600: (Solo) How Founders Should Actually Use AI (Without Getting Lost)

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0:39Just head to omnisend.com forward slash founder without the E to get started. All right, now let's jump back into the show. Hey guys, welcome back to another solo episode. These are short bite-sized lessons on all the things I'm learning as I build founder and I want to share all the lessons, learnings with you guys. So if you are enjoying these episodes, please do take the time to leave us a review, shoot me a DM at Nathan Chan and I would love to hear from you any feedback at all. So I want to talk about a shift that's happened recently in the past year or so, two years for founders and that's the use of AI.

1:19This is the biggest disruption that we've seen since the dawn of the internet. Hear the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan. The first lesson I have for you is how can you use AI as a thinking partner? So, so often I am using AI every single day if I've got writer's block, you know, I've got an email. So often now, if I've got an email, I use AI to write the response. If I need to create a deck, I use this really cool software tool. It's called Gamma. And basically, I can use it as a thinking partner and say, hey, here's what I'm trying to create.

2:03Can you often create it? So Gamma for all my decks, all my presentations, all my talks. Chat GPT or Claude for responding to emails or draft responses. Even just an idea of like understanding data. I think AI can be so powerful looking at data. Like if I want to look at reviews. So if I want to understand a little bit more about our customers, I'll dump a whole data set in there and look for commonalities. So it's thinking for me. If I want to look at reviews from a competitor, I'll go to Trustpilot, copy and paste all those reviews, dump them in there and get it to summarize things. So I'm really kind of getting it to do a lot of heavy manual lifting and as a thinking partner to provide me insights wherever it can.

2:45Another thing I'm doing now as well, which is really fun, is when I'm driving, you can use like the AI voice memo thing and you can actually go up and back and talk to it. So you can give it a data set or you can talk about a particular problem that you have and you can go up and back to really get ideas going. And I also use it as I shared to kind of work through pitch decks, presentations, but I don't use ChatGPT. I can't swear enough. Gamma is incredible. And then also one tip that I would give you when it comes to prompting and using it as a thinking partner is one thing that I do is, as an example, if I want to create content, if I want to create content for my personal brand as Nathan, what I will do is I will go and use Notebook LM, which is a Google native AI tool.

3:35I will get it to scan and go through all the interviews I've ever done. And then I will go to ChatGPT and tell it what I'm doing and I will get it to write a prompt for me. So some of the best ways to get the most out of AI as a thinking partner is tell it what you want to achieve, like ChatGPT or Notebook LM, and then get it to write the prompt for you. That's a really good tip and hack because if it's writing the prompt for you, that's how you know you'll get the best outcome. And I think prompt engineering is a massive thing right now. Like so many people are just writing whatever, but if you write the right prompt, if you describe the exact thing that you're looking for and you ask it, what would be a solid prompt if I want to achieve X, Y, and Z, then you'll get a far better outcome to use AI as a thinking partner.

4:23So the second way that I'm using AI every single day is using it to speed up time and execution. So what would usually take me a couple of days or weeks, I can now get done in a couple of hours. So simple things like writing copy, writing content, writing scripts. Now, I know that a lot of people use ChatGPT. Claude is much better for copy, writing scripts, creative content as well. Then any internal processes mapped out for the team, summarizing things for you, and then really giving people great actionable takeaways, landing page copy for a new program or funnel. Another great tip is deep research.

5:06AI can be so incredibly powerful. Like if you are wanting to look into a competitor, you can use the deep research function in chat GPT. That is golden because it'll go deep. Sometimes I find if you don't use deep research, the information you're getting is quite surface level. So deep research can be really, really powerful. And then also just like mapping out product ideas, concepts, I can really get good summaries. Now the strategy always has to come from me. I don't fully trust AI from a strategy perspective per se, and I can't stress this enough. And I'm sure some of you guys see it wigs out.

5:41Sometimes it goes kind of crazy and it brings back data or information that's actually not true. So you've got to be careful from a strategy perspective or what you put out there. But what it can do is summarize things incredibly well and it helps you move so much faster and I use it a lot for copy. I use it a lot for clearly mapping out processes or summarizing my thoughts. I'll give you an example. Because of the power of AI, I was able to create this incredible software tool, this AI software tool. We've got it found called Flagship and what it does is it finds trending products that are selling online.

6:19It finds out the volume, the search volume, and if it's trending or not. It finds out what the supplier, who the supplier is, and the margin of the product. It also finds out Reddit threads on what people are saying around that product. And effectively, I was able to map out the whole concept for that product really, really quickly and have a great brief for our developers. And that would have taken me so long to create that product. And so through AI, I was able to create that product, launch that product in the space of like a month. And it's so powerful. That would have taken months and months and months to develop.

6:55But now through the power of AI, I was able to create that product, brief it. Yes, we still had a developer. Yes, he still used Cursor. But such a powerful way to move so much faster as a founder. So the key takeaway here is through the power of AI, you can move so much faster and speed is everything. and the founders that are winning right now that are launching things that are just like 10x-ing their output, they're using AI. The next thing that I'm doing with AI to 10x myself as a founder is training our AI like a team member. So in ChatGPT and Claude, you can give all sorts of parameters for it to remember.

7:32So for me, as an example, how to speak. I don't like using the long dashes, M dashes, EM dashes. So if you see anybody that's posted, you know, a caption or, you know, a social media post or wrote an email and you see those M dashes, those long dashes, you know it's been written by AI. It just looks really bad if someone knows you've used AI. So I set up parameters that do not use M dashes. I set up parameters, do not use emojis. Chat TVT, Claude, they tend to use emoji. So you really want to be careful and train it on how you speak. and you want it to learn certain stories over time. So I've added and added to the memory all these different stories about my journey that you wouldn't be able to find because how AI works is it's basically using all of its data, getting a lot of its data from search and then obviously being trained by the inputs that it's taking from people.

8:21So all of these crazy stories around my journey that I've learned. In fact, a lot of these things that you see here right now that I'm sharing about in my solo episodes, it comes from stories that I've trained it on. You know, frameworks that we use internally at Founder. We have many different frameworks on how to find your product idea, how to source your product idea, how to market your product, how to grow your business. So many different frameworks. I've trained AI to know all those different frameworks. Also, my preferred formats like memos, emails, voice notes, how we position founder, right?

8:52Our voice, our tone of voice. These are things that once it learns your style, you can move and operate so much faster. We also have some really cool GPTs that we've created at Founder that really help you. We've also trained it on high-performing emails. So then we have a GPT that can help rank out emails for us, right? We can give it stats. Another thing that I do is I've trained our ChatGPT to know the best performing social media content for my personal brand. And I've trained it so it's learnt and it's learning from a data perspective what content works. And it works. Like the more you get it dialed in, the more you train it.

9:31Like I did a post on my personal that got like over a million views. And that only came from me just constantly training, constantly getting things dialed in, saying this one worked, this one worked, this one worked. And I say like, if it was a life or death situation, what piece of content would you use? So I train it. So then it acts like a team member. So that's another way I'm able to operate faster as a founder. So the key takeaway is the more that you invest in training AI and setting it up, the more time you'll get back over time as it learns and gets better and better and makes you way more efficient as a founder.

10:05The next thing I would say, and this is really important, is you don't have to be technical. So I know some people can be a little bit intimidated by AI, like, you know, you see all these N8N automations and, you know, chat GPT agents and all this kind of stuff and connecting it up to all these different tools. You don't have to be technical. So for me as a founder, I'm not technical. I don't know how to write code. I'm actually not that good at plugging things together. But what I do know is how to ask it great questions and how to train it. So I shared with you that tip before. One of the best pieces of advice is when you're trying to achieve something with AI, ask it what the prompt should be.

10:45What's a really solid prompt to get X, Y, and Z outcome? And then another thing to think about as well when it comes to using AI is I want you to act as a high-performing copywriter. I want you to act like a Mr. Beast script writer. I want you to act as a McKinsey consultant. I want you to act as a world-class marketer. I want you to act as a high-performing media buyer. So tell it how you want it to act as well and then also ask it what sort of prompts and then you don't have to be super technical. So the key takeaway here is to master AI, you don't need to be super technical. You just need to use it consistently and be curious and use some of the tips that I've shared with you.

11:29So the summary here is, guys, if you are not using AI yet every single day as a founder, you are getting left behind. I hope you found these tips and the way that I'm using it really helpful. So go out there and start using it. And then also, if you do want to stay up to date on the cutting edge, our Founder Plus membership, we have guest experts coming in all the time teaching how founders can use AI. It's one of the really cool things that we do. We have guest experts. We have all sorts of training on how to use it better. So if you guys do want to get ahead, you want to stay on the cutting edge, make sure you sign up to our Founder Plus membership.

12:05It is the ultimate membership for e-commerce founders that want to start or grow their e-commerce brand. And you can sign up on a 14-day$1 trial. Just go to founder.com forward slash membership. All right. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode as always shoot me a note let me know you enjoyed it leave us a review it helps us more than you can imagine and i'll speak to you soon