Latest / Business Brain – The Entrepreneurs’ Podcast / FridAI - AI Browsers Test Your Website + Markdown
Transcript
- 0:01Dave Hamilton: Business Brain, episode 773 for Casual Friday Eye, July 24th,
- 0:07Dave Hamilton: Tell an Old Joke Day, 2026.
- 0:13Dave Hamilton: You know, I should have teed up an old joke here.
- 0:15Shannon Jean: Yeah, I was going to say, I don't remember any old jokes.
- 0:17Dave Hamilton: Oh, I got one. I got one. It doesn't get much older than this.
- 0:21Dave Hamilton: Why did the chicken cross the road?
- 0:24Shannon Jean: I don't know, Dave, why?
- 0:25Dave Hamilton: To get to the other side, Shannon. It's the old one. Of course.
- 0:28Shannon Jean: That's the oldest joke in the world.
- 0:29Dave Hamilton: Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take some
- 0:34Dave Hamilton: ideas and some old jokes, we crunch them, we dissect them, we use them to tune
- 0:39Dave Hamilton: our business brains and get to the other side and lead our charmed lives.
- 0:44Dave Hamilton: Our sponsors for this episode include fanview.com, F-A-N-V-U-E.com,
- 0:49Dave Hamilton: where you can start your own creator journey and make it big.
- 0:52Dave Hamilton: And scribe.how slash brain, where CodeBrain gets you a demo and your first month
- 1:00Dave Hamilton: of Scribe capture for free.
- 1:02Dave Hamilton: So you can stop writing manuals and start having Scribe create all of your stuff for you.
- 1:08Dave Hamilton: We'll talk more about those in a little bit. For now, here in Durham,
- 1:11Dave Hamilton: New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.
- 1:13Shannon Jean: And out here in Northern California, I'm Shannon Jean. How are you, man?
- 1:17Dave Hamilton: I'm good. Yeah. Rocking and rolling. Sweet. Yeah.
- 1:21Shannon Jean: Nice. Yep. Fantastic. This is going to be a really good show about tools to make you better.
- 1:28Dave Hamilton: Okay. I like that. All right.
- 1:31Shannon Jean: Let's start with this Markdown tool. If you tell everybody what Markdown is, Dave.
- 1:36Dave Hamilton: Right. You're better at it than describing it. Yeah, years and years ago,
- 1:39Dave Hamilton: a guy named John Gruber had this idea that he didn't want to write HTML code
- 1:43Dave Hamilton: for his website anymore,
- 1:45Dave Hamilton: but he needed something that he could write that a computer could process and
- 1:50Dave Hamilton: turn into HTML for his website.
- 1:54Dave Hamilton: And so he created this thing called Markdown, and then he essentially ran it
- 1:58Dave Hamilton: by this guy named Aaron Schwartz, who helped sort of refine it with him. But but that's it.
- 2:04Dave Hamilton: It was so it was built to be human, readable, computer processable.
- 2:09Dave Hamilton: And that was the whole idea. So, for example, you know, if you want to have
- 2:14Dave Hamilton: something in bold, you put some, you know, some stars around it.
- 2:20Dave Hamilton: Right. And yes, actually, I guess that's two stars for bold.
- 2:24Dave Hamilton: One set of stars on either side of it makes it italic. Right.
- 2:28Dave Hamilton: And that way you can just look at the text and read it, and it makes sense.
- 2:33Dave Hamilton: It's not like wrapped in the HTML entities that are distracting to read and all that stuff.
- 2:40Dave Hamilton: And if you want different headers, you just use, again, just a pound sign,
- 2:46Dave Hamilton: hash marks that we call them nowadays, but the pound sign, the shift three.
- 2:51Shannon Jean: And that does the size that you want and all that kind of stuff.
- 2:55Dave Hamilton: One of them is header one, two of them is header two, three of them is header. It's very easy.
- 2:59Dave Hamilton: Even if you've never even heard of Markdown before, I could hand you a Markdown
- 3:04Dave Hamilton: file and you'd be able to read it. And it's all plain text, completely unformatted.
- 3:10Dave Hamilton: It can be turned into formatted text, but this is why the AIs love it because
- 3:16Dave Hamilton: it is all plain text and readable by their human masters.
- 3:20Shannon Jean: Yeah, and the show we did, we talked about how if you're having your AI convert
- 3:26Shannon Jean: everything to like Word or Google, it's using up more of your tokens, right?
- 3:31Dave Hamilton: Yeah, and I mean, that's valuable for output, right? To make a spreadsheet or something.
- 3:36Dave Hamilton: But in terms of documents for the AI to use like as its own internal stuff,
- 3:42Dave Hamilton: Markdown is so much better because like you said, you're not burning all those tokens. And it's fast.
- 3:46Shannon Jean: I noticed that it kicks it out quicker. It's like, okay, it seems to like it better.
- 3:51Shannon Jean: And so since we had that episode, I've been, yeah, okay. Cause I was one of
- 3:54Shannon Jean: those people just like, hey, create a Google doc, create a Word doc,
- 3:57Shannon Jean: whatever. And it was, you know, take a little bit more energy, a little more time.
- 4:00Shannon Jean: So now I put everything, it's just Markdown. But I often want to see what it
- 4:06Shannon Jean: looks like or mess with it and then dump it into maybe a Google Doc,
- 4:10Shannon Jean: a Word or whatever. So I found this site and I wanted to share it today.
- 4:14Shannon Jean: It's called markdownlivepreview.com.
- 4:19Shannon Jean: And basically it's just like the URL says, it's a single page.
- 4:27Shannon Jean: There is a bar, like a divider down the middle.
- 4:31Shannon Jean: On the left side is markdown and on the right side is formatted text. and you can...
- 4:38Shannon Jean: Type in, if you're watching this on YouTube, Dave is typing in stuff in the Markdown side.
- 4:43Shannon Jean: Or you can erase all that and paste in a full document of Markdown.
- 4:49Shannon Jean: And it'll show you what the preview does. And you can copy that,
- 4:52Shannon Jean: dump it into Word if you want to or whatever. Google Docs actually has a Markdown
- 4:56Shannon Jean: reader that'll allow you to convert it, you know, on the fly.
- 5:00Shannon Jean: But Word doesn't or if you're going to send email or different things.
- 5:04Shannon Jean: So I found it useful. I've used it quite a bit.
- 5:07Shannon Jean: And I thought it would be worthwhile to share with the folks at home.
- 5:12Dave Hamilton: Yeah, it's great. This website's awesome. Like you can, you edit the Markdown
- 5:16Dave Hamilton: and then you get to just see the preview sitting right there and it's all live.
- 5:20Shannon Jean: Yeah, and it doesn't cost anything. It's free and, you know,
- 5:22Shannon Jean: I'm sure there's some other ones, but I thought this one was so simple.
- 5:25Shannon Jean: Yeah. And it's actually a great way to learn Markdown because you can see exactly
- 5:29Shannon Jean: what it looks like across on the other side of the page.
- 5:32Dave Hamilton: And plus you can understand what, you know, our AI overlords are,
- 5:40Dave Hamilton: you know. What they're reading. Yeah.
- 5:41Shannon Jean: Yeah, it's interesting. So, I like it. It's a good tool, and I find myself using
- 5:47Shannon Jean: it, you know, often now, for sure.
- 5:49Dave Hamilton: I use an app called Marked, M-A-R-K-E-D. Okay.
- 5:53Dave Hamilton: And it's just a Mac app that displays your Markdown in, you know.
- 6:01Dave Hamilton: Nice. And then can also export it to PDF or Word or, you know,
- 6:07Dave Hamilton: whatever you might want.
- 6:09Shannon Jean: That's really cool.
- 6:10Dave Hamilton: It's great. And it edits live. Well, it updates live.
- 6:16Dave Hamilton: So if I have a Markdown file open in just a text editor, which is where you
- 6:19Dave Hamilton: would, or if you have your AI file.
- 6:22Dave Hamilton: Generating a markdown file you can point marked at it and it will live updates
- 6:27Dave Hamilton: happen right and it'll let's say you have like a 14 page markdown file which you might wind up with
- 6:33Dave Hamilton: uh as an if an update happens on page six marked sees that that's where the update is and kind of
- 6:40Dave Hamilton: changes its focus to that so you really get to kind of watch this in in real time it's fantastic
- 6:47Dave Hamilton: i that's pretty good yeah it's a good little app so it's cool
- 6:49Shannon Jean: Three dollars a month 30 bucks a year or get it permanently unlocked for 70 bucks.
- 6:54Dave Hamilton: He, speaking of business stuff, he says, and I actually, I was at Mac stock
- 7:00Dave Hamilton: last weekend and we were, I was talking with him. He was there and other people
- 7:05Dave Hamilton: who make software for a living that, you
- 7:09Dave Hamilton: They were all saying that for software, you have to offer the,
- 7:13Dave Hamilton: you know, monthly, yearly subscription prices because a lot of companies prefer
- 7:19Dave Hamilton: to buy on subscription because it's a fixed annual cost, right?
- 7:22Dave Hamilton: They know what they can do.
- 7:24Dave Hamilton: They can move seats up and down depending on what they need for their users
- 7:28Dave Hamilton: or even on a monthly basis.
- 7:29Dave Hamilton: But almost no consumers buy the subscription pricing.
- 7:36Dave Hamilton: The you know brett was even telling me he's like you know i i wasn't sure where
- 7:40Dave Hamilton: to put the the the all-in price he's like so i set it at 70 bucks and he's like
- 7:44Dave Hamilton: i i forget what the number was but it was eight and i hope i'm not oversharing
- 7:47Dave Hamilton: things but uh it was a vast majority of his customers were buying just
- 7:53Shannon Jean: Buy it outright i love that because i don't want another subscription.
- 7:56Dave Hamilton: Either right uh that's it yeah yeah yeah but you have but as i understand it
- 8:01Dave Hamilton: that that kind of the The deal is you have to do it
- 8:08Dave Hamilton: for the corporate purchaser.
- 8:09Shannon Jean: Enterprise.
- 8:10Dave Hamilton: Yeah. But here's the thing. As a consumer, and it's because I think about this
- 8:17Dave Hamilton: too much, this is Shannon, obviously, but I actually prefer the idea
- 8:26Dave Hamilton: Of a subscription over a subscription.
- 8:30Dave Hamilton: Over a flat price. And I'll tell you why in a minute. I realize we're getting
- 8:34Dave Hamilton: long in the tooth with this segment. So I'm going to come back to this.
- 8:37Dave Hamilton: The next thing that I want to do is I want to tell you about our sponsors.
- 8:40Dave Hamilton: Because here's the thing nobody warns you about when you start building a business.
- 8:45Dave Hamilton: At some point, all your best systems live entirely inside your own head.
- 8:49Dave Hamilton: The charmed life you're building runs on processes that only you fully understand.
- 8:55Dave Hamilton: And the moment you need to hand one off, teach it or scale it,
- 8:59Dave Hamilton: you're back to square one explaining the same thing from scratch.
- 9:04Dave Hamilton: I ran into this building our podcast network right at BackBeat Media.
- 9:08Dave Hamilton: We built a custom podcast management
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- 9:26Dave Hamilton: You turn on the browser extension, go through a process exactly as you normally
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- 9:42Dave Hamilton: What used to take hours of documentation work is done before you've even finished the process.
- 9:47Dave Hamilton: And then it gets even better. The Guide Me feature gives anyone following that
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- 10:29Dave Hamilton: Go check it out. I think you're going to like it as much as we do.
- 10:31Dave Hamilton: And our thanks to Scribe for sponsoring this episode.
- 10:34Dave Hamilton: And every entrepreneur is sitting on something they could earn from.
- 10:38Dave Hamilton: And that is the charmed life, right?
- 10:40Dave Hamilton: Turning what you already make into real income.
- 10:44Dave Hamilton: That's our sponsor, FanView, a platform where creators monetize their content. And it's simple, man.
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- 11:45Dave Hamilton: and our thanks to fanview for sponsoring this episode
- 11:48Dave Hamilton: so the reason that i
- 11:51Dave Hamilton: Theoretically like subscriptions better than outright purchases uh personally
- 11:57Dave Hamilton: i like outright purchases better i like to own the software But I know how
- 12:04Dave Hamilton: If a small developer sells an app, right, and it's a great app,
- 12:09Dave Hamilton: and all they need to do is some minor updates.
- 12:11Dave Hamilton: Well, I want them to support it and keep it. I want them to stay in business,
- 12:16Dave Hamilton: right? So that's the part that, and like the idea of them having to hold features back.
- 12:24Dave Hamilton: In order to be able to sell you version four or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 12:29Shannon Jean: That's kind of old school.
- 12:31Dave Hamilton: It's old school, but we as consumers are speaking and saying it's what we still
- 12:37Dave Hamilton: want, even though it might be shooting ourselves in the foot.
- 12:40Dave Hamilton: So that's what I meant by that.
- 12:41Shannon Jean: Yeah, and also, I don't mind the subscription so I can use it for a while if
- 12:46Shannon Jean: they don't have a free trial or I want to use it for a month or whatever.
- 12:49Shannon Jean: Sometimes you're just like, hey, let me try it out. I set a reminder if I want to cancel.
- 12:55Shannon Jean: So, you know, yeah, I agree with you. You wouldn't have those small developers
- 12:59Shannon Jean: if you didn't have some kind of model like that.
- 13:02Dave Hamilton: Yeah, they need recurring revenue like the rest of us. Yes. We all have recurring expenses.
- 13:08Dave Hamilton: Therefore, a sustainable business needs recurring revenue.
- 13:12Shannon Jean: Yeah, exactly.
- 13:13Dave Hamilton: At some level. I don't know. Yeah, absolutely. That's my thought.
- 13:17Dave Hamilton: All right. It's Friday AI, though. What else you got, Shannon?
- 13:19Shannon Jean: Hey, so one of my favorite AI browsers to use is Comet. It's by Perplexity, which I love.
- 13:27Shannon Jean: And I think they have a free version. I don't think you have to be on there.
- 13:30Dave Hamilton: Okay.
- 13:32Shannon Jean: Paid plan to get it. But ChatGPT has one. Atlas. Yeah, Atlas. But one of the things.
- 13:40Dave Hamilton: Chrome doesn't have one yet. Just for it. They don't. I was wondering about that.
- 13:43Dave Hamilton: No, but they do have a Chrome plug-in. And they can take over a session in Chrome.
- 13:50Dave Hamilton: And essentially do all these same things there.
- 13:52Shannon Jean: That's cool. um i've been using
- 13:54Shannon Jean: comet lately to check out some sites that i've built doing things and,
- 14:00Shannon Jean: uh i found myself using it a lot to to test like my website like okay in what
- 14:05Shannon Jean: way uh yeah in like for example how easy it is it,
- 14:11Shannon Jean: to find what i want my my customers to find like if i want them to contact me,
- 14:18Shannon Jean: How many clicks, how many steps is it taking for them to be able to find that
- 14:23Shannon Jean: contact information and be able to reach out to me? And does it work,
- 14:27Shannon Jean: right? Does the form, can you test the form? Does it do all this stuff?
- 14:31Shannon Jean: How many clicks does it take to, like for my mastermind?
- 14:35Shannon Jean: How hard is it to unsubscribe? Because you don't want to make it hard for people
- 14:39Shannon Jean: to unsubscribe because they get upset. So it'll go through and run those tests
- 14:45Shannon Jean: for you like it's someone else that's not you because you know exactly how to do it.
- 14:50Shannon Jean: So you ask questions like, hey, go find this FAQ.
- 14:55Shannon Jean: Tell me how to solve this problem if I'm my customer and see what it finds on
- 15:00Shannon Jean: your website. How long does it take?
- 15:02Shannon Jean: How many pages does it have to go through to find out how to send a return?
- 15:07Shannon Jean: How to file a warranty claim? how to, you know, all this, all this kind of stuff,
- 15:11Shannon Jean: everything that's important to your customers.
- 15:17Shannon Jean: An agent based browser like Comet can help you figure out and show you where the weaknesses are.
- 15:23Shannon Jean: It works great. I love it.
- 15:25Dave Hamilton: I like that. I would, your, your last statement, tell me what the weaknesses
- 15:32Dave Hamilton: are, I think is an important one to continue asking your website.
- 15:39Dave Hamilton: You're talking about the user interface like when a human comes and visits my
- 15:44Dave Hamilton: website what are the the weaknesses where are they going to what are the friction
- 15:48Dave Hamilton: points that they're going to run into and i mean that's hugely valuable
- 15:52Dave Hamilton: it's similarly you want to ask it um how is my seo how is my ai eo right my
- 15:59Dave Hamilton: ai engine optimization because we get a lot of referrals from ai engines now
- 16:04Dave Hamilton: for our websites, right?
- 16:06Dave Hamilton: But again, back to what you said, you know, test it for me.
- 16:12Dave Hamilton: Find the failure points. Most of us that have
- 16:17Dave Hamilton: data that we are displaying on our websites have probably got huge security
- 16:23Dave Hamilton: holes on our websites for people to access that data who aren't using the website.
- 16:30Dave Hamilton: And I will tell you that Fable especially is really good at finding those things.
- 16:37Dave Hamilton: A lot of times what will happen is you'll build a model like a database or something,
- 16:41Dave Hamilton: right? It has all the data in it or whatever.
- 16:44Dave Hamilton: And then you build your front end, right? You know, your view. And...
- 16:50Dave Hamilton: One of the simplest ways to connect the view to the model is by essentially
- 16:57Dave Hamilton: creating a private API, right? Where the view can just pull things from the
- 17:01Dave Hamilton: model, then it can display them any way it wants and all that stuff.
- 17:05Dave Hamilton: Well, unless you have it locked down properly, that private API is not private.
- 17:10Dave Hamilton: It's just unpublished, which is very different from being private. Yes.
- 17:17Dave Hamilton: Because really what's happening is a website is just usually just software right
- 17:22Dave Hamilton: and software that loads on your computer inside your browser
- 17:26Dave Hamilton: and then it points back at your server to pull this data well if somebody's browser
- 17:32Dave Hamilton: is intended to have your software to pull data they can have their software
- 17:38Dave Hamilton: to pull data and guess what's really good in addition to finding those private APIs.
- 17:45Dave Hamilton: Guess what's really good at building the software to read from them?
- 17:48Dave Hamilton: Fable. Also great. Yeah.
- 17:50Shannon Jean: Yeah. Yeah.
- 17:51Dave Hamilton: So that was great. Be aware of that too.
- 17:55Dave Hamilton: And you might not care. You might be like, look, people are getting the data.
- 17:58Dave Hamilton: I love that they're able to get it the way that they want it.
- 18:01Dave Hamilton: It's great. Like it, but just eyes wide open, right? You know,
- 18:04Dave Hamilton: you just want to know that people, you know, if, I mean, if you have a storefront
- 18:08Dave Hamilton: and what they're getting from you is that the products you have and the price,
- 18:12Dave Hamilton: like, I mean, maybe that makes it easier for somebody to buy.
- 18:15Dave Hamilton: It does make it easier for competitors to scrape you, but, you know. Yes.
- 18:18Dave Hamilton: So, you know, yep, there you go.
- 18:21Shannon Jean: That's good. Yeah. That's great. I love it. But, you know, use these tools to
- 18:26Shannon Jean: make your site better, to test things, to help, you know, eliminate frustrations
- 18:31Shannon Jean: and bottlenecks for people that are, you know, what do you want your people to do?
- 18:35Dave Hamilton: That's, you know, what do you want your clients to do? When they visit your website.
- 18:40Dave Hamilton: I will share something that we started doing with one of my companies,
- 18:43Dave Hamilton: and it's like our user engagement rates are 10x what they have been.
- 18:48Dave Hamilton: We essentially threw away our user interface, and we now have a chat interface for the website.
- 18:55Shannon Jean: So when they come, they can just start chatting.
- 18:59Dave Hamilton: Correct. Now, it's a well-informed chat interface that knows about our site
- 19:05Dave Hamilton: and what our users would want to do there, but it also knows about their account and all of the stuff.
- 19:10Dave Hamilton: So it can help them very quickly get to what they want and all that stuff.
- 19:15Dave Hamilton: It's crazy. It's crazy how well it works.
- 19:19Shannon Jean: Yeah, that's huge.
- 19:19Dave Hamilton: I love it. I don't think, maybe a year from now, why would we have a web interface
- 19:24Dave Hamilton: that's anything other than a chat interface?
- 19:27Dave Hamilton: Yeah. I don't want to have to learn.
- 19:30Shannon Jean: Yeah, it's the same thing that we're talking about here. We're just coming in.
- 19:33Shannon Jean: What I want to find. This is what I want. Does it do this? Give you the answer.
- 19:37Dave Hamilton: Yeah, that's cool. Let your fingers do the walking, man. Yeah,
- 19:40Dave Hamilton: it's genius. I love it. I know. I love it. I know. When my business partner
- 19:44Dave Hamilton: over there suggested it a year ago, I was like, wait a minute,
- 19:49Dave Hamilton: dude, I think you're right.
- 19:51Shannon Jean: Yeah, this is great. I think so. Especially now, the tie-in's so good.
- 19:54Shannon Jean: You train it, give it to your...
- 19:57Dave Hamilton: Yep. Your knowledge base. and all that stuff.
- 20:00Shannon Jean: Your knowledge base, whatever you got.
- 20:01Dave Hamilton: Exactly. It's genius. Yep.
- 20:04Shannon Jean: Genius, man. I love it.
- 20:05Dave Hamilton: All right, what's our big takeaway this Friday night?
- 20:12Shannon Jean: I think it's that you need to be testing and checking on your site.
- 20:17Shannon Jean: Wherever people are coming in, your app, your website, whatever it is,
- 20:21Shannon Jean: you need to continually be testing it to make sure that it's doing what you
- 20:27Shannon Jean: want. You can't ignore it.
- 20:29Shannon Jean: Are your forms working? Yes.
- 20:32Shannon Jean: That kind of stuff. So continually testing, I think, is crucial.
- 20:35Dave Hamilton: I like it. Yes.
- 20:36Shannon Jean: For me, that's a big takeaway.
- 20:37Dave Hamilton: I'm going to write down, use AI to test all the customer touch points of your business. Perfect.
- 20:42Shannon Jean: Yeah, I love it.
- 20:43Dave Hamilton: Businessbrain.show slash blueprint is where you're going to go to get the full
- 20:49Dave Hamilton: business plan, the business blueprint of that takeaway and everything we've
- 20:54Dave Hamilton: just discussed in this episode and all our other episodes. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks.
- 20:58Dave Hamilton: Have a great weekend. Keep living that charmed life and we'll see you next week.
- 21:02Shannon Jean: See ya.