Every AI Tool We’re Using & 4 Pillars to Guide You: Operators Build (E7)
from Operators
1h 49s
The core of an AI-first company revolves around four foundational pillars: the company brain, a unified operating system, strategic tool adoption, and intelligent agent use. The company brain acts as a living memory bank, storing context like mission, products, and customer insights so AI agents can operate with contextual awareness. This is paired with a centralized OS—like Wings OS—that aggregates all tools, files, and workflows into one accessible, real-time environment, eliminating silos and lengthy handoffs. Instead of building custom software, teams prioritize purchasing proven, API-integrated tools (e.g., OmniSend, Rich Panel) that deliver immediate value. AI agents are deployed for routine tasks—research, ad creation, email flows—automating 80% of workflows, with humans focusing on final review and creative oversight. While AI excels at volume and speed, it doesn’t replace human judgment in copy, design, or strategic thinking. Tools like HQ enable secure, shared access to context and credentials, ensuring every team member has consistent, up-to-date knowledge. The result is a lean, agile operation where ideas move from concept to execution in minutes—dramatically faster than traditional models. This model not only accelerates growth but also redefines roles, merging design and development and enabling non-technical teams to build full-fledged products. Ultimately, AI-first success isn’t about replacing people but amplifying human potential through automation, speed, and scalable volume—proving that the future of consumer brands lies in high-leverage, low-personnel operations.
Okay. We're here. It is episode seven of operators build. This is the all things AI episode.
I want to start by saying I think there's like four big things that we've created that I think
are like pre-universal everybody should do. So the first is you have to think of company brain,
right? This is like context, memory, all the stuff that like the models are just bad at.
Probably the most important part. Number two would be like an operating system.
So it's nice to use all these tools. It's great to build software, but you need some way
for the humans in the company to interact and visualize things, right? So we call that wingsOS,
the grade number two. All right. Number three, all of the software and tools. So I don't know
what you mean, but I'm just to believe that there's a lot of stuff that we shouldn't be building.
That we should just buy and we should just use. So this is like the omnicens, the rich panels,
the iris, high beam, like all of the tools that we've opted to buy for the company, some of these
are sponsors, some are not. And the number four, we'll call them agents. So for wings, we have like a
researcher, a brief writer, and we probably have other ones like competitor analyst. Yeah.
Those are kind of the four big buckets. And I think what we do today, Cody, is like go very deep
on each of them. And we even show people like let's share, share screen. We'll like get into
like how we're actually constructing the company. All right. Let's get into it.
Explain brain to people. The brain is your context layer. And so context engineering is one of
the most important things is with these agents, with the cloud of codex, they're the smartest,
most capable things or people ever, but they're not trained on your specific business. They have
a lot of general knowledge. And what you need to do is equip them with specific knowledge. And I
think about it the same way that you would want to educate somebody if they're coming into your
business. What's all the context you would want them to know and have access to? What is your
mission? What is your vision? What are your past tests? What are your products?
What are your cogs? What are your SKUs? What are your reviews? What are your customer insights?
You just want that dumped into one place. And then these agents and any tool AI tools that you're
using will then be able to access that and have knowledge of it. So you won't have to prompt it
every time and say, Hey, this is my company. This is what I want you to do. It'll just know what to do.
If you have the right setup. And the thing with this is important is it's updating all the time.
Absolutely. So you don't like set something like this up once. It's a living breathing,
like that's why you call it company brain. It's like you have to have it. Oh, it's yeah,
let's go to number two then like the operating system. So like one of the first things you did
when we started on ways was you set up wings OS. What was the thinking like why is that important?
I said, this is one that's probably not the most important things just live in so many different
places, right? And like we would be getting ready for a launch and we would need cogs from this
place and we would need shade descriptions from this place and copy here. And it just takes so
long. I think the big theme is just everything in one place whether that's for a human or for an
agent have everything in one place that it can access. See, I disagree. I think that it is
actually really important because if you've ever used one of these LLMs like to people watching
listening, they aren't very fast. So if I had to say like, can you show me the last 10 ads that
we've made today. That's going to take a long time. Whereas if I go into wings OS, I can just click
and see them. They're there. So there are certain things that like you should not be using all of
this compute power from these. Sure, sure. So I still think it's like more important. Okay,
let's move on to like software. I think there's a lot of people that just think that it's stupid to
pay for software in general now. Where do you stand on the subject? Because like we're using a bunch
of software. Same thing just because you can doesn't mean you should, you know, it's really easy to
feel productive. And it's really easy to waste time doing it. And then there's a lot of maintenance
costs and stuff like that. Yeah, like I think when it first came out, it was cool to try to build
the stuff. Oh, yeah. But now it's like, no, like spend your time on the most valuable parts of what's
actually going to grow the business. We're a two to four person team. We don't have time to waste.
No, you know, yeah. So I think for software, we're looking for a few things. We're looking for software
that like has an MCP or API. It's almost a non-negotiable where we can use it because there's a lot of
value in taking the context and the brain and then giving it the tools to go and use a specific
MCP to get access to something. Sure. And it can get more information about the specific tool.
Either that or a tool like a rich panel or an iris where maybe doesn't have the MCP,
but it's purpose built for that one specific thing. Yeah. Experts at technology and building
softwares and finance or CX have actually built it to do that function. And they're going to do a
way better job than you and I are going to be able to do it. Yeah, 100% agree. Okay. And then the
agents, when do you decide that something should be an agent? I truly think everybody listening that
has any com brand should be using agents. And if you're using cloud code, that's a coding agent.
You know, codex is a coding agent. I can go do stuff. You can watch it use a browser. So
that's very basic level, but you know, something like a run-eth or a Hermes or something like that or
Grockbot can be really, really powerful to just allow you to do a lot more with the leaner teams.
Like scheduled tasks, workflows, like things that are just going to happen a lot and agents are
a good place to start looking. Definitely. Yeah. When we set out to build this company,
one of the things we said from the beginning was AI first. Maybe tell me what does that mean to you?
When you hear like, oh, I'm going to build this company AI first. We're in a good time for us
because we don't have people. And it's very hard to go AI first in the established company,
where you have like, instead of tech debt, you have like people debt and you have like workflow debt.
And it's really hard to get things to change. And so the beginning, it's like, we don't have people.
Before we hire somebody, before we do emails or do ads, like, let's see how far we can take it.
Yeah. And it doesn't have to be this binary like people or not, but it's like, how do we give ourselves
more leverage? Because it's essentially you and I did a day in marketing and we got ads to run,
emails, landers, all that stuff. So it's like, how do we just give ourselves leverage to do as much
as possible and do it to a high level? Yeah. And I want to be noticing in other companies,
like coming from Jones Road, coming from Pila, it's actually the workflows at their hard part.
It's like, you have all these SOPs, so many systems. And they were all designed like human first.
And the way that we're building things is whenever we have to do something, we're like,
if we just start with, okay, well, can we get AI to do this? And can we start the workflow with AI?
So that we're only really reviewing things. So like, I would, I think this framework of like 10,
80, 10 with AI is great. It's like 10% of your effort goes into idea. So like, right now,
we're talking offer yesterday. So it's like, idea, now we're going to get AI to do 80% of it,
all the grunt work. That's the workflow. And then the last 10 is, let's make sure that it didn't
hallucinate, do something really stupid. Yeah. Yeah. And it always does. So like, there's always like,
just dumb in. Is that one now perfect? Oh, God, no. So why, why do you think this is important
to build the company this way? You know, just the way D to C is going, e-commerce is going,
like more of your P and L is going to go to CAC. It's possible. And so the best companies are just
going to be extremely high leveraged. And they're going to have, you know, up X 1%, 2%, 3%, 3%,
it's just like D to C 4.0 model. And it's just probably not possible to do without a ton of
automation and tech. But there are, there are 50 million, 100 million dollar brands with like,
two, three, four full-time people. I have a lot of questions on whether or not those companies
are sellable. Current market sellable, right? I think that there's like the, and this is a conversation
that at some point will probably continue to have it as a bunch of shareholders. Because I think
there's an argument right now that the market doesn't know how to buy a business without employees.
It's sort of, I don't know if you remember maybe like six, seven years ago when the whole like
VA thing or the whole like offshore thing started. Same thing. There were buyers in the market
saying, if there's five of you in America and a hundred of you somewhere else in the world,
how do we value that company? I think we're there right now. My bet is with what you're saying is
that fast forward five years, we will absolutely have a framework as an industry for how to buy a
company with one or two percent because it'll just be normal. We'll know how to underwrite these
deals like private equity will figure it out. So this is sort of like a, for me at least, it's very
forward looking bet on like this is just what the company in the future looks like. Yeah, I agree,
especially a consumer e-commerce brand. Yeah. And then the other thing is speed. Like when at
Jones Road, when I was doing stuff and I did a lot of web and serum and stuff, you know, you can
do a lot in these roles or conversion work design and development and strategy and copy one person
can do it all. And so yes, it's, you need less people. But also as soon as I finish strategy,
I can go to design as soon as I finish design, I can go to dev versus normally you have to do a
handoff or just more people involve slow things down. And I just think fundamentally speed is
the biggest competitive advantage in a business like ours. Like we need to go from how do I have an
idea? How do I have an insight? And like, how do I get that life today? And like that's what the
best brands are doing, whether it's AI or not, that's what the best brands are doing. We've already
seen it like you and I will chat on Slack and then we'll have something implemented. It will be
hours. Whereas if five years ago, you can have a conversation and it might be a week, two weeks,
like stand up a landing page, build up something new, like we do this in minutes. We launched with seven
landing pages. Maybe they weren't perfect and great. But I remember when Jones Road launched five
years ago, like you wanted a landing page. It was like 20K for an agency, right? Yeah, it's a
very different. I also think what you're talking about. So I didn't expect this with AI. My initial
expectation with all tech is like, this is going to flatten an org. So like companies themselves,
like we'll just flatten them out. We'll have less hierarchy. What I didn't expect was that the roles
would also start to merge, you know, like designers and developers. That's just like a person now.
So, I think that's also interesting.
is like, neither one of us is like super technical
by trade two, three years ago.
But if you look today, it's like,
we're doing a lot of code commits.
We're doing a lot of everything.
Like your GitHub usage is way up.
We're designing.
I've never designed before.
I can't design safe in my life.
I basically only wrote copy.
That was it.
Now it's like, you can take copy and turn it into any asset.
And I think that's kind of what we're seeing.
So what we're gonna get into is like,
what functions and departments are like,
what are we actually using AI for?
But maybe let's start with,
what are we not using it for?
'Cause that's gonna be a small list,
but it's probably an important list.
So like, what are areas that you think
we just don't use AI to do these things?
- There's probably a few.
There's probably a lot that are like, not black or white.
Like, we're using AI for a lot of copy,
but in some ways AI sucks that copy.
So it's not like we're just trying to one-shot it there.
- No.
- Design, we're using it a lot.
But our first employee was a designer slash editor
that we brought on.
There's a lot of limitations of that.
- Yeah.
We are using it for images, assets,
but I think there are pros and cons of that.
There are some people who are incredible at making AI,
really like not look like AI.
- Yep.
- Images?
And it actually like, those are actually like creative people.
Like they are, like I don't actually don't have
the skill set, like they're creating,
not in the AI skill set, like the mood boarding
and the creative skill set.
But I've seen some people do it.
But I think we want real images.
We want, usually see we want real people.
- Yeah, really huge.
- So I think people.
- And I don't know that we have a hard rule
where it's like no people, but it's there.
So I don't think we want that, but like we want content.
Like I'm, we'll do some AI ads,
but I'm not bullish on like AIUGC.
Like we want real content.
So how do we, you know, for our creator programs,
how do we do all of the,
how do we automate all of the backend stuff,
the uploading of the ads,
setting briefs and stuff like that, the analysis,
like let's automate that.
So we can actually get like real content.
- Yeah, I think there's like a human taste element
that AI is terrible at and that you still need people
to start every idea, right?
And actually, I don't know.
I use it to help me ideate, I definitely do.
I'll start, if I have an idea on copy,
I might go to a cloud or chat GPT or whatever
and get it to give me like 50 or 100 variations of the idea.
But then I quickly narrow it down
and I try to write most of the copy myself.
Most AI tools right now are all promise and no delivery.
You know exactly what I am talking about.
Super fancy launch videos.
This is why I'm loving what Rich panel is doing.
They have AI and support smashed together,
made it practical, made it useful,
made it valuable to brands today,
not on some future promise.
And instead of asking you to spend weeks writing prompts
and uploading help docs and babysitting,
they flipped the whole script.
There AI builds your support team for you
and everything it needs.
I've watched it, it works, it's freaking amazing.
Rich panel even guarantees 50% of your support volume
will be automated by AI within 30 days or your money back.
I call that a no-brainer offer.
If you are interested, go to richpanel.com/demo,
not for some generic demo,
but to actually book a call
and watch them build your actual support team.
I don't know how nerdy and copy you are,
but we used to, copy writers used to do this thing
or to get good at copywriting.
You used to actually just handwrite,
handwriting like sales letters and stuff.
You just like take it and like I would just sit there
and I would copy out, copy, copy.
And that's how you learn to do copy.
I think that all AI is gonna do is like,
make great creatives, better creatives,
make great copywriters, better copywriters.
It's gonna be like the great amplifier.
- I completely agree with that.
I had that thought when you were kind of describing it.
Completely think about the same way.
And like what I've seen is the people
that are very good at their subject matter expert.
They are much better at it or like they can do more.
Like a creative can actually design stuff in AI
way better than I can.
- Yeah, but I think here's the difference.
Not every role in a company.
So this applies to consumer,
it applies to everything.
Your business doesn't need superstars
in every function, sure.
So I think in consumer, we need really great creative.
That's like image, video, copy.
And when you really good sort of judgment,
everything else is secondary.
And this is what I mean.
Again, if you have employees,
no employee likes to hear this.
It's like, no, your job's just not as important.
But it's true.
Like some roles are just less valuable than others.
So I think what AI is doing is you get people
who are amazing copywriters.
Well, now they can be a mediocre everything else.
And that's fine 'cause the company
doesn't need them to be amazing at those things.
You can just be a mediocre supply chain person
'cause the super brain is gonna be way better at it.
Whereas copy, well, no.
You still need to be a pretty freaking amazing copywriter.
You can be very good at making ads.
That's kind of a consumer risk.
- And there's someone getting areas
where we're gonna, like you said,
which is the 108010,
we're gonna, you know,
we're never just kind of one shot it.
Like yeah, even like research and stuff like that.
Like you just have to be careful
and have to know what you're looking for.
- Yep.
- Because it'll, you'll get slop.
And you can get like,
I've heard people talk about this
or I can give you like the perception of competence.
- Yes.
- But I can just give these long reports
and stuff like that.
Like you have to know what you want it to do
and know what to look for and kind of curate it down.
- I used to, I'm perplexity a lot.
And to go do research for links, like persona research.
And it would come back with these like crazy-ass briefs.
And then I would ask if for sources
and I would go to like Reddit or ever
and like read the sources.
I'm like, that is not at all what I read.
And I'm like, wait, you're your inference, you know,
as an AI is completely off the mark
of what like these ladies or this guy was saying.
So I think that's a good call.
Everybody should be very careful
of just like blanket following this thing.
It is really, really, really bad
at constructing video scripts.
I find, and maybe this is just how I use it.
I find it terrible at like building a narrative.
You know, it's sometimes it'll like,
it'll get one or two lines right.
But I find the actual structure just never looks quite good.
And I got skills for this.
I've built like, built so many versions.
It still is just not there.
Whereas like if you meet somebody
who can write a great piece of content,
that per, it's like, it's so natural to that person.
So I just find it's not great there.
Okay, let's do this.
Why don't we show people like our entire stack?
'Cause I think that'll actually be helpful.
How do we work? Like, let's start with HQ.
Because I think that's like pretty foundational to how,
it's also how we work together.
Yeah, is through HQ.
We'll finally get to explain to people what it is.
The way I describe it, and I don't know
if you have a different way, is like,
normally AI is like Microsoft Word or Excel.
It's like, if I make a change
to a financial model or Word document, I have it.
And if I want you to have it, I have to send it to you.
And then we can't really be working on the same thing
at the same time, and that's like super outdated, right?
Obviously everyone is using, either you can use a SharePoint
or if you're using Excel or you can use Google Drive.
But that's how most AI is.
Most people are doing things locally, right?
You have files on your computer, you know?
And then you have to go and share it.
And there are definitely ways without HQ.
To do it, we did a Jones Grub before HQ,
but you have to use GitHub and push and pull
and teach everybody that.
And so HQ just makes it really easy
to be able to make AI stuff multiplayer.
So it does a bunch of things,
but essentially any file that I have and a skill
is just a file, right?
It's all Markdown files and stuff.
When I'm working in my HQ, which I only do,
my local HQ folder, I just have a folder,
it kind of automatically gets pushed to the cloud, right?
And so it's just shared.
And then automatically it's pulled down to yours
to anybody who's in our organization, has it.
And so we can be working on the same thing.
So my analogy is it just takes it
from Microsoft Word to Google Docs.
And it's not quite real time
where we can't do the exact same time,
but it does help.
So any skills that we have,
we can just share them automatically.
And then there's just a few small, really,
like quality of life things that are great.
So the skills, any like integration, MCP.
'Cause I'll share credentials.
Exactly.
'Cause I'll do, you and I both use Codex.
We use Cloud.
We both have a Mac Mini.
We have a Hermes stuff like that.
And so I used to have to put them in three different places.
And so there's just one, it's very safe, secure.
It just opens up a tab, a window in your browser
and you put it in there and it's very safe.
'Cause I've, prior to that, wasted a ton of time trying to,
you know, like how you access Shopify is, how I access Shopify.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like we have shared credentials, Higgs field,
whatever we're using, HQ has like the secure vault
of all those credentials.
Yeah, the way I explain it to people is,
yes, it solves the multiplayer thing.
So how do you get that?
For me, I mean, the greatest thing with AI,
the greatest downfall with AI is like,
we all have a memory problem, right?
And we have super geniuses with Amnesia.
So how do you solve the Amnesia thing?
There's lots of ways to do that locally.
People who use Obsidian, they create like, you know,
whatever your own G-brain, like all that stuff.
But company memory, that's the issue.
So I think HQ solves that and then credentials.
Like those are sort of the three big things.
EQ can do other stuff in it, but like really,
for how we were working, it's mainly those three.
Context.
Yeah, it's context.
Yeah, it's company context.
Which is one of the most important things, like,
dude, it's like all company value is inherent knowledge.
Well, and like, you know, two years ago, whatever it was like,
people talked a lot about prompt engineering.
Like yeah, that's pretty much set it up.
And we can share how we're actually using the models and stuff,
but like all the models are so good.
Like they don't really matter much.
No.
Prompting is dead.
It's really context and then like,
understanding how to set loops and goals and stuff like that, but you have to have the company
context. You know, I think that's it where people will try to write copy or they'll try to do
something that's like not good, but you haven't built the skills, you haven't built the context and
it takes a ton of time. I don't know how much time you put it, but like it's a lot. And they're never
ending. Like if we build a skill, it's like we're constantly refining yet, but then once you do it,
and you you marry that with the context and the integrations of the different MCPs you're doing,
it can get really powerful. I wasted two hours over the weekend trying to upload ads and I said,
I never got to do that again. So I had run a do it. Looked at every ad, picked the right landing page,
it named all the ads wrote the headline and copied to match from options. I gave it set the name
and conventions set UTM's all of it and push it to ads manager for me. All I had to do is go into ads
manager, QI it hit live and it was done run at this an agent with its own virtual computer. So it never
shuts off. It's always on the whole team can talk to it. The same run at the Slack. It remembers
everything. It has pre built skills based on some amazing stuff that the motion team has built.
Here's one example of how I'm using it last night. I hooked up Tribe, our creator sourcing tool,
and anytime a creator video comes in, it gets Q8 against my feedback that I gave in it before.
We get notified of any new video. I can have it ad captions. It watches the video, figures out what
it's about ad's name and conventions and it hooks. I've been doing a lot building a lot of static ads
with run it as well. It's pretty awesome and it all comes out of the box. We've been using our
Winx as our main creative strategist using it to build tons of ads for us. Winx is using it,
Ridge is using run of Hexclat is using it as well. Go to runit.com. They're giving listeners 500
million free tokens for your first month. So can you show people when you say you have a local
folder with HQ, you start working it. What does that look like? So when I am using codex,
I would say it's more often, but it's kind of just my default folder. So normally it's just working
on desktop or working on a folder and you just give it permissions. But now do you follow them really
only ever doing things in HQ. So this will just have context of really all of the files that are
in there. Okay, so context. You have HQ folder. You start all of your work. You start it in this one folder.
Instead of having, let's say, five different GitHub projects, one for Shopify, one for Omnisand,
one for. This is just one. Inside of there, there's different companies. So I have one for Winx.
I have one for like my personal. I have one for like, you know, for podcasts, stuff like that.
But yeah, you know, so for Winx, there's one folder and one company. And so any work happens and
goes in there. And then in that one company, Winx, we might have like, we have a GitHub repo for
Shopify. We have a GitHub repo for something else. So then it's all inside of that one company.
I would say GitHub is like slightly different. We're like, this is like the context and stuff.
It's not doesn't house the actual codebase. Right. So the actual codebase is in there. Yeah.
But it kind of has knowledge of everything. Yeah. It can see it all. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So if
you're going to go work on, like right now, you're probably doing work on our Shopify site.
You'll still start that in HQ. Yeah. Yeah. Even though there is still a separate GitHub repo
for Shopify, all of our skills live in HQ. Yeah. And so even prior to HQ, if I was working on our
website, I don't want to do it directly on our live site, right? Normally, I have a dev theme,
but I actually would be working on that locally on my computer. No one will be able to see it.
And then I would push that using the Shopify CLI, the command line interface to Shopify to be able
to preview it there. And then once I wanted to actually, we'll call it submit that or commit it,
I would open a PR pull request and have that go to Shopify. But so I was just, I'm doing it locally,
which is HQ, but then it just syncs it with like the HQ cloud. Yeah. And so the benefit of that is,
A, it could save, B, it's again, it has all of that context in one place. So as I'm working,
I'm working on an ingredient section right now. And I'm like, hey, pull from this claim, pull from
the study, because what I did is, you know, I just think the context engine is really helpful. You
know, we have Dr. Todd Bourne who formulated a bunch of stuff. He tossed in a Google drive folder of,
yeah, all studies. So as soon as I see something like that come in, just give it to an agent and say,
hey, toss us in HQ, this is what it is. So it just has the memory of that. It has a context of it.
And so it's just really powerful. Like I learned this the first time when I was building like a,
maybe a CRO system for Jones Road, I built a copy skill and copy context for a different project.
And this was when I was earlier on. And the CRO skill was just like calling upon it and writing
copy as I was building landing pages, even without me trying to. Yeah. So like sometimes even when you
don't know the intended goal, just getting all of this context in one place can just be extremely
helpful and valuable. Yeah. I think it's the thing too. Like, so obviously like for the show,
we have different sponsors for different things. But we also have a lot of other tools that we're
using. So like codex is in sponsoring show clause on sponsor. Like this is just our chosen stack
right now. Like we use Higgs field for things. We use millions for things. Like we're trying to
like, I think my approach at least has been like, let's just try out everything. This is a fun time.
It's nice. Then when you're starting something scratchy. Yeah. Screw it. Yeah. Let's just try it all.
Like we don't need to be married to anything. In this case, like HQ, I'm actually super impressed.
Like I was a bit hesitant when we started using it. I'm like, I don't know. This seems like
onerous and more. I had something else at the learn. I didn't want to do it. Yeah. I'm kind of
happy now. It was like a pleasant surprise. That's what all these things. It just takes time to learn.
Yeah. At all. They're worth it. But yeah. But I definitely think, you know, it allows us to
share stuff and not have to do this. I think the start work was at the handoff thing. So like,
if I'm working on something and I want you to have it, I can just hand off and then send you a
link. Yeah. Just talking about the file. Yeah. And then it just keeps working. I think
for the people who are listening or watching, and if you're going to be doing work together as a team,
this is what do you use HQ or not? Like just figure this part out. Yeah. As productive as you think
you're going to get single player, the multiplayer thing is where like the company part gets built.
Definitely. And the brain and like the company. Yeah. The company brain thing is like is huge.
Let me show it. Let's do it. So I'll share my screen here. Like this is what it would actually
look like. So I'm inside HQ here. And I never have to go in here. But just to see what the,
you know, organization, you know, system is so this is cool. Like people have probably seen this
with a obsidian. Yep. But it's a very similar thing where it just shows you all of your,
your different things you have. And here are all the skills that, you know, we have. And kind of
the connection they have with each other. These are a lot of the different files that, you know,
we built in kind of projects that we've done. Knowledge. These are just various. This is just our brain.
But these are just, you know, different files, competitors, you know, different things that we've
done over time. Best practices. Like the same, I think about training agents in building context.
The same way you would think about training employees and onboarding employees. Just here's
everything I know. Here's how I want this to be done. And so that has all the being you can
see if we hover over it. This is a good frame because like every employee you hire needs context.
Like you have to get them, you onboard them. Yeah, you onboard them. Yeah, teach you about
company culture, like all that stuff. So like this is sort of where we do that. And then people
can see like there's a folder structure that is in place, right? There's projects, there's skills,
there's just like lots of stuff. And everything goes in here. I want people to get like, we don't work
outside of HQ. And so even when we use like, we're going to do work with Omni Cent, right? We're
going to work with the Omni Cent MCP to like build emails. We do it through HQ. Yeah, the emails
live in HQ. And then we use the Omni Cent MCP to push it to our Omni Cent account. Right.
So here's knowledge. And this is the company brain, but just the, you know, the file structure.
Sure of it. And you can kind of see what are, what are our new things. And so like one of the things,
one of our sponsors is motion and run-eth. And we're using that for agents. And the first thing we
wanted was how do we get run-eth to have access to this? Sure. But also we need, we need, we need
run-eth to know what HQ is. So if we tell run-eth, hey, go find this. Yeah. But vice versa, we need,
we need our agents to know like our cloud and code extra. Also know who run-eth is as well. So
this is just context, you know, you just go in and say, hey, this is, this is what this is,
this is what run-eth is. I'll even go to run-eth and say, hey, this is what I want to do. Please
write up a document that I can copy over to explain what you are and who you are. Yeah. And it'll
just save it. And so you don't have to tell it again, you know, that, that, that amnesia thing.
You have been listening to us talk for years about building nine-figure durable goods brands,
hex-clad, Ridge, simple modern Pila. When we sat down to build wings, there was never a question
it had to be a subscription brand. And being the veterans we are, we could work with anyone,
but we decided to work with Ski-O to build wings. Working with the team over at Ski-O has been
awesome. We get to see all of the stuff that the fastest growing CPG brands are actually doing
to acquire more subscribers and keep them longer. My favorite example of this has been
incentivizing new customers to go from a monthly subscription to a quarterly subscription.
Right after their first purchase, but before they get their first order, the team at Ski-O has
been sharing insights on how much in-portal flexibility to give subscribers when to change
frequency, when to offer product swaps, when to do gifting, what rewards should look like,
what is cancel flow optimization. The list is freaking endless and they have shared it all.
They have been incredible to work with. They are bringing so much value to this partnership,
almost feels a little unfair. If you run a subscription brand, you should be talking with the
team over at Ski-O. They know their stuff. There's knowledge and the folder structure,
so I don't necessarily look and care about, but just of having the different
kind of folder structure the same way you would do like a Google Drive kind of where you have
yeah you have a department and then you have subfolders within it and what's it you're right
here like I actually don't look at what's in here right I use codex or mods to look at what's in
here um I also have I don't know if you've done this but like I have uh I will take like my Hermes
agent which is my personal like a CEO brain thing and I will then have it commit things and
it can work with HQ yeah it's just like same anything that's like multiplayer it's like okay just
put it in here because like we need every every person that we add to the team needs to have access
to this yeah just dump everything in okay that's my philosophy yeah okay so then from HQ let's talk
about like what have we plugged into this thing so like what are what's the rest of our tech stack
let's just go through that for people so we've got um omnicend for email and SMS and so it's
really cool as we're doing that from codex clawed terminal something like that yeah like we don't
long like I don't I log in to omnicend simply it was so easy to just like mcp and build emails
and then use yeah uh then I actually the only reason I logged in to omnicend because I didn't believe
that it just oh just to approve yeah I just like I I need to see that this is true yeah then I
would go in there when we were building the initial flows you're like can you just go in and check
everything and I'm like I would go to HQ and use clawed I'm like working like no I need to go
double check that this is all actually accurate oh no there it was it's pretty cool yeah it's pretty
cool yeah yeah I that was my my other big surprise was like how easy and how good the omnicend mcp was
like well done to that team um okay so there's omnicend rich panel right so like rich panel for
customer service AI like they've been a long time sponsor yeah rich panels a little different because
we're not doing that from like a clawed or codex yeah they just that's not just part of our AI stack
exactly we just need best in class like customer yeah but it's like solved handled like very rarely
do we have to go in and think about it is gonna go check okay so then all website work
right yeah we don't have a developer we are the design and dev team currently all that is just
done through HQ um using codex or clawed more for that now primarily codex um is that an astro
thing or is that given before that um codex was terrible at design prior to GPT 5.6 yep um so
it was definitely more clawed before that fables really good at design but on 5.0 it's just
eight tokens yeah it's way better now on 5.1 yeah um so I do use it more but astro is pretty good
at design so that that's my preference do you do we have like a set of design skills for the
brand and is that an HQ yes they all have an HQ so we have um design system that's like one of the
you know really important ones and actually can share like wings OS as well and we should show
people um but we have design system we have skills for development like we have very specific rules
for like never pushed to production here's the audit you know here's different things like that so
we have there's like a whole workflow that again has been refined that allows non-technical people
like you and I to you know do our website with no developers without also breaking it every time
we touch it yeah okay so websites done through there uh what about asset generation so images
videos yeah so you like Higgsfield so you use that a bunch well I like Higgsfield because it's just
the one I know yeah old dog and yeah um but I think we've got Melius and then we use just like open AI
API as well yeah I built a skill I think you had some of your own as well of you know doing that
so we kind of built some some skills for like static ad design and things like that planar
obviously with like the videos the animated videos we built some controls you know we had yeah
Sean showed us how to make animations then we went to town okay and then runeth let's let's talk
runeth a little bit because I've actually had a few people message me how are you guys using runeth
where does it live what is it good at maybe uh you've been I watch you and slack and you just boss
it around uh nice to it yeah you're very polite um but um what are what are you mainly using runeth
for it took me a while with like runeth and even like open clock to understand all of it so I'll
try to like explain a little bit I mean you have you have really I guess two different components of
like an agent or anything and you have the harness and the model yep right and so the model is you
know you have from anthropic you have clawed you have fable you have opus there's the different ones
that's the model and you know there's different sizes and token cost of them and then you have
the harness and the harness is essentially like the UX that you're using it with with like any like
prebuilt skills or things like that oh and then you also have the machine right so like we're doing
stuff locally on our computers primarily but if your laptop is closed it's not running so it's not
you know always on and if you have automations when it's closed it'll stop so a lot of people what
they did you know with open claw which is a harness that can then run on a model and yeah I think
we have our hermit hermese as well which runs on you run yours on your codex plan right um
but hermese open claw or two other ones that require a little bit more setup they're like very early
yeah and they kind of you have to be a little more technical and most people run them on a mac mini
because it just can always run it never closes and so that's what we do but it does require like more
setup and there are definitely like prebuilt skills that come with those sure but they're very general
right like there's a skill with hermese where it auto learns and create stuff but like there's
no marketing knowledge that it has yeah there's no yeah you know company knowledge what run at this is
again it can run on multiple models so it can run on you know all of them we have access to them
because they have different skills yep um it has a lot of prebuilt things for example you and I
spend a lot of time building static at skills with run if it was just done you know I mean it's
good it's really good yeah and because they've trained it you know it also runs on a virtual
computer so instead of a mac mini yep um and now you know I think they were pretty early to that
Resos are early to it now Grockbot is you know yeah I know they're all kind of on virtual one
yeah uses on a virtual one instinct is doing the same thing like they're all giving you like
sort of dedicated hardware because they also realize like you got to solve the memory problem
exactly so that's essentially it and then again you can use it where you want you can use it and um
you know the motion app and run it or in slack and so I also think it's really cool just to have
it in slack and collaborate with people on it see what it feels like we live in slack yeah like
most working companies is linked in a slack yeah yeah yeah I believe I don't know exactly everything
is trained on but obviously motion has just so much data and context you know like Alicia who's
great who's working with us um you know she's got a lot of different just like creative strategy
yep stuff um and so we have it in HQ but it can do a lot like off the shelf
I'm getting back into the weeds and one of the things I'm probably the rusty is done is emails
and I'm super excited to be using on the send they're using them on wings for AI pill we we are
using it to do everything I'm running most of our email program from cloud and codex using the mcp
and it's awesome we also have email SMS and pop-ups all in one place we have all of our flows welcome
series it's all talking to each other I love the platform the analytics are really good to highly
recommend it especially if you're in position the wings is in new brand starting out but if you're on
different platform and you're paying too much and you want to switch they will do the migration
completely for you no lost data no loss list takes only five days start to finish and they are
giving our listeners 30% off the first three months go to omnicend.com/9 operators to try it out
for yourself I have been very impressed with it what it can do looks I spent two hours last week
uploading ads yeah and I'm like I'm never doing this again and so run it is uploading our ads now
so any ad it'll watch the ad it we created again you just have to build the stuff from the beginning
we created I mean see like it's connected to tribe yeah so like our tribe creators so we created
videos yeah right and then you can have run a upload the videos into it does that I had to add
captions yeah next step is working on video editing skills it'll watch the videos for example for
static ad or for not it'll figure out what they're about I we built a database in HQ of our landing
pages right and if it's a more general sleep one it'll pull it'll name the name and conventions
and it'll pull copy for the headline and text based on you know what we've given it
and it'll run it to a general landing page versus if it's a melatonin one and it figures a melaton
it's gonna go to our melatonin page we told to go to with a melatonin headline that's another
example of like the the workflow debt yeah like at Jones Road we get a spreadsheet and there's
somebody there who's sitting there matching these things up yeah going like yeah yeah and it just
takes a ton of time and so now it's automatic I was at the US opening the other day we got some tribe
videos in they got sound Slack I approved them run it built them you know all you have to do and
go go in a meta and just I ask run it to pause and keep upload and pause and then I go in and
upload them it's like look at you know we go in we recruit the creators we do all that stuff
then there's this workflow that happens right creator submit videos run it goes in gets them sends
them to us we approve uploads we approve that's what I mean by like yeah that's a very AI first
workflow yeah that would have and in my last company same thing it's like there would have been a
creative key sheet where like all of this stuff is in there it's all tracked we try to name and
convention match it to meta like we don't do any that none none and it's I was thinking about this
before it's all about how ambitious you want to go like we're pretty advanced and like I was
surprised that run it could do all of this yep and so now even like the motion team is pushing us
to be like let's integrate more what feedback does Cody normally give on tribe videos like let's
have run a learn from that can run it start giving feedback on the videos as it comes in like
so what what are some examples like your you've got slack open here what are some of the things
that you've done with so there's one of our tribe so some so like we just set this up where just
any new tribe video comes in again this is like a pretty basic one
But any new tribe video comes in and just, you know, to be able to watch.
Yeah.
Um, I'll show you, I want to create, you know, some, some ads.
I mean, this is a one I do all the time.
We're like, I don't think that this is the most sophisticated way to come up with ads, but
I do it for fun because I'll just be scrolling on X or on social at night, and I'm just
like, Hey, make this for us.
And again, play with the site like this idea.
I like this idea.
Can you make me a version?
And that's all, and because this shows, right, if we didn't have the context with HQ and
all this stuff, it's like, Hey, I want you to make this ad.
My brand is winks.
We target moms.
It's like, no, like, here's our ingredients like, you do it once, you put it in HQ, you have
context, and then you say, make it for us.
And it's not always going to do it perfect, but it knows because I've asked it to do four,
always making me a four by five first.
Yeah.
Once I prove that I do that, it'll analyze this one, right?
It'll analyze this, you know, ad.
Yep.
It'll pull that.
It's trained on decent amount.
And it made me, it made me not, I mean, is it perfect?
No, I don't think so.
But I'll show you, I mean, it did pull, again, without asking it, images of the ingredients
at the context of the ingredients.
But like, there's some small design things, like there should be more spacing there, there
should be more padding.
Yeah, sure.
We can improve the copy.
I think it's just like, you go from an idea to a prototype very quickly, which a lot
of people are using AI to do that with software.
I mean, one of my goals is like, I want to build less software.
I don't actually want to use AI to build a lot of cost, custom software, custom software
needs to be taken care of.
Yeah.
It's like saying, I want 45 kids.
I don't want 45 kids.
That sounds like a lot of work.
I would like to just continue to use the models, right?
And use something like run it.
So I'll have it get better.
So now that we've got this, to me, it's like, great.
You can take a designer and it's like, this is actually really good and like, clean it
up.
Yeah.
And make a better version now.
That is a one part where the handoffs are not good.
So on that 1080 tan, like, I can one shot, maybe I'll do this, like, I can one shot a landing
page and get it, we'll call it this, like 80% of the way there, really easily.
That extra 10%.
What I wish I could do is hand it to a designer and have them actually do stuff by hand.
But there's not a great workflow for going because it's all to take it by hand now.
So I mean, this is all code and so it doesn't transfer super well to Figma.
Yeah.
That design is decent stuff, but like, that's the one challenge, but yeah, I completely
agree.
But if they could fix that, like, that would be epic because then you could just ship
so much faster.
But now going back and forth, I'm like, Hey, I want you to change this headline.
I want you to change that like, that does take multiple rounds of revisions, normally,
you know, if you get a designer, you know, like an amazing one, they would get closer
on the first shot.
Yeah.
But if you get a junior designer, there's a lot of rounds of feedback.
Yeah.
It's like, you're going back and forth anyway.
And a lot of this.
So like, for example, you know, this headline was, I'll call it benefit driven.
It pulled in one that was more feature right here.
And so you just say, Hey, you just give feedback.
Hey, run it.
I want it to be a benefit headline.
You pulled in a feature and there's not enough spacing.
Please make those changes.
Yep.
Please save this so you don't make this mistake again.
Right.
So each time you do it, it's just learning your preferences more and more.
So you you posted this video and so it uploaded that ad.
Oh, you can try to get it to white list me.
Yeah.
And then it told us, Hey, you don't have permissions.
Yeah.
Here's here's what to do.
But so it launched that, you know, creative analysis.
So it was at least a promotion.
And so analyzing the ad, you know, can do a really great job of that.
Cool.
Oh, this was a pretty cool one.
Caption.
So we launched this ad from tribe was doing pretty well.
It was B-roll, not a talking head.
So I thought it needed captions.
So one of the add of the captions to the video.
So it downloaded the original video from tribe using the API.
This is awesome.
Told it who it was, you know, created the naming conventions for it.
What campaign it lives in added the captions, picked what landing page to go to, showed
them here, you know, I didn't love.
There was something I didn't love.
I forget what it was, but it was like the format or style of it.
So I asked it to change that.
Sure.
I wanted to add a, then like a, like a hook up top, and so it, I didn't love how it
did it.
It came in love, you know, late and whatever.
And so I asked it to change that.
And then I said, hey, now anytime I ask you to add a hook, like do it this way, essentially.
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So it's added.
This is like for people listening, literally editing video in Slack.
And now it's adding captions to it.
Yeah, but still that's that.
That has to edit video.
Yeah.
And the next step is like to cut it up.
Yeah.
Combine this.
Yeah.
So I use clad code for that.
Oh, right.
Like I open up a clad code session and I edit the videos right in there.
Okay.
And we have skills, especially any animation, we go inside of, yeah, yeah, and it's like,
it's pretty good.
I took what Sean built and I'm just like, okay, that's good.
Like, how do we make it as repeatable as possible?
So you can now go in there and say like, we have consistent characters.
You can animate anything.
Yeah.
That's video editing.
It's like very close.
So like, but I mean, again, think about, you know, terms where we had four or five editors
and I wasn't doing any design myself, any editing, like five years ago, I tried to teach
myself editing, you know, but now like, are we going to be the, you and I going to be the
best editor in the world?
No, but like a basic UGC thing we can do things like that.
And so I think that's what's so cool is like, you know, if you have a marketing team and
you have a growth marketer, like they can have this idea and then be empowered to go
and do it and not need to put it in a sauna and do a brief and get three different people
reviewing it and then go and do it.
What's your take on this whole like ad volume versus quality of ads?
Like, and I get that, you know, to make great ads, you got to make a lot of ads.
But it seems like everything we're talking about, it would be easy for somebody to look
at this and just be like, great.
You guys are promoting making like a 5,000 sloppy ads every day.
Where is this going?
I actually wonder, is this going to force us all to make better ads because everybody
can make these now?
I think quality first and then volume.
And I feel like everyone you ask has a different, you know, opinion of us.
I mean, if you're doing the same ad and same messaging, you know, you're not going to
get a better hit rate or a better win rate.
Yeah.
I think get the performance, get quality, learn what works.
And then you can just ship slop and it can work.
Like sure, I was talking to some, some e-com drop shipping guy in DM's the other day.
Dude, it's crazy.
He was asking me some questions and I was asking him and he's like, yeah, it's just
AI slop, bro.
But like, I think he's getting some, I think he's getting some winners first, though.
But no, when, when we reached out to Sean the other day to like get some ideas and offers
and stuff, the first thing he said was, let's just launch 1,000 ads.
Yeah, I know.
It's like, oh, Sean, we wanted to do an offer.
He's like, launch 1,000 ads.
Like, that's not what we asked for, but like, I made and stuff like that.
Like, you can say they're, they're all launching a ton of ads, you know, it's mental.
But I think they're getting winners and it's just like, how do you compete with that?
Like, if you're, if you're not and you're doing things the old way, like, I don't know
how you, yeah, there are ad accounts.
I've, there's one, I don't want to name names in one of my chat groups.
There's 14,000 active ads in that ad account.
Yeah.
And I'm like, I get it.
They're big, but like, that's a lot of ads.
Now, I think 90% of it is AI slop, but I don't think they would have them in there if
they weren't working.
Yeah.
Like, at that scale.
It's also part of me thinking like, the old school guy, I mean, is like, just make great
pieces of content.
And then the other part of me is like, well, it's working.
You know, people seem to be reacting to this crap.
So yeah, I think there's some bar level of quality.
And I know that there are people that say that the way you get quality is actually volume.
Yeah.
And I, I tell you that camp, you know, just make a lot and you'll get better at it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
As long as you're actually getting better at it, I think like if you're working with creators
and we're on tribe, like, it is a volume thing.
But you do have to then learn from it and get better at it.
You can't just make the same thing.
You have to coach them and you have to like, do all that stuff.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, HQ, OmniSend, RichPanel, all of our site work, there's HiggsField, Malia's Runeth,
because all software now is an element of AI built into it.
So like, Mike is doing a ton of modeling, right?
So like, he took a lot of what he built with simple modern around, like taking in real
time sales data.
And can we build a financial model for the business that is updating, like in the minute,
as orders come in, it's then building like individual customer and individual skew forecasting,
which I think is a very interesting use case for AI.
All of our asset management, do you want to show people, uh, links, OS, and how we're doing
this?
Yeah, definitely.
So we did this at Jones Road, um, and I just wanted to set it up so I set this up
before launching, just like kind of very semi-HK, like anything that is in WYNXOS also
lives in HQ, but it's just like, how do we get everything in one place?
And how do you get a, a human viewable version of what's in it there?
That's how I like, I use WYNXOS.
It's like, I still need to be able to look at this stuff sometimes.
I mean, here's a good example, like, uh, design system.
Right.
Like, what lives in GitHub is just markdown files, right?
And, and CSS.
Yeah.
It turns out we suck at reading those.
And so this is just, you know, a way to visualize it.
And then we have a shareable asset, you know, a way to share this.
But it's just here are, are rules for typography and font and when.
we do when you use certain things just so that they stay consistent so things like that are in here.
Also like, again, anytime we save an ad, I have them in here and I just have different landers,
let me see if I can find some of them, but just different ads that we've saved.
Sure. Because if you're using all of these different tools, then your agents might not have
access to all of them. And so that's another example of it.
Subscription brands, I am talking to you. You obsess over churned, but you only know your
subscribers by skew, by cadence, and the real cancellation risk, it lies in the actual humans behind
that data. Outer signal enriches your existing customer data, the existing shop of wireless,
and it turns it into real identifiable people and personas. We are talking demographics, lifestyle,
who's a VIP, who's a creator? Who is buying for a business? All of these persona attributes
think it pushed into your favorite email platform so that your retention and windback flows can speak
to a segment, a specific small group of people, instead of everybody on a 30-day plan.
There's a native Shopify install, it's set up in minutes, get your free persona report on your
customer data when you sign up, go to outer signal.com/operators, tell them we sent you, I promise
it'll help. And then asset library or same thing, it was like, okay, how do we get it? So I never
have, I never want to go to an agent and be like, hey, let me go and I'm going to upload this image
and use this image. It just should know. And so in creative, you know, we built an asset library.
Like one of the things you can do for people, again, listening, watching is you can set up
a process. Like if you're a doomscroller, like I'm a doomscroller, and I like to just find stuff,
all I do is like bookmark or save it. And then my agent picks that up. And we'll do that.
You have your harmonies, do that. Okay, cool. Yeah, I actually just had mues do it, because mues,
yeah, I was the Instagram one. Yeah, it's built in. Yeah, but yeah, so wait, so does mues have access
to your Instagram? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I showed my wife because we're building a house right now,
and my wife is doing a lot of it. And so I set her up on her mues the other day. And I was like,
hey, go, go ask it to find these fixtures and you're in your saved. Yeah, so that's like a really
cool. Oh, yeah, because I think that's like one of the downsides to a lot of the stuff is Instagram's
a closed playground, right? Yeah, like you got to use different tools to scrape and all it. And it's
really inefficient, like inefficient, and they use a lot of tokens, it costs money. Yeah, yeah. But
if it might be good for creator stuff, yeah, that's kind of what I'm thinking. Yeah. So yeah, so
here's all our assets. Again, it's not perfect. I think I have to just do a little bit like
architecture on it, but yeah, you know, it has all of our assets. You can download them. They're
all saved here. And I actually built an MCP for for this, this asset library. So now it can pull
from them and not have to use, you know, the browser, but just wanted to get everything in one place
versus having all of these different, you know, places and directions and things like that.
Very cool. Before we finish, can you just show people? I'm going to show something. It'll take
a little bit of time. I'm also going to show a more complicated version. This is kind of like,
not to like to my own home, but like something that is not like a 101. It's to show like what it
can be potentially capable of because these things can be really, really powerful if you allow it
to do that. So it's kind of pull a few of these principles together that we talked about.
So number one, I'm going to use a skill. So I have this Winks page builder skill and have trained
the skill. It's one I built for Jones Road and poured it over to Winks, but it is going to build
us a new landing page. And it's kind of trained on analyzing and existing landing page, figuring
out what are the principles that makes that page successful. And how do we build that page for
Winks using our design system? Okay. So Javi has great pages. I don't think they'll mind that we're
using ours. Well, they're like one of the best landing pages they have left there. They're amazing
pages. I love their UX. So we're going to pick theirs. And I'm a big whisper whisper flow guy.
So I'll kind of, you know, yap a lot and do things like that. But this is going to use the skill.
It's going to use context that we have about our business and our brand. And I'm going to set up
what's called a loop or goal. I'm actually going to spin out some sub agents. This is where it's
getting a little bit more complicated. Within here, I do have run-eth with the CLI. I've access to it.
This is codex. I do have clawed and then grok models as well. One thing agents are bad at is
grading their own homework, right? And so sometimes it helps to bring them out. And I'm going to do a
goal, which is essentially saying, don't stop until you do this. Yep. That being said,
this is we're doing design thing, which is subjective. And it is harder to do. It's called non-verifiable.
And so I'm going to try to make it more objective and verifiable, but it's not always perfect.
Okay. How are you going to make it more objective? I will. I'll show you. I would like you to make
a new landing page for Winks using the page builder skill and this Javi page. I want you to use
all of the contexts that you have in HQ about our business. Use our current or recent ad performance
to take any learnings that you have from this. I want you to set up a goal. I want you to propose
an overly ambitious goal. I want you to spin up adversarial sub agents using run-eth,
using clawed code on Fable 5.1, grok as well. I want you to create objective criteria where you're
going to spin up creative director sub agents. You're going to do at least three rounds of
revisions and you're going to get it into a 9.5 out of 10 until you think I would be happy
shipping this page live. Ask me any questions you have, send an ambitious goal and then start.
Boom. And now it'll work. We're going to sit here. It's going to go do work. Yeah.
And it probably come back and ask you questions because that's what it does. But then once it's going,
it's going to, it's just going to work for a while. Yeah. Right. So we're not going to make
people sit here and watch. It's like that sort of thing. And do you always do this on like
Astra? This is an early question. Astra medium. Like why? Why medium? Astra is a new model. And so
it's just very powerful. Very intelligent. You know, it's their most powerful model. So it will
use more tokens. Yeah. And so I think medium is just, it's a good mix where it can do most things.
Don't put it on extra. Yeah. Or, or also burn your weekly, you know, if you say hello to
Astra on extra high, it's like there goes half your week. Okay. So while it's working, I think
let's, let's wrap. And I want to say this, everything AI is changing all the damn time.
Like every week is a massive, like massive whip lash sort of model. New models. Then like this one
upmanship. And it's like, I mean, these labs just continually punch each other in the face.
And it's fun to watch as a spectator. But I think if you try to keep up with it on a daily
weekly basis, it's, it's, it's a lot. Yeah. So if I could leave people with sort of, I think
there's three things that I think you absolutely need to like get in place right now.
So the first is, and we started off the episode with like company context. So this is like shared
memory, inherent knowledge. As you build a business, you're collecting this stuff. You got to
put it all on place. It needs to be agent friendly. And it needs to be human friendly.
Right. Would you agree? That's number one. Okay. Number two. And this is, I have a very strong
bias here because it's seen the value of it at this point is you should build your own,
this is not company, your own CEO, founder, brain, and agent to take care of your brain.
Everything that you read, write, watch, anything you create, every email you get,
everything that is like literally entering just your brain, not your teammates, just yours.
That should all be stored and duplicated somewhere that is like AI friendly. So that as you go
through life, you're keeping a perfect copy of everything that you do with work and personal.
So that like when I start my next day, I have like a perfect like here's what you're doing today.
Here's context for the last week. I can see that you're meeting with Cody. This is the last
thing that you talk to Cody about like all of it's in my brain. And I say this because as a founder
or a builder or a creator, whatever you want to call yourself, there is no way that you remember all
of this. Like there's just not. I don't remember what I did last year on this day. I don't. My brain
does though. Like it has a perfect recounting of that. So I think that's number two. Would you agree?
I think so. Yeah. Okay. I'm in a, I have it. I like, I use it as my note taker. Like, yeah,
I don't use it. I'll just like whisper float in my Hermes and be like, hey, hey, I parked here,
you know, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just keep everything there. Okay. Number three is what you just showed
us, which is learn to work in goals and loops. So a lot of people use these tools. And it's a very like
linear and transactional. Hey, chatchy, PT, hey, Claude. I would like you to go do this for me.
And then they wait for it. And if they're crazy, then maybe they have like four or five or ten of
them going all at once. But what you just showed us is like, I'm going to give it a job. I have a goal
in mind. And I'm going to give it specific set of instructions. And you're just human language
this thing. And then you're going to let it go off and work. And it's going to figure out how to get
reach the objective. And it's going to loop around and do whatever. It's absolutely token
heavy. Yeah. Like it can be very token heavy. Would you agree with that? That that is like a skill
that people working with the eye, they should have that right now. Yeah. I would say first start
using agents. And so I think only two percent of the population are using agents. Yeah.
Most people are using chat. There are a lot of people who don't know what it can do. And there's
people that are using it like a chatbot. And then there's people who are running entire businesses.
And there are a whole lot. I was with it. And I think agents are becoming more popular as, you
know, muse or a rock bot or instinct are, you know, making it easier to set up. Yeah. But I would
say just start experimenting. If you're using
it like that, start somewhere and start having it do things for you and taking things that
you used to do manually and it could be as easy as organizing your inbox. It's a great place
to start or organizing your files on your desktop. But as far as go and do this action for me,
buy this thing for me, do this flight, upload these ads, take some manual things, and then once
you're done with manual things, then take things that are actually hopefully income producing,
revenue producing and create these ads, build these things. So just test that. And then once you get
that, then putting it all together where you have your contacts, your skills, your MCPs,
your software, your brain, agents, set up loops for that. And that can, you get the full power of
these systems. Yeah, I like that. That's great for me. Awesome, dude. I think that's the pod.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
The company brain is essential—context, memory, and company-specific knowledge must be systematically built and updated for AI agents to operate effectively.
A unified operating system (like Wings OS) centralizes workflows, enabling real-time access to tools, files, and team collaboration, eliminating manual handoffs and delays.
High-value companies should prioritize buying proven, purpose-built tools (e.g., Rich Panel, OmniSend) over building custom software, leveraging APIs and context for better efficiency.
AI agents—such as researchers, brief writers, and competitor analysts—should be core to operations, automating repetitive tasks and enabling lean, high-leverage teams.
AI is not a replacement for human judgment but an amplifier
Tools like HQ provide secure, multiplayer access to shared context, credentials, and skills, solving memory and onboarding challenges across teams.
Workflow automation (e.g., ad creation, video captioning, email flows) drastically reduces time-to-market, shifting from 10% idea work to 80% AI-driven execution.
True AI-first success lies in speed, scalability, and volume—driving performance through volume and learning, not just polished individual outputs.
Summary:
The core of an AI-first company revolves around four foundational pillars: the company brain, a unified operating system, strategic tool adoption, and intelligent agent use. The company brain acts as a living memory bank, storing context like mission, products, and customer insights so AI agents can operate with contextual awareness. This is paired with a centralized OS—like Wings OS—that aggregates all tools, files, and workflows into one accessible, real-time environment, eliminating silos and lengthy handoffs.
, OmniSend, Rich Panel) that deliver immediate value. AI agents are deployed for routine tasks—research, ad creation, email flows—automating 80% of workflows, with humans focusing on final review and creative oversight. While AI excels at volume and speed, it doesn’t replace human judgment in copy, design, or strategic thinking.
Tools like HQ enable secure, shared access to context and credentials, ensuring every team member has consistent, up-to-date knowledge. The result is a lean, agile operation where ideas move from concept to execution in minutes—dramatically faster than traditional models. This model not only accelerates growth but also redefines roles, merging design and development and enabling non-technical teams to build full-fledged products.
Ultimately, AI-first success isn’t about replacing people but amplifying human potential through automation, speed, and scalable volume—proving that the future of consumer brands lies in high-leverage, low-personnel operations.
FAQs
A 'company brain' is the centralized repository of context, knowledge, and internal information like mission, products, customer insights, and past data. It's essential because AI tools lack business-specific knowledge and need access to this context to perform effectively and avoid repetitive prompting.
wingsOS is an operating system that centralizes all company data and tools in one accessible place. It allows team members to instantly view and collaborate on content—like ads, copy, or designs—reducing delays and improving workflow efficiency by eliminating scattered information across different platforms.
Businesses should prioritize using established, specialized tools like Rich Panel or Omnicend over building custom software. These tools are built by experts with proven functionality, better integration, and lower maintenance costs, especially for teams with limited resources.
AI agents are autonomous tools that perform tasks like research, content creation, or workflow automation. Businesses should create agents for recurring tasks—like ad creation or competitor analysis—to free up human time and improve speed and consistency in operations.
An 'AI first' approach reduces reliance on large teams by automating routine tasks, enabling faster execution. It allows individuals to take on more responsibilities—like design or development—leading to role merging and faster iteration, which increases speed and agility in product launches.
AI often struggles with narrative structure, nuanced creativity, and human judgment. While useful for ideation, it tends to produce generic or off-target outputs. Real human oversight is still critical to ensure quality, authenticity, and brand alignment in creative content.
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