Latest / Business Brain – The Entrepreneurs’ Podcast / FridAI - Voice, Slack & Markdown

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FridAI - Voice, Slack & Markdown · Business Brain – The Entrepreneurs’ Podcast

• 0:00
  Dave Hamilton: Business Brain, episode 755 for Casual Friday AI for May 22nd,
• 0:08
  Dave Hamilton: Bitcoin Pizza Day, 2026.
• 0:11
  Dave Hamilton: You know what, Bitcoin Pizza Day?
• 0:13
  Shannon Jean: Yeah, a guy that paid like a billion dollars for a.
• 0:17
  Dave Hamilton: Piece of pizza. I think he paid like 40 Bitcoin for a pizza at the time, you know.
• 0:22
  Shannon Jean: Yeah, what's that now? What's Bitcoin, like 60 grand?
• 0:26
  Dave Hamilton: Yeah, 75, that's 75 grand. 75 grand.
• 0:29
  Shannon Jean: That's a lot. Almost, yeah.
• 0:31
  Dave Hamilton: But you don't know what you don't know.
• 0:33
  Shannon Jean: No, no, at the time, it's probably a darn good pizza.
• 0:36
  Dave Hamilton: Yeah, exactly. Made sense. Greetings and welcome to Business Brain,
• 0:41
  Dave Hamilton: the show where you send in ideas, we come up with ideas,
• 0:45
  Dave Hamilton: we crunch them, we dissect them, we use them to help tune our business brains
• 0:51
  Dave Hamilton: so that we can each level up our charmed lives every single week.
• 0:54
  Dave Hamilton: Our sponsors for this episode include bit
• 0:58
  Dave Hamilton: defender.com slash brain where you can save 30 on bit defender ultimate small
• 1:02
  Dave Hamilton: business security and whatnot you just search for whatnot in the app store and
• 1:09
  Dave Hamilton: uh you can you can get free uh shipping on your first order it's such a whatnot
• 1:14
  Dave Hamilton: yeah game changer yeah i know yeah yep
• 1:18
  Dave Hamilton: Crazy. Largest live shopping platform out there.
• 1:23
  Dave Hamilton: And you can download the app and get free shipping. We'll talk more about all
• 1:26
  Dave Hamilton: that in a little bit. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.
• 1:29
  Shannon Jean: And in Northern California, I'm Shannon Jean. Happy to be here. Happy Friday.
• 1:33
  Dave Hamilton: I happy Friday. I indeed. I have a I have a very quick tip to start this episode for Friday.
• 1:39
  Dave Hamilton: I everybody learn Markdown. uh
• 1:43
  Dave Hamilton: markdown okay markdown is a it
• 1:46
  Dave Hamilton: is a language it was actually created by a friend of mine you might even know
• 1:49
  Dave Hamilton: him too john gruber right yeah oh yeah he he wrote it a long time ago because
• 1:54
  Dave Hamilton: he wanted a way of editing for the web that was both human readable and machine parsable
• 2:04
  Dave Hamilton: So okay he didn't want to have to write his his blog he makes a blog called
• 2:09
  Dave Hamilton: daring fireball and a podcast called The Talk Show, very popular among the Apple
• 2:14
  Dave Hamilton: community, developers especially,
• 2:15
  Dave Hamilton: and John's a developer as well.
• 2:17
  Dave Hamilton: And so he didn't want to have to just hand code HTML all the time,
• 2:22
  Dave Hamilton: right? But he wanted a machine to be able to parse whatever he wrote and turn
• 2:27
  Dave Hamilton: it into HTML or whatever the machine, you might want the machine to translate it into.
• 2:32
  Dave Hamilton: But it was essentially built to be human readable and then able to go to HTML.
• 2:36
  Dave Hamilton: So there are, it is, and it is plain text There is there's no like you don't
• 2:41
  Dave Hamilton: highlight bold for formatting for bold.
• 2:43
  Dave Hamilton: You do like pound signs and there's way to organize lists and all these things. It's plain text.
• 2:48
  Dave Hamilton: Very easy for a human to look at and read and it's structured and then also
• 2:52
  Dave Hamilton: very easy for a machine to read and, you know, translate into whatever you want
• 2:55
  Dave Hamilton: to do and display it the way you want to display it. It's really smart.
• 2:59
  Dave Hamilton: Of course, at the time, he did not know that he was writing the language that
• 3:05
  Dave Hamilton: every AI engine was going to prefer.
• 3:10
  Dave Hamilton: All of the robots love it. And the reason the robots love it and the reason you're going to love it.
• 3:17
  Dave Hamilton: Is because it is very low overhead for them to parse through it.
• 3:21
  Dave Hamilton: If you give the robots a Word document, they certainly can parse it.
• 3:25
  Dave Hamilton: They don't always get it right, but they mostly get it right.
• 3:28
  Dave Hamilton: But it costs so many tokens to traverse through all of the structures in a Word document.
• 3:35
  Dave Hamilton: You and I never see the actual code of a Word document, but it is code.
• 3:42
  Dave Hamilton: And it's usually zipped and all these things. it markdown
• 3:46
  Dave Hamilton: is so much less overhead when i
• 3:49
  Dave Hamilton: have the robots create me things they will default to
• 3:52
  Dave Hamilton: markdown when i was doing that whole social media thing
• 3:54
  Dave Hamilton: before before x said you can't do that anymore uh and
• 3:58
  Dave Hamilton: i needed a a way to store everything i thought
• 4:01
  Dave Hamilton: oh google sheet would be great no google sheets were
• 4:03
  Dave Hamilton: disaster because you know it's way too complex and
• 4:07
  Dave Hamilton: it was i asked the robots i'm like what do you want and it was like well what
• 4:10
  Dave Hamilton: about markdown i was like yeah okay that's fine sure you're the one writing
• 4:14
  Dave Hamilton: and reading it you let me know and everything i do now is it's saving all the
• 4:19
  Dave Hamilton: stuff in markdown if you look at like if you use claude co-work or claude code
• 4:23
  Dave Hamilton: uh it will save a claude.md file that yeah always
• 4:27
  Shannon Jean: Always wants to save the md.
• 4:29
  Dave Hamilton: File that md is markdown right so getting good at on and it really this isn't
• 4:35
  Dave Hamilton: going to take you very long just open up a Markdown file and just read it or
• 4:40
  Dave Hamilton: go look at the Wikipedia entry on Markdown.
• 4:42
  Dave Hamilton: It'll explain to you what it is and how it works.
• 4:47
  Dave Hamilton: You're going to save yourself a ton of frustration and token costs by being
• 4:53
  Dave Hamilton: familiar with Markdown.
• 4:55
  Dave Hamilton: Yes, cash, cash, money, token costs, right?
• 4:58
  Dave Hamilton: That's awesome. So Learn Markdown.
• 5:00
  Dave Hamilton: And I'll put a link in the show notes to actually, I'm going to see what the
• 5:05
  Dave Hamilton: Google search for Learn Markdown is because my guess is markdownguide.org.
• 5:10
  Dave Hamilton: Sure, it's not going to be the worst place.
• 5:13
  Shannon Jean: Yeah, yeah. That's great. I have a quick tip, too. If you use Slack.
• 5:20
  Dave Hamilton: One of the
• 5:21
  Shannon Jean: Keys to the kingdom is if you connect your clawed AI to Slack,
• 5:26
  Shannon Jean: it will change your life because you can interact with...
• 5:33
  Shannon Jean: How do I phrase this?
• 5:36
  Shannon Jean: You could just pull so much data out of your Slack conversations and out of
• 5:41
  Shannon Jean: the channels, out of the DMs, out of everything to tell you what's going on
• 5:46
  Shannon Jean: with your business, with your team,
• 5:48
  Shannon Jean: with priorities, with if you have all your employees in there,
• 5:52
  Shannon Jean: what are their number of problems you're dealing with over and over and over.
• 5:55
  Shannon Jean: And I have it in a cohort that I manage of people, about 20 people.
• 6:00
  Dave Hamilton: Yep.
• 6:00
  Shannon Jean: And I can't keep up with all the data, but I do Slack or not Slack.
• 6:04
  Shannon Jean: I've had Claude do a weekly summary. It's automatic.
• 6:08
  Shannon Jean: It alerts me when it's done. It says, hey, every Friday I pulled everything out.
• 6:12
  Shannon Jean: It creates a document that, you know, here's the whole summary of what's going on in your Slack.
• 6:18
  Shannon Jean: I share that with everybody there.
• 6:21
  Shannon Jean: And it's so powerful because it gives you a breakdown. Here are the wins.
• 6:25
  Shannon Jean: Here's the things people are struggling with. Here's the problems that we weren't
• 6:29
  Shannon Jean: able to solve that are carrying forward.
• 6:31
  Shannon Jean: Here's who the most active has been this week, who's participating the most. Really powerful, man.
• 6:38
  Shannon Jean: So connect your claw to Slack. It's really easy to do. Just ask it and it'll tell you.
• 6:43
  Dave Hamilton: You couldn't possibly have teed up what I want to talk about here in the episode
• 6:50
  Dave Hamilton: any better than you just did.
• 6:51
  Dave Hamilton: I agree with you 100%. hundred percent like this is there's
• 6:56
  Shannon Jean: A but coming.
• 6:56
  Dave Hamilton: No there's not a this is a yes and very much a yes and oh yeah no this is great
• 7:02
  Dave Hamilton: but it is it is the tip of the iceberg so we will talk about the iceberg uh
• 7:06
  Dave Hamilton: in a little bit awesome the next thing that i want to talk about is our sponsors
• 7:12
  Dave Hamilton: We all know that the charmed life favors those who move quickly.
• 7:16
  Dave Hamilton: And right now, live shopping on our sponsor, WhatNot, is exploding.
• 7:21
  Dave Hamilton: The number of sellers making over a million dollars a year on WhatNot has doubled in the past year.
• 7:27
  Dave Hamilton: And that is perfect because Wednesday of this week is Be a Millionaire Day.
• 7:32
  Dave Hamilton: So you've got to get started here.
• 7:35
  Dave Hamilton: I have checked out WhatNot as a buyer. Shannon, I was on there and I found somebody
• 7:40
  Dave Hamilton: that was doing a warehouse sale.
• 7:44
  Dave Hamilton: I understand why you have done what you have done for your career.
• 7:49
  Dave Hamilton: This is like super exciting. All the deals like it's really it's great stuff, man. Like so cool.
• 7:56
  Dave Hamilton: Whatnot is the largest live shopping marketplace in the country?
• 8:00
  Dave Hamilton: Beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury, fashion, even cookies.
• 8:05
  Dave Hamilton: And sellers there make 10 times more than on other major marketplaces.
• 8:09
  Dave Hamilton: Why? Buyers spend over an hour a day in the app building real connections with real sellers.
• 8:17
  Dave Hamilton: I totally get it. It's live. It's engaging. It's great.
• 8:21
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• 8:26
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• 8:28
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• 8:35
  Dave Hamilton: deals go check it out i think you're gonna love it i'm certainly amazed by this
• 8:40
  Dave Hamilton: and our thanks to whatnot for sponsoring this episode
• 8:44
  Dave Hamilton: And as we all know, the charmed life of an entrepreneur is built one client,
• 8:49
  Dave Hamilton: one contract, one late night at a time.
• 8:52
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• 8:58
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• 9:01
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• 9:05
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• 9:09
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• 9:14
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• 9:19
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• 9:23
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• 9:27
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• 9:30
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• 9:35
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• 9:38
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• 9:43
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• 9:48
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• 9:52
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• 9:54
  Dave Hamilton: seeing there. And our thanks to Bitdefender for sponsoring this episode.
• 9:59
  Dave Hamilton: All right, Shannon. So you talked about connecting Slack to Claude,
• 10:04
  Dave Hamilton: which is brilliant, smart.
• 10:07
  Dave Hamilton: Claude came out this past week with Claude for Small Business.
• 10:13
  Dave Hamilton: Ah, yeah, I heard about this. Yeah, it lives inside of Claude Cowork,
• 10:17
  Dave Hamilton: and it is a bundle of pre-built AI agent workflows and skills that plug Claude
• 10:25
  Dave Hamilton: directly into things like Slack,
• 10:28
  Dave Hamilton: But also QuickBooks PayPal HubSpot Google Workspace,
• 10:32
  Dave Hamilton: which is a huge one Microsoft 365 Canva DocuSign So it can help with you know
• 10:38
  Dave Hamilton: all of those things right finance operations sales Marketing all of that stuff
• 10:43
  Dave Hamilton: and it is a toggle on layer inside of those apps you do it via co-work and
• 10:49
  Dave Hamilton: All the automations are there. It is your small business operating system is
• 10:56
  Dave Hamilton: kind of the way that I like to think about this.
• 11:00
  Dave Hamilton: That's awesome. And you just go in. You sign up for your Claude plan.
• 11:06
  Dave Hamilton: You enable Claude for small business.
• 11:08
  Dave Hamilton: And then start with one or two.
• 11:11
  Dave Hamilton: You don't need to turn them all on at the same time. What you described about
• 11:15
  Dave Hamilton: Slack is a great example of this. Like that's a pain point for you and you fixed it.
• 11:21
  Dave Hamilton: All right. Now that you've done one, now the bug is there. And I know that that's not the first one.
• 11:26
  Shannon Jean: Google workspace has got to be huge.
• 11:27
  Dave Hamilton: It's going to be huge. Right. So you just go turn that on and,
• 11:29
  Dave Hamilton: and, you know, start using that.
• 11:31
  Dave Hamilton: Or if it's, if QuickBooks is your pain point, having, you know,
• 11:34
  Dave Hamilton: Claude integrate with that, you know, again,
• 11:37
  Dave Hamilton: do all of this eyes wide open, make sure you understand,
• 11:41
  Dave Hamilton: you know, with QuickBooks, chances are you're, unless you've got things set up in a strange way,
• 11:45
  Dave Hamilton: chances are you're going to be giving Claude the ability to see your business
• 11:50
  Dave Hamilton: finances so you know eyes wide open you may choose that that's okay you may
• 11:54
  Dave Hamilton: choose it's not okay that's okay like whatever you choose it's okay just
• 11:58
  Shannon Jean: Yeah yeah.
• 11:58
  Dave Hamilton: Yeah so yeah yeah
• 12:00
  Shannon Jean: No that's awesome i love it yeah i'm just looking at hubspot uh yeah it's a
• 12:06
  Shannon Jean: job at work for everything's like employee how to get started you just toggle
• 12:09
  Shannon Jean: it on in co-work connect the tools you use pick the job you want done Cloud
• 12:13
  Shannon Jean: doesn't work when you approve it before anything gets sent,
• 12:15
  Shannon Jean: posted, or paid. So you stay in control.
• 12:18
  Shannon Jean: Oh, and they're doing a training.
• 12:20
  Shannon Jean: 10-city tour with free half-day workshops for small business owners,
• 12:24
  Shannon Jean: Chicago, Dallas, Salt Lake, and more.
• 12:27
  Shannon Jean: So you might want to look at... Yeah, it's...
• 12:30
  Shannon Jean: They have a link to a complete setup guide here. If you just ask Claude how
• 12:34
  Shannon Jean: to do it, they'll give you this link.
• 12:36
  Shannon Jean: They've also partnered with PayPal on a free online course called AI Fluency for Small Businesses.
• 12:43
  Dave Hamilton: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 12:45
  Shannon Jean: And there's a setup guide here. Open the link. I'm going to take a look.
• 12:49
  Dave Hamilton: Amazing. That's great.
• 12:50
  Shannon Jean: Yeah. So definitely.
• 12:52
  Dave Hamilton: Oh, you can take the course on demand. Like they're doing this tour, right?
• 12:57
  Dave Hamilton: That started, and like you said, the one closest to you is San Jose,
• 13:03
  Dave Hamilton: but you can do the course on demand right now. Love it.
• 13:07
  Shannon Jean: Payroll planning, 30-day cash forecasting, month-end close accounting,
• 13:11
  Shannon Jean: overdue invoice chasing, marketing campaigns from Hussbot, analysis to Canva,
• 13:16
  Shannon Jean: Monday morning business pulls, covering cash, pipeline of commitments, contracts.
• 13:20
  Dave Hamilton: This is amazing. Yeah.
• 13:22
  Shannon Jean: I love it.
• 13:23
  Dave Hamilton: Yep.
• 13:23
  Shannon Jean: And the course is free.
• 13:25
  Dave Hamilton: Of course. you know, they know where they're going to get their money from you.
• 13:28
  Dave Hamilton: Yeah. Yeah. That's great.
• 13:30
  Shannon Jean: I love it. I love it. Yeah. That's just great. I'm looking forward to this. Um,
• 13:34
  Shannon Jean: It's great. Like you said, you got to be careful. You want to go and do it smart.
• 13:38
  Shannon Jean: Think about it. But it certainly makes your life much easier.
• 13:40
  Dave Hamilton: I think it's awesome. I think it's great too. Yeah. I think it's good.
• 13:44
  Dave Hamilton: It's just every three months things are, it's a whole new world. Yep.
• 13:50
  Shannon Jean: Hey, real quick before we go. Last week we talked about, and I talked about
• 13:56
  Shannon Jean: using the X, is it XAI or Grok?
• 14:00
  Dave Hamilton: Not Grok. I think it was XAI voice cloning, right?
• 14:03
  Shannon Jean: XAI voice cloning. So, yeah, so I did the clone. I just want to read something.
• 14:07
  Shannon Jean: I got back after sharing that clone of my voice. It says, it sounds like you
• 14:12
  Shannon Jean: got about 20 years older and you went to old broadcaster school and spent way
• 14:17
  Shannon Jean: too much time learning how to soften your sibilance.
• 14:20
  Shannon Jean: I don't even know what that word is, Dave, but you do.
• 14:24
  Dave Hamilton: I wrote that.
• 14:25
  Shannon Jean: Yes, yes.
• 14:27
  Dave Hamilton: It's listening further.
• 14:28
  Shannon Jean: It's quite robotic.
• 14:29
  Dave Hamilton: Let me play it if that's okay.
• 14:32
  Shannon Jean: So yeah, it's a first run at cloning my voice. Yeah. So we'll see how this sounds. Yeah.
• 14:38
  Dave Hamilton: Let's see what happens. Yeah.
• 14:39
  Shannon Jean: We'll see. We'll see. Small business owners are heroes. This is one of my favorite t-shirts.
• 14:45
  Shannon Jean: The shirt celebrates entrepreneurs and small business owners.
• 14:49
  Shannon Jean: These people are heroes and I will fight anyone who disagrees.
• 14:54
  Shannon Jean: Here is why you should use the hero framework. So that's a post.
• 14:59
  Shannon Jean: I just dragged it in after I cloned my voice. So clearly you've got to tweak that a bit.
• 15:03
  Dave Hamilton: But the part that, and the first thing I noticed was your voice just sounded older. Yes.
• 15:11
  Shannon Jean: I actually pushed the middle-aged button because I'm like, well,
• 15:14
  Shannon Jean: I'm middle-aged. Yeah, of course. Come on. But I shouldn't have done that.
• 15:17
  Dave Hamilton: You have a youthful energy that it took away. Yes, it did. And then instead
• 15:23
  Dave Hamilton: of saying S's, you were saying S's, right? You know, because that's the whole thing.
• 15:29
  Dave Hamilton: Like, that's fine. Yes. But where it really was interesting to me was that part
• 15:34
  Dave Hamilton: where you were like, and I will fight anyone who disagrees with me.
• 15:38
  Dave Hamilton: It was so level and even keeling.
• 15:41
  Shannon Jean: Yeah, super level.
• 15:42
  Dave Hamilton: But it sounded like you were being paid to read an audio book,
• 15:48
  Dave Hamilton: right? That's interesting.
• 15:49
  Dave Hamilton: And it sounded great for that. So there's hope here.
• 15:54
  Shannon Jean: It was very, I thought it was interesting. I'm going to go tweak it because
• 15:56
  Shannon Jean: it was my first, I only spent five minutes doing it. I had to buy some tokens, of course.
• 16:01
  Shannon Jean: And then I ran it through things. So I'm going to tweak it.
• 16:04
  Shannon Jean: We'll get some more samples for you. But if you've played around with it,
• 16:09
  Shannon Jean: with XAI voice cloning, I'd love to hear from you.
• 16:11
  Dave Hamilton: Yeah.
• 16:12
  Shannon Jean: Business Brain, no, feedback at businessbrain.show is the email.
• 16:16
  Shannon Jean: That's how you reach us. You can also reach us on X, my name or Dave's name.
• 16:21
  Shannon Jean: And we'd be glad to give you some feedback.
• 16:24
  Dave Hamilton: I have a question for you Shannon what's this episode's big take away
• 16:31
  Shannon Jean: I think the big takeaway is connection.
• 16:35
  Dave Hamilton: Oh, yeah.
• 16:37
  Shannon Jean: Using these AI tools with your existing platforms and connecting them together.
• 16:43
  Shannon Jean: The more I get spread out on all these apps and services, the more I want one
• 16:47
  Shannon Jean: dashboard. Yep. And I'm hoping that we're headed that way.
• 16:51
  Dave Hamilton: I like it. Yep. Yep. I would agree with that. Connect, connect, connect, connect.
• 16:56
  Dave Hamilton: Leverage, leverage, leverage. It still remains the best, not the best,
• 17:03
  Dave Hamilton: a great assistant that is available 24-7.
• 17:07
  Dave Hamilton: And I still think that that's the way to treat this.
• 17:10
  Dave Hamilton: It is not something that you could just set up to be autonomous and never check its work. I agree.
• 17:16
  Dave Hamilton: It's not there yet. It will be. And for some people, it is already.
• 17:21
  Dave Hamilton: But they've spent a lot of time building that system to do a specific thing.
• 17:27
  Dave Hamilton: But that's okay. You know, so yeah,
• 17:30
  Shannon Jean: Yeah, It's good for them. It's great. I agree. It's a great time to be alive.
• 17:32
  Dave Hamilton: It is an amazing time to be alive. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks.
• 17:36
  Dave Hamilton: Make sure, like he said, go to businessbrain.show slash review and feedback
• 17:41
  Dave Hamilton: at businessbrain.show so we can hear from you and share your stuff.
• 17:45
  Dave Hamilton: Keep on living that charm life. We'll see you next week, folks.
• 17:49
  Shannon Jean: See ya.