRM in Business 5:19 which if you're not aware is for anyone listening is customer relationship management whenever you are working with 5:26 a business and they have more than one client they probably have a CRM where 5:32 they keep all their customer data and usually like in I guess the not that 5:38 long ago like all the all these systems and it's still like this today like all the different platforms that a business 5:44 uses are not necessarily connected in like a meaningful way and so you might 5:51 have your accounting system in one part which you does the invoicing and you've got your your marketing platform in one 6:00 area and you got your emails in another area and your CRM and in another platform again and so all of these 6:06 different systems are not communicating with each other and so you've got to double handle triple quadruple handle 6:13 the work as you get the leads coming through and then you got to take that information out and put it in something 6:18 else work I've done primarily has been streamlining that process so that when 6:25 you say if you get a lead through your website that will automatically feed in 6:31 through to like the CRM it will like populate a lead database with 6:37 information about the lead it will send you know other triggers off to other parts of the business so it's taking 6:43 that one action that was usually used to be manual and spreading the the effects 6:48 of the automation through the other parts of the business so that it's yeah it's reducing the amount of time people 6:54 have to spend on what they're doing and that can be things like automating reporting and um all kinds of things um 7:01 yeah that that's the the CRM world has probably been my my biggest or rather 7:07 longest time spent I suppose and yeah just making sure that everything is actually connected and communicating 7:13 with each other which is which is huge yeah it makes makes a lot of sense 7:18 I know as far as solopreneurs listening that you're either hiring someone to do it as far as a task got to get done or 7:28 you're finding a system or process to make it happen for you 7:34 and people are generally more expensive over time not that there aren't place 7:40 for people in business but if someone's also having to do the same thing over and over again it's probably not the 7:46 most exciting part of their job y I see Automation and these kinds of processes 7:52 as really a win all around you can find 7:57 things that are a bit more creative or unique to a person's skill set that 8:02 maybe they're better suited for versus having them do something that a computer could do yeah that's right uh I see a 8:11 ton of value in in what you're doing and there are some unique things that you've been able to do why don't we jump into 8:18 some of that the last conversation we had you talked about taking a video 8:23 input and turning it into a few different things for a business and this 8:28 was this was extremely fascinating so maybe you want to explain what you were talking about yeah sure the process that 8:34 I've developed basically is a framework you could look The Power of Content Marketing Automation 8:40 at it with would be like a Content marketing Automation and so what I mean by that 8:46 is there is such a strong need for Content 8:52 marketing for basically anyone who's anyone out there these days like whether 8:57 you're an individual um whether you're a brand it is really the only way to 9:03 differentiate yourself in the marketplace these days is with your content and so recognizing that I saw a need in the 9:13 market um a little while ago for a way to lower or remove the barriers entry 9:21 for how people create that content because when you think about okay there's there's Facebook there's 9:28 Instagram real there's Tik Tok there's Pinterest there's Twitter or X there's 9:33 YouTube and there's so many platforms out there which people are on and and 9:41 should be on but it's overwhelming to go okay I'm just going to I just want I don't want to have to think about all 9:48 these different platforms I just want to focus on one and develop a following on that like I network with a lot of people 9:55 who just focus on LinkedIn and that's great but getting your organic traffic 10:01 sources from all the different platforms with such a significantly powerful tool 10:08 rather than just focusing on one area and the way that that i' I've done that is I've taken the transcript from one 10:15 video so say I I upload a video to the system which called engine which I've 10:20 developed end GN and I upload a video to that and that would take a transcription 10:28 from the video and and send that transcription through to chat GPT utilizing zapia for the process it's not 10:35 like a manually cutting and pasting it in and from that saying okay basically 10:41 the Crux of what I'm doing is saying okay I want you to generate three articles based on the the written style 10:50 of what I've just given you like the transcription like here's my style here's my unique voice and here's a 10:56 template of a good article I want you to write three different articles based on The Process of Content Generation 11:01 three different templates that I'm feeding it and this is three different conversations running in tandem so it's not just one repeating itself and then 11:09 from that article I then say okay I now want you to generate 10 like statements 11:15 like tweet length statements based on this article that I can 11:21 publish and then from that I refine the 11:27 guess the syntax further to might adjust it for Facebook and Instagram and so basically from that 11:35 video we we've gone and produce three articles which is high quality articles 11:40 it's not just garbage because AI if it's not guided properly can certainly write some pretty crappy stuff but it's 11:47 usually pretty good what what comes out of here basically 30 tweets and 30 seems 11:53 like a lot but it's actually Twitter the Twitter attention span is like 30 11:59 seconds or something so if you're not posting 30 times a day you're not getting seen basically is from what I 12:04 understand like doing a bit of research in that area two to three Instagram and Facebook posts which is roughly the 12:12 Cadence that apparently is the good way to be posting don't want to be flooding your feed in that in that respect as 12:19 well as Pinterest which is interesting one which is a lot more organic and Beyond just the text I've also plugged 12:27 in another image generation tool because like most of these image based platforms 12:32 like Instagram Facebook even Twitter has a lot of image and especially Pinterest 12:37 obviously and so we'd actually would take that that statement that was 12:43 generated and generate like a a hook or something similar and actually 12:50 automatically transpose that that hook or that statement onto an image and that 12:56 can be an image that is templated or actually so it is templated and whether 13:01 that is a randomly selected stock photo based on the content of the article or whether that's like a photo that I've 13:08 already pre-selected or pretty much whatever you want to put in there and 13:15 that basically will then generate an image and then you can send that off and you can schedule all of this stuff 13:21 automatically as well like it just looks for the next available time and and place it so the the net result is you've 13:28 you've recorded one video like it could be a video like this or it could be like literally just you sitting down and 13:34 talking at a camera and answering questions about a topic and you've 13:39 generated 30 tweets 30 Pinterest pins three articles three Facebook and 13:46 Instagram posts and it's all been scheduled and then on top of that you also you can do 13:53 WordPress blogs as well just as an afterthought on top of that you would also publish directly to uh a podcasting 14:01 platform and then also take the the audio from from that recording publish that to podcasting platform and then cut 14:09 the the actual video into smaller sections using tools like off Clips or or whatever and post that out to your 14:16 socials as well and so you've got you're leveraging like a 20 30 minute video or 14:22 an hour depending on how how long you want to do it and you're producing such a a mar of like High quality content 14:30 it's an extremely powerful lever that it's it makes it so much easier to 14:38 create engaging content and then push it out there and then you don't have to 14:43 worry about oh have I posted to Twitter have I posted to to LinkedIn it's all just done and yeah that's that's 14:50 basically the engine service that I've put together which is that's really exciting and I've waffled on a little 14:55 bit there apologies but yeah I quite enjoy talking about it no worries it's it's very 15:01 fascinating I'm curious what are the systems of checks before content goes 15:06 out how does that work yes I built in a 15:12 basically a Trello based QA system which is totally optional but highly 15:18 recommended I once it come once the content is generated it comes into a 15:24 staging list in Trello and so I would see and it sends a notification to my phone 15:32 or the client's phone whoever is using it comes through and says okay there there's 30 cards in here which have the 15:37 content it's got we're generating images the image will be attached to the trailer card excuse me and and you just 15:44 you go through and you would say okay yep I I'm going to pick three of those I'm going to label them those three 15:51 posts that I I really like like they're they're the best ones also going to label those as Instagram and Facebook 15:59 maybe get rid of one or two occasionally some come through that like that doesn't really make sense um but it's usually 16:04 pretty good and then just drop the rest of the list into my twitterpinterest 16:11 list which will then automatically publish it out to Twitter and Pinterest as well as anything that was labeled as 16:18 Facebook and Instagram goes off they on a different workflow so it does yeah it does have that QA step where it is 16:24 important to to check and review and you can edit them as well it's not not static so you can go in and make changes 16:31 if you need to and the Articles come through there as well I use Trello because it's got that easy sort of cand 16:37 style just like Drop Cards into different lists but done any other platform on S just wanted to add that 16:45 I've used Trello in the past for a similar QA for social media posts and it's super easy it's it's so easy 16:52 probably one of the easier ways especially Trello has a really nice app 16:58 that makes the user experience very simple so I think it's a 17:03 good choice for QA yeah I think the uh only thing I would mention about Trello 17:09 is I've yeah I totally agree I love the app as well and I use it on multiple 17:16 devices but I also I use another tool which is like $5 and this is like a 17:22 little tip I suppose called pushover it's like a a $5 app which um 17:29 is like a push notification app which you can integrate with zapia and so once 17:34 because usually Trello claims that they will push notifications to your phone when you get a new card but it never 17:40 works for me I don't know why and I want to know when my content is ready for me to review and I've just I just add a 17:47 little pushover action at the bottom of my workflows and zapia so that once the 17:53 card is is done and is in in the list it then sends a notification to to my phone 17:59 letting me know and I have a link to the the Trello board there so it's literally just a matter of just oh there it is and 18:05 just open it up yeah that's if you're having troubles with Trello not sending notifications to your find that's an 18:11 easy fix I also know that you've been very generous with with sharing you've created some videos on your YouTube 18:17 channel as well as some some lead magnets on on Instagram there with 18:22 videos that explain how to do a lot of this stuff most business owners love the idea but don't really have the time to 18:31 or maybe want to get into the weeds of how to do it on the benefit side what The Impact of Automation on Business Efficiency 18:37 kind of Time Savings have you seen for businesses across some of these uh 18:43 implementations yeah sure so it's I guess it depends what they're looking at 18:49 at doing for example if we're we're looking at like the engine the platform where you're creating social media 18:55 content it's something that people are not doing enough of anyway and so 19:01 they're it's not as though they're often taking hours of their time each week to 19:08 create content it's it's usually oh something that they're like oh I should be doing this but I'm not and I I just 19:14 don't have the time and so that's yeah it's more that kind of thing is more like here's a way you can leverage your 19:21 time rather than save it in another way and sure some I know some businesses are 19:26 not like that and then they do create content in which case this does save them time but for other processes yeah 19:33 if you're wanting to just trying to think of a recent use case that I had so 19:40 for example if you're using something like Salesforce or which is a CRM 19:46 platform if you're using something like that and they getting their leads into 19:51 Sal force and then they're having to manually work through the different processes and fill it all out you can 19:59 basically listen to get the transcription from a sales call and 20:04 automatically pass the information from that sales call and just put it straight into the appropriate lead forms and then 20:11 also based on the conclusion that's extracted from that you can then push 20:16 that lead through to the right process uh sorry the right stage so rather than 20:22 going in after the call and going okay now what did they say and is this dis closed one or is this in progress 20:28 whatever like it it listens to the call and then we just automatically push it through based on the sentiment analysis 20:35 of of what's happened there so it's really just you're focusing on actually 20:40 closing the sale or nurturing the lead rather than doing all the data entry yeah like that that data entry piece 20:47 like I I did do some some content around how to do that but yeah it's a massive time suck for a lot of people like just 20:53 sitting down and having to input um data into their platforms but you can can use 20:59 your voice to just talk to it and if you've got it set up properly it can 21:05 take that voice data transcribe it and turn that into commands and information 21:10 to automatically put into your platforms so that's that's an exponential Time 21:16 Saver for sure if it's implemented probably yeah I'm I'm constantly wrestling with things that I should need 21:24 to be doing administratively versus figuring out how 21:30 to not do them administratively like the where's the time better spent on 21:37 investing in figuring how to automate something or just hiring someone to have 21:42 it automated or going through the same repetitive process of doing that thing 21:48 it's I've been in Automation and this type of thing for a long time and I still get excited about businesses like 21:55 Saving Time on tasks Chach ke just made that exponentially more interesting because 22:00 there's far more use cases do you find that a lot of the work that you're doing is more bespoke you have to build 22:07 something custom or is engine set to uh work with most people's kind of standard 22:14 multiple platforms and have you got it worked out where it's this is what 90% of people are going to want it for yeah The Future of Automation and AI 22:22 uh so I mean I've got it comes down to the prompting right so it's I've I've got the prompts 22:28 written in such a way that it will cover 80 90% of use cases like it's not going 22:36 to misunderstand or struggle with anything really I guess if you wanted to 22:41 refine it further I do allow like I do have customization options where I can 22:47 write thepoke prompts for people if they want to have a very specific kind of 22:53 content that isn't necessarily going to be generated just based on the standard inputs and yeah but like most of the 22:59 time it's it's just a matter of here's the context and that's variable which comes from whatever input is coming in 23:06 and here's a template which is another variable and here's what I want you to 23:13 do which is the prompt and that typically doesn't really have to change it's yeah and it's it's always I guess 23:20 the thing that changes is actually the tool itself like they're always releasing new versions They Don't Really 23:27 publish it on the web version of chat GPT but when you're using the API like I 23:32 do you can usually see like it's version 0.1 63 or something like that which 23:38 these incremental improvements that they are always releasing which means you get more tokens you get more more speed and 23:45 more more understanding and that kind of thing so it's always I think a matter of 23:52 updating the tool or the way you're using the tool in order to better harness the power that it that's 23:58 constantly growing yeah like it's most people I think wouldn't need to adjust the prompts if they they might think 24:05 they do but they they probably don't yeah that's that customization question comes up down the road right it's not 24:12 something that you really need to think about out of the gate where do people start with thinking about automating a 24:19 process is it I guess you're it's engine so the they start with the end goal in mind is that is that where you got the 24:26 name so it's actually engine would be like phonetically like a car engine 24:32 drive driving the process actually I had the domain from 24:37 originally say for something else but I was like oh this is a the it's a end 24:44 dn.com nice a six letter.com yeah those are always great it's five even yeah GN no just GN 24:55 GN oh five nice nice one yeah yeah so go engine yeah so yeah sorry what was the 25:02 question again like how do they get uh what's what's the process to think about automation how do you start as a 25:11 as a business owner where do you begin I guess first thing that you were do sort Identifying and Documenting Pain Points 25:17 of comes back to my experience as a business analyst as well as you want to 25:24 uncover and document the pain point yeah there's the site there might look a 25:30 little different when when people are visiting it but here we are quick shout out yeah thanks I threw that together 25:38 last night actually so it's it was ready for today yeah 25:43 yeah it's a bit of tongue and cheek saying I even PS I'm not cheap I so the 25:50 the you want to be for for any kind of project you want there to be a well established a well documented pain point 25:57 and so if you're not trying to uh if you're not spending money or 26:03 you're not spending resources on solving a pain Point what are you doing really 26:08 like why are you doing it and so understanding what that pain point is so if there's our financial system takes 26:15 too long or like it it it it doesn't do doesn't do this or our we don't get 26:21 enough data to to use this other system properly there there's so many potential 26:26 pain points out there but honing in on what that paino is and then building the 26:32 automation from there and like taking care to have a holistic view on how that The Importance of Understanding the Broader Context 26:38 affects the broader organization if you're just a solo prur not just but if 26:45 you're a solo prur and you've it's it's just you and maybe one or two offshore 26:51 or resources people that help you out then you don't necessarily have to think about the broader context of the 26:57 organization but when you're working in a larger organization and you're saying okay we want to focus on fixing this 27:04 pain Point like we we don't like our recruitment processes so let's 27:09 completely automate that and just have a laser focused on fixing that if you then 27:16 that's great but if you do that without considering the broader context of the organization and say okay if we change 27:22 the way we we do our recruitment processes here and we ignore 27:28 our HR processes we ignore our onboarding processes we're going to 27:35 lose and I hate using the word Synergy but we're going to it's going to break 27:40 other processes in the organization so it's really we used to take them we used 27:45 to get people on this recruiting system and that had a bit of a a manual process 27:51 to transfer their information to HR but now that we've onboarded a new 27:56 recruitment system that doesn't talk to HR at all but we didn't think about that because we just saw this shine in you 28:02 software and we bought it it's yeah it's important to see the pain points not just of the individual area that you're 28:08 looking at but also how they affect the the broader organization yeah like and then piecing together what capabilities 28:16 are available every software vendor is going to say that they solve all of your The Pitfalls of Rushing into Software Solutions 28:22 problems but they very rarely actually do solve all of your problems there's almost always gaps between what you need 28:29 and what they they say they can actually do yeah it's just it's important to just 28:34 slow down think about the problem analyze it properly and consider your 28:40 options rather than just diving in and buying the first thing off the shelf I suppose that's just saying it's someone 28:46 who's worked in countless IT projects where that's exactly what's happened and 28:51 sometimes it's hard to know uh what you're going to come across down the road exactly what I was using using Wix The Unexpected Challenges of Subdomains 28:59 their their Studio their their Flagship product and they've got real issues with 29:04 subdomains yeah and you don't find that out till you spend a bunch of time 29:11 building something yeah fortunately you can always go back to something like WordPress and have pretty much the same 29:18 thing done pretty quick uh but to to double your costs for each additional 29:25 subdomain is um that's czy not at what I would say the market expects when you 29:32 get to that bridge it's a bit of a surprise and I understand the economics from a business model but or maybe they 29:41 should be clearer about who it's for um or I don't know that kind of stuff I 29:47 hope people find out about it sooner so that they if it's important to them they 29:53 don't waste their time yeah so the lesson that I had was was that so I can 29:58 totally relate to trying to make a decision based on all of the things 30:04 you're going to need it's often challenging on larger projects and things that maybe unknowns or not 30:10 important when you first start yeah and you often run into the sunk cost I don't The Sunk Cost Fallacy in Problem Solving 30:16 want to it's usually called the sunk cost fallacy but you keep persisting in the problem because you're like I've 30:22 already spent so much time and energy and effort on this on making this work 30:28 that means I have to keep going and so that's not necessarily the case like you 30:33 can actually backpedal and go okay Wicks or whatever trying to pick on Wicks here 30:39 but if they yeah no I like Wix anyone uses Wix there's a lot of there's a reason why I decided to go with them in 30:45 the beginning right they do a lot of things right yeah totally It's just in 30:50 in the once you get into using more advanced features sometimes just based 30:56 on what's available it falls short and it's it's just impossible to know ahead 31:02 of time where that's going to come up for you yeah that's right and that's going to be the case with I think just 31:08 about any product like I guess it's yeah like not being so tied to a particular 31:15 product that you your entire brand rests on utilizing that particular technology 31:21 because it's just a tool at the end of the day you don't have to be married to it yeah I use car 31:27 C which is a great sort of onepage website builder and I use it like I can 31:34 build websites I just don't like to like I it's I don't know I find it yeah 31:40 emotionally taxing it's yeah and so and you can't 31:46 technically create um pages in card but you can get around that by just creating 31:52 subdomains which is what I've done on my site which you loaded up just before but if I didn't know how to do that 32:02 there would have perhaps been another solution to to the problem ra rather than just being like Oh I have to have 32:08 another page which is what I originally thought and I need multiple pages on my 32:14 site I reframed the problem and said actually what I Just Need is Another The Power of Reframing Problems 32:19 like U ux area for my information where I want like people to progress through 32:25 to another part of my my site and that doesn't technically have to be another 32:30 page on the same domain I can create a subdomain and have the same experience 32:36 the same layout everything and yes technically it's a completely different 32:41 website on the back end but like the user doesn't know that and so the actual 32:47 the solution doesn't necessarily have to fit what you originally think the problem is yeah there's usually multiple 32:54 ways to solve a problem it's yeah just about thinking about how how to fix it rather than just hanging your head on the wall and saying I can't fix it this 33:00 particular way so I'm going to throw the tow in but yeah there's always multiple wise to address things I imagine you 33:08 come across different kinds of problems all the time what are some of your maybe 33:14 known or unknown approaches to solving problems at a high 33:20 level so I yeah there are lots of problems I Pro probably my 33:28 I'll break it into two categories if it's a a problem that 33:34 requires like just brain power and a bit of intellectual rigor 33:41 and sitting down and working out the problem and it's not something I can I necessarily expect other people to be 33:48 involved in I will just get a notepad and Pen like I 33:54 love notepads and pens like I literally if you don't know what to get me for not 34:00 you but if people don't know what to get me for Christmas on my birthday pad in pen is literally like what I ask for 34:05 because I just love I don't know if it's a tactile thing but I love writing and 34:10 using that and I've solved most of my problems that way that's a quite a grand 34:16 statement I I haven't solved all my problems but I love that all I need is a notepad and Pen I should re rephrase 34:23 that and say most of the problem solving I do is done on not p and Pen yeah just sitting there and I I talked about this 34:29 on one of my my podcasts where I like to maybe just let the the subconscious mind 34:37 activate a bit and so rather than going I have to drill down and focus on this 34:42 problem like let's like engage in another activity like whether that's 34:47 watching the NBA or something on TV and sitting there with my notepad and pen and watching the a bit of TV but then 34:54 going all right while I'm doing this I'm now going to have a bit of a think about what I'm doing rather than just focusing 35:01 everything um on trying to solve the problem because like I feel like I will 35:06 get distracted from the main task regardless of what that main task is so if I make the problem solving not my 35:13 main task I I don't know I I tend to approach it a bit better which seems a 35:19 bit counterintuitive but no I can relate to that I think that there's many times that if you're focused on one thing we 35:26 drift we're we're solving other problems while we're doing something yeah so if we know that let's not give the main 35:33 attention the main problem but keep it visible or in our uh peripheries and 35:40 then yeah all of a sudden we we're not going to let go of the problem it is 35:46 being worked on yeah but you're right about giving it all of our energy all the time but sometimes that problem 35:52 needs a break to to simmer let that problem 35:57 be solved and it may seem like a bit of a maybe a lazy way or people be like 36:03 you're not working on the problem but the mind works in mysterious ways so 36:09 yeah that's right if you've had a history of being able to solve things when you're not working on them then you've learned from that track record 36:15 that hey it's okay to mentally turn this off and have a sleep on it or do 36:21 something else so I like to go for a little rollerblade or do some physical exercise that's 36:28 yeah I I quite enjoy live on a property here and so I've got like a walking 36:34 Track that I I've modow regularly which I take the dog on so yeah like taking the dog for a walk and I'll put 36:39 headphones on and listen to something related perhaps to the problem 36:45 if it's if I'm trying to come up with a solution to an automation problem like I 36:51 might listen to someone talking about that kind of thing and that can help 36:56 prompt ideas and and things like that yeah definitely just getting out and doing something else is definitely The Role of External Perspectives in Problem Solving 37:03 helpful and talking to other people is great as well like I've Got a Friend Nat 37:08 who I've done a few podcasts with and yeah she was saying the other day she was like what do you need to what do you 37:14 need to do I'm like I've got so many things I need to do she was no mate just close that one sale that you're working 37:20 on and everything else can happen afterwards I'm like fine yeah like she 37:26 was right that's what needed to happen it wasn't I had so so many projects 37:31 going and so many different things that I was like I have to do this I have to do that and getting distracted and just 37:37 do the one thing that actually matters and yeah getting someone else's outside perspective is always useful as well 37:44 yeah it's keeping the main thing right yeah yeah definitely last day of the 37:49 month here it should be focused on I guess for you you're you're yeah no it's 37:55 good love that love that nice and early this 38:01 has been really interesting I love talking about problem solving and automation when it comes 38:08 to these you talked a little bit about going for a walk and listening to people talking about automation what are you 38:13 listening to what what are these is it podcast is it the audibles automation 38:20 experts who's talking in your ear yes so I I tend not to listen to specifically 38:28 podcasts that often fun enough like I I'm a big YouTube consumer and so I I've 38:36 got YouTube premium so I can listen to it while my phone is in my pocket and so 38:41 I will listen to all kinds of content creators on YouTube this morning I I 38:50 before this when I took the dog for a walk for about half an hour I listened to Dave Shapiro talking about 38:57 AGI and like what that means for the medical industry and like how that's 39:03 going to revolutionize our health and minimize hospital visits and all kinds of things 39:10 he talks a lot about post labor economics as well which um is super interesting yeah that that that was what 39:15 I was listening to this morning and it guess yeah like it go through different 39:20 phases of what I'm listening to but yeah YouTube is definitely my main source of listening and I don't watch YouTube 39:27 really I just listen to it which is a bit weird but it still still helps their views yeah that don't know I'm not 39:33 watching it yeah are you listening to it what speed do you listen at yeah 39:39 normal I don't sped it up yeah I know it's not very not 39:45 very bioh hacky of me or whatever you want to call it to each their own y so 39:52 that's great do you have any books that uh you either revisit or 39:57 uh or books part of your learning so I I do listen to audio books 40:04 quite a lot I have an quite an extensive audible library because I've I've been 40:10 paying for Audible for years and I got to spend the credits on something I I go 40:15 between fiction and non-fiction and most of the time I listen to like non-fiction stuff I've I think I must have listened 40:23 to Alex H's $100 million offers And1 million leads like maybe three or four 40:29 times each I'd say how's your offering yeah it's well it's it's getting better 40:36 yeah it's yeah I really enjoy his approach and I'm usually super skeptical 40:41 about anyone in that from that kind of world I'm not not a big internet 40:47 marketing fan to say the least so I the fact that I really dig his content is is 40:54 means it must be pretty good I think if I'm not listening to to non-fiction I I will listen to either British sketch 41:03 comedy or like some of Bill Bryson's books I don't know if you're familiar with him at all he does like these 41:09 travel books which are hilarious no I Haven I haven't heard of him yeah no 41:15 it's definitely look him up yeah I I really love listening to his books and 41:22 The Pillars of the Earth series can follow it it's yeah like the is 40h hour 41:28 Masterpiece stories that you know like told as an audio book which I yeah I 41:35 love just listening to those if I'm trying to not think about work or 41:40 something yeah like I I always often listen to those going to sleep yeah it's a lot there some some good 41:47 recommendations in there I'm curious do you think in your opinion AI is helping The Impact of AI on Time Management 41:54 you save time or because of the abundance of cool stuff you can do with it it's actually eating more of your 42:02 time yeah good question I think I'm definitely playing a lot less video 42:07 games at the moment so I'd say I'm probably got less time for that because of all this kind of thing and yeah like 42:15 it's the way I I look at it is it's whenever they invented the calculator would be like saying to the 42:21 mathematicians are you are you saving time now because you've got a calculator you don't have 42:28 to use the Abacus or whatever and they would have been like no like now that we have these 42:33 calculators we can fill in all that spare that spare time with more cool 42:39 stuff which is which we can now do with calculators which I don't know that's how it went the the concept applies 42:46 there's yeah there's so much more we can do now that used to be filled up with 42:54 doing stuff manually and by by hand I can instead of spending an hour reading 43:02 a document I can just put it through CH at GPT and say can you summarize the main takeaways that I need for this 43:08 specific use case and it does it and there like I don't need to don't need to read it now which is some would say 43:15 that's that's bad and that's a signifying the the end of the human races we know because people are not 43:21 going to not going to retain knowledge anymore or anything like that but I think it's just yeah using that time for 43:27 more leverage so yeah I definitely don't have a lot of time for myself at the 43:33 moment but that's probably my own fault and I don't know if I could blame AI for that I think part of it is Seasons right 43:40 if you're an entrepreneur and you're trying to build something then your focus may be stacked a little heavy in 43:46 One Direction and that might not be forever but for a period of time I also feel a little bit of time sensitivity 43:54 may put on myself or pressure that things are moving so quickly I really want to capitalize on what's 44:02 happening now right yeah because it'll change and the opportunities that exist 44:10 three months from now may be gone right or they may not be gone but they're going to evolve so yeah having an ear to 44:17 the ground on what's Happening and talking to a lot of people I think about 44:23 what's happening there was a guy I was talking to earlier today who mentioned that uh the editing tool 44:30 descript or descript they P they purchased a platform identical to Riverside that 44:38 we're on right now six months ago or something and during our call I went on 44:43 there and signed up and for free because I have descript I get access to this 44:50 maybe the next podcast I'm going to be doing I'm going to be using this this different platform but here is 44:56 information that it's out there it's available but without having these 45:02 sometimes you never know when you're going to come across that one tool that literally changes your 45:09 business and I was on a marketing panel yesterday we were talking about 45:15 collaboration and marketing and I mentioned to the group something called reclaim AI have you heard of it no I 45:22 haven't actually so this one is about in so it's got think of Kenly on steroids 45:30 so it has it's using AI to optimize meeting Cadence with your teams making 45:36 flexible appointments so they're not fixed prioritizing what's your to-dos 45:42 pushing them around in your calendar and doing things that would be very difficult for even the best executive 45:49 assistant those little things they and that tool for the cost of tonly you get 45:57 all this other stuff yeah so it's figuring out what uh what your goals are 46:03 what are you trying to do and then reverse engineering it as much as possible with tools leveraging 46:10 automation AI to build your own custom stack but something like zapier I think 46:17 is going to be essential to making all those things work together because as 46:23 much as those tools try they're not and it sounds like with the work that 46:28 you've been doing it can be a huge asset for a lot of companies looking to find 46:34 creative ways to solve their problems yeah definitely like it's it's The Potential of Zapier for Prototyping 46:40 zapia is a fantastic prototyping tool as well I've used it twice now for 46:46 different basically SAS prototypes just to see if something is technically possible like 46:52 I last year like I've started work on a tool called Auto work which basically a 47:00 project management in Project risk management automation platform where you 47:05 can yeah use like the chat interface to to manage your projects like at scale 47:11 and if your the original idea came from going why is a project manager going and 47:18 booking like project meetings and asking for updates and I'm sure like a chatbot could just be programmed to to ask the 47:26 project team for updates every Monday and consolidate that into project update 47:32 to send out to the stakeholders and what else does a project manager do and so like yeah like I built a tool that was 47:39 able to do that and I'm now in the progress process of getting that turned into an actual SAS app and I did the 47:46 same exact same thing with engine like it's wanting to get that turned into an actual product as well so I don't have 47:52 to H into other platforms I can have it all in one spot which you know would 47:58 make it you know significantly more streamlined again but yeah if you're ever um wanting to build like an 48:07 application and see if something's possible see if you can do it in zapia first and if you can then like you might 48:12 be on to something yeah just a bit of advice for anyone out there great Ain this has been this has been amazing Wrapping Up and How to Connect 48:18 we're right out the hour here tell me how can people get in touch with you 48:24 yeah sure I've got engine as you mentioned before has all my contact details on there so that's 48:31 nn.com and so that's my service platform there I've also got just Aaron J steel 48:39 so a n j SLE 48:45 e.com as that's a bit more of just my personal brand information Hub so I've 48:50 got all my links to everything there as well I'm very active on LinkedIn but 48:56 always happy to hear from pable on other platforms as well and and a growing YouTube channel so you can subscribe to 49:03 that too yes yeah subscribe to my YouTube channel and yeah that that'll be 49:08 fantastic amazing I appreciate having you on the show uh for everyone listening thank you for joining us for 49:15 this fun conversation I hope you got as much out of it as I did for shows 49:20 similar to this and for more information you can check out opening.com uh as well 49:25 as open open AI training on YouTube thanks so much my name is Mark ladimer 49:31 this has been Aaron steel and I having a back and forth on AI and automation 49:37 thanks so much for your time Aon appreciate you English (auto-generated) AllFrom OpenAi TrainingPodcastsFor youRecently uploaded