Latest / Business Brain – The Entrepreneurs’ Podcast / FridAI: You Don't Need Another Tool

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FridAI: You Don't Need Another Tool · Business Brain – The Entrepreneurs’ Podcast

• 0:01
  Dave Hamilton: Business Brain, episode 775 for Casual Friday AI, July 31st,
• 0:06
  Dave Hamilton: National Talk in an Elevator Day, 2026.
• 0:12
  Dave Hamilton: That one reminded me of elevator pitches.
• 0:14
  Shannon Jean: I always talk in an elevator. I think it's funny. People kind of shock them
• 0:17
  Shannon Jean: a little bit and they always make a little joke or talk about something.
• 0:20
  Dave Hamilton: Well, there was that Stephen Wright joke, you know, you get into an elevator
• 0:23
  Dave Hamilton: and it's like, did your grandfather make you do this too?
• 0:26
  Dave Hamilton: Elevator training, where you just stand next to each other and say nothing.
• 0:29
  Dave Hamilton: Don't say a word i always i when i get into an elevator i,
• 0:33
  Dave Hamilton: i continue facing the direction that i was in when i walked in,
• 0:36
  Dave Hamilton: which is the opposite of the direction every because everybody gets in turns
• 0:39
  Dave Hamilton: 180 yeah yeah yeah right so i just i stay that way and i just look at people
• 0:43
  Dave Hamilton: i'm like okay well now you're my audience like i'll talk to that's funny totally fine
• 0:47
  Dave Hamilton: welcome to business brain everybody the show where we take some ideas we crunch
• 0:50
  Dave Hamilton: them we dissect them we use them we tune our business brains so that we can
• 0:55
  Dave Hamilton: keep living that charmed life and speaking of charmed lives
• 0:58
  Dave Hamilton: our sponsor shopify.com slash business brain will let you go to that link and
• 1:03
  Dave Hamilton: start with a free trial and you get to own your revenue so we'll talk more about
• 1:08
  Dave Hamilton: that in a little bit for now here in durham new hampshire i'm dave hamilton.
• 1:12
  Shannon Jean: And I'm Shannon Jean out here in Northern California. Happy Friday, I.
• 1:17
  Dave Hamilton: Happy Friday, I. Indeed. Yeah. I've been doing a lot with AI, as usual.
• 1:22
  Dave Hamilton: Maybe more. I love it. Yeah, I need, like any other kind of work,
• 1:28
  Dave Hamilton: like the amount that I am, the productivity levels that I'm able to hit with
• 1:32
  Dave Hamilton: AI are addicting, right? They are addicting.
• 1:36
  Dave Hamilton: But I need to make sure that that productivity is actually productive.
• 1:41
  Dave Hamilton: I know we talked about productivity versus productivity and it like that is
• 1:45
  Dave Hamilton: a is a game that I am constantly playing because it's like, well, I could do this.
• 1:50
  Dave Hamilton: But the other thing I could do is actually going to move the bottom line.
• 1:54
  Dave Hamilton: Right. So I'm I'm reminded of, you know, what's what's the most important thing
• 1:59
  Dave Hamilton: to do right now to increase my revenue?
• 2:02
  Shannon Jean: That's exactly right. And I see it all the time, too. And I do. I fall.
• 2:06
  Shannon Jean: I fall prey to it as well. Of course. where I love the data it brings back to
• 2:11
  Shannon Jean: me. I've wanted access to this kind of data my entire life.
• 2:14
  Dave Hamilton: Same.
• 2:15
  Shannon Jean: I've wanted to know the true value of like an Instagram follower my entire life.
• 2:22
  Shannon Jean: And now with my current business, it's like, yeah, they're worth 97 cents.
• 2:26
  Shannon Jean: You know, it's amazing, but you can definitely get being productive by kind
• 2:34
  Shannon Jean: of going down the rabbit hole a bit.
• 2:36
  Shannon Jean: And you can also get – it's kind of addicting to add new tools to your arsenal.
• 2:42
  Dave Hamilton: That's the problem. They just have to hit that litmus test, right?
• 2:47
  Dave Hamilton: What's the most important thing to do right now to increase my revenue?
• 2:52
  Shannon Jean: That's right. That's what we're
• 2:53
  Shannon Jean: all about. And, you know, like speaking of tools, one of the things that –
• 2:58
  Shannon Jean: I'm always looking for new ways to do things, new ways to implement things.
• 3:01
  Shannon Jean: And I've come to realize lately that, you know, I don't think oftentimes we don't need a new tool.
• 3:08
  Shannon Jean: We need a new way to connect the tools that we're using.
• 3:13
  Shannon Jean: And that has been a big breakthrough for me before us to stop.
• 3:18
  Shannon Jean: Because there's just, there's hundreds and hundreds of different AI tools that
• 3:22
  Shannon Jean: do very specific things.
• 3:24
  Shannon Jean: And when I go and I read and it's, you know, it's very enticing.
• 3:29
  Shannon Jean: It's like, wow, this could do awesome. But now I make myself go back into,
• 3:34
  Shannon Jean: I typically use Claude the most now, although I'm leaning back to the ChatGPT
• 3:38
  Shannon Jean: because they've improved dramatically, I think.
• 3:39
  Dave Hamilton: Interesting, it's good to hear, okay. Yeah, got much, much better.
• 3:43
  Dave Hamilton: Maybe it's not good to hear because I'm like, well, changing tools comes with a cost, right?
• 3:48
  Shannon Jean: Yes, it does come with a cost. And so, and you know- A focus cost,
• 3:52
  Dave Hamilton: I meant.
• 3:53
  Shannon Jean: Yeah, yeah, folks got it. But I, before I do anything of like signing up for
• 3:58
  Shannon Jean: another subscription or another app, I always go into Claude and say,
• 4:02
  Shannon Jean: listen, look what this thing does.
• 4:05
  Shannon Jean: Can we do this now? And, you know, one of the good examples is I wanted more
• 4:10
  Shannon Jean: analytics out of my community, which I use Kajabi, I'm on their platform.
• 4:15
  Shannon Jean: And they've just started to implement some of their own AI features,
• 4:20
  Shannon Jean: which is great. Sure. But I wanted that.
• 4:23
  Shannon Jean: While they're developing it, they released an MCP.
• 4:27
  Shannon Jean: So to link your AI of choice to the, you know, your community.
• 4:33
  Shannon Jean: And so I was just able to pull some, it's like, no, you don't need this tool.
• 4:36
  Shannon Jean: Claude says, you don't need that.
• 4:38
  Shannon Jean: Just link, connect the MCP and ask me what you want.
• 4:43
  Shannon Jean: And so I could get all this backend data. I could ask it things like, okay,
• 4:50
  Shannon Jean: which of my users hasn't been active in the last 30 days?
• 4:55
  Shannon Jean: Super valuable. Because then I can nudge them and say, hey, how can we help? There's this.
• 5:01
  Dave Hamilton: Yeah, a retention campaign or a reactivation campaign or whatever. Yep.
• 5:05
  Shannon Jean: Exactly. Just to be, you know, for engagement. And so it can look at all the back-end data.
• 5:11
  Shannon Jean: Now, they don't have it connected yet to the front end where it could live inside
• 5:16
  Shannon Jean: the community and give me good data from posts and everything.
• 5:19
  Shannon Jean: But again, I'm looking for a tool.
• 5:22
  Shannon Jean: I go ask Claude and Claude says, you don't need that tool.
• 5:25
  Shannon Jean: All you need to do is use the Chrome extension, log me into the community,
• 5:29
  Shannon Jean: ask me whatever you want.
• 5:30
  Shannon Jean: And so I did that. Sure enough, I leave it up all the time. Claude is logged
• 5:35
  Shannon Jean: in and I can come up and say, tell me about the activity today. What's going on?
• 5:39
  Shannon Jean: Yeah. Where's the best way to focus?
• 5:42
  Shannon Jean: You know, we have a community manager, we have a growth operator,
• 5:45
  Shannon Jean: we, me, what's the best use of our time?
• 5:48
  Shannon Jean: What makes us most productive? What is going to increase revenue the most?
• 5:52
  Shannon Jean: Yeah. And all that stuff. So super helpful.
• 5:56
  Shannon Jean: Just, you know, before you go buy some new thing or subscribe to some new thing,
• 5:59
  Shannon Jean: ask your current tool or tools, can you do this? Or how do we do this with, you know, with you?
• 6:05
  Dave Hamilton: Yes. And that, that I, you know,
• 6:10
  Dave Hamilton: I love that question. It highlights one of the things that we've always missed
• 6:18
  Dave Hamilton: out on or often missed out on in the past prior to generative AI,
• 6:23
  Dave Hamilton: in terms of like, how can I connect my tool?
• 6:27
  Dave Hamilton: How would my existing tools be able to connect with each other?
• 6:31
  Dave Hamilton: Right. Yeah. Because you have all of this stuff, but you don't know everything
• 6:35
  Dave Hamilton: about Kajabi. You don't know everything about every tool you use. Of course you don't.
• 6:40
  Dave Hamilton: Right. You know, you're using the parts that you're using.
• 6:43
  Dave Hamilton: And I know that we've all missed out on these valuable connections.
• 6:50
  Dave Hamilton: And now with generative AI, we can just point this stuff and say,
• 6:54
  Dave Hamilton: oh, let you go be the glue or teach me what is what could be the glue. like it yes yeah yeah.
• 7:00
  Shannon Jean: Yep yep it's great and uh it's just a good question to ask so you're not just
• 7:05
  Shannon Jean: continually expanding i don't want
• 7:08
  Shannon Jean: you know all these specialized little things i mean i appreciate them but uh
• 7:14
  Shannon Jean: to your point about productivity versus you know uh
• 7:17
  Shannon Jean: photo activity or productivity is is
• 7:22
  Shannon Jean: you can, it's a, it's a big investment of your time, not just your money,
• 7:25
  Shannon Jean: but you got to learn a new tool. You got to figure out how it works.
• 7:28
  Shannon Jean: And then, you know, often I just, I forget about it.
• 7:31
  Shannon Jean: If it's not that great and I don't find myself using it. And then there's one
• 7:34
  Shannon Jean: more subscription that I'm subscribed to that I forgot about. Yep.
• 7:37
  Shannon Jean: And then I got to, I do upload my credit card statements to Claude every month
• 7:41
  Shannon Jean: and say, Hey, find all these subscriptions and tell me what I need.
• 7:45
  Shannon Jean: Yeah. Yeah. Clear them out. because it's just too much yeah much
• 7:48
  Dave Hamilton: Well i to that and and what you're doing with with that is you're essentially
• 7:53
  Dave Hamilton: bypassing signing up for another subscription that helps you clear out all your
• 7:58
  Dave Hamilton: subscriptions right like those companies exist.
• 8:01
  Shannon Jean: They do exist but you got it
• 8:03
  Dave Hamilton: You don't need them you know that the whole sass apocalypse thing right is it's real.
• 8:09
  Shannon Jean: When i tell people i upload my credit card statement say freak out i'm like
• 8:12
  Shannon Jean: well have you ever heard of and i won't name the app but these apps that say
• 8:15
  Shannon Jean: you have to do the same thing with
• 8:17
  Dave Hamilton: Those freaking thing it's.
• 8:18
  Shannon Jean: The only way they can get access to it and like oh oh yeah oh yeah so you know yeah
• 8:24
  Dave Hamilton: I did a talk at max stock um about lots of uses of ai and all of them were things
• 8:32
  Dave Hamilton: that essentially were the goal was to teach people,
• 8:36
  Dave Hamilton: get out of chat start using code like we talked about a couple weeks ago start
• 8:40
  Dave Hamilton: using co-work start using code start in chat and then teach it tell it hand
• 8:46
  Dave Hamilton: me off to a claude co-work session or you know whatever your tool of choice
• 8:49
  Dave Hamilton: used calls it and uses it and that's fine,
• 8:51
  Dave Hamilton: and um and one of them was the whole throat thing that i went through last year,
• 8:56
  Dave Hamilton: and this year and i think we figured it out but you know i i threw i was at
• 9:02
  Dave Hamilton: my wits end and i told claude look at all of my apple health data as far back as you can see,
• 9:10
  Dave Hamilton: and find a pattern that might help and it did
• 9:13
  Dave Hamilton: right but it and as humans once we know where to look then it was like oh yeah
• 9:19
  Dave Hamilton: i can see this but we never would have found the pattern no human would have
• 9:22
  Dave Hamilton: found that my overnight blood oxygen levels started dipping below their
• 9:28
  Dave Hamilton: normal average starting in july of 2025.
• 9:33
  Dave Hamilton: Oh interesting because i didn't know i didn't tell it go look at my blood oxygen
• 9:37
  Dave Hamilton: levels i said look at everything and find me a pattern that might explain why
• 9:42
  Dave Hamilton: i'm having these throat issues and it finally figured out i have allergies i
• 9:46
  Dave Hamilton: mean it didn't figure that out
• 9:47
  Dave Hamilton: but like that was help that was the data that helped me and my doctor unlock
• 9:51
  Dave Hamilton: it yeah as soon as i started saying oh i'm using you know ai as my doctor people
• 9:56
  Dave Hamilton: like people groaned and i'm like stay with me here i love i love that you're groaning.
• 10:00
  Shannon Jean: Your doctor's using ai
• 10:02
  Dave Hamilton: Your doctor is You're 100% using AI and you're glad for it. That's right.
• 10:06
  Dave Hamilton: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. All right.
• 10:08
  Dave Hamilton: I have more about this to share. The next thing that I want to talk about is
• 10:12
  Dave Hamilton: I want to talk about our sponsor.
• 10:14
  Dave Hamilton: As a builder, you're used to duct taping every system yourself, right?
• 10:19
  Dave Hamilton: The shock with our sponsor, Shopify, how much is already done,
• 10:24
  Dave Hamilton: right? When I first used it, I was shocked, right? Setup, payments,
• 10:28
  Dave Hamilton: they're already day one.
• 10:30
  Dave Hamilton: That's the closest thing to a charmed life a founder gets, right?
• 10:34
  Dave Hamilton: Time back to actually build.
• 10:36
  Dave Hamilton: I run my own Shopify storefront for merch with another podcast and actually another business too.
• 10:42
  Dave Hamilton: Idea to first sale in under a day, right? It works.
• 10:47
  Dave Hamilton: The checkout also just works. More customers finish paying, returning buyers one tap, done.
• 10:55
  Dave Hamilton: Cha-ching indeed, right?
• 10:58
  Dave Hamilton: Set yours up at shopify.com slash business brain.
• 11:03
  Dave Hamilton: Same platform behind Mattel and Gymshark running so smoothly.
• 11:07
  Dave Hamilton: My star started leaving me performance reviews and it was telling me I needed
• 11:12
  Dave Hamilton: to step it up because it was getting ahead of me, which I love.
• 11:16
  Dave Hamilton: With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business.
• 11:21
  Dave Hamilton: So go make it one. Start your free trial at shopify.com slash business brain.
• 11:28
  Dave Hamilton: That's shopify.com slash business brain go check it out i think you're going
• 11:33
  Dave Hamilton: to like it as much as i do and our thanks to shopify for sponsoring this episode.
• 11:38
  Dave Hamilton: So the thing that I brought to Business Brain today for Friday is that I built
• 11:44
  Dave Hamilton: an MCP connector for one of our engines and it like for exactly this reason.
• 11:50
  Dave Hamilton: And the thing is, it's the easiest thing for the AI to do because it's building it for other AIs.
• 11:57
  Dave Hamilton: Like there's no better engine to build an MCP connector for your internal systems
• 12:03
  Dave Hamilton: than like Claude Code or or, you know, or or Chachi BT's like,
• 12:08
  Dave Hamilton: whatever their agentic coding thing is of the platform that you use because
• 12:12
  Dave Hamilton: they're building it for themselves.
• 12:14
  Dave Hamilton: And it has been a game changer. I the MCP connector that I have for Backbeat,
• 12:21
  Dave Hamilton: we have we have an internal system that we've used for years to track like all
• 12:26
  Dave Hamilton: of the ads on all of our shows and all that stuff and it knows,
• 12:30
  Dave Hamilton: you know what avails are out there which shows have this which shows have said
• 12:36
  Dave Hamilton: yes I will take that spot like we don't take every sponsor that comes to us
• 12:40
  Dave Hamilton: here at Business Brain right.
• 12:41
  Dave Hamilton: We are asked when a sponsor shows up at the door of BackBeat Media,
• 12:47
  Dave Hamilton: we send out a thing to all of our hosts and say.
• 12:50
  Shannon Jean: Would you try to make them as relevant?
• 12:51
  Dave Hamilton: Yes. I don't want to. I don't want to. As a salesperson, I don't want to put
• 12:56
  Dave Hamilton: a show on a plan only to have the show be like, oh, I got to read for this sponsor. I hate that.
• 13:02
  Dave Hamilton: Yeah, no. Right? We have Shopify because we like and use Shopify.
• 13:07
  Dave Hamilton: And we're happy to tell you about them.
• 13:09
  Dave Hamilton: And so it knows all of this stuff, right? It's got this huge database of all of these things.
• 13:14
  Dave Hamilton: And now with this MCP connector, like I just got an email.
• 13:18
  Dave Hamilton: And it was from somebody saying, hey, here's all these these shows that I want
• 13:21
  Dave Hamilton: to put this, you know, this particular sponsor on.
• 13:25
  Dave Hamilton: And it's like, oh, crap. You know, it's here's six o'clock on a Monday. Yeah.
• 13:28
  Dave Hamilton: And I want to get them an answer so I can plug this into Claude and point Claude
• 13:34
  Dave Hamilton: at this MCP connector and say, go make sure all these shows said yes.
• 13:37
  Dave Hamilton: That's great. Make sure the dates that they want are available.
• 13:40
  Dave Hamilton: And currently I built the first version as read only. It doesn't have write
• 13:44
  Dave Hamilton: access, but obviously it's an easy switch to flip.
• 13:47
  Dave Hamilton: I could have it go on reserve and hold all those dates for this if I were to
• 13:50
  Dave Hamilton: open that door up, right?
• 13:51
  Dave Hamilton: That's super cool. And our podcasters can use it to pull their data out.
• 13:57
  Dave Hamilton: So that's one subset of our customers. Our buyers, I haven't opened it up for
• 14:03
  Dave Hamilton: our buyers yet, but that's the next spot. So they don't even have to send me
• 14:07
  Dave Hamilton: an email. They can go and look and say, oh, yeah, all right,
• 14:09
  Dave Hamilton: this is great, good to go.
• 14:10
  Dave Hamilton: Um i if you haven't built an mcp connector if you have an internal system that does something and you
• 14:18
  Dave Hamilton: ever even once a week find yourself in the position where you're getting an
• 14:24
  Dave Hamilton: email from somebody that basically is can you go look this up in your internal
• 14:28
  Dave Hamilton: system and give the data back to,
• 14:31
  Dave Hamilton: That is reason alone to build that MCP connector and get yourself out of the
• 14:35
  Dave Hamilton: way of that process. That's huge. Yeah.
• 14:37
  Dave Hamilton: And certainly for yourself. Like, I'll use this. I've already been using it constantly.
• 14:43
  Dave Hamilton: Yeah. Because I don't want to use my web interface. Just like we were talking about last week.
• 14:48
  Dave Hamilton: I don't want to use my web interface. We talked about chat interfaces.
• 14:51
  Dave Hamilton: Okay, well, it's even better if the chat just can talk directly to it.
• 14:55
  Shannon Jean: How do we, yeah, and how do we implement that chat interface on our businessbrain.show?
• 15:00
  Dave Hamilton: So very easily, with a huge asterisk, we will be paying token fees for every
• 15:08
  Dave Hamilton: user that shows up and starts using it. So we need to find a way to monetize that. That's right.
• 15:14
  Shannon Jean: I got it. That's good to know. Like we have it at, it's businessbrain.show slash brain.
• 15:21
  Shannon Jean: Yep. And that takes you to, what was the service?
• 15:24
  Dave Hamilton: I forget what the name of the service is, but it's essentially that.
• 15:26
  Dave Hamilton: Let me find it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 15:28
  Shannon Jean: Yeah. And business brain, no,
• 15:37
  Shannon Jean: businessbrain.show slash brain takes us to Delphi.
• 15:42
  Dave Hamilton: Delphi, that's it.
• 15:43
  Shannon Jean: Where you can, it's a chat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What about fear-based decisions?
• 15:49
  Shannon Jean: I'm just curious if it's the worst.
• 15:51
  Shannon Jean: And we went to the free plan.
• 15:54
  Shannon Jean: And, yeah, it comes right up.
• 15:57
  Dave Hamilton: Yep.
• 15:57
  Shannon Jean: That's interesting.
• 15:58
  Dave Hamilton: I know. I know. Yeah. So it can, and, you know, you can, and now we're kind
• 16:05
  Dave Hamilton: of out of the realm of the MCP connector and in the realm of the chat interface. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 16:11
  Dave Hamilton: But, like, you can build your chat interface so that it's caching things and
• 16:15
  Dave Hamilton: it's smart and it's, you know, compressing your queries and your prompts so
• 16:20
  Dave Hamilton: that token usage doesn't just run out of control.
• 16:23
  Dave Hamilton: But you have to do that otherwise it'll you know you'll put you in the poorhouse
• 16:27
  Dave Hamilton: and you've got to pick the right model to use too right like yeah that's right would we use fable no
• 16:32
  Dave Hamilton: we don't use anything from from anthropic no we would use deep seek right for
• 16:37
  Dave Hamilton: yeah for the website because
• 16:39
  Dave Hamilton: it's you know 10 of the price yes that's all.
• 16:42
  Shannon Jean: You need yeah
• 16:42
  Dave Hamilton: Exactly right so you know you you get you have to be smart about it but the
• 16:46
  Dave Hamilton: the options are all there so.
• 16:48
  Shannon Jean: Yeah that's cool man yeah man That's a great
• 16:50
  Dave Hamilton: Idea. I love it. I agree.
• 16:52
  Shannon Jean: I think the big takeaway, we talked a lot about tools.
• 16:57
  Dave Hamilton: Yes.
• 16:59
  Shannon Jean: And it's not, there's, well, there's kind of two, I know we've got to pick one. Yeah.
• 17:05
  Shannon Jean: I think the takeaway for me is the connecting of your tools together.
• 17:09
  Dave Hamilton: Yeah.
• 17:11
  Shannon Jean: I love the MCP thing too. And I'm curious about teaching people how to do that, building an MCP.
• 17:18
  Shannon Jean: But I think the time your tools together.
• 17:21
  Dave Hamilton: And just in case people got to this point in the episode and haven't yelled
• 17:24
  Dave Hamilton: at us yet about not explaining what an MCP connector is.
• 17:27
  Dave Hamilton: Mcp is essentially it's called model context protocol it's the protocol that
• 17:32
  Dave Hamilton: ais use to talk to each other or to talk to other engines it's open,
• 17:37
  Dave Hamilton: it's like an open protocol so yeah it's not just for claude or just for chat
• 17:42
  Dave Hamilton: gbt they all can speak it there you go,
• 17:45
  Dave Hamilton: perfect that's it awesome yeah yeah no i i agree with your takeaway that using
• 17:50
  Dave Hamilton: a use ai to connect as the glue to connect your business tools together because.
• 17:54
  Shannon Jean: It's related to your mcp stuff as well
• 17:55
  Dave Hamilton: For sure Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's all the same.
• 17:58
  Shannon Jean: So if you want to get the complete business blueprint of connecting all these
• 18:03
  Shannon Jean: tools, how to use them, what to do, MCPs, you go to businessbrain.show slash blueprints.
• 18:10
  Dave Hamilton: That's it.
• 18:10
  Shannon Jean: And you can grab it there for every episode we've done.
• 18:13
  Dave Hamilton: Absolutely.
• 18:13
  Shannon Jean: In the last few months.
• 18:14
  Dave Hamilton: Yeah, that's right. Since we started doing it. That's right.
• 18:17
  Shannon Jean: Yes.
• 18:17
  Dave Hamilton: Thanks for hanging out, folks. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week.
• 18:20
  Shannon Jean: See ya.