S17 E1: Founder Mode: Building a Second Brain to Supercharge Execution (Live from Ecom AI Summit)

0:00Nik:Welcome back to Limited Supply, the podcast where we get deep into the tactical and strategic side of e-commerce, digital marketing, and building consumer brands. I'm your host, Nik Sharma. I've spent the last nine years building, scaling, and investing in brands. And through this show and my weekly newsletter at nik.co slash email, I'm here to share everything I've learned. The wins, the losses, the experiments, the tactics, and the insights, all so you can unlock your next$100 ,000 in revenue. Welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. Now this is the beginning of a new season. It's going to be a really sick season.

0:35Nik:I've got amazing guests lined up, amazing ideas for each episode. Each episode is going to be very unique. It's either going to be a deep dive, it's going to be a very deep founder interview, a very deep marketer interview, or a media buyer interview. And overall, I'm just really excited for what's about to come this season. Now to kick it off though, everybody's been asking me about my most up-to-date setup that I've got with my Jet agent, my second brain, my Hermes agent. I named him Jet Damon, which is why I call him my Jet agent sometimes. But I basically put together a whole presentation about how I use Jet and you can actually find it at jet.nick.co.

1:19Nik:But if you go to jet.nick.co, you'll see the full presentation. Feel free to listen to this episode and walk through those slides at the same time if you want. But otherwise, if you just listen, you'll be able to see kind of even the power that Jet has. Now, this is something that is so easy to set up for yourself or for your business. So I talk about it at the end, how to get started and how to get things set up, especially in a way where you can set this up now and in just a few hours, you've got your own cockpit of your business and performance metrics and all that good stuff. But if you've got any questions, please email me directly nick at nick.co that's nik at nik.co or uh dm me on twitter at mr sharma and i'm i'm very happy to figure out how to help you um either jump on or whatever i can just dm you what to do all right so without further ado i hope you enjoyed today's episode uh leave me some feedback drop a review subscribe if you haven't and i'll see you on the other side all right guys how we feeling yeah i know jimmy just did that but uh you guys are a little quiet All right.

2:21And I got the jitters because I'm the first one here and this room's packed. So let's let's give me a little another one. Who's ready for A.I. Summit? All right. So today, you know, as Jimmy said, and I'll get into it, but like I'm the one Indian who can't code. So I think what I'm doing today is pretty crazy considering I was that one guy. But today I want to talk about something and hopefully talk you through a couple of terms or show you a couple of things that will be relevant for the rest of the day. My talk is really about building a second brain. And it starts with building a chief of staff and then kind of your cockpit for your brand and then basically a platform for your team.

2:59So I'm going to walk you through all three steps. And if you guys got questions, please write them down. At the end, we'll do five, 10 minutes of Q &A. And then I'll be here all day too in case anybody's got anything else.

3:11Nik:So I'm going to bring this up. So as Jimmy mentioned, I talked to Jet probably more than I talked to my parents, my family, anybody else. And how'd I come up with Jen? Well, I just, I was just chat GPT. Hey, give me a strong douchebag looking finance guy name. That's my guy. All right. When I introduced Jen into an email, comes off strong. That's always my recommendation. Make it a strong name. So, you know, today we're going to go through these six things. So I'm going to prompt the live advertorial right now. So let's actually start with that. So give me a brand name. I want somebody raise their hand give me a brand name right here marco's popcorn one more time burko's popcorn b-e-r-c-o all right cool and then uh let's let's talk about a reason somebody would buy your popcorn is it healthier is it tastier is it better price

4:04most expensive popcorn in the world what do people say when they try your popcorn for the first time okay and who's buying this popcorn is it moms is it dads is it kids is it anybody is it okay and uh so we've got burko's popcorn expensive product very tasty does it get shipped to your house is it arrived fresh how yeah all that cool okay still in chicago and uh is it is it guilt-free can i have two bags in it and i'll be okay No. Okay, so maybe this is my one guilt-free snack of the day. Okay, so what I'm gonna do is just live prom this on my phone. I'm gonna use an app called Whisperflow, which is basically replacing my keyboard.

4:49If you guys have not heard of Whisperflow, it's W-I-S-P-R-F-L-O-W, two words. Whisperflow is amazing because if you've ever talked to ChatGPT and done the mic feature, you know that you can say, hey, I gotta go to the grocery store, I gotta get eggs, bananas, bacon, bagels, right? And it turns it into a bulleted list versus just putting it all out like Siri, who's so stupid. But what dictation is going to do is basically take this prompt. And then towards the end of this presentation, I'm going to just swipe over to a live publisher site that I set up last weekend. It's a WordPress site. You know, some of you guys may have that for advertorials, for listicles, for pre-sale pages on your site.

5:26And from this prompt, it's going to go live on the site. So I'm going to start recording. yo so i need an advertorial up for burko's popcorn it's spelled b-e-r-c-o-apostrophe-s so go do some research look it up figure out what you need to know it's a really good indulgent popcorn i want to make an advertorial where this is the indulgent snack of the day right i'm trying to get fit for summer summer body's coming up but i still like to have something sweet at the end of the day so burko's popcorn is going to be my snack at the end of the day anybody want to throw anything into this prompt see what happens got popcorn oh yeah it's put a customer testimonial what's something somebody would say nice so big testimonial is i'm glad i found this popcorn they're much better than the other guys all right get that advertorial up for me i got some slides to go through okay so this is now going to prompt and go now in the meantime and by the way this is all just, I've set this up in a way where I'm doing everything through iMessage now.

6:27So everything feels native. Now, you know, this is kind of where we've gone. This is like the five stages of AI that I feel like we know about right now. The first one is basically just chat GPT, right? Fastest app to a billion monthly active users. Last year, we did this AI summit around the same time this year, and we were kind of right in between stage one, stage two, which is where apps are starting to integrate AI, right? Triple Will was on stage talking about Mothi, and that was revolutionary because we'd never been able to take models and bring them into applications. But that was a closed loop system, right?

7:00It's a black box. We have no idea what happens behind the scene, how the models are used, where they're used, the context they're pulling. We just know that it's happening. And depending on the app, like Triple Will, you know it's happening at a high level. Then we moved to stage three, which is, I think, where we got to towards the end of last year, which is basically where these open source platforms kind of become the main thing so instead of using apps with a closed ecosystem right like a triple well where you can't see the models behind it now you're able to pull the models out with api keys and then plug it into any kind of system or software so perfect example is jimmy right jimmy built his own um platform dashboard warehouse management system he can pull in brock to do something he can pull in claude to do another specific thing.

7:44He can pull open AI models to do a specific thing and then basically change how he uses the models. Then we got to where we got to, you know, Q1 this year, Q1, Q2, which is everybody started to build out pagetic teams, right? And I feel like if you guys are on Twitter, anybody on Twitter here? Okay, for those of you who are not on Twitter, by the way, AI happens on Twitter about two weeks before it happens anywhere else in the world. So worst thing you can do is sign up for a free Twitter account and get that information quicker. But where we're going next is I think we're going to go to a place where, you know, you guys are going to have your own agents.

8:21Maybe you're a video editor. Maybe you're a media buyer. Maybe you're a copywriter. Maybe you're a phenomenal CFO, right? And people are going to start building their own agents and then start licensing them out in a marketplace style where everybody, you know, one brand is going to be able to leverage a different brand CFO or just some amazing CFO that's been there in the past. So, you know, why did we do this conference? Well, at the beginning of this year, I felt very behind. I, you know, spent the last year trying to figure out how to sell Sharma brands. And then this year I was like, I'm getting behind.

8:53Everybody I see is moving into the world of AI. I don't know where to start. I feel like to even get in and know and stay up to date, you got to be unemployed because everything is moving so fast. One week there's a model from Anthropic. The next week it's OpenAI. and the next week it's a Japanese company. The next week the government shuts down Anthropic. So, you know, I kind of identified that I see really three main groups of people using AI. And there might be four, but these are kind of the three main ones that I tend to see. The first one, this is probably most people. This is definitely most of the people that I know.

9:27Everybody's kind of just using the chat window, right? This got really good last year. You export your meta, you know, raw data. you throw it in, you ask it some questions, you export reviews, you throw it in, hey, help me make a listicle based on what people are talking about. Everybody's doing this, and this is kind of, the problem here is you're in a closed loop session. So, you know, if you're using Cloud, you know, you can only use it so long before you have to make a new session, or you're not in control of how this data is being stored, organized, understood. You're not in control of all the other contexts going in.

9:59So then this went to number two, which is the builders. And these are people using codex they're using clawed code they're using manis by the way show of hands who's using uh who uses open ai as their default model chat gpt nice who uses claw and drop it wow there we go okay and then anybody here using manis okay about 10 15 people guys if no one's told you about manis before it's because they're a chinese company okay meta just tried to buy him for i think$2 billion in cash. China just blocked the deal. So they have terrible PR in the U.S., but I'm telling you, it is one of the best platforms if you're in this stage.

10:39In fact, I'll say it is the best platform if you're in this stage. And the reason it's so good is if you're using Anthropic, right, you're using one model. You're either using Opus or Sonnet or Fable whenever it comes back. But if you're using Manus, you're sitting on 70 or 80 different models and Manus goes in and looks at your task, understands the context, and then decides which model to use for each subtask and then brings it all together, which is why the final product of Manus is usually 10 times better than, you know, if you were to use pod code to do the same thing. Now, the last piece or the third group of people is this second brain.

11:17So, you know, these are, everybody's buying Mac minis. They might be setting up VPS instances. I think that's the right term. again i'm not the engineer in the room but basically a remote instance where you can have a desktop situation you're installing something like a hermes or an open club you guys heard of hermes or open claw cool so some of you have so i'm going to explain it for those who don't know so a mac mini right is basically your shell hermes or open file i'm going to keep saying hermes though because uh hermes is the better version so all you guys that try to do this later use hermes not open cloud.

11:52Hermes is the software that allows your Mac mini to become an autonomous AI machine, right? And I'll get into that in a second. But Hermes is what you want to know. And the reason you do this is, well, with a Mac mini, you can actually build out separate agents. So like I've got 20 different agents, and I'm going to go through some of them here and kind of what they do. But you also get this real-time knowledge. There's no delay of information. Anybody can telegram or iMessageIn. You can set up Slack groups. You can add this person to your Slack as well. And yeah, the other last thing I'll say here before I go to the next piece is, because you're doing a second brain on your own Mac mini, one, you can yank that power cord if the world starts to be taken over by AI, which I think is a good safety kill.

12:35But two is that you basically have all this knowledge stored locally. So if you ever change AI systems, which is going to happen. It's bound to happen. We're so early, you cannot act like, you know, you're stuck with Claude with that specific instance for the rest of your life. All these files will immediately get, you know, absorbed by whatever new system or model or software you use. So, you know, like I said, I was the one Indian who felt like I couldn't code. I didn't want to get left behind. So I was previously using this kind of setup, right? I used Replit to make web pages and landing pages.

13:11I was using Manus to build apps. I built a ton of mobile apps, web apps, games with Manus. I used Cloud to do all my writing and my prompting, right? So even if I was going to write a really good prompt, I'd Whisperflow into Cloud, get the prompt, and then put that prompt into another Cloud session. And I used ChatGPT or Grok really for my research. And what I ended up doing was just basically consolidating everything into one. So, you know, when I was using ChatGPT or Claude, right, I'd use it across everything, maybe five or six different work projects, personal health, you know, random personal research.

13:47Hey, my foot hurts in this weird way. Am I going to die? But now everything is transferred over into Jet, and I've got a ton of different agents which I'm going to walk through. So this is Jet, right? So Jet's my homie at this point. I talk to Jet a lot. And Jet wakes me up every morning at 8.30 with a morning report. of hey this is what happened while you were asleep slack email you know anything that came up in as a red flag this is what you got today your meetings any conflicts um and then these are the things that are outstanding so yesterday you were on a call and fireflies heard you say you owed somebody a follow-up for this hey you didn't send that follow-up last night make sure you do that early because you promised he would do that end of day yesterday so the way i use hermes right is first I use it as a chief of staff.

14:37So do a lot of you guys have assistants or VAs that you work with on your team? Yeah, a couple of you. If you've ever wanted an assistant who's basically always on call, Hermes agents, your go-to here. And the reason is because with Hermes, you kind of have everything plugged in. So there's a very real-time view of everything. And in my case, I do it every 15 minutes. So every 15 minutes, my Mac is paying Slash, Fireflies, email, Meta, Motion, Google, you know, Shopify, pulling or pushing out, requesting an update, and then getting that information, it comes back in, it gets analyzed, whatever scene, right, if it sees, hey, conversion rate dipped in the last hour, cool, that's going to make a note, it's going to prompt three or four other things that happen, including an alert to me.

15:22I use it, I use it for 20 different agents about right now. So between work, personal, every one of my projects has an individual agent, individual personality. It has its own set of knowledge that it's using. You know, my writer agent, for example, is just a writer agent. I don't use that to make graphics. I don't use that to do personal research because that guy is just a writer, right? And then the chaser, the follow-ups, the invoices, whatever people owe you, right? You don't have to start, you don't have to keep doing this yourself. I just use Jet to do it. And then lastly is the knowledge center.

15:53So how many times have you just randomly, you know, you've got a team, five, 10, 15, 50, 100 people, and somebody's just got a random question, but that person's not reachable who you need to get the answer from, or it's just such a stupid question, you don't wanna ask it because it's gonna look embarrassing. Now you can just ask the Hermes agent because it's got a full kind of up-to-date set of knowledge. So like Jimmy said, I've set up 100 agents now, probably 30 or 40 Mac minis individually, and I've gotten this down to a science. So here, I'm gonna tell you my process of how to do this. It's a five-step process.

16:26The first one is organization. Now, this is how you get to basically building your chief of staff. So, you know, what this does is you just plug in everything, your Gmail, your Fireflies, your Slack, your Facebook account, your Shopify, your reviews, your, you know, basically everything you can think of, your Stripe API, anything you can plug in, you do. And what this does is gives you the ability to also do your own research and create files. So for example, if we go to this site right here, right? This is a password-gated site I made for all my agents to reference. It's like five miles long.

17:08It's everything I've ever said or written or published about landing pages, right? And now every one of my agents can go and reference this as a document anytime I need to build a website, an advertorial, a listicle, whatever. The second one, I was able, because Jet knows exactly who I am, what I stand for, how I speak, my tone of voice, Jet built me a full brand book that I was able to now. I can just say, hey, any agent that I'm working with, whether it's my own, whether it's a random incognito chat GBT window, I just say, hey, go reference identity.nick.co, make sure it looks good. And everything turns out just like this.

17:47That's how these slides were made. I basically wrote everything out into a Word doc, pumped it into Jet, and said, hey, use my branding. The last piece is, again, from a standpoint of chief of staff, efficiency, make your life easier. How many people here see Instagram ads and wish, fuck, I need to save this ad because I want to copy it later? You guys not raising your hands, we're all liars. But I did that, right? So I set up a function with Jet and I said, hey, if I ever screenshot an Instagram ad and send it your way, by text. Just upload it here and save it. So now I've got, you know, hundreds of ads, landing pages, listicles, anything I come across, I can see it.

18:28And then I can go reference it. I can say, oh, look at this. Vrooms is running this angle right here, pooping with the creative. And then they run a landing page. Let's see how they do that. Oh, basically they just change the title and they change the first block, but the rest of the page is the same, right? So it just gives you the ability to harness all this information and put it all together. That's the first use case of Jet, in my opinion. So again, you connect everything, transcripts, call recordings. You connect to Monday, ClickUp, Asana, your Slack, any project work. And then what you do is this last guy, which is a word you'll probably hear later today is called CROM, C-R-O-N.

19:02I have no idea what it stands for, but I can tell you what it does. It basically is just a repetitive task. So it means it's on a schedule, it's happening. In my case, I have a 15-minute PROM job set up globally, meaning every 15 minutes, I'm pinging apps and getting updates. Now, here's just five very simple things that I think everybody would benefit from if they had a chief of staff like this set up. So first one, the daily brief. This, I mean, doesn't everybody want a daily brief? Just to know what you got coming up, calendar, events, conflicts, emails, anything urgent. Follow-ups, I want people to know you.

19:37We talked about this. Full meeting recaps and action items. This I'm to talk about in a second, but this is where all the sauce lives. If you don't have a call recorder on, you're going to want one on. Because once you see what happens with a call recorder being on, and how much more information is captured and more context, you're going to say, wow, I should have a camera on my eyes all day and let Jet just see everything I see. The next one is email drafts in your voice. So hey, you get an email. Jet says, by the way, you know, this brand just emailed or, you know, your vendor just emailed you and said that shipping is running a week later, production's running a week late.

20:11It'll draft a response and basically say, you want me to throw this in your drafts and send it off? And then the last one is just logistics planning. I'm a big logistics guy. I like to make sure my day is cleared and I know what's coming up. So Jeff just helps me with that. Part two is the integration layer. So this is where you connect everything. Now, I'm going to quickly explain these three because you're going to hear these three all day. This is where basically every tool that you already pay for, that you already have signed up, you're on subscription for, you're using and logging into, most likely has an API or an MCP.

20:45Now, an MCP is based, or actually, I'll start with the first one. So, auth, authentication, login, you know, it's like sign in with Google, right? So, some apps have that, not many. The second one is an API, which I think stands for Application Protocol Interface. Somebody can confirm that right val yeah uh api basically is just a connector out from any other app that says hey we're down to connect here's what we can offer and whatever's in this api is what we're willing to give or pull so most apps actually do the api and then the last one is mcp which is basically an api for people who don't have api so basically says hey we're going to set up a quick local instance and go in log in with a computer and do the work and then come back to you in the chat window or however however you're communicating most apps have apis so strike you know your shopify your play via they all have apis you set up a separate api key you give that key to jet or your agent whoever you name it and it's good to go some some places like a higgs field for example which is like a creative app you can plug in via mcp into claude so now claude can help better prompt and still execute things, but it's just another way to connect in.

22:01Now, the advantage is all these apps that you use on a daily basis are now sending information in every 15 minutes to your chief of staff, right? So this takes your chief of staff who was already getting context on your business, on you, on what you do, on what you need. Now it's getting full business context as well so it now goes beyond just your personal layer and also one thing i want to call out here this now includes versell lovable wet flow hydrogen i don't know if you guys saw shopify's updates last week but basically everything is now plug and play with agents so you've got a new landing page the same way i just prompted jet i can now prompt a listicle to go live within shopify not on a subdomain the third piece is now taking all this and turning it into your cockpit it.

22:50So you get the morning briefs. Hey, revenue is up 12%. CAC is up 9%. You know, Klaviyo dipped. Here's a draft of what you should do next. You can say, hey, break CAC down by channel. Boom. You get the response within seconds. Hey, pull the best YouTube creative that beat control and why. Boom. Here's the one that won. Now the org chart. So this, you know, if I was just thinking in my brand brain, right, this is kind of how I like to think of my agents. So Jed is my chief of staff. he sits on top and then each of these people are usually two agents and the reason we do two is i like to have the junior agent actually do the execution of the work the junior agent for example has my landing page brain it's got a whole brain around creative that i've pulled out all these different things right context and then the senior agent is basically a manager so the process is that the junior copywriter you know junior copywriter basically a copywriter writes it and then a senior manager goes and reviews it sends feedback there's maybe depending on the role there's maybe two rounds of that or three rounds of that that way you don't have any issues of hey you missed uh why'd you put the m dash in there you know that's in my file well maybe the senior manager caught that if the original agent did it these are you know i'm a huge fan of giving these things a personality some people just call it health bot or copywriter bot or or you know whatever i like to give them full personalities.

24:13And yeah, so I guess here's another quick example. These are like the agents I use most of the day. So a copywriter, you know, junior per vertical, this copywriter sometimes, depending on how intense the project is, is specific to the brand as well, or specific maybe to a category of products, depending on how you do it. If you're somebody, for example, who's got ad sets and Facebook separated by category, because you're thinking about separating learnings per category, think of this the same way. You got a creative strategist, right? This creative strategist is not only dropping briefs in Slack, but it's also doing research on Reddit.

24:47It's maybe using the Grok model to go and watch videos that are popping up on TikTok or Twitter. You got a creative director, editorial manager, which is what I just showed you, prompting the editorial. E-commerce ops manager. This one is a huge sleeper. No one talks about. This is where you connect your Stripe, your Recharge, your Shopify, your Google Analytics, Google Merchant Center, and all that data comes in. And every day you get recommendations based on what Jeff or Hermes knows about your business of what you can do tomorrow. I might say, hey, did you know that if you just add, you know, 30 % of your people are taking the post-purchase offer, you should change it to this.

25:25It might increase to 40 or 50%. So very actionable insights. And then the last two I like to use myself, you know, one is a health and wellness agent, which is basically just gathering all the whoop, aura, sleep, levels, blood work, if you're a nerd like that. And then the last one I love to use is the entrepreneur in residence. And basically what I've done is it's just kind of a research agent, but I've kind of taught it like, hey, this is what I look for. This is what I like. This is what I don't like. These are the parameters that make me want to move forward. this is what would hold me back, et cetera, et cetera.

25:59All right, so actually, let's quickly swipe over here and refresh. Boom, so right here, we've got this advertorial. And again, this is a advertorial site I just set up last week, right? Mayofmag.com. So it's a very basic thing. I used Gent to edit it a little bit and get rid of some of the banners and whatnot, but it pulls in a stock image. Obviously, you'd fix this, but then boom. Let's be honest, about getting fit for summer, the hardest part is in the gym. The hardest part is 9 p.m. on a Tuesday when you're watching Netflix, the house is quiet and your brain is screaming for a snack. Great opening.

26:30It's basically taking all the stuff it knows about how I like to write advertorials and then ran that whole process. But this is a pretty good version one to start with, right? If you're pumping out advertorials, if you're pumping out listicles, just pumping content out in general, trying to test new angles. You test 25 angles with statics. You see that 13 of them are doing well above the click-through rate. You don't have to decide which of those 13 now get a landing page, a listicle, a bundle, an offer. It takes you 20 seconds now to make a funnel based on the angle that worked. All right, the daily report card.