I built 4 Agents in 55 minutes to save 20+ hours a week

0:00 All right, this is super cool. This type of stuff only happens, I think, on MFM, but here's the deal. I have a friend named Wade Foster, he started a company called Zapier. Zapier is a business that was bootstrapped to hundreds of millions in revenue and it's worth five or ten billion dollars. And I had the CEO and founder on Wade, I had him on MFM and I said, look, Share your screen and show me how you're using AI to save ten, twenty, thirty hours a week. It's pretty amazing he did it. And he broke down like three or four different ways that he has automated parts of his life and his business. And it's really, really cool because this guy

0:34 has an incredible perspective because he has such a large company. But because he helped create this whole automation industry. So if you want to save a bunch of time The stuff is not complicated. I don't know AI that well, and I'm going to implement a ton of the stuff that I've just learned. And by the way, if you're listening to this with audio only, you might want to go to Spotify Video or YouTube to watch this. It has a lot of visuals. You can still get a ton of value on audio, but it's just better, I think, on YouTube. So

1:01 Give it a watch. Give it a listen. And let me know if you dug it. Talk soon. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be But I want to I'll put my lawn in it like a day song on the road, let's travel. So uh I'm thinking about how to introduce you, but basically I met you in two thousand and sixteen or seventeen, something like that, when you spoke at one of my events, and then I asked you to speak at one of my events because you founded and ran a company called Zapier.

1:29 You know, you guys took off before AI was way before it was ever a thing. But you basically, if I remember correctly, you only raised at the time a million dollars, but you got it to nine figures in revenue. and then eventually raise a series A at something like a five billion dollar valuation. Is that about those numbers about right? Close. So the seed round was one point two and then the Five billion number, that wasn't uh that was all secondary. So none of that stuff went on to the balance sheet of the company.

1:59 How much did you guys raise? Was that public? It wasn't we didn't raise anything. We took money. early investors, early employees like got some liquidity from it, but nothing came to the company. How big are you guys now?

2:11 What is the public number? I don't know the n public number. Nine figures is public, though. Nine you're at nine figures in revenue. And uh dude, it just it's it's one of my favorite companies. I never thought in a million years I'd be fired up about such like a dorky product, like connecting APIs, but basically my entire company And everyone I know, our entire company's run off of Zapier. Well, it's it's wild. Like the so the first decade of existence, it that Dorky company thing, like hundred percent true. Like no one cares about workflow.

2:41 Automation is like Like we think it's cool. And there's like definitely people who do think it's cool, but like the Silicon Valley wisdom is You know, raise a bunch of money. Throw bodies at the problem, like blitz scale, go like nuts. Um And so like people like say they

2:56 They cared about automation, but they're Action sort of like betrayed them in a lot of cases, certainly in tech. Um and so we're kind of like a out here doing our thing, not a lot of people sort of in our space. Now you get into the AI world and it's sort of totally inverted, where

3:13 Everyone cares about automation. Everyone cares about AI. Uh and so the market potential for us has just Ballooned enormously. Um but of course there's a lot more players in the space now. Yeah, at the time when I like when you guys were just getting going, it was basically you and maybe one other company doing this. Mm-hmm. Now there's so many more.

3:35 Yeah. And you know, everybody has their angle, their niche, you know, vertical this, vertical that. Um, you know, more dev centric, less dev centric, like yeah, so there's you know, there's just everybody's kinda trying to get a piece of this what is, you know, gonna be You know, a trillion dollar Opportunity. In ten years, how big do you think your company will be in terms of revenue?

3:54 Ten years uh Well Shoot, I think we should be well past uh a billion in ARR if we do our jobs right. Same. And you think you will still not have raised the money?

4:07 Uh I don't think we will. So you're gonna you're gonna be one of the largest one of the larger ever companies that only r I mean I don't know if you still say Bootstrad, but you only I'm you try to uh

4:20 You turn a million dollars into something worth tens of billions of dollars. I mean, that's gotta be one of the more efficient stories ever. Yeah, you know, this is how they used to do it though. Um, you know, if you look at Yeah, Microsoft's and how their uh fundraising trajectory went. If you look at Amazon and their fundraising trajectory, now those companies obviously went public much earlier in their life cycles, but you know, they didn't raise huge gobs of money. Yeah, how much did Google raise? I think they raised like

4:45 Uh Low tens. Yeah, I think it was something like that. Google and Google was a lot. Like Google had a big round I think it was their A or their B that was huge, and people were like, Whoa, this is this is nuts. And nowadays, like Yeah, what the the the AI companies, the the foundation model companies, they'll do like a billion dollar series A.

5:03 Yeah. This is different. So this is different. I wanna ask you about all of that. But Someone like I I've noticed that I had better conversations with people. While we are doing stuff. Um, and that doing stuff is this thing where we basically have asked people like you. So people who run big companies. How many how many employees do you have?

5:28 Seven hundred in change. Okay, so you have seven hundred employees. And you're trying to get everyone to use AI at your company. And you guys are an AI company at this point. You were kind of an AI company a little bit before that was really uh popular. The thing that I wanna do that I've loved uh doing lately is I want you to share your screen and show me how you're using AI and really practical use cases. And you say, that sounds good. And so while you're showing the screen, I might ask you questions about like the background. Of the company and things like that.

5:54 So w I asked you to make a list. You you have a list. One of them suck out, right? You wanna tell me what that was? Well, so the first one, this is like a pretty basic like thing that uh I use day to day, which is like a instant dossier. Um creator. So Uh you know, you can use it for all sorts of things. Like it's handy Uh it's particularly handy when you're sort of like out and about, like you're going to a dinner or you're at an event.

6:18 And you got a list of names, or you're sitting down and there's name tags everywhere and you're like, okay, who are these people? Uh and so that use case, uh, you know, I usually just like feed Claude uh some details on the the person and then Uh Claude will just return like a quick little dossier that includes You know, public details about the person, but also like what's going on. Like are they a customer? Is there any details in our HubSpot account? Like is there anything that Zoom Info can tell me? Uh just to qu kind of just like get some quick hitters to be like, Hey, is there something I can sort of talk to this person about? It's sort of like you've ever watched Veep. Uh uh Selena has like Yeah, like has Gary in her ear, like, you know, just saying like these things. And so you kinda get like your own little version of this.

7:00 And so do you do a lot do you do a lot of these dinners with customers and potential investors, things like that? Uh but the cool thing about this one is you can use it in all sorts of ways. So You know, if you're just sitting in your home office and you've got a string of meetings coming up You can do it for all the people that you're about to meet that day. If you've got um Leads coming in on your website.

7:21 And you want to go enrich those and send those over to your sales reps, you can do the same thing. So like this process works in all is applicable in all sorts of different scenarios. And mostly what you're doing is you're just sort of like amending how you utilize it based on the the situation you're at.

7:40 Cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible, but that's exactly what Sandler training did with HubSpot. They use Breeze, HubSpot's AI tools to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch. And the results were incredible. Click through rates jumped twenty five percent. Qualified leads quadruple. And people spent three times longer on their landing pages.

8:04 Go to hubspot.com to see how breeze can help your business grow. So I can maybe do a a screen share on this. Yeah. You know, Claude I do a the the thing I love about Claude is Claude has um tools connected. And so uh the Zapier MCP server is available here and you can see

8:25 Uh, you know, if you click into here, like you can connect all these different things, but Yeah, with Zapir you have access to eight eight thousand different tools. And so I can just like turn on all sorts of different tools to to use within um Claude, so Uh, for example, you can see here we've got eight tools turned on, but basically these tools are a series of hub spot.

8:45 Um Capabilities like finding contact information, finding company information, finding deal information. And zoom info in points. So like finding again contact information and finding company information. And the other thing you can do inside of Claude is you can make Projects?

9:02 So I don't know if you've used projects before, so I've used it with Chat GPT. It's like I have a health project, I have like a therapist project, I have like a business project. There you go. So you can assign These tools Like to or you can give these projects like certain system prompts to like help them do a certain task. And so within a pr one of the projects I have. it basically sort of coaches it on how to do like uh contact information uh for me where I'm like, hey, make these these dossiers for myself.

9:32 So um we can actually use the I actually made a quick one for us, which is this my first million demo, and I have like a I got a buddy who's uh gonna be cool if I use them's uh their their name on this stuff. So Tell me more about Lars from Social puppy.

9:51 And so what was in that file that you uploaded? So I didn't upload any files. Basically What this chat has access to is it's got access to the Zapier HubSpot account. And then it's got access to our Zoom info account and then it knows

10:09 my like system instructions, which basically say, Hey, uh step one is Look up the contact and company inside a HubSpot. Step two is Look up Information inside a Zoom info. Step three is Go find anything.

10:23 on the web. to to go do this. Now you might have seen there were some errors popping up here. This is one of the the tricky things about uh MCP and Claude right now is that It's still a little buggy. Like MCP is Technically like a it's been out for like maybe

10:39 I don't know. two or th their tool stuff has been out for maybe two or three months. And so it mostly works. What does MPC stand for? And what is MPC?

10:49 Yeah, MCP is called monol contacts protocol. So effectively what this is is a Way for Agents. To talk to

11:00 Data. So You know in the old world We would have APIs. Where

11:06 Yeah. You would say, Hey, I wanna talk to the Gmail API or wanna talk to The HubSpot API or the Slack API. And these were ways for like SaaS companies to talk back and forth to each other. And so that protocol works really well for

11:20 Disaster. Tools. With Agents. They don't exactly

11:25 know how to utilize like all those API endpoints. And so MCP is basically this layer that sits in the middle. That helps them go find different tools that they can go use. And then uh Take advantage of them. So unfortunately right here you can see this one is

11:43 Uh Oh it it worked. Um but the cool thing you can see is It's iterating over a bunch of different Endpoint. So it's saying, Hey, this didn't work. Um, let me try a more direct approach. Okay, that didn't work. So this is Claude trying to figure out How to go do this task. They're like, Hey, I you know

12:00 I'm not exactly sure I've got access to a bunch of different tools. Some of these things might work, some of these things may not work. And then at the end It'll spit out. information on it. So it pulls up, you know, LinkedIn URL. You can see that

12:14 Lars is a product manager at Zapier. Uh he's got you know, he's hanging out in Vancouver. You can see all the different things that sort of we know about them and then Social Puppy happens to be his Side gang. Uh it's this uh way for people who own dogs to to do meetups. Together.

12:30 Of course, he's not paying for HubSpot, so you know they took a look at HubSpot and was like, Yeah, there's no deal associated with this, um, for for Lars. Do you see what it says? It said colleagues describe him. Where wait, what was that? Colleagues describe him as what is it? As having incredible drive, enthusiasm for the goals, yep. Okay, and he's known for being fun and energetic. That's cool. Okay. And I would say that that's act knowing Mars, I would say That's accurate, yeah.

12:58 So when you're going to uh let's say you have a work dinner, let's say you're you're flying like uh uh to a different city and you want to meet with like ten customers and just like host like a cool hang with them to get to know them, let's say they're big customers, would you just upload all six of the names and then just Tell it like make this in note card format or I mean how would you do it? Well, okay, so Uh I wanna show off some something separate. So if I was doing that, I would actually do

13:26 This is an internal tool that we built. Now This that I was just showing off, this is kind of for like basic on demand stuff. Yeah. So you can see Like it it did a good job, but

13:39 You know, if I'm trying to show up to like a dinner and I know who's gonna be there in advance. I wanna come in. Well equipped. Like I don't want to do this sort of like on the fly sort of thing. I want to come in having done my research. So we built an internal tool. This is

13:56 A company brief generator. Now use it as zap your interfaces. So this is like a pretty easy thing to to build. And then What it does is you put in a domain name. So you could put in Netflix or Shopify or Slack or whoever. You know, you're meeting somebody from this company. And then what this does is it goes and retrieves information from three sources.

14:15 So one It pulls from A web search. So just goes and finds like what what do we know about this company? Based on what's on the internet.

14:25 Two It does a glean search. So we use this tool called Glean internally, which is like uh an internal Like Google, you can think of it. It'll go search all your sort of like internal stuff.

14:38 Glean is basically I've been trying to use it. It's you just log in. Uh to everything. And then it makes yeah. Okay. And so it'll search like Slack and Google Drive and Yeah, all the tools you give it access to.

14:51 So we'll do a clean search. And then the third thing it will do. Is it will hit our actual Customer database. Well

15:00 A a replica of it in Databricks. and help understand like what usage is going on inside the company. Then on the other side. It spits out a report. And so I actually did

15:12 Hampton. Before this call. Oh my God. Let me see. Alright, you wanna see it? And who's gonna be using this? And and at your company, what roles are using this? Everybody uses this internally.

15:22 So if you're customer facing at all, you will do this. So it doesn't have like a crazy amount of information on on Hampty, but you can see here The Company summary. So this is like public pulling a bunch of like public Data on it.

15:39 Now I did some like research on it and it's it's sort of correct. Like I'm betting you're spotting things here that you're like oh that's not quite right. I think the goal of having this if if you're If your intention is to connect with me at a dinner or something like that, like you have

15:53 ammo there. Exactly. And that's what I'm getting out of this. I'm not you know, like uh I like I looked up before, like it doesn't look like Jordan is the CEO anymore, right? So That's a thing where I'd be like, Okay, you know, I probably don't want to talk about that, but there's, you know, this oh, it's a membership community. It's in New York, like You know, here's some things that I can, you know, riff with you on. You know, it pulls up a bunch of information then. You can see here's our glean summary.

16:18 Where it's got, you know, more issues about like what's going on with the account and things like that. And so, you know, maybe there was a payment issue with you all at some point in time. That is so awesome. Yeah, and so I can be prepared where I'm like, if you come up to me and you're like Wade, like you really screwed me over in twenty twenty four. Like uh I I can be like, Yeah, hey, I'm really sorry about that. Here's what we did to fix this, we did this, this, this, and this And all of a sudden you're like, Okay, Wade's really on top of it. Like I feel better about, you know

16:46 Zapier as a as a vendor. Uh versus like, you know, if if I didn't have this and you were just like Wade I'm still pissed about what happened in December and twenty two four and I'm like, um What happened? Like I don't I don't know what happened.

16:59 And so now you're like, Man, he doesn't even know what's going on in his own company. And so you have a tool like that and then Lastly. It didn't actually pull much, so I don't know how much usage is going on here, but for companies that are really using Zapier. The visualizations area pulls up

17:14 A whole bunch of metadata about how their account as being used. So I can see like Oh, you know, they use Slack and HubSpot and Google and they're using AI or not using AI in the account. Here are the users that are using it. All that sort of stuff. Well who built this?

17:30 I think it was like one of our uh Data analysts built this tool. On like Replit or something? Uh no, this is mostly just a zap. So it's

17:42 You know, a zapier interface. So you put in a domain name, then there's a zap that goes out and it hits those three Area so it hits uh Does a web search, probably a step one. It does a glean search at step two, and then it does an internal search on our data breaks instance at step three. And then the output is an HTML file.

18:01 What would I Google to find the landing page that allows me to make this? So we have uh a bunch of templates that you can check out. So zapper.com uh template slash use cases. This has like a bunch of places where you can go figure out how to do versions of the this for yourself. So like anything under lead management is gonna give you like great examples for ways to like build a version of this for yourself. And then the second place you can check out is we have this

18:30 This project but it's product called agents. Which is in beta, but it has its own templates. Which these are pretty slick as well, too. So you can you know, company research is the number one thing here. So you can go build a version of this. to to help you with company research.

18:45 Have you seen uh on the office they um They show like uh I guess Michael stole Dwight's notes on his customers, but he'd forgot how to like he didn't know how to like read'em. And he's like, Oh, uh I see you, uh From uh PA, right?

18:59 And uh you have a gay son, right? Well and they're like weird. It's like green is color coded green is color coded to mean this, to mean this, which means stop. You're just oh man. Hold up. Just a a a really quick break. I know you're watching this and you're thinking this is a ton of information. Our producer, Ari, she just listened to the entire episode and she wrote out all the important stuff. So if you want to go and implement a lot of these workflows or whatever you wanna call them. She wem all out.

19:29 And so you can use the QR code on the screen or there's a link below in the description. You can click that. And you should still watch and listen to the rest of the episode, but The thing that she made, it's a PDF and it has uh everything written out. So you just click and link off to all the important great stuff.

19:45 Alright, back to the episode. Oh, yeah, what's the second one?'Cause you have a bunch here. Yeah, so the um we could go to the agents manning the inbox one or there's another even more basic one. Like how basic do you want to get? You try, baby. I like I'm basic. I'm pretty I I I'm a I'm a I'm a huge noob when it comes to this thing. So

20:05 Here's one that I do all the time. Alright, so what's this use case? I Yeah, if you're if you run a company, you probably get Like a Google Doc.

20:15 Like of a business review or a strategy memo or something like that shared with you all the time. And you're trying to figure out like What's going on in this thing? And You know, the use case that I like to do is I like to just talk to like just go back and forth with ChatGPT to try and better understand this. So I didn't want to share

20:36 our own internal stuff. So I actually pulled the uh some of you might have seen this, like Mr. Beast put out this like uh leaked had this l leaked memo of like how they do their production stuff. So I figured we could just Yeah, so for the viewer, um, about a year ago, Mr. Beast the famous YouTuber. He has a production company. he has like a fifty or a hundred page document that sort of breaks down how he wants his team to behave in different situations. So like for example, one famous thing is he was like, I want you to hire a consultant. Consultants are amazing. They'll like save you time. Whatever. I want you to post this many videos. So he like had the outline for the company processes and culture.

21:12 So here's what I like to do. I like to give it to ChatGPT, basically tell it what it is. I like to say it's a rough draft. And then I want it to uh succinctly Describe Back to me.

21:27 What is in the dock. So I mostly just don't want it to I don't want it to like put its opinion on it. So you know, you'll do that and then you know, it kinda describes back to you like, okay, here's what it is. Yeah, the Corb philosophy What makes a YouTube video go viral?

21:45 You know, it kinda just goes through the doc a little bit, but it's kinda it's kinda generic. So I'm like, hmm, like I don't I don't know that I love this, so then I might just say like hey, be a hundred X, you know, more specific. And I stole that from This uh woman who's the runs product at Woop. Hillary.

22:06 Uh, I saw a YouTube video where she did this and I found that to be like Okay, now you start to get like, all right, a lot of really good nitty gritty details inside of this. Where you can see What's going on, and all the while You know, for Zapier internal.

22:21 Stuff. I I'm able to now try and get a better sense of like what is this team trying to tell me? So when would you use this? So and you're using the Mr Beast one as an example, but give me uh a realistic uh like so you're with within your company. You know, sh uh maybe I'll give you an example. Like we're trying to decide should we launch A voice agent or not.

22:46 Right, hypothetical thing. And some product team will say Hey, I want to go r make a case for it. And they'll write up a strategy memo to say, here's why we should or shouldn't do this stuff. Now if there are like really good at making their case. They'll

23:00 Have You know. qualitative data to support their evidence. They'll have quantitative data to support their evidence. They'll have multiple options for like how to go tackle this. You know, we could go Rou, we could go route B, we could do, you know, a hacky version. Here's what like the all in version looks like. And then they'll have their like strong recommendation for how to go do this stuff. Yeah.

23:23 That's like what I great like strategy memo looks like to me. But Not everyone like sort of comes in and does that. And they don't always tee up the information in the way that like I am best at interpreting it.

23:36 And so I will usually start by reading the raw document myself. So that way I like, okay, I I understand what the team is trying to say. In their own words. Then I'll upload it. Like this to chat GPT.

23:50 And start going, Okay, what does ChatGPT think about this stuff? to start to augment it and get like a a thought partner. On What am I gonna sort of try and what what types of questions should I ask the team? You know, what types of things am I trying to get at?

24:04 Uh at the end of the day. Got it. Okay. So that's how I end up using This But the the interesting question is like you kinda ask it a couple of questions like this. And so Chat GPD starts to get a warm up and then

24:18 You ask it like the real questions. The one hundred times more specific one. That's a really good hack. Another good hack that I use is I will tell chat GPT. the problem I'm trying to solve and what I think the prompt should be. And then I just say, now write the prompt for me. Totally.

24:35 Yeah, meta prompting, right? You're like I need a prompt to do X. Yeah. And so this is like the the the way that I see like some of the the people that I'm like, holy cow, you're like really using chat GPT or like using these tools exceptionally well. is they don't just like ask their question right away. They usually ask like

24:55 These warm up questions. Where they're trying to like gather a bunch of context, get a bunch of specific information going. And then Once they sort of have

25:06 Enough of like things in memory for ChatGPT, then they start asking like the real things they want to know, which is like where are my blind spots? But the blind spot question is Uh So let's say that you're using the voice AI. So you're saying where are

25:21 Wades blind spots and deciding if this is a good idea. Is that what you're saying? Well, basically, you know, because I'm presenting it as my own idea, uh It and then when I ask where is the blind spots sorry, I'm scrolling really fast. I'm pretty sure it's a lot of it. I understand what you're thinking. The author Where's the team's yeah. Where's the team's blind spots? Got it. Okay. Yeah. And you know, as you read through this now, so like if I was, you know

25:45 uh Mr. Beast and I was going through the blind spots you would say, Oh, okay, interesting. Role specific guidance. Yeah, there are different roles inside the team, so should I add like you know, training that's specific to different roles, or should I not? You know, there's no feedback system for creative feedback. Do I care about that or not?

26:05 And now when I asked this blind spot question. I don't find that like There's usually one or two things that chat GPT will catch where I'll go, Oh yeah, that's a good one. And then there will be a bunch of things while I'll be like nah I I I'm good. Like that that's not an actual blind spot. Like that's not real. Like we'll we'll be fine with that.

26:23 And so it's Like I find this just like simple back and forth to be like good at just catching stuff. Like it just catches like simple errors that are obvious. Um it doesn't do the work for me. doesn't do the thinking for me, but it just it augments it. It's like just having a thought partner there that can help you.

26:42 navigate any of the sort of tricky decisions that you're they're you're talking to. Other good warm up questions. You had the you had a good one, which was the meta prompt. The second thing that you can do is Just blab a bunch of context to it.

26:59 So a lot of folks use Things like uh Super Whisper or Whisperflow. You talk to it. You talk to it. Yeah. I love that. Yeah.

27:08 My co founder goes on like long walks with his dog. And he will literally just talk back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And then he'll take the transcript Of that. And then input that and say, Hey, based on all of this.

27:23 Now I want you to go. Right. a strategy memo on XYZ thing versus saying, Hey, just write the strategy memo on this. Can you actually walk Walk me through that. You know, I I take I'm like a history buff. And I like go for walks with AI with Chat GPT and like we're just conversing about World War Two.

27:41 Uh and like it it's so funny that like I It's great. Like I'm like, Wait, so why do they do this? And how did these people react to that? Like that's like I have my I have like a historian who I have conver conversations with. Obviously using it this way is significantly more productive. Can you walk me through Uh

27:59 his conversation with that. Like is it on Chat GPT and then Does he say like at the end now transcribe all of this? He I see, I'm trying to think how he does it. So you if you talk to ChatGPT, it does give you the transcript. And so I suspect he'll just take the transcript out of it. I maybe he uh he might have it he might actually just tell it like, Hey, give me the whole transcript of this conversation in JSON format or something like that, because he's an engineer and he likes stuff in JSON and he'll be able to do something. More sophisticated with it.

28:31 And then upload it back into The next prompt. Got it. Okay. This is awesome. So good ways to um warm up questions. So

28:40 Uh I like the meta prompt. You like um be a hundred X more specific. Another one that I like to do that I think people a lot of it. Describe it back to me. Oh, that's a good one. So you'll say, Describe it back to me.

28:53 I'd like to say Before we get into it. If there's any questions that you think you need answered, so you have full context, please ask them now. Yep. I do that as well. That's a hundred percent a great one. Like I I have a really long running

29:09 Chat GPT. Project. around like my personal health and wellness. And so there's a whole bunch of stuff. I don't know.

29:19 And Health and wellness space. And so I'll just take exports of like I have a workout app that I have and I'll just like upload the outputs of that. I have like a sleep app and I'll upload that and I'm like, here's a bunch of stuff. data on me.

29:36 You know, I wanna know how to improve my overall health and wellness. But Tell me if I can give you more information. Thank you Gives you better up.

29:44 Better suggestions for me. Yeah. Dude, this is awesome. So you've basically like this whole episode it's turning into like a thing where it's like, How can you save me twenty or thirty hours per week? Yeah. You you've done a good job so far of of saving time. What are a few other um ways that you're using this stuff? So Zapper agents is another one that's interesting to go give a try to. So most people when they talk about agents.

30:09 They are usually talking about Like chat agents. where you're going back and forth with ChatGPT or you're going back and forth with Claude. What's different about Zapier agents is these are fully automated agents. Like these are things where you can say, Hey I want you to just go do this job for me.

30:26 Always. So for example Let's make an agent that replies to your email. Uh

30:34 And actually I don't want it to reply to my email because I'm a little scared. That it might Reply in a way that is not up to my standard. So what I actually want you to do is

30:44 Make Drafts. For my emails. So I'm just gonna do like a really basic thing here, which is let me start from scratch here. So you can just do like new agent here. And we're just gonna do a custom agent. We're just gonna like do like just kinda blab into this box here.

30:59 So What is this? This is Zapier uh This is Zapier agents. Um and so It has access to All of Zapier's tools. And it has access to Zapier's trigger infrastructure, meaning These agents wake up.

31:15 based on all the events that might happen in your world. So if you get a new email, you get a new lead. You get a new uh customer, you have a new project come in, like all the things that you can think about that happen and all the SaaS tools you use in your software, you can use that. to wake up your agent and have the agent go do something. So in this case

31:32 We're gonna use uh Gmail any time you get a new email to wake this agent up,'cause then we want that agent To go Uh reply to the email. So we're gonna just do some a really basic prompt. This is not a prompt you would actually use, but I wanna show off how this works. So you would say, hey

31:49 Uh any time I get a new Email. Uh write a draft. Reply. For me.

31:58 So this is like super basic. Um And we're gonna see what this thing goes and does. So you can see You know, building these agents takes a little bit of effort.

32:10 Um to do it, but you get this co pilot that starts to like suggest Like okay. We're getting ready to go build this agent with you. Uh I'm gonna I'm gonna help you make this workflow. But

32:22 I need some more details. So that question you were saying, Sam, which is like, hey, ask me more qu questions to help me make this better, like it's baked into the experience here. 'Cause we know that like when you say, Hey Anytime you get a new email, write a draft reply for me. If that's what you're going with, like you're probably not gonna actually have a great agent. Like you need to provide these agents with tons of details. to actually make it good. So

32:46 You know, it's asking me like what email service do you r use? I'm like, Oh, I I use Gmail for my email. Um Two. I want you to save it as a draft. Reply inside Gmail.

33:03 And then reply content. What should the draft reply include? Um You know, it should It's like, hmm, I don't know, like what should it include? Like I get a lot of different types of emails. That's interesting.

33:16 It's like email filtering. Should this apply to all new emails? Only emails from specific So it starts to ask you questions, it start to make you think. Yeah, so maybe like uh Only internal uh only my co workers or something. Yeah, well so I was thinking Actually, I don't want it to draft a reply to every email. What I really want it to do is

33:34 Uh reply to everyone that is asking about a job. It's happier. Uh,'cause I get a lot of people that are emailing me and saying, like, I'd love to work at Zapier. Uh this would be an amazing thing. Uh It's basically just like a like a super smart vac like um Yeah, like when I go on vacation. Yeah, you used to have like these autoresponders, but they were like all those autoresponders were like pretty dumb.

33:59 Dude, and this is great because like we get You know, for M F M, we get dozens a day of people wanting to come on the podcast. And it ruins my inbox. Yeah. All right. Okay. So now here we're going, right? So it's starting to build the actual prompts for the agents.

34:18 You know, when a new email is received in Gmail, analyze the content to determine if the sender is asking about a job or a career opportunity. Look for keywords like job, career, position, hiring, application, blah blah blah. So like we're making it it's actually making a really good Prompt for ourselves. So now I start to go, ah, this is interesting. So I can come in and edit this directly. Uh yeah, thank'em for their interest in Zapier. Yeah, I like that. Uh direct them to the career page. Yep, that sounds great. Um mention that they can find current opera uh openings and apply directly through the career page. Yep, I like that.

34:50 Keep the tone welcoming and professional. Um I like that okay, but you know, what I really wanted to do is Um rub'em the wrong way. With no big

35:02 Uh you know. Let's see. I want him to be polite. But Really brief.

35:12 'Cause I find that these agents like get really wordy. And that's not how I write an email. Like I do really short email where I'm like, Hey, thanks for thanks for checking us out. Did you check out the jobs page? You know, maybe I actually should ask him, maybe and say th thank'em for their interest in Sapier. And ask if they've Already applied. For a job.

35:32 Something like that. Yeah. Um, if I was being really fancy, what I could do Is say I want you to actually go look

35:40 Insider applicant tracking system. And go. That's crazy. If they've already replied. Yeah. So you could do something like that.

35:49 Uh save this as a draft reply in Gmail so you can you know, re you and send it manually. If the email is not job related, take no action, right? Uh that's really important. Like I do not, you know, I do not want you writing draft emails for I don't know, a customer.

36:06 So there you go. And I'm be like, hmm, all right. So this feels pretty good here. I like this. So you know go test the agent. and and turn it on. Uh and so it'll go in now and look at my own inbox and see Yeah, hey, do I have Anybody that is asking for a job in my inbox right now. And I actually cleaned out my inbox before this, so it's probably not gonna find anything, which is why.

36:30 There was a problem testing this agent here. How hard has it been to encourage I guess your I mean, your company's very technical, but how hard has it been to encourage your staff to really embrace this stuff? So for us. I think we have it better than the marginal company because we're an automation company. Like our employees nerd out over this stuff. We have a company value that's

36:51 Don't be a robot. Build a robot. So we're literally trying to teach people that automation is a core primitive. But even for us. There still is a learning cur curve. Like, yeah, we employ a bunch of engineers, but Yeah, we have accountants on staff and HR folks on staff and

37:07 Yeah, folks that You know. Probably haven't by default been exposed to this stuff as much. And so we really do make it our mission to

37:18 Help. People Help make this technology a lot more accessible. So like you could see when we were building this agent, like we're just assuming that somebody's gonna come in. And do a bad prompt.

37:30 Like we just know that because most people don't come in breaking the problem down step by step by step by step butt like this. Do you have like an a a full like you you you know, at seven hundred people You almost need like a five person team and it's like all I'm going to or Or do you just send him a bunch of YouTube channels? I don't know. Like how do you train because the shit changes every three weeks.

37:52 We had A wake up call. When Chat GPT launched. Because we were like, Holy cow.

38:00 R roadmap. And how we are operating the company. It needs to shift like і's so much more opportunity. And candidly threats to our business if we are not paying attention to this stuff. And so we did a

38:14 A f handful of things that has gotten our Usage of AI From effectively zero. To now Just shy of a hundred percent. The last time we r we did uh

38:26 stats on it, we were right around ninety percent of our employees using this stuff daily. And so the three things were first. We call the code red. And we did a hackathon where I stopped the company for an entire week. And I said.

38:40 I don't care what job you're in. You know, if you're In HR accounting or support or sales or engineering, we're all gonna press pause. For the whole week. We're gonna go build stuff with AI.

38:51 You know, if you're engineer, maybe you're gonna build a feature for our products. If you're in recruiting, maybe you're gonna go see how you could use chat GPT to Right. Job descriptions or

39:04 Yeah, how you could do basic research. You know, this is two twenty twenty Three, I think, right. So It's pretty basic stuff back then. So That was really important for people to just start to get familiar with the tooling.

39:18 Then from there. At the end of the hackathon, we did show and tell. So we said, Hey, everybody's gotta show off what they built. That Does two things. One, it promotes accountability.

39:28 So people are actually gonna take this stuff seriously because they gotta show it off to their teammates. Two, it also promotes knowledge sharing. Because now you get to see how other people do this stuff. And I have found that that's been the most impactful for my own learning. It's like, oh, tell me what prompt you did there. Like show me how you did that.

39:45 Um Because there's just like a bunch of people out there that are like constantly experimenting and nerding out on this stuff in ways that I just simply don't have time. on my hands to look like try all this stuff. So I benefit a lot from just like watching how other people Um

40:01 are are using this stuff. Then The second thing we did is we said We're gonna go do these hackathons. Every so often.

40:10 So about every three to six months. we do it again. Now we don't do it for a full week. Usually we just do a day or two. But that gets people to keep coming back. To the watering well to see what's changed, what's new. And that helps again.

40:25 People get like refresh their mental model of what these models are capable of and what the tools are capable of. So awesome, man. This is so awesome. All right, so when my employees join Hampton, we have them do a whole bunch of onboarding stuff, but the most important thing that they do is they go through this thing I made called copy that. Copy that is a thing that I made that teaches people how to write better. And the reason this is important is because at work or even just in life, We communicate mostly via text right now, whether we're emailing, slacking, blogging.

40:54 Texting, whatever. Most of the ways that we're communicating is by the written word. And so I made this thing called copy that. That's guaranteed to make you write better. You can check it out. Copy that dot com. I post every single person who leaves a review, whether it's good or bad. I post it on the website and you're gonna see a trend. Which is that this is a very, very, very simple exercise. Something that's so simple that they laugh at, they think, How is this gonna actually impact us and make us write better? But I promise you, it does. You gotta try it at copy that dot com. I guarantee it's gonna change the way you write. Again, copy that dot com. Um do you want to do one more or do do you have one more or no?

41:28 I don't I can't demo this one because it's a lot more sophisticated to demo. But I wanna show like what great can actually look like. I think mostly what I've showed today is candidly like pretty basic starter stuff. But this is where

41:43 If you have a couple people embedded in all your functions inside of a company. You can really start to use AI at a pretty impressive rate. So For example Couple weeks back, like the internet went viral because there was this guy who

41:58 Um had been hired by a bunch of different Y C companies. He was he had like five or six jobs at once. Tel Tell that story. So basically, uh I think I forget the guy's name. The guy who started a mixed panel called him out, but he was like Just so you know. I just caught this one employee working for us. And turns out he's had another job. And then like dozens of other companies were like

42:19 Dude, he would for me too. Turns out he got called out. Then he did a podcast where he was like, Yeah, I've been working three to four to five jobs at any given point. I've been doing this for two to three years. And everyone said the same thing, which was he passed the uh he was amazing, like he I thought he was just an amazing employee. And he nailed the job interview.

42:40 And then everyone was like how that that that was the most impressive part, which is how on earth did this guy crushed the interviews so well that he got These positions. So that's the story. Yeah. Yeah. It turns out

42:54 There's a whole subreddit. about this. There's a subreddit called like overemployed. It's crazy. It's crazy. It's it's like I mean hats off to him. Like I think if these people worked that hard at like starting a business or like just even in their core job, I think they would be incredibly successful. These folks obviously have Some unique skills.

43:14 They just employ'em in like, you know Nefarious ways. Yeah. Nefarious ways. It's I've always thought like I think there was um a b uh Freakonomics wrote a book where they like look at drug dealers and like how much work they do and they like it turns out they only make like fourteen dollars an hour for how much work. And like the conclusion was like you guys are You should do normal jobs. You would you make more money and you're clearly very hard working.

43:36 Totally. So what is this? This is a this is a template that I think Would have caught this guy. It's a candidate risk detector. So effectively

43:47 What you do here. is it hooks into things like Ashby, Slack, Veriphone, I p the an IP API. And you run through applicants and then it tries to score their risk. On is this

44:02 Applicant. Potentially fraudulent. And so Effectively, you know, you get an applicant that comes in. It takes the details of what came in from the applicant.

44:13 And then it runs checks on the IP address, phone numbers, and a whole bunch of other metadata. And then it compares them to other applicants to try and spot mismatches or suspicious patterns or things like that. Ten years ago?

44:30 This would have been like machine learning engineers. that are like building this type of stuff. They'd be like You know, y you you really would have like it would have really been tough. To go set this up. But this was built by

44:43 Casey. Who is on our talent team? She just Just part of the talent team. Like that's what she's good at. It's Casey like Frank Agnelli Junior, where you remember the Catch Me If You Can movie where they like he gets he's like a Czech fraudster. And after twenty years it gets caught and the FBI is like, uh hey, do you want a job catching other fraudster?

45:01 So did Casey have like ten jobs and you caught her? No, she didn't. But that would've that would make a better story. Yeah if it if we did. Uh Casey should have done more illegal stuff. Yeah. And so you can see pretty much here like how the the the process, how the template actually works. Do you do does the way your business work so if you scroll up, it's a uh k a k this is a k uh an agent that someone made or do you guys call it agent or templates? Yeah, this is a this is an eight this is actually I mean, you could call it an agent. This is actually just a straight up workflow in this case. Um, but it has AI as part of it.

45:34 So are you guys gonna become a platform where people can sell their Agents that they make. I like that idea. So comments. Yeah, understood. Uh Yeah, I mean that that's a no brainer, you know, is a that's a that's a no brainer. So that would be awesome.

45:51 Uh, and it would eff definitely like blow you guys up. I mean, uh very similarly uh to Microsoft and Shopify, like the platform model, like is is an amazing model. Yeah. And these are the types of templates you could sell, right? The thing like the Yeah, the thing I was showing before about the like email reply thing. It that's that's super simple.

46:10 But this this takes some effort. Like Casey Yeah, she probably Wait. I don't know. I I'd have to ask her, but I would guess this probably took her a couple of days.

46:20 Trying to think through, break it down into all the different steps. You know, find all the tools she needed to To to use But at the other end. You know, it saves our HR team like a huge amount of headaches because now we're like not

46:36 having to go spend time on these candidates that are Yeah, maybe trying to pull one over on us. What what do you call your industry? Automation, like platform automations. So w we think about this as like a AI orchestration at the end of the day. It's like AI orchestration, workflow automation, like AI automation. This is the kind of stuff that like the most

46:59 sophisticated teams are are doing right now. Is there building things like these candidate risk detector for hiring teams. And they're using that to like solve problems that candidly they couldn't solve before. Or like do work that they just couldn't do before. Who who's the biggest in your space? Are you the b are you guys the big guys?

47:18 There are I mean I yeah, we are like it's us, it's um Yeah, Microsoft's got a product that does stuff like this. Yeah, workato that's like Yeah, much. uh has started like much, much, much more enterprise oriented though.

47:33 These days Zapier is like very enterprise oriented as well, too. And then uh yeah, there's a hop can't handful of like small startups that are doing stuff like this as well, too. Dude, this is awesome. I um do you remember what so I used to have this trick, and you're the first uh person who was a victim of this trick that I will admit that this was my trick. So Mm-hmm. I had so uh for years, from the age of like twenty four to like

47:56 twenty eight, I would host this event called HustleCon. Where I would get people like you to come give a talk. And I would lie to everyone. The speakers. I would be like, you know, you you're talking at three o'clock. You have to be there at ten A. Uh mic check and all that stuff.

48:13 And at conferences. There aren't mic checks. The mics the mics work. It's the same mic. It works fine. The reality was is I wanted you to come back stay to just hang out. I wanted to like Not necessarily hang out with me, but I wanted to see Wade talk w I think it was like I was in the room, you were in the room, and then like the founder of the athletic

48:31 And I would just sit and listen to you talk and and just like It was it was very inspiring. Um That was I Think sixteen or seventeen. I forget exactly when.

48:41 And you were there I didn't even have to lie to you, you were there from like eight to seven Two days in a row just sitting on this couch with me. And I don't know if you're doing this this uh the like On purpose, but I'm pretty sure you're the doing the same thing I was doing. And it was awesome because that that I that was the biggest impact I've th probably on my business that I've ever had because or my life, because I remember being with you and the founder of We Work, Miguel and Casey Neistat and all these ballers and I was like Wade might be a little different, but most all these guys they're not

49:11 That much smarter than me. But they're like I was like They're not a thousand times smarter than me, but they're a thousand times more successful than me. Why why does that gap exist? Uh, it's because they are fearful, but they do it anyway.

49:23 Or you know, things like that. And it was very inspirational. Well, I think that's like there's this meme that goes around the internet of like you can just do things. Yeah. I think that that is Like if I could sort of like go back to my former self or just

49:37 Talk to the graduating class or whatever. It's like just do stuff. Like it's like You know, I think most people Are so scared that they're gonna have egg on their face, but usually what happens Is it when you fail? Nobody even noticed.

49:51 Nobody even cares. Like that's what usually happens. And so if you mess up Who cares? Nobody saw it. Like try again. Um and so there's just so much advantage to be had around just like trying stuff. Well, um

50:04 You did just do stuff. You you did the damn thing. So I appreciate you coming here and doing this. Um Uh thank you for being so gracious and and making this happen. You bet. When I come back we'll actually have to do the MFM thing and like jam on business ideas and stuff like that. Uh r r right after we get done hitting uh uh you know off of this we'll we'll get you scheduled. We'll do the second one, right? I'm down. No, I'm uh we're

50:27 Um, all right, God bless. Thank you. That's it, that's the pot. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I put my law in it like my day's off On the road less travel never looking back All right, my friends, I have a new podcast for you guys to check out. It's called Content is Profit. And it's hosted by Luis and Fonzi Cameo. After years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and Orange Theory Fitness, Louise and Fonzie are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue.

50:59 In each episode, you're gonna hear from top entrepreneurs and creators, and you're gonna hear them share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit. So you can check out content is profit wherever you get your podcasts.

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