I built 4 Agents in 55 minutes to save 20+ hours a week

0:00All right, this is super cool. This type of stuff only happens, I think, on MFMFM. But here's the deal. I have a friend named Wade Foster. He started a company called Zapier. Zapier is a business that was bootstrapped to hundreds of millions in revenue, and it's worth$5 or$10 billion. And I had the CEO and founder on Wade, I had him on MFM. And I said, Look, share your screen and show me how you're using AI to save 10, 20, 30 hours a week. It's pretty amazing. He did it. And he broke down like three or four different ways that he has automated parts of his life and his business. And it's really, really cool.

0:32because this guy has an incredible perspective because he has such a large company, but because he helped create this whole automation industry. So if you want to save a bunch of time, this stuff is not complicated. I don't know AI that well, and I'm going to implement a ton of the stuff that I've just learned. And by the way, if you're listening to this with audio only, you might want to go to Spotify Video or YouTube to watch this. It has a lot of visuals. You can still get a ton of value on audio, but it's just better, I think, on YouTube. So give it a watch. Give it a listen and let me know if you dug it.

1:04Talk soon. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like my days off on the road. Let's travel. So I'm thinking about how to introduce you. But basically, I met you in 2016 or 17, something like that, when you spoke at one of my events. And I asked you to speak at one of my events because you founded and ran a company called Zapier. you know you guys took off before ai was way before it was ever a thing but you basically if i remember correctly you only raised at the time a million dollars but you got it to nine figures in revenue and then eventually raise a series a at something like a five billion dollar valuation is that about those numbers about right close so the seed round was 1.2 and then the five billion number that wasn't uh that was all secondary so none of that stuff went on to the balance sheet of the company.

1:59How much did you guys raise? Was that public? It wasn't. We didn't raise anything. Well, you took money. Early investors, early employees, like got some liquidity from it, but nothing came to the company. How big are you guys now? What is the public number? I don't know the public number. Nine figures is public, though. Nine. You're at nine figures in revenue. And dude, it just it's one of my favorite companies. I never thought in a million years I'd be fired up about such like a dorky product, like connecting APIs. But basically my entire company and everyone I know, our entire companies run off of Zapier.

2:31Well, it's wild. So the first decade of existence, that dorky company thing, 100 % true. No one cares about workflow. Automation is like, we think it's cool. And there's definitely people who do think it's cool. But the Silicon Valley wisdom is raise a bunch of money, throw bodies at the problem, them, like blitz scale, go like nuts. And so like people like say they cared about automation, but their actions sort of like betrayed them in a lot of cases, certainly in tech. And so we're kind of like out here doing our thing, not a lot of people sort of in our space. Now you get into the AI world and it's sort of totally inverted where everyone cares about automation, everyone cares about AI.

3:18And so the market potential for us has just ballooned enormously. But of course, there's a lot more players in the space now. Yeah. At the time when I like when you guys were just getting going, it was basically you and maybe one other company doing this. Now there's so many more. Yeah. And, you know, everybody has their angle, their niche, you know, vertical this, vertical that, you know, more dev centric, less dev centric. Like, Yeah, so there's, you know, there's just everybody's kind of trying to get a piece of this. What is, you know, going to be, you know, a trillion dollar opportunity. In 10 years, how big do you think your company will be in terms of revenue?

3:5410 years? Well, shoot, I think we should be well past a billion in ARR if we do our jobs right. And you think you will still not have raised the money?

4:09I don't think we will. So you're going to be one of the largest, one of the larger ever companies that only, I mean, I don't know if you still say bootstrap, but you only raise, you turn a million dollars into something worth tens of billions of dollars. I mean, that's got to be one of the more efficient stories ever. Yeah, you know, this is how they used to do it, though. You know, if you look at, you know, Microsoft's and how their fundraising trajectory went, if you look at Amazon and their fundraising trajectory. Now, those companies obviously went public much earlier in their life cycles.

4:40But, you know, they didn't raise huge gobs of money. Yeah, how much did Google raise? I think they raised like low tens of millions of dollars. Yeah, I think it was something like that. Google and Google was a lot like Google had a big round. I think it was their A or their B that was huge. and people were like, whoa, this is nuts. And nowadays, like, you know what, the AI companies, the foundation model companies, they'll do like a billion dollar series A. It's like, whoa, this is different. This is different. I want to ask you about all of that, but someone like, I've noticed that I have better conversations with people while we are doing stuff.

5:18And that doing stuff is this thing where we basically have asked people like you, So people who run big companies, how many employees do you have? 700 and change. Okay, so you have 700 employees and you're trying to get everyone to use AI at your company. And you guys are an AI company at this point. You were kind of an AI company a little bit before that was really popular. The thing that I want to do that I've loved doing lately is I want you to share your screen and show me how you're using AI and really practical use cases. And you said, that sounds good. And so while you're showing the screen, I might ask you questions about like the background.

5:52of the company and things like that. So I asked you to make a list. You have a list. One of them stuck out, right? You want to tell me what that was? Well, so the first one, this is like a pretty basic like thing that I use day to day, which is like an instant dossier creator. So, you know, you can use it for all sorts of things. Like it's handy. It's particularly handy when you're sort of like out and about, like you're going to a dinner or you're at an event and you got a list of names or you're sitting down and there's name tags everywhere and you're like, okay, who are these people? And so that use case, you know, I usually just like feed Claude some details on the person.

6:30And then Claude will just return like a quick little dossier that includes, you know, public details about the person, but also like, what's going on? Like, are they a customer? Is there any details in our HubSpot account? Like, is there anything that ZoomInfo can tell me? Just to kind of just like get some quick hitters to be like, hey, is there something I can sort of talk to this person about. It's sort of like, if you ever watched Veep, Selena has like, yeah, like has Gary in her ear, like, you know, just saying like these things. And so you kind of get like your own little version of this.

7:00And so do you do a lot, you do a lot of these dinners with customers and potential investors, things like that? A reasonable amount of them. But the cool thing about this one is you can use it in all sorts of ways. So, you know, if you're just sitting in your home office and you've got a string of meetings coming up, you can do it for all the people that you're about to meet that day. If you've got leads coming in on your website and you want to go enrich those and send those over to your sales reps, you can do the same thing. So like this process works and is applicable in all sorts of different scenarios.

7:31And mostly what you're doing is you're just sort of like amending how you utilize it based on the situation you're at. Cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible, but that's exactly what Sandler Training did with HubSpot. They use Breeze, HubSpot's AI tools to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch. And the results were incredible. Click-through rates jumped 25%. Qualified leads quadrupled. And people spent three times longer on their landing pages. Go to HubSpot.com to see how Breeze can help your business grow. So I can maybe do a screen share on this.

8:12Yeah. You know, the thing I love about Claude is Claude has tools connected. And so the Zapier MCP server is available here. And you can see, you know, if you click into here, like you can connect all these different things. But, you know, with Zapier, you have access to 8 ,000 different tools. And so I can just like turn on all sorts of different tools to use within Cloud. So for example, you can see here we've got eight tools turned on. But basically these tools are a series of HubSpot capabilities like finding contact information, finding company information, finding deal information, and ZoomInfo endpoints.

8:54So like finding, again, contact information and finding company information. And the other thing you can do inside of Cloud is you can make projects. so I don't know if you've used projects before so I've used it with chat GPT it's like I have a health project I have like a therapist project I have like a business project there you go so you can assign these tools like to or you can give these projects like certain system prompts to like help them do a certain task and so within one of the projects I have it basically sort of coaches it on how to do like uh contact information for me where I'm like hey make these these dossiers for myself.

9:32So we can actually use the, I actually made a quick one for us, which is this, my first million demo. And I have like a, I got a buddy who's going to be cool if I use them, their name on this stuff. So tell me more about Lars from Social Puppy. And so what was in that file that you uploaded? So I didn't upload any files. Basically, what this chat has access to is it's got access to the Zapier HubSpot account. And then it's got access to our ZoomInfo account. And then it knows my like system instructions, which basically say, hey, step one is look up the contact and company inside of HubSpot. Step two is look up information inside of ZoomInfo.

10:20Step three is go find anything on the web. to go do this. Now, you might have seen there were some errors popping up here. This is one of the tricky things about MCP and Claude right now is that it's still a little buggy. Like MCP is technically like a, it's been out for like maybe, I don't know, their tool stuff has been out for maybe two or three months. And so it mostly works. What does MPC stand for? And what is MPC? Yeah, MCP is called Model Contacts Protocol. So effectively what this is, is a way for agents to talk to data. So, you know, in the old world, we would have APIs where, you know, you would say, hey, I want to talk to the Gmail API or want to talk to the HubSpot API or the Slack API.

11:12And these were ways for like SaaS companies to talk back and forth to each other. And so that protocol works really well for the SaaS tools. With agents, they don't exactly know how to utilize like all those API endpoints. And so MCP is basically this layer that sits in the middle that helps them go find different tools that they can go use and then take advantage of them. So unfortunately, right here, you can see this one is, oh, it worked. But the cool thing you can see is it's iterating over a bunch of different endpoints. So it's saying, hey, this didn't work. Let me try a more director approach.

11:53Okay, that didn't work. So this is Claude trying to figure out how to go do this task. They're like, hey, I'm not exactly sure. I've got access to a bunch of different tools. Some of these things might work. Some of these things may not work. And then at the end, it'll spit out information on it. So it pulls up LinkedIn URL. You can see that Lars is a product manager at Zapier. He's got, he's hanging out in Vancouver. You can see all the different things that sort of we know about them. And then Social Puppy happens to be his side gig. It's this way for people who own dogs to do meetups together.

12:30Of course, he's not paying for HubSpot. So, you know, they took a look at HubSpot and was like, yeah, there's no deal associated with this for Lars. You see what it says? It said colleagues describe him. Wait, what was that? Colleagues describe him as incredible drive and enthusiasm for the goals. It's having incredible drive and enthusiasm for the goals. Yep. okay and he's known for being fun and energetic that's cool okay and i would say that that's knowing laurs i would say that's accurate yeah so when you're going to uh let's say you have a work dinner let's say you're you're flying like uh to a different city and you want to meet with like 10 customers and just like host like a cool hang with them to get to know them let's say they're big customers would you just upload all six of the names and then just tell it like make this in note card format or I mean, how would you do it?

13:20Well, okay. So I want to show off something separate. So if I was doing that, I would actually do, this is an internal tool that we built. Now, this that I was just showing off, this is kind of for like basic on-demand stuff. So you can see like it did a good job, but you know, if I'm trying to show up to like a dinner and I know who's going to be there in advance, I want to come in well-equipped. Like, I don't want to do this sort of like on-the-fly sort of thing. I want to come in having done my research. So we built an internal tool. This is a company brief generator. Now, it uses Zapier interfaces.

13:59So this is like a pretty easy thing to build. And then what it does is you put in a domain name. So you could put in Netflix or Shopify or Slack or whoever. You know, you're meeting somebody from this company. And then what this does is it goes and retrieves information from three sources. So one, it pulls from a web search. So it just goes and finds like, what do we know about this company based on what's on the internet? Two, it does a Glean search. So we use this tool called Glean internally, which is like an internal like Google. You can think of it. It'll go search all your sort of like internal stuff.

14:38glean is basically i've been trying to use it it's you just log in to everything and then it makes yeah okay and so it'll search like slack and google drive and you know all the tools you give it access to so we'll do a glean search and then the third thing it will do is it will hit our actual customer database well a replica of it in databricks and help understand like what usage is going on inside the company. Then on the other side, it spits out a report. And so I actually did Hampton before this call. Oh my God, let me see. All right. You want to see it? And who's going to be using this? And at your company, what roles are using this?

15:20Everybody uses this internally. So if you're customer facing at all, you will do this. So it doesn't have like a crazy amount of information on on Hamptey but you can see here the company summary so this is like public pulling a bunch of like public data on it now I did some like research on it and it's it's sort of correct like I'm betting you're spotting things here that you're like oh that's not quite right I think the goal of having this if if you're if your intention is to connect with me at a dinner or something like that like you have ammo there exactly and that's what I'm getting out of this I'm not, you know, like I looked up before, like it doesn't look like Jordan is the CEO anymore.

16:02Right. So that's a thing where I'd be like, OK, you know, I probably don't want to talk about that. But there's, you know, this oh, it's a membership community. It's in New York. Like, you know, here's some things that I can, you know, riff with you on. You know, it pulls up a bunch of information. Then you can see here's our glean summary where it's got, you know, more issues about like what's going on with the account and things like that. And so, you know, maybe there was a payment issue with you all at some point in time. That is so awesome. Yeah. And so I can be prepared where I'm like, if you come up to me and you're like, Wade, like you really screwed me over in 2024.

16:36Like I can be like, yeah, hey, I'm really sorry about that. Here's what we did to fix this. We did this, this, this and this. And all of a sudden you're like, OK, Wade's really on top of it. Like I feel better about, you know, Zapier as a vendor versus like, you know, if I didn't have this and you were just like, Wade, I'm still pissed about what happened in December in 2024. And I'm like, what happened? I don't know what happened. And so now you're like, man, he doesn't even know what's going on in his own company. And so you have a tool like that. And then lastly, it didn't actually pull much.

17:08So I don't know how much usage is going on here. But for companies that are really using Zapier, the visualizations area pulls up a whole bunch of metadata about how their account is being used. So I can see like, oh, you know, they use Slack and HubSpot and Google and they're using AI or not using AI in the account. Here are the users that are using it, all that sort of stuff. Well, who built this? I think it was like one of our data analysts built this tool. On like Repplet or something? No, this is mostly just a Zap. So it's, you know, a Zapier interface. So you put in a domain name. Then there's a Zap that goes out and it hits those three areas.

17:49So it hits, does a web search, probably a step one. It does a glean search, a step two. and then it does an internal search on our Databricks instance at step three. And then the output is an HTML file. What would I Google to find the landing page that allows me to make this? So we have a bunch of templates that you can check out. So zapier.com templates slash use cases. This has like a bunch of places where you can go figure out how to do versions of this for yourself. So like anything under lead management is going to give you like great examples for ways to like build a version of this for yourself.

18:27And then the second place you can check out is we have this project that's product called Agents, which is in beta, but it has its own templates, which these are pretty slick as well too. So you can, you know, company research is the number one thing here. So you can go build a version of this to help you with company research. Have you seen on The Office, they show like, I guess Michael stole Dwight's notes on his customers, but he forgot how to like, he didn't know how to like read them. And he's like, oh, I see you are Eric from PA, right? And you have a gay son, right? Well, they're like weird.

19:04It's like green is color coded. Green is color coded to mean this, to mean this, which means stop. You're just like, oh man. Hold up, just a really quick break. I know you're watching this and you're thinking this is a ton of information. Our producer, Ari, she just listened to the entire episode and she wrote out all the important stuff. So if you want to go and implement a lot of these workflows or whatever you want to call them, she wrote them all out. And so you can use the QR code on the screen or there's a link below in the description. You can click that and you should still watch and listen to the rest of the episode.

19:38But the thing that she made, it's a PDF and it has everything written out. So you just click and link off to all the important great stuff. All right, back to the episode. all right what's the second one because you have a bunch here yeah so um we could go to the agents manning the inbox one or there's another even more basic one like how basic do you want to get you drive baby i like i'm basic i'm pretty i i i'm a i'm a i'm a huge noob when it comes to this all right so here's one that i do all the time all right so what's this use case i you know if you're if you run a company, you probably get like a Google Doc, like of a business review or a strategy memo or something like that shared with you all the time.

20:22And you're trying to figure out like, what's going on in this thing. And, you know, the use case that I like to do is I like to just talk to like, just go back and forth with ChatGPT to try and better understand this. So I didn't want want to share our own internal stuff so i actually pulled the uh some of you might have seen this like mr beast put out this like uh leaked had this leaked memo of like how they do their production stuff so i figured we could just try it for the viewer um about a year ago mr beast the famous youtuber he has a production company he has like a 50 or 100 page document that sort of breaks down how he wants his team to behave in different situations so like yeah for example one famous thing is he was like, I want you to hire a consultant.

21:05Consultants are amazing. They'll save you time, whatever. I want you to post this many videos. So he had the outline for the company processes and culture. So here's what I like to do. I like to give it to ChatGPT, basically tell it what it is. I like to say it's a rough draft. And then I want it to succinctly describe back to me what is in the doc. So I mostly just don't want it to, I don't want it to like put its opinion on it. So, you know, you'll do that. And then, you know, it kind of describes back to you like, okay, here's what it is. You know, the core philosophy, what makes a YouTube video go viral.

21:44You know, it kind of just goes through the doc a little bit, but it's kind of, it's kind of generic. So I'm like, hmm, like, I don't, I don't know that I love this. So then I might just say like, Hey, be a hundred X, you know, more specific. and I stole that from this woman who runs Product Whoop, Hillary. I saw a YouTube video where she did this, and I found that to be like, okay, now you start to get like, all right, a lot of really good nitty-gritty details inside of this where you can see what's going on. And all the while, for Zapier internal stuff, I'm able to now try and get a better sense of like, what is this team trying to tell me?

22:28So when would you use this? So you're using the Mr. Beast one as an example, but give me a realistic gap here. Like, so you're within your company. So say we're trying to decide, you know, maybe I'll give you an example. Like we're trying to decide, should we launch a voice agent or not? Right? Okay. Hypothetical thing. And some product team will say, hey, I want to go make a case for it. And they'll write up a strategy memo to say, here's why we should or shouldn't do this stuff. Now, if they're like, really good at making their case. They'll have, you know, qualitative data to support their evidence.

23:05They'll have quantitative data to support their evidence. They'll have multiple options for like how to go tackle this. You know, we could go route A, we could go route B, we could do, you know, a hacky version. Here's what like the all-in version looks like. And then they'll have their like strong recommendation for how to go do this stuff. Yeah. That's like what a great like strategy memo looks like to me. But not everyone like sort of comes in and does that. And they don't always tee up the information in the way that like I am best at interpreting it. And so I will usually start by reading the raw document myself.

23:41So that way I like, okay, I understand what the team is trying to say in their own words. Then I'll upload it like this to ChatGPT and start going, okay, what does ChatGPT think about this stuff? to start to augment it and get like a thought partner on what am I going to sort of try and what types of questions should I ask the team? You know, what types of things am I trying to get at at the end of the day? Got it, okay. So that's how I end up using this. But the interesting question is like, you kind of ask it a couple of questions like this. And so Chachupiji starts to get a warmup and then you ask it like the real questions.

24:20The 100 times more specific one, that's a really good hack. Another good hack that I use is I will tell ChatGPT the problem I'm trying to solve and what I think the prompt should be. And then I just say, now write the prompt for me. Totally. Yeah. Meta prompting, right? You're like, I need a prompt to do X. Yeah. Yeah. And so this is like the way that I see like some of the people that I'm like, holy cow, you're like really using chat GPT or like using these tools exceptionally well is they don't just like ask their question right away. They usually ask like these warm up questions where they're trying to like gather a bunch of contacts, get a bunch of specific information going.

25:02And then once they sort of have enough of like things in memory for chat GPT, then they start asking like the real things they want to know, which is like, where are my blind spots? But the blind spot question is, so let's say that you're using the voice AI. So you're saying where are Wade's blind spots and deciding if this is a good idea? Is that what you're saying? Well, basically, you know, because I'm presenting it as my own idea. And then when I ask where is the blind spots? Sorry, I'm scrolling really fast. I understand what you're saying. So where am I blind? You're really saying the author.