We can talk about a whole bunch of stuff. I'm happy to talk about this concept that I've been exploring recently called a process playbook.
I love the sound of that because in the framework that I use, I've got loops that include processes of various sorts. And then a collection of loops with standard operating procedures is called a play. What is a loop, a loop is any flow within a system that has been built in such a way that it has some sort of adaptive feedback in it. So it's anything you do
regularly. Yeah. I'd love to talk about that. I've heard other people call it like a business Bible or sort of the singular asset necessary to sell a business as a way of transferring. I'd love to talk about that. I think that could be a really fun
conversation. Yeah. Let's make this the episode then this is going to be a very different episode than normal for you to spaces, because this is our first return guest and yeah, let's talk about things that people don't talk about too often, especially in relation to this sort of stuff that we're doing now. Cause like I'm building one of these outs specifically for.
Okay. And so that I'm guessing is very different than the kind you're building out for your business right now, or that you're helping businesses. Yeah.
It's a lot of different pivot points. You can actually have. The term that we've been using at x-ray is a process playbook. And that process playbook is sort of the, how to, for everything automation and robotics and everything. Human right.
So the process playbook like contextualizes the automated systems with the non-automated systems and make it abundantly clear what a human in social media or a human in, whatever specific process marketing, onboarding, operations, whatever needs to do to run. Five or 10 processes that are critical to the success of their role. So it loops together a whole bunch of different dimensions of the workflow at whatever company.
Yeah. I'm interested now, do you build these out on a roll basis first? Sort of what's the workflow for mapping something like the south?
Yeah. It's on a process basis. So a really good example is onboarding and we've built this out both for us internally and. Several members of the x-ray tech membership. So onboarding is a really good example because it's a process that spans multiple departments and multiple roles. So the process playbook is going to have a page for every person that is going to initiate an automated or semi-automated.
So you might have a sales person who would drag their deal over to closed one when they close and win that deal. And then that actually kicks off the automation for the operations team to then we'll say delegate, the four people who are going to be on this project. Right? So the operations team only gets bothered when there's a deal that's marked as closed one. And that automated system pings the operations team. They might fill out a survey designating who were the four people, a part of this.
And then after they fill out that survey, maybe there's another 10 different automated steps that would create the Google drive folder or the slack channel or whatever else. And then notify all of the people that were designated to be on the project that be a multi page sort of step, because one page would be dedicated to the sales person. One page is dedicated to the operations person. One page is dedicated to like the technical talent. Who's going to be on the.
You know, it culminates in this playbook where now it doubles as a training material, right? Because if you have a new sales person, you don't need to teach them what they need to do to enable the operations team, to actually do an onboarding correctly. You just give them that page of the process playbook, and they know it.
Interesting. I love how this is a very similar thing coming out of a very different context and it ends up so different. Tell me about it. What do you mean? So I build ground up role specific 90% of the stuff I build is designed for a team that's never going to be larger than maybe 10 or 12 people. Oh, so. In most cases, it's all tied to a single role.
So the education around the processes and across teams scenario occurs very similarly, but the majority of processes are for a single person to own and manage, right. Because it's their responsibility to understand those and improve them over time. Whereas in your onboarding example in building out like a small media company, I would put a single person in charge of all client partnership, relationships for sponsors and other partners like that.
So long as there was a monetary transaction involved yeah. Or a goal. And then in that case, they would actually be in charge of onboarding. It. Wouldn't go to another team. It would be during onboarding where they would pull in a data analytics lead and say, okay, let's get the analytics set up for this partnership, but then that team member would leave again. And so the ownership of the process falls on that
partnership. I think that that's a wonderful way to do it too. I mean, you're creating the intentional dependency and opportunity for growth for that person. Who's leading that process. And the
thing that just gets me with it is that the team size dynamic changes the way you pin it all together. So
dress. And
that's hard to predict it too. Oh yeah. Had I not already written out two or three of these before and now I'm on my call it three and a half. Yeah. I would not have known these things. And I'm guessing if you have not scaled your last agency up and built a lot of these things and found out how valuable some of those processes and automations you built, you probably wouldn't have ended up building this direction. Either
past agencies certainly contributed. But the bulk of the learning as to why I'm structuring process playbooks, like this has been the previous nine months, basically. It's been, Hey, I automated this process for you now. You're going to take it over and try to maintain it or train people on it. So there was like this request. Hey, you can do this for me, but I don't want to be dependent on you forever.
That's actually the same pain point where I came up with these
exactly. Like I don't want to do forever, which is okay. You know, I'm not in business to be a black box, right. I'm not trying to lock people in like that. I don't think that's an ethical way to do business, but to the same extent that really like pushed me. To figure out what are the structures that I need to communicate in order to actually be replaced.
So this singular process, page or collection of process pages for onboarding lets us really easily like hand that off as here are your five process pages for onboarding is your sales person, your operations person, your project manager, your this, that, and the other thing, here you go. They're all live on this link. You can click and be taken to the Google doc or the notion page or whatever software. That one textual description lives on, but ultimately it's yours now.
And it's this thing that can accumulate. That was an aspect of my last company that I just didn't value or understand the fact that you need to have these processes established and written down for training, for scaling, for sale, every dimension of it, you have people and you have process unless you're building products. Those are the only two. Assets of value.
Yeah. In my experience, it's a lot easier to hold on to process than people. Yeah. It is. That's a corporate
structure. Yeah. And the interesting thing too, is like in building these process pages, it's like, where are the human decisions that you need a person to Excel at, especially in the structure that you're talking about, like that onboarding lead, that's a person that you would imagine stays with the company and grows with the company over time, this sort of
structure. And especially when I'm thinking about like these tightly knit. These are things where everyone has to have ownership. They have to have a share. You really want to have a five to 10 year average life span on a team member in an ideal world. And so that's a huge structural change, I think, to most companies, especially larger ones where they're looking at two to four years on the high end.
And definitely like in a relationship facing role like that, you don't want somebody to shift on the other side of things. You've got content writers, you've got analytics team members. You've got. Other operational, more internal things that are less brand facing or less client facing where you can build up those style guides and you can build up brands. And when it comes to partnerships, I'm a big fan of using personas over actual people for the majority of client communication.
Okay. So using a team address and a shared inbox or creating the name of somebody who is almost obviously not a person, but is the face of the team that people communicate with most of the time. Yeah. And specifically for the reasons we're discussing. So that way there's less friction in the transfer to remove the process from the.
Yeah, those challenges like that when you're moving key personnel that manage relationships, that's just hard, right? There's no easy way around that type of scenario. I think if there are people that are leaving, that is a bigger indicator that maybe, you know, your processes weren't as defined or your communication styles weren't as aligned, right? Like it's more of a signal of underlying problems, more so than it is. Oh, my process isn't defined enough in this person.
Doesn't like the way that my process is defined, that's like probably not, you know, people don't leave jobs, they leave managers. Like that's just an old adage I've heard, but it's interesting. One aspect that I want to just return to here. And I think you called them looping and how there's like this iterative feedback mechanism inside of the loop. Could you like explain that a little. Yeah.
So I don't build a process without a loop. I don't want anything to go one way, at least in the systems I built. So if I'm building like say a company operating system yeah. I'll think of it as a series of operational loops that occur on regular. Quarterly, you've got monthly planning, normally some sort of weekly meeting, but then at the role level, people are operating on a few regular things.
So like if I'm growing a Twitter account and I'm in charge of growing a Twitter account, the things I'm doing are batching tweet, writing I'm then going to schedule those tweets or post them throughout the week. I've got some sort of preset engagement time. Every. And I'm probably writing threats. If I'm doing all those things, that's not enough because that gives me no guidepost to turn back to. So every day or every week, depending on the pace that I'm posting.
I should also be having an analytics checkup and that should relate back to a dashboard related to the management of that account. And that should be built into the process because the very last thing on the process at the end of the week or the very beginning of the week, however, it would go for me. It's the beginning. I would sit down with those analytics, look over them, report at. And I'd adapt the plan for the following week based on
those. I think that is an incredible habit to establish my devil's advocate here is don't you have a hundred different processes that are running at all these different levels of the company. Do you also batch the reviewing of all these analytics?
Oh, definitely. In many cases. And as an organization grows, I've put in a dedicated analytics lead who then takes over that role or a portion of it for many people, because there's a point at which scale comes into play in analytics, move beyond just putting down numbers and tracking over time. And move into the actual data science portion of it. And that's when it grows beyond any individual, at least in my opinion.
Yeah, totally. If anyone's seen Google analytics or the type of data that you can collect from some social listening tools, like it's an incredible amount of data, but the aspect of the air. You know your learnings from the previous week and deploying it to the future week. The thing that you're actually looking at is the result of the process.
In this case, like a platform you're not actually measuring the process itself, you're measuring how good the output of the process was relative to itself over time.
So I think this is. Where we're getting into semantics. Okay. And it's not just semantics, but I think we use different definitions. Okay. Because at least to me, I see the process under management or in my phrasing, the loop under management as the management of a Twitter account, which would include underneath of it processing. Including the creation of content, the analytics and review, and the posting and scheduling.
And I would look at each one of those individual processes as a component of the loop. Okay. Would you phrase that the same way,
all of them, those different components of your loop or in this case, sort of the output that we're trying to generate growing a Twitter following account? I would keep that defined. You've defined them. I think the two layers that I'm talking about where I think our automations actually differ probably quite a bit is your automations would maybe post right the Twitter post or, you know, automatically collect the analytics. Maybe send you anything.
On Monday morning with, Hey, here are all your Twitter analytics for your review of your meeting this afternoon. And some of the process changes or the processes that I'm building and I'm talking about are really the first 30 seconds of what you said. I need to generate content. I need to do this. Like, what are the checklists milestones?
So my loop would, for example, taken top performing posts from the prior week, and then auto-generate variations of those. To add to a queue or for
review. I think that's awesome. That is the end. Yeah, but that iteration step is so crucial whether it's automated or not the fact that there is a, take a breath, sit down, review what just happened and make a decision on this. I think that's so critical in, in, in a lot of processes or organizations that step is just not addressed at all. Well,
that's why they don't get anywhere. That's why they raise as loop instead of process. I don't want anyone to ever think in a straight.
That's a really good point because that is a pretty categorically different way of thinking. Yeah.
That's where I see the playbook shift is because forcing loops is sort of the base unit in my playbook. What happens is I have to tie ownership of that loop to somebody. And so that forces the role-based definitions and because the loop gives sort of a broader definition, it ends up taking in, I think, a little more than some of your processes might.
So what ends up happening then is through those two shifts in definition we end up with, I guess they're more like role-based playbooks for specific goals rather than process guidelines across an
organization. Yeah. And I'm going to shamelessly adapt this to some of the stuff that we're doing now, where honestly I'd want to put a page in there specifically for adapting. That's how it would manifest in our sort of deliverables is that we would have a process page dedicated to updating the process. And how do you create the loop dimension of it, but it didn't work. Oh,
good enough. I'm not sure if it was my hiring, not high enough quality people or. My description, but adding in Mehta, step two, like SLPs for VAs did not work.
Oh yeah. That's a different
animal. I was like, I've got to stick this in. It's got to have to, did not.
And I think the people that were probably making process playbooks or looping guides are probably pretty different than people that we're making for our COO director of finance, head of operations type. So they're already up to their eyeballs and process and they're drowning in the million and one things that need to get manually done. We'll take the 10 steps that someone needs to get done in a day.
Cut it down to three and then give them visibility into the other seven things that just automatically. Yeah. And I
think that's the big advantage, especially in the more complex processes you're talking about.
Yeah. It's not a process that's going to be done in a day or even necessarily in a week. Like these could be asynchronous processes that end up getting bottlenecks because of the humans on any side, a member last week, who was like, Hey, can I delay 10 days? I'm just not really ready to do. Okay. That doesn't bother me, but it's definitely a change and we can pause that and let it go.
Yeah. So question for you. Sure. Do you have a process playbook on how to create a process playbook?
We are making that, that is the thing that's in draft right now. It's such an iceberg of an endeavor because when you make a process playbook, there's so many other things that happen underneath. So I'm looking at a page right now, and it's four really simple content areas. It's when do you use it? How do you initiate it? What to do next and things you need to know? It's just those four really simple pieces on a page, but the iceberg comes into effect when, oh, how to initiate it.
I just need to complete this one survey or I just need to mark this deal as closed in Salesforce. There's at somewhere between two or one and 12 automation. That are hooked up to that action. So just because I moved this deal from pending to closed one, that's all I need to do to trigger this automation. Now I have a process page.
That's explaining everything that's going on when I. But there's a hundred other things that happen that I don't even need to necessarily do, but I just need to know about, because I'm going to be opening Google drive or slack at some point, and I'm going to be messaging somebody about this new member that we just got and that such channel needs to be there. And it would be kind of nice to know how the heck it got there.
So that's really what the process pages are for is to like, make it abundantly clear the one or two things that the person needs to do. And then just give the iceberg of context of, Hey, this happened because of this, we're using this variable to populate this content field in this document and like, you know, sort of web together, the tapestry of templates and assets that you already have. And in order to build the process playbook, you need to have done so many other things.
And like a process playbook is really not going to be very helpful. If there is no repeatable way of doing this process manually, period, if you can't create a checklist right now for doing, you know, a key process at the company, you don't need a process playbook. You need to create repeatability in the manual steps of the process, right? If you do the same process, 10 different ways and get 10 different results or 10 similar. That's not good enough. You can't hand that over to somebody.
Who's trying to buy the company or hand that over to an intern or somebody else you're trying to hire and expect them to do anywhere near as good of a job as you, because it's just not
that's fair. I think even if you have a great setup for those little points of contact where you do need a human in the loop, helping manage the process, as soon as that comes into play. If you try to replace that person, but the person you replaced them with doesn't have the same experience or background. You can run the entire process off the rails immediately. For example, I use AI to write a lot of the.
But if humans got to go over them, at least once before we submit them Teddy one to say, yes, no, these are good. That human has to know what a good tweet looks like. A number of times I've seen people skip that one little step in trading like, oh, we need you to identify these things, but we're not going to teach you. Identification is astounding.
That is astounding. So
how do you put that sort of little stuff into the process playbook? Would there then be like a link out to education materials on that subject? Or would that be outside
right now? It would be outside the scope. What constitutes a good quote, good tweet right now that would really be outside the scope. You know, that stuff. Yeah. Like that would be the best way to go about it is still create a checklist or.
But for the process pages, we have very simple of like page status, trigger description, action description, all of the automations that are linked to this process page, all of the documents that are linked to this process page in that checklist of, you know, a good Twitter post would probably be a document in my system here, the flow chart and what departments are involved. Those are really the main content areas charts. Oh, you have to have it flow chart.
You have to, and we struggled a lot with this early on was like, what is the right depth of detail to share? And the right answer is it depends because people that are paying you to build automations for them generally don't care at all. What you did, they really care about what the result is. They really care about how they use. But they don't care that you used a loop here or an if statement there or a code step, or it's all built in Zapier or Integra mat.
And it uses this function like nobody cares. And it kills me a little inside. Like the nerd inside of me is just very sad because of like, but it's so beautiful and the things that they care about are right. I know how to use. I know how to teach my team, how to use it. It makes sense to me from a objective perspective, right? We are trying to accomplish this thing.
And that's where we've geared a lot of our process, playbook documentation for the person who generally doesn't care and just wants the result. And then all of our internal documentation, like when I said, oh, this is linked to whatever automations or whatever documentation, that's really stuff that we look at internally and we have filed away in case we ever break.
Or we need to go review something or we need to update an automation, or we need to change the way the trigger works or, you know, the way that one certain thing gets modified or added or whatever. So like a lot of that documentations for us versus the people paying us because the people paying us just want the result and you really can't fault them for that. They're an expert in whatever they're an expert in, and to expect them to learn the discipline of automation. A tall order.
Yeah. So what do you think is the most complex playbook?
So the playbooks are all really simple. The playbooks are know those four content areas that I shared with you for operations or for sales ops, or for adding a new team member, or they're relatively similar topics, but they take very different. So to answer your question, what is the most complex process playbook we've made?
The most complex automations we've made that have turned into the process has been around a company called verb.co they're a tool for really like personal trainers and fitness people, influencers on line that, you know, have their own following and want to create this SMS based touchpoint with their following without giving their personal information. It's an amazing platform. That's been built all online. They set you up with a phone number.
They give you AI generated questions to ask, to help people train and connect and be better at being a influencer coach. So the automations that we made for that work gnarly, we hooked it up so that it's a simple survey can create their webpage on Webflow. It creates the Stripe object so that all of the coaches can actually see. One click away plans on Stripe and updates and everything, and you can edit everything. It's a pretty amazing, now I want
to know about how you're using Webflow because I've looked into something around web flow with building templates and pages before, and it definitely seemed like I could do it, but I wasn't sure if it was.
So the content really matters.
Yeah. So I was thinking about using it for podcasts websites, to populate from an RSS feed, to pulling all their content and then create a web flow page optimized for email capture, featuring the.
I see no reason why you wouldn't be able to do
that. Oh, I know that you can do it. I just want to know how it is working with web flow to build out those sort
of automated templates. Oh, fantastic. We set it up as a collection and we're not doing it based off of an RSS feed. We're doing it based off of a survey completion through air table. So it's all connected like that, but it's very reliable speed into. Yeah, there's a little wonky things around IDs because you do need to use the ideas for everything in web flow. You're making references between different collections or tagging certain people.
And when you have multiple objects inside of web flow, you just need to use the IDs. But that's the only thing.
So are you generating a whole new site every
time, a new unique webpage that's generated off of the collection of coaches? So it's a
webpage on the existing site, correct? Yeah. That's
quite whatever. Do you want to generate a full website from scratch? How has your theories of inputs? That's my problem. Hook up the domains and everything like you. Can't well, I
think you can get to the point of generating the site. You just can't actually migrate it or push it live. You know, you can put it up as a preview, I think. Yeah, you probably a good web flow. I don't think has easy access for that sort of create new project.
No.
Not yet. Uh, somebody's going to make this someday because it would be so useful for only somebody could automate
this. I made a bull, you could do it through people or my stroke, but it would be less fun to build than most things.
Yeah. I feel like that's the sort of thing where once you're using a tool like that, you can have one misclick or they change one UI X thing. Yep. Yeah. And
it's all dead. It's all dead rebuild it. And that's the very delicate automation.
Why nobody's built it yet. I've been building a lot of websites off of Google sheets. That's been really easy. Oh yeah. That's cool. Yeah. Anyway, so you're building out these process playbooks. They describe a process. You're building out more complex processes. You have an automation search engine.
Yeah. So it is currently in beta for lack of a better. It works right now. You can go to it. It's called x-ray dot tools, X, R a Y dot T O L S x-ray dot tools. And definitely, you know, let me know what you're thinking, Michael. I'm sure you're hopping on right now, but long story short, it is currently only connected to. So it's a really fast way of searching Zapier and figuring out what can connect with Zapier. So you can add all of your tools.
There are, we call them tool belts to connect this back to process playbooks. When we're a building a process page, or a process plan. We will create multiple tool belts to show all of the tools that are connected inside of this process page. So then if anyone wanted to say, oh, I wonder if we could also do this. They can just click on the tool belt, click on discord, slack, whatever, the 3000 tools that are in Zapier, right?
You can click on those inside of x-ray tools and immediately be shown all of the actions, searches and triggers associated with that particular. It's way faster than going to Zapier. I can't underscore that enough. We built it for us. Cause we were like, oh my goodness, we are going from tool to tool all the time. I just want to see the bird's eye view of all the tools that we're using for this member or this process and all of the things that are possible. Right.
And now you can just go right there. Boom. And you can copy that link and share it with a team member or share it with some. And it becomes like a much faster and understandable way of sharing all the tools that you're working on. And you just have a much better sense of what's possible in the next few months before the end of the year. Really, we are going to add a lot more to this, how we're using it right now. We're going to come out with that in a more formal way.
I'm going to have example, tool belts, example, automations and templates that leverage certain tool belts for specific processes. So you can say, Hey, what's, x-ray's onboarding. And you can see our tool belt and you can see our process page. It all connects sorted together so that you can really see inside out right through x-ray we're trying to turn our own company inside out.
So we're trying to build the tools that allow other companies to really see and understand how they are getting certain processes done. And what tools do they need to use or could they exchange right. To get something done? So that's. I like it a
lot. I use Zapier and Integra mat now, and I don't think there'll be a day when I just use one or these I'd be surprised. But I could see a new tool coming and replacing both of them. That seems more likely to me.
Yeah. Then converting to one, they both have their quirks and it's really amazing. Yeah.
And then now we're getting into more and more tools where you just give it an API endpoint and it does the rest. And that's where I see integrations getting really powerful.
What tool have you used that?
I think it's internal and retool. I feel like there's one more I've seen, but they're really designed to be. And you're 95% internal tools and tie together, API APIs. And so that gives you a basic understanding of JavaScript or Python plus that gives you. Untapped potential. I should say,
I don't know how we could measure this, or if you have data on this or not, but how much money in time is actually dedicated at companies to generating internal tools,
millions or tens of millions of dollars at large company. I know, I personally at my admittedly very small company that I kept small. We probably put five to 10% into internal tools annually. Most of that was around like podcast research tools, but nevertheless, they exist. And we spent thousands of dollars a year on a sub million dollar a year budget. So I'd say a good
amount. I mean, you know, that it's own sort of economic opportunity of being able to transition internal tools into external assets that can make money for the company. Just curious, since you did this in podcasting, like the tools that you built in the podcasting world, what would it take for you to sell one of those tools to your. How do you elevate yourself to be able to do that?
Only one of them turned out to be really commercializable and it is being commercial.
Yeah. Yeah. Why do you think it was only one
because there were other competitors that came up who were more dedicated to building out more fully featured client service solutions for the other categories. I think we're probably the closest to building a fully automated podcast production suite compared to others. I've been working on that for you. Yeah, you're going to tie one of those together with a Zappy or Dropbox right now. Like where it transcribes it summarizes.
And then it writes show notes that now it's not very good, but it is functional and it is more on AI summarization in text generation. At this point,
are you using like GBT three to do that?
I don't feel like GP T3 is the best option for a lot of this stuff, just because of the limits they put on their providers. It ends up not being the best generation option in the long run. Most of the tools I use are either homespun from like the generation perspective inside the tool for SEL. For other conversion in long form stuff, but that's really the slow part. It's getting annoying because a lot of them are preventing API access and preventing automations from getting too heavily involved.
Yeah. Because they don't want people doing what I'm doing is explicitly the thing they do not want you to do.
Yeah. It's just a matter of time. Those systems need to be ready to handle that. I was working on an automation yesterday and a slack thread got murdered. It was just so many messages inside. And like to imagine GPT three or any of those things end up hitting an infinite loop and gets around whatever protocol they have for cutting those things off. Like it could just get really messy. So you can't blame them for saying, Hey, it's not ready yet. It just takes time.
Yeah. But Michael, I'd love to see what your tool does. If you can add a few tools that you use on there. I'm curious if it's a, if it's helpful
guy, I'm simple enough that I really only have one issue point within mine and that's click up. That's an issue. Well, no, that's my point of integration. There are some things I cannot do other places or that I can do other places that I can't do in click up except through integrity. And so, because the rest of my stack is like Google sheet and a form and email and mailer Lite. It's all very common tools and they all work well in Zapier. The only real point of issue that I run in.
If I'm moving data in or out of click up and it isn't a perfect
sync. Does that make sense? Yeah. Have you used any like synchronization tools to try to sync, like either click up bases or I know you were in Coda for awhile. Have you never used Kota? Oh, you didn't? No, I
would not use a tool like that probably ever.
I know how big of a fan you are of notion. So I figured if you were in notions camp, you're in.
What do I need to either one of them for, I use air table for some things. And then I use Google sheets for others. Part of my build is also that I have so many AppSumo deals that like if a tool works and it's an absolute moat, but it's a perfect. I'm going to use that. Cause then I don't have to add another recurring
subscription. Do you get that for your team or just for you?
I have a recurring subscription to AppSumo that I use to buy tools for my team. Oh, nice. So I have a phrase, the SEO software. Yep. I pay $30 a month for their highest tier version because I upgraded off of a lifetime AppSumo deal and that's my team's account. And then I've got a few others like that. But like the reason I'm building my websites on Google sheets now is because I bought a 10 pack to spread simple on AppSumo. And so that gives me 10 websites built on top of Google.
That's 10 directories. At least one of those will be profitable and that has e-commerce built into it. Yeah. All my landing pages are built on AppSumo tools. I guess a lot of what I do for myself and my team through their lifetime
deals are worth it. I never seen that so far to be honest. Wait really well. There's a couple of them though. This is like the
original, this is the biggest by far. Yeah, I've been an AppSumo user for five or six years. Probably maybe longer and over half my tools come from AppSumo I think all my SEO suite does. I know for certain, because I don't do enough SEO to make it worthwhile, to spend continuously in most case. So the AppSumo tools, give me SEO tools as a one-off purchase prices
that make it workable. Yeah. I'm scrolling through now. I'm pretty excited to get into these. I just
bought for all IQ. That seems. If it actually does text generation, that is going to be the most highly trained text generator that I've ever used. But it seems almost like they're just inputting text into templates based on how detailed they're asking questions. Oh yeah. There's like 400 questions to answer in their market research section. Jeez. So maybe it's a great tool. Maybe it's. I'll probably find out in
another year. Yeah. There's enough of these on here. You can test the new one. Yeah. Cross
pollination is very popular deals right now, but I've already got enough of them. Three or four different
content generation tools. Well, Hey, that's awesome. And a lot of those tools are definitely not going to be on x-ray tools, right? You're not on. That's one of the things, right? I think no code and automation get lumped together for whatever reason. And they are, they're not at all the same, like no-code tools. Some of them happen to be for automation, but a lot of these no-code tools are just souped up really technical features. That have no connectivity to the outside world.
The AI tools are most interested in are going to be. Whoever gives me the ability to import export content briefs from a Dropbox. And then the AI is going to automatically write from that brief that's, who's going to win my business first for the longterm, because that's how I can actually get it into a workflow. But otherwise, to your point, these are really just graphical interfaces on top of text generation. So yeah.
Yeah, it's not until you get a tool like phrase where you have the SEO tool built in and then the SEO tool will scrape together a content brief. And then the AI will generate content from that brief that you get to a point where you're actually in the automation space and you're out of no-code, you know, we're near no-code at that point. Yeah. That's content automated.
What you do, I think actually is like very similar to no code automation or is in the space of no code automation, but you lead more to the automation side of things and no code is just a tool set
because it's faster. Exactly. Right. We like to say we design workflows and we're tool agnostic, workflow designers, and that's ultimately what you're deciding. You're like, I. To make this decision and it's like, all right, we'll literally move your workflow out of the way so that you can make this one decision and then everything else will just happen so that you can just focus on this one thing. And like, we're really designing the type of work that people want to indulgent.
And for a lot of people that should. Unless you're doing automation. You just don't have that luxury. Yeah, it makes
sense. I like it. This has been a long winding conversation.
Yeah, it has Michael. I really appreciate having me back on the show. It's always good to talk and catch up a little bit and it sounds like you've been up to some awesome. Yeah.
An interesting world out there. I've gone in some weird directions. I feel like every time we talk I've made another zigzag, which is probably a good sign, but as I look at it from the standpoint of the points that our conversation. It would be a wildly varying
journey. It's interesting, nonetheless, there's no right way to do this stuff. And it all takes time. Right? The last time we talked, I didn't have the glimmer of x-ray tools in my eyes. It was nowhere near a today thing. And here we are 2021 with this tool up in live on the. And, you know, we're lucky to be able to produce it. You have to adapt to whatever is right in front of you. And I don't think a Zig or zag is necessarily a bad thing.
I think we'll only know the bad things
in hindsight. That's what the data tells us. I agree. I hear you hopelessly optimistic. I have a great rest of your day. You too, Michael. Thank you very much. Bye-bye now.