Latest / The SmallBizChat with Melinda Emerson / How to Leverage AI Strategically to Grow Your Business with Clarence Wooten

Transcript

How to Leverage AI Strategically to Grow Your Business with Clarence Wooten · The SmallBizChat with Melinda Emerson

• 0:00
  Three, two, one, zero.
• 0:04
  Ignition.
• 0:06
  Lift off.
• 0:09
  Ending small business failure.
• 0:11
  Welcome to the Small Biz Chat podcast with the number one small business expert, Melinda
• 0:17
  Emerson.
• 0:18
  Melinda's goal is to end small business failure, and she'll give you the information
• 0:23
  you need to succeed and live the life you dream of.
• 0:26
  Now here's your host, the small biz chat lady herself, Melinda Emerson.
• 0:34
  Have you subscribed to the small biz chat podcast?
• 0:37
  Well, it's time.
• 0:38
  Every Wednesday, we offer listeners bite sized actionable tips to start and grow a successful
• 0:45
  small business.
• 0:45
  In just twenty minutes or so a week, you can get a ton of insight and resources to propel
• 0:51
  your business forward.
• 0:53
  Be sure to subscribe to the Small Bitch Chat podcast today.
• 0:58
  Have you been thinking about adding agentic employees to your business?
• 1:03
  Co founder Doubt AI could be a great option.
• 1:06
  Build an AI powered team that can help you research, strategize, market, and sell, and
• 1:12
  just get more done.
• 1:14
  Put AI to work in your business.
• 1:16
  Visit cofounder.ai and meet your new digital team.
• 1:23
  Hi, everybody.
• 1:24
  My name is Melinda Emerson, the small biz lady, America's number one small business expert.
• 1:30
  And I'm so excited to welcome you to another episode of the Small Biz Chat podcast.
• 1:36
  We are the go to destination for entrepreneurs who want to build a profitable business that
• 1:41
  creates freedom, wealth, and lasting impact.
• 1:45
  Now our mission is simple, to end small business failure by giving you the strategies,
• 1:51
  systems, and confidence to succeed as your own boss.
• 1:55
  Every week, you'll hear from inspiring conversations with today's top experts,
• 2:01
  successful entrepreneurs, and industry leaders who share practical, real world advice for you
• 2:07
  that you can put into action immediately.
• 2:10
  If you're ready to grow smarter, lead stronger, and build the business you've always
• 2:16
  envisioned, you're in the right place.
• 2:19
  Today, we're talking about how to leverage AI strategically to grow your business.
• 2:25
  But first, before we get started, if you are a fan of the Small Bitch Chat podcast, we invite
• 2:31
  you to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite podcast.
• 2:38
  Now, as always, please, no hate mail.
• 2:41
  Only if you love our podcast will you please give us a review.
• 2:45
  It's important so that we can share this information with other entrepreneurs so they
• 2:50
  can benefit from the valuable guest experts that we have.
• 2:54
  Now, let me introduce my first guest today.
• 2:58
  He is Clarence Wooten.
• 3:00
  He is a serial entrepreneur, technology innovator, and CEO of Co Founder AI, where he
• 3:07
  helps entrepreneurs transform ideas into investor ready startups using AI.
• 3:13
  As a pioneer in digital media and venture creation, he has founded and scaled multiple
• 3:19
  successful technology companies throughout his career.
• 3:23
  Passionate about innovation, Clarence empowers founders to accelerate product development,
• 3:29
  validate business models, and build high growth companies that create lasting economic impact.
• 3:37
  I am so excited to welcome Clarence to the Small Bitch Chat podcast today.
• 3:42
  Hey there.
• 3:43
  Hello.
• 3:44
  Hello.
• 3:45
  Hello.
• 3:45
  How are doing, Melinda?
• 3:47
  Oh my gosh.
• 3:48
  I'm so excited to have you on, Clarence.
• 3:50
  The first thing I wanna do is launch into your entrepreneurial journey.
• 3:56
  Like, what first inspired you to become an entrepreneur?
• 3:59
  I know you would just go over architecture, but what inspired you to become an entrepreneur
• 4:04
  instead?
• 4:05
  You know, I think I knew I was gonna be an entrepreneur from a very early age.
• 4:09
  One, I was that kid in high school who was late to school every day.
• 4:13
  I didn't think homeroom really meant anything.
• 4:16
  So I would get to school just in time for first period.
• 4:20
  So the whole thought of a nine to five just kind of made me ill, even in high school.
• 4:26
  So I always knew I would be an entrepreneur.
• 4:29
  Even in high school, I was an entrepreneur.
• 4:31
  I was a kid in eleventh grade with a business card where I was VP of Apex Designs, which was
• 4:37
  a company a buddy of mine who started who was a couple of years older than me.
• 4:41
  And so, yeah, no, I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur.
• 4:46
  Also, I grew up in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood.
• 4:50
  So a lot of my family, my parents were small business owners.
• 4:55
  They had to be self employed to avoid being underemployed because they were not college
• 4:59
  educated.
• 5:00
  And I had many friends in my neighborhood whose parents were also entrepreneurs.
• 5:06
  And really, really quickly, I realized that was you know, at some point someone told me that
• 5:12
  90% of the population works for 11% controls 90% of the population's wealth.
• 5:20
  So I knew very early I needed to be an employer and not an employee.
• 5:24
  Now prior to starting your latest venture, you actually were able to successfully exit to
• 5:30
  other companies before you kind of jumped in there with Google and then now your own AI
• 5:37
  company.
• 5:37
  Tell us about what that journey was like and how long it sort of took you to kind of go from
• 5:42
  start to exit in both of those instances.
• 5:46
  Yeah, yeah.
• 5:47
  Well, I guess the first successful exit I had was this is going to date me, but it was during
• 5:54
  the original dotcom boom.
• 5:56
  So I was fresh out of undergrad.
• 5:58
  I decided to start a multimedia company.
• 6:02
  We were designing websites for small businesses and small businesses didn't want to pay a lot
• 6:09
  of money for a website because back then they weren't even sure if they would get a return on
• 6:13
  investment.
• 6:14
  So we needed to find a way to sort of scale and service more small business owners in an easier
• 6:21
  way.
• 6:21
  So at the time, Amazon had just launched or maybe a couple of years prior, and it was
• 6:28
  basically the world's largest bookstore.
• 6:30
  So my partner and I thought, what if we created the world's largest online superstore of ready
• 6:37
  made websites to go for small businesses where we could literally serve hot websites to go?
• 6:43
  And Image Cafe was born.
• 6:45
  So my partner at that time, Andre Ford, and I started imagecafe.com.
• 6:51
  And, you know, I was back in Maryland.
• 6:54
  This is before I had moved to Silicon Valley.
• 6:57
  I read a book called Burn Rate, which kind of introduced me to how startups work in Silicon
• 7:02
  Valley.
• 7:02
  So I kind of followed that playbook, was able to engage a top Silicon Valley law firm, which
• 7:09
  opened up a lot of doors.
• 7:10
  And in April of 'ninety nine, Image Cafe went live.
• 7:16
  And by November, we were acquired for $23,000,000 by Network Solutions.
• 7:21
  So it felt like an overnight success story that was ten years in the making.
• 7:26
  I think all success stories are like that, right?
• 7:30
  So then you went on and you started another company soon after?
• 7:36
  Yeah, well, so when Image Cafe was acquired by Network Solutions, part of that deal was for me
• 7:41
  to go join Network Solutions, become a VP, and continue to run Image Cafe as a separate panel.
• 7:48
  So I did that for three years.
• 7:50
  And then ultimately, I thought about raising a fund to invest in tech startups, but ultimately
• 7:56
  created another company in 2006.
• 7:59
  It's still around today.
• 8:00
  I'm the chairman of the board.
• 8:01
  It's called groupsight.com.
• 8:04
  But it didn't have that, you know, that rocket ship exit.
• 8:09
  And ultimately, I moved to Silicon Valley in 2010, founded a company called Progressly,
• 8:16
  progress.ly.
• 8:18
  We were kind of like Pinterest for processes.
• 8:20
  We enabled business owners to create visual, repeatable workflows in the cloud so that they
• 8:27
  can teach anyone anything and make sure the process was executed.
• 8:31
  And that also took off and we were acquired by Box in 2018.
• 8:36
  But that time I did not have to go and join Box and do an earn out, thankfully.
• 8:41
  And yeah, so that was the second exit to a publicly traded company.
• 8:45
  I'm giving you now there were some things in between, some failures in between.
• 8:49
  Of course there were, of course there were.
• 8:51
  But I want to get to your latest venture.
• 8:53
  So I know the last position that you had, you were the entrepreneur in residence at Google,
• 8:58
  right?
• 8:59
  I mean, that was your last thing.
• 9:00
  And then you got an moment to start the company that you're running now.
• 9:04
  So jump in there and tell us about that.
• 9:06
  Yeah.
• 9:07
  So I was recruited by Google's Moonshot Factory, also known as Google X.
• 9:12
  If you guys are familiar with Waymo, Google X is where Google creates other companies and
• 9:17
  spins them out.
• 9:18
  So they bought me in as an executive entrepreneur in resident that helped, you know,
• 9:23
  think of the next great tech idea.
• 9:26
  And since I've been a software guy AI blockchain, I leaned in on the AI space.
• 9:34
  And as we all know, in late twenty twenty two, ChatGPT had its moment.
• 9:39
  And that moment was really an epiphany for me.
• 9:42
  The first time I had an opportunity to touch ChatGPT and also our own internal equivalent,
• 9:48
  became Gemini, it became really, really clear to me that this was the ultimate bootstrapping
• 9:54
  tool for any founder.
• 9:56
  It would help any startup.
• 9:58
  And so I started thinking of AI as a co founder, went out and acquired a domain name,
• 10:03
  and then quickly wrote a book called cofounder.ai, which was really about how to
• 10:09
  build a company 10 times faster and 10 times cheaper leveraging AI tools, prompts and
• 10:16
  playbooks to do it.
• 10:18
  And throughout that process, it started to become clear to me that this needed to be more
• 10:23
  than a book.
• 10:24
  I really wanted to democratize the ability for anybody to build a successful company, whether
• 10:30
  you're building a tech startup or a main street enterprise.
• 10:34
  And I just couldn't stop thinking about it.
• 10:37
  So I think God called me to leave Google after four and a half years at the Moonshot Factory
• 10:43
  and turned cofounder.
• 10:45
  Ai into a company.
• 10:46
  So that's what we did late last year.
• 10:48
  I left Google in October, started the company in November, and we launched literally about
• 10:53
  thirty days ago.
• 10:55
  Now, so cofounder.ai is, as you see the logo behind me, is exactly what I've just described.
• 11:01
  It is an AI business partner that doesn't ask for any equity, will never give you any drama,
• 11:08
  and it's all execution.
• 11:10
  And that AI business partner manages a team of six AI employees on your behalf called
• 11:15
  specialists that conform to your type of business.
• 11:19
  So they help you from sales to marketing to product development, you name it.
• 11:24
  And it's very human like.
• 11:25
  So you really form a relationship with your co founder.
• 11:29
  Call it software as a partner, not software as a service because it feels like a partner.
• 11:35
  Now, you know, everybody kind of understands how to use ChattypuTee and Claude at this
• 11:41
  point, right?
• 11:42
  You gotta be a good prompt engineer.
• 11:44
  You gotta know the right keywords to use to get it to give you what you want.
• 11:48
  But tell me how, like, how is cofounder.ai different from just, you know, figuring out how
• 11:58
  to build an agentic tool, like through Codex inside ChatGPT or something like that?
• 12:04
  Yeah.
• 12:04
  Well, I think first, you don't need to prompt it.
• 12:07
  As a matter of fact, it will prompt you because your AI co founder has been trained on over 12
• 12:14
  different industries and 160 different business types.
• 12:17
  So it understands how to go from idea to exit.
• 12:21
  So whether you've just thought of an idea and you need a partner to help you think it through
• 12:26
  and execute it, or whether you've been in business five years, it knows what phase you're
• 12:31
  in, and it understands how that phase of growth, should work in that particular
• 12:39
  industry.
• 12:40
  So for example, someone building a SaaS startup is very different than someone launching a
• 12:45
  restaurant or running a food truck or a hair salon or barbershop.
• 12:49
  So we've trained our AIs, our AI co founders, to really understand those industries and also
• 12:56
  to understand you as a founder or as an entrepreneur.
• 13:01
  We give you a five question assessment test to determine your personality, and we give you an
• 13:06
  agentic AI co founder to kind of counterbalance some of your blind spots.
• 13:10
  So it's a very different experience than using a chat GPT or Claude.
• 13:18
  And it's only $39 a month.
• 13:20
  So to have a business partner that's probably smarter than you are on your industry that
• 13:27
  knows how to go from concept to exit and a team of six employees out of the box starting at $39
• 13:35
  a month.
• 13:36
  It's really unheard of.
• 13:37
  And we're a mission driven company.
• 13:40
  Again, our whole mission is to democratize the ability for anybody to build a successful
• 13:45
  business.
• 13:47
  So help me.
• 13:49
  I think I understand, but I but I want you to just get one more layer down for me.
• 13:55
  So my AI co founder, that's what you refer to it as, is it sort of like my project manager
• 14:05
  person?
• 14:06
  Like I talk, do I type things to it?
• 14:09
  Do I talk to it?
• 14:10
  Like tell me, how do I interact with my AI co founder and then they assign other AgenTic,
• 14:19
  like how do you know what AgenTic employees I might need?
• 14:23
  Like does it automatically know based on what industry I'm in?
• 14:26
  Like give me a little bit more information because I'm still a little bit fuzzy.
• 14:30
  Absolutely.
• 14:31
  Well, first off, as you're consuming this information, if you're sitting in front of your
• 14:35
  computer, go to cofounder dot ai.
• 14:37
  It's our name and our URL, as you can see behind me.
• 14:41
  So yeah, in terms of how you interact with your AI co founder, it's just like interacting with
• 14:46
  a human being.
• 14:47
  If you had a human co founder, you would talk to him on the phone because you can call your
• 14:51
  AI co founder up.
• 14:53
  You could text him through iMessage or WhatsApp or log in to your online dashboard and your AI
• 15:01
  co founder is right there.
• 15:03
  You can still talk to them.
• 15:05
  So it's a real human like interaction.
• 15:09
  We don't believe we're competing with other software.
• 15:11
  We're competing with the notion of having a human co founder.
• 15:15
  And so if you add a human co founder, you would brainstorm with that co founder.
• 15:19
  You would invite them on the Zoom calls, etcetera.
• 15:23
  Same with your AI co founder.
• 15:24
  You can invite your AI co founder into meetings.
• 15:28
  You can brainstorm.
• 15:29
  And automatically, it's more than just an assistant.
• 15:33
  It will push back.
• 15:35
  It knows, like I said, your industry and your business.
• 15:38
  And it's not just going to say, yes, you're great at every single thing you want to do.
• 15:43
  It's going to surface actions, the next five actions that you should do as a founder.
• 15:48
  We call it founder focus.
• 15:50
  Or not even that you should do, that your AI co founder and team will execute on your behalf,
• 15:56
  given what it thinks the business needs so that you can start to focus on working, you know,
• 16:03
  not working in the business, but working overall about the business.
• 16:08
  I'm not sure if that completely answered your question, but the best way to try it is to give
• 16:11
  it a shot because it's not really, you know, you're not locked in.
• 16:16
  You can cancel anytime.
• 16:18
  And, yeah, the best way to again to experience it is much better than explaining it.
• 16:25
  Yeah, it definitely sounds that way.
• 16:28
  I mean, because the thing about it is, is every founder wears a lot of hats in their business,
• 16:32
  right?
• 16:32
  So if you could have a tool, that could help you think about how to operate more like a CEO
• 16:42
  instead of staying stuck in what we call the day to day operations, is that how a lot of
• 16:49
  people are leveraging AI Co Founder?
• 16:52
  Yeah.
• 16:52
  I mean,
• 16:52
  it definitely helps you work on the business instead of in the business, right?
• 16:56
  Because a lot of things come at you when you're building your business.
• 17:00
  There's a lot of distractions.
• 17:03
  You'll get a lot of noise that will prevent you from really advancing the business because
• 17:08
  you're so caught up in it.
• 17:10
  And having an AI co founder that really helps you stay focused and automatically helps you
• 17:19
  execute like you had a full team.
• 17:22
  Because in essence, you do.
• 17:24
  You don't just get the AI co founder.
• 17:26
  As I mentioned, you get six AI specialists that your co founder manages on your behalf.
• 17:31
  And as the needs of your business change, your co founder will restaff that specialist team to
• 17:38
  promote other AI specialists to do different things depending on what stage you are in your
• 17:43
  business.
• 17:44
  And so one of the things that I talked about in my book that is kind of the core of the brain
• 17:51
  behind the co founder is this five phases for building the company.
• 17:56
  And whether you're a tech startup or a main street small business, they're all pretty much
• 18:01
  the same, but they execute differently.
• 18:03
  And you go through conceptualizing, then launching, then iterating because very rarely
• 18:07
  does any business plan survive first contact with customers.
• 18:10
  Most businesses have been in business for years are still iterating.
• 18:14
  Then you scale once you've gotten that product market fit and you know that your solution is
• 18:19
  working well.
• 18:20
  And then you exit if you ever decide to exit.
• 18:23
  And that's really what founder focus is all about, leading you through all the steps of
• 18:29
  those phases and supporting you with the whole agentic AI team, which will actually do the
• 18:36
  work.
• 18:36
  You just have to approve, delegate and sometimes direct it.
• 18:41
  All right.
• 18:42
  So let's take AI co founder out of the equation for a second.
• 18:46
  A lot of entrepreneurs are just kind of overwhelmed with trying to leverage AI.
• 18:52
  And so what are some of the biggest mistakes you see small business owners make when they're
• 18:58
  trying to implement a new AI tool, for example?
• 19:01
  Well, I mean, I think part of the challenge is a lot of AI companies are still giving you
• 19:08
  tools.
• 19:10
  I think we're in the agentic AI era.
• 19:13
  You don't need another SaaS tool really.
• 19:16
  And don't get me wrong, you know, you need a partner.
• 19:19
  You need AI to execute those tools on your behalf.
• 19:22
  Because if you're still logging into dashboards and executing tools, we've all been tooled to
• 19:28
  death and subscription to death.
• 19:30
  But to give you a partner and a team is completely different, particularly where they
• 19:35
  are executing the tools on your behalf.
• 19:38
  So that's first and foremost.
• 19:40
  I also see a lot of small businesses still using ChatGPT, or Claude or Gemini, as a
• 19:49
  wordsmith or email writer.
• 19:52
  That's the very basics.
• 19:55
  I think most of us start there.
• 19:58
  But it's not just about AI model.
• 20:03
  One of the things that the Anthropix and OpenAI have discovered is that it's as much about the
• 20:09
  harness around the AI model as it is the AI model.
• 20:13
  So let me explain what I mean by that.
• 20:16
  Claude code is a harness that makes Claude's models really, really useful.
• 20:23
  Same for cursor, same for, you know.
• 20:29
  Yeah.
• 20:29
  So without going too deep in that, we've we've taken those models because we are built on top
• 20:35
  of many AI models, but we've built a custom AI harness that's built around the entrepreneur,
• 20:41
  the founder.
• 20:42
  So it gives it memory.
• 20:43
  It makes it proactive.
• 20:45
  It's way more than using a tool.
• 20:48
  Interesting.
• 20:50
  Now I know one of the things you talked about and I completely cosign and agree with you,
• 20:55
  everybody is tired of another tool and another subscription.
• 20:58
  Like I don't even wanna hear about that anymore, but you've introduced the concept of
• 21:03
  software as a partner.
• 21:05
  And I wanna kinda get into that because I've actually never heard that before and I'm kinda
• 21:10
  somebody that would've heard that, right?
• 21:12
  So help us understand how you're sort of like cofounder.ai tool is really creating a whole
• 21:20
  new lane of, you know, in terms of products that we need to be thinking about.
• 21:27
  Yeah, yeah.
• 21:28
  I mean, well, I think at this point we're all familiar with SAS, right?
• 21:33
  Like you said, we all have dozens of subscriptions, many of which we can't even keep
• 21:37
  track of.
• 21:38
  They all require us to log in and operate a dashboard.
• 21:43
  Now that A.
• 21:44
  I.
• 21:46
  Has basically generated A.
• 21:49
  I.
• 21:49
  If it's pulled together correctly, it's almost like I hate to say it, but we've created a
• 21:54
  digital species.
• 21:56
  So why do we have to subscribe to tools and use those tools when AI can operate those tools for
• 22:04
  us?
• 22:05
  All we really need is a human like relationship with the AI.
• 22:09
  And so that's what software as a partner is, SAP.
• 22:13
  Instead of using the tool, your team executes the tools.
• 22:18
  So cofounder.ai is basically it's a platform that's run by your AI cofounder and AI team.
• 22:27
  You don't even have to ever log into it.
• 22:29
  You can talk to your cofounder on the phone when you're coming from a meeting.
• 22:32
  It knows exactly kind of what's going on.
• 22:34
  It's integrated into your calendar.
• 22:36
  It's integrated into your email.
• 22:38
  You can tell it how successful the meeting was and it will automatically say, oh, Okay, well,
• 22:42
  let's do a follow-up.
• 22:44
  Here's what I prepared.
• 22:45
  I'm going to update X, Y and Z, and I'll text it to you or email it to you or send it to the
• 22:51
  person you just met with.
• 22:53
  That doesn't happen with the SaaS tool, but that does happen with SAP software as a
• 22:57
  partner.
• 22:58
  Okay.
• 22:59
  So if I was a small business owner and I'm like trying to figure out the right way to implement
• 23:06
  AI in my business today and I'm still like a little bit leery and afraid of it, what would
• 23:12
  you say is the first thing that I would I should do?
• 23:15
  I think you should sign up, go to cofounder.ai and create an account, get matched with an AI
• 23:23
  co founder and your AI co founder will actually tell you what tools you should you should use
• 23:29
  or actually build those tools for you if it doesn't think it makes sense for you to pay for
• 23:34
  SAP subscription that your AI co founder and team can build on your behalf.
• 23:39
  So that would be the first thing.
• 23:43
  I'm biased.
• 23:43
  It wasn't supposed to be a softball question for you to pitch your product, but okay, I'll
• 23:49
  take it.
• 23:50
  Last question.
• 23:53
  Tell me, what is the best business advice you've ever received?
• 23:59
  Wow, I received a lot of business advice.
• 24:04
  Well, I would say, one, business is a team sport.
• 24:11
  At the end of the day, it depends on what you're looking to do.
• 24:17
  So for me, I've always wondered why some businesses stayed small and some businesses
• 24:23
  grew to significant scale.
• 24:26
  And it really, really goes back to the fact that business is a team sport.
• 24:31
  So if you have great talent, make sure that talent is incentivized and aligned with
• 24:39
  admission and pulled into your company.
• 24:43
  Otherwise, you will not grow a big business without talent.
• 24:47
  Now, the great news is the price of intelligence is hidden towards zero with all
• 24:54
  the knowledge that these AIs know.
• 24:56
  So now you can actually bring in top talent in the form of AI.
• 25:01
  Your average AI has an IQ of 160.
• 25:04
  And so if you don't have an IQ of 160, why would you not use it?
• 25:08
  I also believe that all businesses will be hybrid businesses.
• 25:11
  They won't just have human talent.
• 25:13
  They'll supplement that human talent with an AI staff as well.
• 25:17
  And because if you don't, it's pretty much like you're driving a horse and buggy when everyone
• 25:23
  else is in a Ferrari.
• 25:24
  So it was a long winded answer.
• 25:27
  But business is a team sport, so you need talent.
• 25:30
  So if you have talent available to you for $39 a month starting at, you can't pass that up, at
• 25:36
  least not to try it.
• 25:38
  All right, Clarence, thank you so much for being a guest on the Small Bitch Chat podcast.
• 25:42
  And if you want to check out his new tool, it is cofounder.ai.
• 25:47
  Alright.
• 25:48
  Thank you so much for being with us, Clarence.
• 25:55
  Thanks for listening to the Small Biz Chat podcast with Melinda Emerson.
• 25:59
  Subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and join us next Wednesday for
• 26:05
  more fantastic information and interviews.
• 26:07
  You can find more sources and small business success strategies by visiting Melinda's
• 26:12
  website, succeedasyourownboss.com.
• 26:15
  Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next week.