The AI-Powered Entrepreneur with Laura Betterly

0:01Light that spark fire nation JLD here and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Imperfect Action. Today, we'll be breaking down the AI-powered entrepreneur to drop these value bombs that are brought to Laura Betterly and the EO Fire Studios. Laura is a world-renowned entrepreneur and marketing expert with over two decades of experience in the industry. She has established herself as a key player in the marketing space. She is the founder of Yada Yada Marketing. With her unique combination of creativity and technical expertise, Laura is a forced to be reckoned with in the world of marketing and entrepreneurship.

0:37And today, we'll talk about AI, leveraging it, even if you're not that tech savvy, tools for harnessing AI, KPIs and metrics to study, and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Laura and our sponsors. Success Story, hosted by my friend, Scott D. Clary, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Success Story features Q &A sessions with successful business leaders, keynote presentations, and conversation on sales, marketing, business, startups, and entrepreneurship. In a recent episode, Scott brings Kate Bradley on the show, founder and CEO of Lately.ai, to discuss the best ways to use AI to create content.

1:14Listen to Success Story wherever you get your podcasts. Want to meet me, JLD, in person? Attend Clay Clark's two-day interactive business workshop and meet me, Tim Tebow, and Clay Clark this June. Experience the highest rated business workshop in America and hang out with me in person at thrivetimeshow.com slash EOfire. Again, that's thrivetimeshow.com slash EOFire. Learn more and request your tickets at thrivetimeshow.com slash EOFire. Laura, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Hey, everybody. It's Laura. And I would say that what we just discussed, the more things change, the more they say the same.

1:59It's the circle, Fire Nation, the circle of life. And Fire Nation, as I mentioned in the intro, we're talking about the AI-powered entrepreneur and, Laura, passive income. It's the elusive dream of every entrepreneur. So let's talk about just how feasible it is to leverage AI to take at least some of the tasks off of our plates. Absolutely. I mean, what you're talking about here, you know, I think the set it and forget it model is just not realistic. I think there's absolutely a point where you have to have some interaction in what you're working on. You have to do the research. You have to know.

2:41You have to have a direction. You have to have a goal. Things are just not going to miraculously morphize into some sort of big thing without a little interaction. But what AI does is it allows you to do it smarter and faster. And for me, you know, time is the new money for me in actual fact, right? Money, you can make money, but you can't really make more time. AI does dramatically increase one's ability to get things done and get it done well. So you're not shortcutting things. You've got to know what you're doing, of course, but you can get a whole bunch of what would be days and days and hours and hours of research and grunt work that is very happily done by any one of the many AIs out there that are built to help.

3:32Fire Nation likes being smarter. They like being faster. So let's just say that we're approaching this with a completely clean, fresh slate. What are your recommended first steps for harnessing AI as an early stage startup? Okay, well, the first thing you have to realize is that there's a lot of functions that are being done that can be done better and faster with AI. And I like to look at AI as an assistant, not as an actual piece of technology, but as different types of assistants. So I might have a market research assistant that goes out and does market research for me, or keyword research, or looks at competitors, or improves my web copy.

4:15So first thing to note is that when you're dealing with AI and if it's chat, GPT or Claude or any of the other ones out there, you let them know, you let it know like who it's being, you know, and that's what's so great is you can have a thread that's just an HR executive or, like I said, a research assistant and whatnot and allow it to help you come up with what your plan is or you give it an outline and have it actually write the plan for you and then all you have to do is edit it. so there's some some really good things where i mean john i mean we'd spend days and weeks doing things and we've got it down to hours and that's and then we can spend the rest of the time either you know having more meaningful um relationships or you know figuring out the next thing we're going to do it really is up to you but it really opens up a whole lot of possibilities and for entrepreneurs it puts them in a position where they don't have to be doing 6 000 courses before they can even build their own website.

5:13And that's really important. I mean, listen, Fire Nation, I talk to you all the time. I speak with entrepreneurs all day. And there's things that we want as entrepreneurs. Yes, we want more money, usually, because money can be freedom. Yes, we want more time, we want more bandwidth, we want more freedom to do what we want with that time to spend with our family, our friends, our loved ones. And by the way, maybe on our business as well, like that can be our choice. Maybe we're being able to do the bigger picture things instead of like all the mundane tasks. So let's now kind of shift our conversation from, you know, people who just want those first steps, if they're kind of clueless, to more of the tech savvy founders, where would you recommend they start?

5:54Well, one thing I found for myself, and I'm sure others, and I'm hyper technical, I can build my own websites and, you know, and put things together. I mean, maybe I have to get a dev for some of the really, really heavy stuff. But you can use AI to help write code. I mean, even if it's a simple, something as simple as HTML, how to, how to create a hyperlink or whatever, you can just have it do those type of functions. Also SEO and, you know, looking at your, your tags and your titles and all that other stuff. I mean, you can absolutely have it do that kind of those kinds of functions as well as support.

6:38Like for example, you can put a database of knowledge into an AI and have it be the have the ability to answer almost any question that's already in your knowledge base and you know and a lot of people say oh well it takes away jobs and whatnot well in some cases yes some jobs are also taken away but other jobs are absolutely created because there are people that have to run the machines man you know and and uh and that's actually a much more fun job than dealing with a snorly human it's nice to be able to give them an answer to their questions pretty quickly and if you know the database doesn't have all the answers then you take it to a human who is now not overtaxed because he's been um you know beaten down by people who are pissed off because they don't have the right answer to something you know what i mean i mean support's got to be the worst job in the world uh you know as far as as far as emotionally what it, what it, you know, how, how crushing it is.

7:39And that makes it much easier. Fire Nation, there's so much here that we can work with that we can say, you know, what makes sense for me right now? What makes sense for my business right now? And maybe only take one step at a time, implement one thing and try it, test it, you know, adjust, pivot, do what has to happen and to, to make it more part of what you want to do flowingly wise, day to day, month to month, year to year. And then over time, you might wake up and say, wow, I'm actually integrating a lot of things from the AI world into my business. I didn't start that way, but it's just evolved that way.

8:11And we have a lot more to talk about on this topic when we get back from thinking our sponsors. You know, your customers want fast personalized support, but how do you find a customer service solution that actually delivers? Most solutions leave reps struggling to stay productive and customers frustrated by the lack of support. But with the new AI powered service Hub from HubSpot, you've now got a better way to do service and success. Service Hub helps you fly through the service queues and lighten the load on your reps with AI-powered self-service chat and knowledge-based articles. It also helps you grow your customer base with tools that helps reps anticipate customer needs before they ever become issues.

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10:09Remember, knowledge will only attract money when it is organized and directed through implementing practical plans of action. Become the next success story and request tickets to join Tim Tebow, myself, and Clay Clark at the June business conference today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. Laura, we're back and fire nation, they are savvy entrepreneurs. They are on fire. They know they need to measure things. They know they need to have their KPIs in order. So let's talk specifically about what metrics or KPIs actually matter most when judging the effectiveness of artificial intelligence. It's an interesting question because KPIs are KPIs.

10:49So if you want to see, if you're using like AI in your marketing, you're going to be able to say just by your own, by your conversion rates and how much income you're making, how well it's doing. And you can use third party applications, let's say on a website, like let's say you have AI, go ahead and improve your copywriting. Okay, just improve the copywriting and you're doing a split test. You're going to be able to see very easily what it also creates. But the other thing that I use is how much free time I have in my life. That's my KPI because as an entrepreneur, I mean, and I've been doing this, I've been hitting it hard since the late 90s, okay?

11:31And I'm not going to tell you how old I am, but probably older than most of Fire Nation. and you know I really like to have some time down where I can do things with my music or my artwork or my friends and whatnot and that to me is my big my big indicator like I have now created a quality of life KPI that is directly related to how much time I have to do the things I like to do. I mean Fire Nation I now have a three-month year old son as my first child I can tell you, one of my KPIs that didn't exist three months ago or six months ago or 10 years ago was how much time am I spending with my child?

12:10Because that goes fast. I mean, you blink and there are three years. You blink and they're taking the keys to the car. You blink and he's off to college. I mean, that's just how quick it goes. So that's not one of my KPIs that matters most when I judge what I'm doing in my day-to-day. And you need to know what yours are. You need to know what metrics matter to you? And then how can AI assist with that, improve that? And we've been talking around this a lot, Laura, about how entrepreneurs have limited time. We have limited bandwidth. Of course, we always want to do more on the business side of things.

12:41We always want to do more on the family side of things. We always want to do more with our financial side of things, with our health, with our wellness. So which AI opportunities provide the most bang for the buck in your experience thus far? I think in marketing, we have a huge, huge, huge amount of help because one of the toughest things you can, you know, as a is marketing is copywriting, and putting together a program. And even though you have a great idea overall, putting it down and articulating it can be pretty difficult, especially when it comes to being trying to be very, very creative.

13:19As a creative person, I find that I get sometimes stuck. I call it creative constipation. You know what I mean? Like you're trying to think of what to do next or have ideas on stuff. And I got to tell you, having an AI assistant that can help kind of prime my thought processes is really, really life changing. I can get things done much quicker than that. But there's also other things that I love and that makes a big difference. For example, saving time by using transcripts. Like I use Otter AI to record meetings and whatnot. And then I also have, you know, I'll also transcribe things. Like, for example, I bought a very, very long course on taxes, which is really important.

14:08And, you know, and like how to shelter your money and whatnot. But it's going to take me six months to go through. And what I did was I had the audio transcribed by Otter and then I put it into a database and I had it do actually do a summary of things for me. And then now I can just ask specific questions like what's in the state of Florida, what's the best corporate structure for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, it'll just spit me out the answer from that from from from that particular course. or the same thing with a YouTube video. Like how many times you look at a YouTube video and it's 52 minutes.

14:44And do you want to invest 52 minutes into that YouTube video when you consider how much time you have? But the subject matter seems to be interesting. So you can go ahead and take the transcript and throw it into AI and ask for a timestamped summary. And then you can decide, oh, these are the four minutes I want to watch. It makes a huge difference. And on meetings, you can not only have a summary, but you could actually give you a task list of what you decide you agreed to do in a meeting. Because, you know, an hour and a half into it, if you write your notes, but sometimes they get a little messy or you forget something, it's all there.

15:22It's really, you know, like I said, I can't say more about it that I love. Fire Nation, I love those concepts of taking something that would otherwise have taken you a long time to consume and just getting the good points out of it or the important points or the key points for you specifically. And this can just really add up over time. I mean, you know, that's, you know, one reason why I listen to podcasts typically in 1.25 or 1.5 because I'm like, hey, that's a 20 minute episode. I can listen to it in 13 minutes. And same thing with audio books. And, you know, I want to still have it at a speed where I can enjoy it and I'm consuming the content, but I'm taking time back.

15:55Now, I want to get back to this passive income idea. To what extent can AI actually allow us to put our businesses on quote-unquote autopilots? You know, it's interesting. There's a lot of things that can be done on autopilot with bots. You can have your social media posting, for example, or like I said before, your support and whatnot. I mean, you remember the four-hour work week, you know, when Tim Ferriss is writing about how you could take things and outsource it? These different bots that you can build, you can outsource a good portion of your business so that you are just looking at stats.

16:39You know, I mean, if you're running Facebook ads, it's almost like now you don't even have to put in an audience. I mean, Facebook knows who it is and their algorithms will go ahead and optimize. Google's got algorithms like that. I mean, you know, it's funny. People keep saying AI is new. It's actually not new. I mean, do you guys have Spotify? I mean, that's an AI. It's been around since the early 2000s. They started it in digital music and whatnot. But now it's becoming so that it's more for the masses. So, yes, you can automate article writing and posting and email newsletter generation. And there's a lot of third party of applications that you can string together with like make.

17:29And there's different APIs. So you can just automatically make. Of course, you've got to check on things. You can't just like go on vacation for a year and expect that you're going to have a million dollars in your bank. But it surely slows down the amount of actual human interaction you have to actually get things done. Fire Nation, AI has been around in a lot of different ways, shapes and forms for a long time now. And it's just like Laura said, it's coming to the forefront now where there's some really interesting and cool new ways and strategies and tactics that we can use to just make our lives better.

18:04Think about that. Now, Laura, you've talked about a lot of value bombs today. What is the one key takeaway from our entire conversation you really want to make sure Fire Nation gets? I think that if you don't innovate and keep up with what's going on, you're going to go the way of the BlackBerry, right? I mean, I just finished watching a movie about the BlackBerry. And it was the most innovative technology back in the day, right, and built. And then, you know, it was it was, you know, usurped by iPhone in a matter of almost minutes. Right. How many of us remember AOL or how big Yahoo was? You know, it's not.

18:47And Facebook is huge now. But, you know, we had my space. So, you know, keep on the lookout. What's hot today might not be hot tomorrow. and new ideas and innovations are the things that really, really build out not only the future, but build huge, huge wealth. So there's somebody who's listening to this, who's probably got an idea that none of us have had yet, that's going to change the world. And I think that's awesome. Fire Nation, that is awesome. And we're going to get there together. So Laura, Laura, if Fire Nation wants to connect with you, what is your call to action for our listeners today?

19:27You know, join my newsletter. You can find me at laurabetterley.com and on Facebook, Laura Betterley. You know, so just find me and you can interact. I'm real easy to find. I'm not one of those guys that doesn't answer their emails or whatever. I mean, my email is laura at laurabetterley.com. It doesn't get much simpler than that. And there you go. So, you know, always looking to help people. And, you know, I have some tools that might help. Fire Nation, you're the average. Of the five people you spend the most time with, you've been hanging out with LB and JLD today, so keep up that heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com.

20:07Just type Laura in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. Laura, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Laura for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation, what can 4 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs teach you? How about how to achieve financial freedom and fulfillment? My first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, is a revolutionary 17-step roadmap that will lead you to the lifestyle you've been dreaming about.

20:41This book took me 10 years of accumulating the genius of the world's top entrepreneurs, and you can get it all in one place when you visit UncommonSuccessBook.com. I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Success Story, hosted by my friend, Scott D. Clary, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Success Story features Q &A sessions with successful business leaders, keynote presentations, and conversation on sales, marketing, business, startups, and entrepreneurship. In a recent episode, Scott brings Kate Bradley on the show, founder and CEO of Lately.ai, to discuss the best ways to use AI to create content.

21:17Listen to Success Story wherever you get your podcasts. Want to meet me, JLD, in person? Attend Clay Clark's two-day interactive business workshop and meet me, Tim Tebow, and Clay Clark this June. Experience the highest rated business workshop in America and hang out with me in person at thrivetimeshow.com slash EOfire. Again, that's thrivetimeshow.com slash EOfire. Learn more and request your tickets at thrivetimeshow.com slash EOfire. Thank you.