634: (Solo) My Current AI Stack (and How It’s Helping Us Move 10x Faster at Foundr)

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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 Founder fam, Nathan here. Welcome back to another solo episode. These are short bite-sized episodes where I share with you everything that I'm learning as I'm building Founder. I've been building Founder for over 10 years plus, almost 13 years. We're coming up to our 13th birthday. And while we've grown, one thing has never really changed is I always try and run things pretty lean as a team. You know, I've made the mistake where the team was so bloated. we had like 80 people at one stage.

1:21It was crazy, 90 people. And we just didn't need that many people. And I found that the speed in which we're growing really slowed things down. So, you know, I had to slow down, to speed up. We move fast. We collaborate fast. We don't have heavy layers of management. We're entrepreneurs at heart and we build like it. And recently I've found that we've been able to maintain that speed even as we scale through using AI. So this episode is going to be super tactical. I'm going to be talking you through my current AI tool stack, the tools I'm using, how I use them, and what specific purpose I use them for.

2:00Nathan Chan:Hear the stories, learn the proven methods, and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan. A quick disclaimer from me, AI doesn't replace real thinking, real market research or real customer connection. It's a shortcut to success. And more than ever in this day and age, I'm focused on building community, building relationships at scale because AI is a tool. And if it's used right, it's like upgrading from a horse to a car, but you can make the same journey a lot faster. All right, so let's get into it. So my first tool, this is my new most favorite tool, which is Manus, Manus AI.

2:48So I used to use Gamma for building decks and structuring long form content out, but Manus has taken it to another level. So I'm using Manus to really kind of learn my content or learn any content or research anything. and then from that build out presentation outlines slides decks drafting educational content writing copy angles reviewing content reviewing any kind of data or audio or video and the reason I love it is it's fast it's clean and it breaks things down like I find with chat GPT and even Claude sometimes it just kind of like loses itself and it starts making mistakes i've been using it pretty heavily for the past two months i've only seen it make a few mistakes otherwise it's very very very on point and i'm loving using manis especially for analyzing data it is one of the best things i've seen and building decks writing copy it is exceptional as i'm recording this they literally just released their agents.

3:58I'm just in the mix of playing around with Claudebot and I maybe might do a separate episode on that but things are moving so fast so they've you know created a competitor basically to Claudebot but I'm getting into the agent stuff. It's pretty cool. That's my first tool. I can't stress this enough. When it comes to you know creating content Manus AI is where it's at miles and miles and miles way ahead of chat gpt the thinking it breaking things down consuming content and learning far better notion now i know most people use notion like email i'm using notion as kind of an ai now integrated as my second brain it really helps me summarize long-term program projects that I'm working on it helps me structure my day it's somewhat of an assistant and a project manager all in one it knows a lot about me and it helps keep me on track and it's been an absolute game changer and I've been learning from a friend I make no claim to being a notion expert but yeah he's helped me really create an incredible notion dashboard and frameworks for kind of documenting all my personal processes and all sorts of things so once i start getting more into the agentic stuff playing around clawed bot or or manis's agentic stuff that's when i can start to feed it these things that i've already taught it and it can go out and do things for me autonomously which i'm really really excited about and it's definitely going to be the future and it's moving really really really fast now of course chat gpt that's it's interesting yeah i I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with ChatGPT because there's been times where I've used it and it's really, really let me down because I've just pushed it to its absolute limits and it loses track.

5:56It kind of, it just kind of breaks and it starts forgetting things and it goes around in spirals and circles. And if you're listening to me, you're probably like, I know a lot of people use ChatGPT and I think it's still a great tool. but what I'm finding is the best thing for chat GPT is for it to understand you and then train it over time on what you're building how you're going about it I like for it to kind of I use chat GPT if I have any blocks like there's something now whenever I need to do something and I'm mentally blocked I just speak to chat GPT and it keeps me going which I find that really really interesting how it just keeps me going so if you ever block or stuck on something and because i've been using it for so long it it really knows you and i've trained it over time it knows me my style but wouldn't use it for copy using manis or claude for copy wouldn't use it for analyzing large hours and hours of content not not the thing gemini gemini is the thing that i use for analyzing large, large amounts of content.

7:04I think Gemini is a really, really powerful tool. So every single podcast that I have actually done, I put that now into Notebook LM, which is basically Google's version of ChatGPT. And in Notebook LM, it's linked to all the YouTube interviews I've ever done. And then I tell usually Manus now, it was ChatGPT, what my you know objective is i want to create you know a story-based carousel what is the prompt that i should give notebook lm and then from there it'll search through all the stories i've ever told all the interviews i've ever done and then pulls out just awesome pieces of gold unique to me so it's like kind of like a repository of all of my thinking not the same as notion notion is more my second brain it's learning about me but it's learning about kind of keeping me moving forward which is kind of cool that's kind of notebook lm i really really like notebook lm for research and i use notebook lm as well for podcast prep so if you're going to meet anybody and they've done most you know if you're going to meet somebody that's a thought lead or anyone that kind of goes out there and does any speaking of any sort and they've done podcasts put like a few of those podcasts into notebook lm you can press play and in 15 minutes it'll give you a summary of two kind of people speaking about this person it's really really cool and that's how i do a lot of prep work it's really cool then we've got whisper ai so this one's a little bit under the radar so the person that introduced it to me was my good friend uh nick shackleford and uh what whisper ai lets you do is think out loud and have things transcribed accurately so now i'm starting to use it to capture ideas while walking or driving or taking notes and really kind of any thoughts that I have without having to type it across all sorts of applications like Notion, which is where I'm storing everything.

9:05And then you've got Gmail, Google Docs. You can use it to reply to emails. It's really, really good. So if you're someone who likes to talk about things or think on your feet, this is definitely worth trying. All right. Now, my last one that I want to share with you is fix AI. So this is something the team's been experimenting with more and think of it as an AI executive assistant, but I think Claudebot might replace this or Manus's agentic stuff. So inbox management, admin workflows, you know, these eat up hours. It doesn't replace anyone in our team, you know, answering emails, but from speaking to them directly, it really helps remove a lot of mental clutter, like, you know, an out of control inbox.

9:49So when you're building a brand especially in e-commerce wearing 15 hats if you want to scale without burning out or bloating your team this is leverage because we always run lean so what's really cool about fixer is it can scan your inbox and it learns over time responses to your email so it just keeps things moving so guys if you are listening to this and you're feeling overwhelmed by ai and the whole way of everything that's going on don't be you don't need to use everything just pick one tool play with it this way test it and see if it gets you to the outcome that you're looking for better and faster but i can't stress enough my new favorite is manis and i have a feeling my next new favorite will be claude bot but don't get intimidated just take it one step at a time it is moving at the speed of not and you're not going to be yet left behind and we're here to help serve you however we can.

10:44If you found this useful, if you found this helpful, I'd love you to share this episode with someone building a lean team or side hustle. These are the exact tools I wish I had when I was building, you know, 12, 13, 14 years ago. So thank you for tuning in and I'll catch you in the next episode.