How To Scale Your Business With AI (Day 2 - Scale with AI Summit 2024)

Full video transcript

Welcome, welcome everybody, to Day 2 of the Scale with AI Summit 2024. Excited to be here with everyone today as we hop off a jam-packed Day 1. Got a lot of great feedback from everybody that was tuning in with us live — the raw, unedited replays are available now inside of the Circle community, and I’m looking forward to a great Day 2. We’ve got some great speakers lined up, and we just dropped a bunch of the pre-recorded AI hack sessions that you’ll find available inside of the community, so you can watch those on your own time, on demand. And I see Kelly Tenny here as well, tuning in with us. Welcome in, everybody, so great to see you joining us back today — those of you that were with us all day for Day 1, or if you couldn’t make all day, I recognize some faces that were in and out, and I see some new faces as well. Please do let us know where you’re tuning in from, and maybe some takeaways that you took away from Day 1 of the summit. Kelly, I know we covered a lot yesterday, but there were some really cool demos, especially there at the end of the day — that AI Voice Assistant that Chris built was some next-level stuff, that was really cool to see happen live. And good morning from Austin, Texas as well. How do you feel coming off of Day 1, Kelly?

Kelly: I’m excited. I feel like yesterday I took my own advice and I tried to hone in on one thing from each session that I could go and implement right away, without trying to be an overachiever and say “oh, I’m going to do all these things.” I really loved the session with Gamma — I thought they were amazing. Even as an avid user of Gamma, there were some features, little buttons, where I’m like “I’m not really sure what that does,” and they did such a great job breaking everything down, so I feel like that session was really valuable for new users and even existing users — there were a couple things I didn’t know it could do, so I got a lot of value out of that. And your session, of course, Darby — I loved it. It actually came up in a couple of the hack sessions that were being recorded, just how amazing of a foundation that is. So if anybody jumped in and out and wasn’t able to go back to your first session on Market Sauce, I really believe it was an amazing first session that sets the stage and gives us all the content we need for all of these other sessions.

Darby: I’m excited. Chris, of course — I knew he was going to blow our minds, and he stepped up to the plate and did, and everything’s just been amazing. I know in the morning I talked about how excited I was for the diverse amount of content we were going to see, and I think Day 1 was definitely evidence of that — all kinds of different, really amazing things that we can all integrate, giving us options to pick and choose what we need inside our business and what we can really use to scale using AI. And for those that did not have a chance to activate their credit for the free Market Sauce blueprint, just make sure you head over to marketsauce.[com] and make sure you’re registered through the summit as well — we’re just prioritizing everyone that registers for the summit. It’s free, but make sure you get access to that credit; you can go through the demo on the site, or you can watch that first session in the recordings inside the community to see exactly how to fill out and get that content brief. Again, especially if you’re just getting started with AI, this is a way to help accelerate getting better content from AI and getting better results.

For some of the speakers coming and sharing today, we’ve got Phil Stringer coming up at 10 o’clock Central Time, and Francis Ablola coming up at the noon hour as well — we’ll be talking about practical ways you can use ChatGPT, use it to speak in your voice, watching some over-the-shoulder demos with Phil. Phil is a fantastic FSBO/real-estate coach; he speaks on stages all around the country and has gone worldwide as well. He helps a lot of real estate professionals be more effective, more productive, and more streamlined in how they’re operating their business. Just to give you a taste of what to expect today and where to catch all the replays and AI hack sessions that have dropped — we’ve got a couple more coming over the course of today and tomorrow. Phil Stringer is coming on in just under an hour, sharing really practical demonstrations for how to use ChatGPT; he’s got a bunch of prompts he’ll be sharing to help you get started, walking you through some of his process. He’s a great communicator; Phil and I have worked on some projects together, and he’s just a great guy overall.

After Phil, we’ve got Francis Ablola at noon to one, talking about AI in the context of creating content that is empathetic and connects with your customers. When we were discussing his session there was a lot of alignment with how he approaches the same content process with content creation and copywriting that we use with Market Sauce. He’ll be sharing things from his 20 years of experience, from direct response all the way to what he’s doing now teaching AI. He’s also a real-estate professional and has helped grow several businesses — he’s had the Inc 5000 list with four of his different companies — so he’s had a lot of success over his career and will share some very practical ways you can leverage AI in your business.

After that, we’ve got Gamma coming up from 1 to 2, another Gamma Lab session, this time talking about building websites with Gamma, which I’m really looking forward to. Gamma is one of our platinum-level sponsors, along with Howdy, making this event possible. When I approached Gamma about being a potential sponsor for the event, I said I love using Gamma — let me see if I could just build the entire summit website with it, along with a lot of the resources we’re doing in post-summit production. So Gamma is going to share tips and tricks for building your own website with it. I even built my own personal brand website at darbyrollins.com using it — you can go see it, very simple websites and landing pages, and making them interactive as well. Excited to see what the team at Gamma can share about getting the most out of the tool specifically for websites, and what to expect down the road.

At 2:00 Central we’ve got Garrett Gravon, aka “GG Worldwide,” coming on. Garrett is a professional keynote speaker — he just got off stage speaking in front of Coca-Cola’s huge branding conference a few weeks ago, presenting alongside Damon John from Shark Tank, and he closed out that session. He brings some very practical experience for how you can use speaking to build your own personal brand, increase your authority, and how you’re perceived online and in person, leveraging your personal brand to open the door for new opportunities. We’ll be dialing things back to before you can even get on stage — how you get to the point where you can get on stage and start to grow your speaking career, walking through creating a blueprint. Garrett actually flew out to Austin, Texas in June for a 3-day hackathon we did here in person, where we created a whole custom Market Sauce delivery system for his free speaker brief product, and filmed a 45-minute masterclass that took all of his experience from 20 years of professional public speaking and baked it into how you get clear on who you’re speaking to, what your keynote will be on, who to target, how to present yourself to decision-makers who hire you to speak, and what you should be charging. That masterclass is free, and you’ll get links to sign up and go through it if speaking is something you want to do more of in your business, or if you just want to be more buttoned-up in how you’re presenting yourself for speaking inquiries. In that session with Garrett we’re actually going to use Gamma to create a speaker kit, because once you know what you’re talking about, who you’re talking to, and what makes you different, having a speaker kit is a must-have for booking additional gigs, and Gamma is a fantastic tool for getting that first kit made.

From there we go into the final keynote of the day at 4:00 Central with Jacqueline and Frank from Howdy, our other sponsor alongside Gamma making this event possible. They’re going to share how they, with a team of 80-plus, are approaching AI and how they’re leveraging AI and training to enable their own workforce, and also help the businesses they work with scale an AI-enabled workforce. Their approach to tackling the topic of AI in general is very interesting. That session is great for seeing how you can leverage talent that’s all around the globe and becoming AI-enabled, available at a rate that may be a lot more affordable for the small business owner looking to scale up teams and hire talent that isn’t US-based and doesn’t carry as large a salary — how to hire people effectively, retain that talent effectively, and enable that talent with AI to be more effective in running and managing these systems, because, like we talked about yesterday, you need a human in the loop to make sure things don’t go haywire and that AI stays on track. Also how to enable people to own those roles, and how Howdy is approaching this specific topic for how they’re looking to scale, and how you can translate those lessons into your own business.

I’d love to hear some more insights and wins from yesterday for those who joined us, and what you’re looking forward to today from the speakers coming up. I’m open to inviting some of you up to share. Yolanda mentioned personal branding — Kelly noted Garrett’s session will be a fantastic one for that; he’s a great, practical, grounded speaker for approaching personal branding, and tying that in with speaking is probably one of the top three ways to get yourself out there and brand yourself, along with being an author. Kelly said she loved the Gamma session and Darby’s session as well. Darby also loved Gamma’s session — it was cool seeing their whole crew come in and demonstrate the tool live, since they live and breathe the tool every day, and it’s cool to see how they’re using it and get an idea of what’s coming. Several folks asked about APIs and integrating with other tools on top of Gamma that aren’t available yet, but hopefully those features get activated as the platform develops. Gamma has big plans for 2025, and there will be more about those in today’s session.

Also worth shouting out are the hack sessions — a couple more are still going to drop, but they’re all under 30 minutes, and every AI innovator interviewed gave easy, actionable, immediate AI hacks — the kind you could get off the call and go do right away. There’s a cool AI Canva hack; Bruce Fleck gave an amazing hack that merged his own system for using ChatGPT and Gamma for presentations; Rachel Rollins shared an AI hack for marketing with three actionable steps for leveraging AI to help with marketing efforts and competitive analysis. Don’t skip the short sessions thinking they have less content — they have a lot of value, and the whole purpose of the hack sessions was to give everybody short content you could consume quickly and learn one thing from.

Sometimes these quick direct wins are exactly what you need, and sometimes you need longer workshops to really demonstrate something in its entirety, like Chris’s AI agent demo yesterday, which needed more time to present live. One more hack: video speed control. A lot of platforms let you speed up video playback — bumping a video to 1.5x or 2x speed (as long as the speaker’s pace is still intelligible) lets you get through one of these sessions in 10 to 15 minutes and still walk away with the core context, knowing what you want to go back and review in detail. That’s something found helpful for watching YouTube videos and podcasts at faster speed. Also, since everyone is busy running businesses or working on projects and using this content for continuing education, a recommended tip: grab the transcripts from each day’s sessions and feed them into something like Claude or ChatGPT, then ask it questions about the content. A similar custom GPT is planned on-site to help people navigate different summit sessions — but as a general tip, whenever a transcript is available, grab it and use it in a large language model to ask questions and interact with the content more.

For anyone just tuning in, there are several live sessions today plus the pre-recorded sessions already dropped inside the community. Make sure you’ve registered at scalewithaisummit.com if you’re here live, so you get access to the community. As more resources get dropped, a directory (almost complete, being built inside a Notion workspace) will let you quickly see all the speakers, sponsors, vendors, and any special deals, offers, notes, or resources from speakers — like Kurt Maui’s pre-recorded hack session on the “dollar a day” strategy for social media, which includes an extra checklist for getting set up and running.

An audience member (Montas) asked a question: they’re interested in building a platform — a website with bots and other things the real estate agency market would need — but weren’t sure where to start, what tools to use, or how to go from the big picture to actually building it from scratch. Darby’s response: if you’re looking at building any generative-AI tool, check out a few of the AI hack sessions already dropped from founders of tools people use, to get started, because many of these tools would make sense to look into. The first recommended tool is Custom GPTs, which gives you the ability to set up your own GPTs and build your own knowledge bases — effective for building a customer-support chatbot interface or knowledge base someone can interact with and get answers from. The second recommended tool is Pickaxe (from Mike Joya, who will be on the knowledge-entrepreneur panel the next day) — a tool that lets you monetize your knowledge through AI, charging per credit or via subscription, letting you build your own tools/apps, embed them into a platform, put them behind a paywall, and build your own “studios.”

The attendee followed up asking what their best option would be for getting hands-on help. Darby said that’s a question with more context needed and suggested asking Perplexity what it would suggest for building a platform like that based on what you’re thinking about — there are so many different ways to build tech on these platforms, and one person’s approach may be completely different from another’s for the same output. Darby’s own default whenever facing a technical question at the start is to go to Perplexity, describe the idea, and have a conversation with it to refine which tools might work, since some tools may already have a lot of the capability being looked for.

On the Pickaxe deal: the original AppSumo listing sold out, so Darby recommended signing up directly through the deal with Pickaxe — Mike set up a code for 60% off for three months for everyone attending the summit, activated with the code “scalesummit” at pickaxe[.co]. Darby recommended checking out Mike’s session first — a 20-minute breakdown of exactly how to use the tool — before signing up; he’ll also be on the knowledge-entrepreneur panel the next day.

A question came in about the link for buyerprediction.com. Darby explained that’s an example of a studio built in Pickaxe with Phil Stringer, the upcoming speaker, for his audience — helping real estate agents get clear on who they’re looking to book more listing appointments with and win more deals to sell more homes. The tool was entirely built in Pickaxe: you enter an address (example given: a street in Austin, Texas) and a price point (example: $2.5 million), and on submit it runs a series of trained prompts to identify who the more likely buyers of that particular piece of real estate are, giving an outline of that analysis. The utility is that when an agent is looking to book a listing appointment, they can provide value up front by showing they’ve already identified potential top buyers, then use that listing appointment as the opportunity to stand out and close the deal to help sell the home.

Yolanda asked whether Gamma was used to create the form in Pickaxe. Darby clarified: no — the form demonstrated was built 100% inside Pickaxe, which offers a “form bot.” Mike’s own session shows the full demonstration of how to use the tool, and Pickaxe has upgrades and features coming to integrate with things like Zapier and Make, adding more automations and functions. For those looking to create tools without using Pickaxe’s studio as the front-facing service — say, on their own platform — you can simply embed the code into the back end of any service you’re providing, gated or free. Darby described it as a powerful tool for getting something out, running, testing, and validating an idea before investing in building something bigger, noting it’s been a pleasure working with Mike and their team, and that community members have had great things to say about their experience with it.

Another audience member asked to get more information on GenAIUniversity.com — how to register, and, as the founder of a small company, how to use AI for marketing to help people learn about what Gamma does and other things. Darby explained: in a nutshell, Gen AI University is the platform that hosts events like this summit (some free, some paid) and has a community that joins for monthly Mastermind calls to share what’s working, what’s not, and what wins are being found in the world of AI — a community of like-minded entrepreneurs and creators figuring out how to adapt and evolve with AI in their businesses. For the summit specifically, they were introducing three months of the Pro membership at 50% off — normally $99 a month, reduced to $48.50 a month for the first three months. Following the summit, paid University members get access to two additional workshops: the first on November 12 (the following Tuesday) from noon to 4pm Central, condensing what was covered in the summit into a hands-on 4-hour workshop building out sales pages with Gamma, email sequences, and some basic automations (exact scope still being finalized based on member input); and a second follow-up implementation workshop two weeks later, another 4-hour block from 10am to 2pm Central, hosted primarily by Kelly, focused on building out micro content, marketing and educational material to nurture clients, attract leads, and build courses. The paid community is a direct line to Darby, Kelly, and other community members and speakers, and is about keeping the conversation and accountability going and getting first access to updates and insights on AI developments. The membership code “scalewithai” activates 50% off the first three months; if it’s not a fit after the first month, that’s fine — the three months were offered so people have time to dive into the recorded growth library, including content like setting up your own GPTs and other micro-courses.

An attendee commented that it was a very good summit with useful content and no fluff, and asked for a short break. Darby confirmed there were about 15 minutes before Phil Stringer’s session would start, and noted there would be a 30-minute block between Phil’s and Francis’s sessions later, with a few breaks throughout the day for anyone needing to step away, with replays and resources available afterward.

James then asked a question: as a small company trying to encourage green sustainability — noting ESG reporting activity across Europe — and trying to bring that focus to the construction community in San Diego County, California, he asked whether there’s an AI resource that can help construction companies build with green sustainability while also getting ROI from those methods. Darby didn’t have a direct resource to point to, but said the default response for any unknown question is to go to Perplexity and ask it directly, recommending James pull up Perplexity on his phone and walk through that same question to see what answer it provides.

The segment closed with Darby noting Phil Stringer’s session was about to begin, describing Phil as a fantastic speaker with great material in store, and wrapping up for a quick break before the first official workshop of Day 2 of the Scale with AI Summit.