Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to between two Ledgers. I'm James Rose and today's guest is Isaac Perdomo, one of the best automators.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: I have met in this industry.
[00:00:09] Speaker A: Isaac and his company Oppsa have helped loads of firms streamline their processes with no code and automation tools like Zapier and Make.com and Airtable. And they use AI quite a lot as well. I'm always a fan of the stuff he's posting on LinkedIn and on his newsletter and all over the place, so I definitely recommend checking him out. But we often refer to content snare customers to them who need help with automation because they've just got a great track record. They're just one of the few companies that absolutely get it when it comes to automation. In this chat we talk about where to start with automation, what good automation looks like, things to watch out for, some quick wins you can get in your firm, how to use the tools you're already using better in a more streamlined way, scaling without having to hire Isaac's favorite tools and more topics. And with that, I bring you Isaac Perdomo.
[00:00:59] Speaker B: Isaac, man, it's so good to have you here.
[00:01:02] Speaker C: Thanks for having me. James.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: You are, dude, you're an absolute gun at automation. I speak to a lot of people in the automation space, especially with the Zapier and mate, because I used to have a course and I was like fairly heavily content creator in that space. So I've met a lot of people and I've seen the stuff you do and like with firms that use content snow, you've helped some automate it, the product, like, you know, things around the product and I'm very impressed with the kind of stuff you've been able to build. So I just want to hear about your journey to get to here. Like how did you get good at automation and what have you done in the past?
[00:01:37] Speaker C: Yeah, the journey. Well, let's talk about it. I guess I finished college and realized that I didn't want it to be an engineer local, locally, here in my country.
A lot of opportunities. But I think that, you know, you kind of get that entrepreneurial bug of like, hey, maybe I can do something for myself, right?
And actually my dad was an entrepreneur as well. So I say, mom, please just give me a year. Let me live here with you for a year. I'll make it happen. If I don't, then I'll find a job.
So at the time, actually I started doing writing, funny enough, copywriting for software companies. I always knew, kind of I wanted to be involved in that kind of like software space is always something that attracted me about it and over time realized that I was better at the software and technical side than the marketing and creative side. So I kind of naturally gravitated towards that over time where I was really not looking forward to writing the things, but then thinking about when to trigger them and exactly what at which point to send it.
So naturally, you know, I ended up getting into automation actually with a friend that was running a agency at the time doing working for hotels and you know what happened in Cobit. And he started doing that and just told me about it. I was like, that sounds fun, so I'll start doing it too.
[00:03:00] Speaker B: Nice. Well, I mean, for a guy that doesn't.
You said you don't like the marketing side. You seem to do a lot of marketing. In the research for this episode, I found you've done a lot of stuff, man. You're like a lot of like guest posts and like podcast appearances and whatever. So you seem to be doing okay. Both.
I need to know what kind of engineer you were.
[00:03:22] Speaker C: Actually, I started, it's funny, I started be a medical engineer. My dream has always been, and somewhat still is to own a bioprosthetics company, kind of build prosthetics and install them for people that don't have limps.
And like, I think that's a big mission to, you know, give people the limbs back. Maybe after some time I'll be able to get into things like that.
But I changed careers halfway through to mechanical engineering, so that's kind of what I studied.
[00:03:57] Speaker B: Yeah, I only use my answer because I was a mechatronics engineer in the start of my career and actually went into automation and control systems. Which is why what I think gave me the bug for automation, you know, like, I don't get to automate heavy machinery anymore in my like building content snare.
I think this is like my fix to get like some level of automation and home automation type stuff. So I just wondered if it was like similar. Similar for you.
[00:04:22] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. I actually had some similar subjects with the mechatronics engineer career, although I think they took a little bit more automation and. And programming stuff that we've got.
[00:04:33] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So let's get into like automation. Why firms should care. I mean, I think at this point it is a lot. It's so much more in focus now, like automation and AI. I swear when I was doing it, it was a bit more obscure and there was probably like a handful of what I would call like automation consultants and Something about AI has just made this blow up and now everyone's talking about it.
So yeah, I don't know, like, why should people care? Like you've spoken about the impacts you've had, I think, and those are like a numbers like 30 to 40% efficiency gains. Like can you. Yeah, expand on that? How do you measure that for one and yeah, what kind of results can people get?
[00:05:17] Speaker C: Love that we starting there because I love to I guess geek out about this stuff. And the impact has some businesses. So roughly speaking, just to answer a question, how do we measure it? For me it really comes down to some sort of measure of production divided by time.
And that could be measured in multiple ways.
Sometimes we literally measure say dollars per hour, like effective hourly rates, especially if the firm is pricing based on fixed fees.
And that's one of the examples that I talked to you about about a particular tax firm that for their personal tax return work, we were able to increase their effective hourly rates by about 47%.
[00:05:55] Speaker B: Damn.
[00:05:57] Speaker C: Yeah, pretty good. And the other way, sometimes some firms don't track time and don't want to.
So in that instances we just try to get a sense of it by either revenue per employee or number of client counts and the staff supporting that.
So the other example of the bookkeeping for I talked to you about, they were six people managing 45 clients and they actually downsized to five people and went from 45 to 60.
You have to run the numbers of that. But 33% more clients with like 1/6.
[00:06:32] Speaker B: Yeah, man, that's. That's a such a good way to measure like, because in your position I would have like assumed it was very hard to come up with a measurement for these kind of things. But as soon as you said that I was like, of course, you know, it became so clear. Right. We've had feedback like that with content snare. Right. Like where it's not like, oh, you've saved me so much time, it's like, no, you enabled me to scale the business.
So it's kind of the same thing. We, we kept the same headcount, but we're able to do so much more. So thank you for pointing that out and I may use that more in our own marketing as prep.
Yeah, okay. Where actually, but just back up where when you talk about these efficiency gains, what are you doing? Are you. Is this like a mix of adding new software or is this simply zapier make type stuff connecting the things I've already got?
[00:07:22] Speaker C: It's a mixed bag, but I'll say That there's a lot that can be gained from better utilizing the software you already have and plugging them in with your tools. Like a zapier make is not rare that we go into a firm and we literally add no new tools that the team has to learn. We just add our automation stack on the back end and do what we have to do.
In some cases, there might be some benefit around implementing a particular app, especially if someone is still tracking their leads or tracking their work in spreadsheets and things like that, where proper project management tool or proper CRM will make sense. But I'll say 70% of the time there's really no new tools to add other than the ones.
[00:08:04] Speaker B: Okay, that's actually exactly what I want to hear.
Uh, that's good. So then on that, like, let's dive in. Where should an accounting firm owner start? Like, I feel like so many people. And this isn't just accounting, this is everyone. Like when, when I surveyed my students back in the day, cause I had a zapier course, it was like, you know what, what's the biggest issue you have with automation? And it was like something like 70% of responses was some variation of I don't know where to start, I don't know what's possible. You know, so that's often where people are coming from. It seems like this like mystical space.
So where do you recommend people start?
[00:08:48] Speaker C: Yeah, I've changed my mind over time on that. I felt like for me, really, you start with process and understand your process at its core before you start thinking about automation. Because I think what I've seen is that if the automation, if the process is not clear, then you know, your automation professional or agency is going to have a hard time even assessing what you can automate in the first place. So it adds so much clarity, actually, so much so that we have kind of an offering in the agency at the moment just to kind of clarify that up front. If a firm doesn't have that kind of documentation or process in place, because then it's just open us a whole can of worms and we can really see exactly how we'll be able to streamline it from there.
So it's worth sitting down with your team blocking an hour, two hours, and just say, hey guys, how do we do this thing? How do we homeboard client, how do we, you know, produce a tax return? How do we close the month end and really spell it out step by step? Use your sticky notes, pace them on a whiteboard. If you're, you know, on site and just organize that process in the flow that makes sense. And you'll immediately see how well you can start to streamline things and automate.
[00:10:06] Speaker B: Yeah, I like that. It's. And it's interesting talking to you. Who's some. Like, I think I come at this from a slightly different angle. Right. Because I almost build the process in the workflow tools now, but that's how my brain works, you know? And I just know that not everyone operates like that. And especially if you're going into somebody else's business and you don't know their process, you absolutely have to understand that first.
Right?
[00:10:31] Speaker C: Yeah. And I feel like you'll be surprised by how many firms don't understand their own process, especially as they grow, if they have a few team members in place.
You might find out that different people doing things in different ways and just getting that alignment initially of like, hey, this is how we do things is so powerful.
[00:10:49] Speaker B: I laughed because you said I'd be surprised and I absolutely wouldn't.
The amount of times, even just with Content Snare, we've gone, can you help us with Content Snare? We want you to, like, build our onboarding process into Content Snare. We'll just pay you to do it. Okay. I'm like, what's your current process? Oh, we don't have one.
So we're not process consultants. We implement our software on some of these processes. So, yeah, like, and we'll go into a firm and like, every partner will be having their completely own way of like, month end, close checklists or like end of year stuff. It's like, okay, just send me the checklist you would send to clients. Oh, no, every partner's doing it their own way. I'm like, oh, my Lord. So, yeah, we can't help there until you get Isaac in first.
[00:11:34] Speaker C: Yeah, definitely that. That's definitely the first step.
[00:11:39] Speaker B: So then let's talk about tools just quickly for. Specifically for people just starting out. Right. Like, not someone who's necessarily talking to you. Where do you recommend people start?
[00:11:50] Speaker C: Honestly, we literally have a little bit of a visual and maybe you can share it if you.
[00:11:55] Speaker B: Absolutely everything. We'll put in the show notes later. Yep.
[00:11:58] Speaker C: Yeah.
If you don't mind giving me just one minute, I'll share it. But essentially we have a visual that is like, hey, this is a beginner. This is like intermediate, and this is advanced. And these are the five different categories of automation tools that we see.
And these are the tools that you just start with.
Okay. But essentially the whole map is around hey, we have five different categories. There's like data automation, building custom tools, AI coding, and then like browser or desktop automation. And pretty much in that beginner layer is really, you wouldn't be surprised on the automation side. It's either Savior or Power Automate. We found such an early start support.
[00:12:43] Speaker B: A lot of tools.
[00:12:45] Speaker C: Of course Power Automate support less so but it's really in the Microsoft environment because it can be free to start from any Microsoft shops.
And then on the data side, you'll be surprised how much you can build with like a good structured spreadsheet.
If you use that as a source of data, then to build, build on top of.
That's interesting. One new tool.
So one new tool that made it to that category and we added just like a couple weeks ago is AI AI based coding or like MIPE coding if you like that. We started like rolling out internally and our favorite beginner layer in that it's actually site. I don't know if you've heard about it, but it's a way to build custom applications and internal tools on top of either Google Sheets and Nerd Table.
[00:13:33] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's by the fill out guys, right?
[00:13:36] Speaker C: The fill out guys. That's right.
[00:13:38] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, cool.
Yeah, cool. So yeah, that's, that's interesting. Especially the spreadsheet bit. I think first, Power Automate doesn't get enough love. We've seen some incredible stuff built with Power Automate and a lot, you know, if, if someone's a Microsoft shop, it's not very hard for them to add that on. I think there's an additional cost, but it's pretty powerful.
[00:13:56] Speaker C: It could be free.
[00:13:59] Speaker B: Oh, is it?
[00:13:59] Speaker C: I think there's a particular license that that gives them, gives us to them for free. So yeah.
[00:14:05] Speaker B: Okay, cool.
And I think that that works good for a lot of firms because the amount of people that don't want to add like quote, unquote, yet another tool, even though it is technically another tool.
But like, yeah, we've got one constant snare customer that we had to go and ask like, what are you guys doing? You are absolutely flogging the hell out of our API. Sending thousands of requests. It turns out they were using Power Automate to Automate like literally thousands of requests per month. And like I saw their flow and I was like, I just didn't know this was possible in Power Automate. So yeah, really, really cool stuff there that people may have access to already. So I like that. I've always said with automation, like, and I guess there's two probably two types of people listening here that are like, there's some do want to dig in and actually learn a bit for themselves and some people are like nut, this is not how my brain works. Shut up Isaac, do it all for me, right? So those people I'm not talking to right now, you can just go and talk to Isaac. But I do think there is a benefit in learning some basic automation because you know the process, right, like as you know the business and what's going on in it more than anyone else.
So if you bring in someone, it's very like you have to bring them up to speed on everything, right? And they have to have a really deep understanding of your business before they could do anything. Whereas if you know how things work, like, and you know, like I, we were talking about this before but I, I'm going to dump Into Zapier and make.com later today and set up a handful of automations for a massive trade show zero con that we've got next week, right? And like, because I, it's only basic stuff but because I know it, I can go in there and I can knock up something in five minutes, right? And I think there is, I don't know, to me there's benefit in that. Like, rather than having to like, if you know how to do it, like if you have basic understanding of automation, not only can you do that and jump in there and set up a couple of things, but you can also translate better and make better requests to agencies like yourself. Right?
Do you, do you find, do you work with many people who have automation knowledge already?
[00:16:08] Speaker C: Yeah, actually I'd say that maybe especially on our early years we felt like, because that's the only stuff we talked about, we tended to attract a lot of very technology savvy people that they already knew how to do it, they're doing it themselves and they just wanted us for the heavier lifts. But to your point, I think that it's such a valuable skill to gain leverage as a business owner that I think everyone should learn even just the basic things about, about it.
[00:16:35] Speaker B: So glad you think that.
[00:16:36] Speaker C: Yeah, I think it, what's the, what's the Hormozi and Nabal Robicon pyramid of like the four Cs of scale? Have you, have you seen that before?
So essentially they have like the four ways in which you can gain leverage in business and they have, I think they call it four Cs because it's first collaboration, then there's content, then there's capital and then there's code or effectively automation. And I think that a business owner should learn how to do all of those things. Right. And you should know how to create content for, for your marketing, but also content internally to train your team members without spending your time on that collaboration. Just the ability to recruit people, you know, managing them and training them. Then capital is just investing money rather than your own time. And then code is just really learning how to use these tools, which it doesn't have to be code these days because it really be an automation tool that without code you can really automate stuff.
[00:17:39] Speaker B: I'm sure there are people listening to this going like, again, because I think there's, there's kind of different schools of thought here where it's like, you know, I feel like a lot of business owners have to be a jack of all trades and I think there's a lot of benefit in that. But then there are other people who are like, I have no idea about code and I never want to.
And when I say code, I mean all of the automation and just that like, type of thinking that they're just saying, I want to give that to someone else. And I think, you know, to an extent some there are benefits to that. Right. If you, if you were just like, I don't know how to do any of those things and you've got the money to just throw it at someone else to sort out, there's just benefit in that. Like I have this internal conflict all the time where I'm like, I wish I didn't know these things sometimes. It'll probably make me a better business owner than trying to like get in there and do this kind of work.
But I don't know, like, I do think, I do think automation is a highly leveraged skill. Like, you know, the fact that I can go and like, I've built automation, I built pretty much every automation in our business. And the. They run like it's several humans worth of recurring tasks a month. Right. Like it's, it's pretty insane. That's multiple hundred thousands of tasks running every month just in our business. So yeah, I don't know, I think there's just value in knowing how it works. So you can communicate what you want to. Like when you're thinking of, when you're building your processes, you, it'll change the way you're thinking about the processes and how you communicate to, you know, an operations consultant or whatever camp.
[00:19:04] Speaker C: Yeah. And it's really around like thinking in systems as well of like having that ability to break a process down and think about it in the logical steps and the rules that will, you know, govern that. So I think they're valuing that for sure.
[00:19:18] Speaker B: Awesome.
Let's say you're coming. Like if someone's listening to this and they're just like, I don't know, I don't even know where to start. What are some or like or what's possible? What do you think are the lowest hanging processes? Lowest. Lowest hanging. Lowest hanging fruits I guess is the term. You know, the simple, simple automations that someone can implement to get a taste and it's like simple enough that they can try it.
[00:19:44] Speaker C: I'll say this, it won't sound sexy because it's not like, you know, the latest and greatest AI, but probably a lot of the tools that firms use today have some sort of automation built into them.
Greatest example, accounting software Equivalent zero has simple things like bank rules or like scheduling reports to go out on an automatic fashion. And you'll be surprised sometimes how much value you can gain from those, you know, unsexy simple things that people don't think about maximizing. And actually it's part of our belief that we want to maximize those simple things before we get to the more fancier things.
So that's probably where I would start. Just look at the apps you have. They have some automation built in, I promise you.
[00:20:30] Speaker B: And Invoice Reminders is a good example. I know a lot of people don't have invoice reminders set up. You can like, you can turn that, flick that switch on in Xero and get paid.
[00:20:41] Speaker C: Right? Absolutely. And it just, it's, it's built for a user. You don't have to even start thinking about like sapier and some of these other tools that will potentially be, as you mentioned, additional costs, additional apps just that are built into the apps you use today.
[00:20:54] Speaker B: I had a situation with Philly yesterday where I got two invoices from someone we do like monthly recurring work with like in close proximity. I was like, oh, something's gone wrong. Like I just assumed they were using recurring invoices in Xero. Something's gone wrong. And the reply was, oh, our accounts person, I think forgot to send one so they sent that one late. That's why they're close together. And I was like, wait, what? You've got someone manually sending invoices for like a thing that happens on the same day every month. Like it's like, wow. And this is like a really tech forward firm, like a really forward thinking that they're like cutting edge Tech type person. I mean I actually feel like I need to go back to them and go like is there a reason for this? Because maybe there's something I'm missing with recurring invoices but I was like blown away because that just seems like an easy win, right?
[00:21:45] Speaker C: Yeah, definitely.
[00:21:45] Speaker B: Definitely.
Okay, so anything else like that comes up like you said, it's not sexy. Right. Like which is fine. I think I always used to tell people the thing to start with with automation was you've got a contact form on your website. When someone fills that out, put it in teams or Slack or SMSU or something because it's. And the reason I say that is because it's super low hanging fruit and it's not like because what that allows you to do is then get back to those leads really quickly. If you're not in your email all day you get that notification. But the other thing is it's also low risk. So if you screw up that automation chances are nothing's going to blow up. Right? Cause this is, this is. People are scared of this, right. They think that you know, automate and screw something up and then it's going to run away and email all their clients like moods or something like I don't know people are legitimately worried but I, I think that's a really low like a simple one that people should just do because it is helpful. It's not sexy, it's. But it's helpful and low risk because yeah it's not going to like blow like if something goes wrong it's not going to need your client base.
[00:22:56] Speaker C: Yeah. And actually that reminds me, I think that a friend of mine in the industry, in the accounting industry told me, asked me about like hey what are some of the low hanging fruit? And one of the things I told him is like go bananas with the Slack notifications because to your point like just getting that notification about a leads, it's cool. But here's another thing like could you have notifications about a sale or a task being completed?
Actually currently in the team, in our.
[00:23:20] Speaker B: Team.
[00:23:23] Speaker C: We have our team sometimes asking me like hey did we sold a new client? Or like sometimes they have don't have visibility into our pipeline and it's something that is like why don't I have an automation. It's just funny because we are automation agency that just like populates is on a Slack channel so that at least the team knows we close a new client and we can kind of celebrate together those more things.
[00:23:44] Speaker B: I think I'm very oh mate, like that. I'm glad you brought that up because I almost think that's its own category of automation. It's just like feeding things into Slack and this may be helpful for people. So I'm just going to list out. I'm looking at my Slack right now and seeing what we've got in the way of like bot type channels. We've got one that is like, okay, every time a new lead comes into the system, we enrich them and then if they're a certain, they match certain criteria, they go into a channel so we can reach out to them.
Every time someone leaves feedback on certain channels, like whether it's an NPS score or review, that all comes into a channel downtime or issues with our website or like things that like basically super technical stuff but like things we need to know about. Every time automated support summaries every day I see what like questions people have been asking in support so I can keep on top of things. So this isn't necessarily notification, this is like a, like a supervisory.
[00:24:36] Speaker C: Like a wolf's jack.
[00:24:37] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Like you could say like what work was done today, like what items were checked off in carbon or whatever. Right. Today, put all that in Slack. So I, I've got that there.
[00:24:49] Speaker C: Yeah, we've done that exact automation of like, hey, these are the tasks that were done today or these are the tasks that are coming up for next week or these are the tasks that are overdue more than seven days. Like there's just an endless variety of those things that you can put in place 100%.
[00:25:03] Speaker B: And then of course we've got the channel that is.
Yeah, every time someone signs up through a paid plan, that's the, it's called sign up party. So and it comes with like little party emojis and stuff. Every time.
It's funny, I just, I just noticed it's, it's got no unreads, which means no one signed up overnight, which makes me sad.
Cool. Well, hopefully that gives people some ideas on where to start. Like I think client onboarding is often, often a good one as well. You know, like automatically creating folder structures in, in what? You know, whatever. Google Drive, OneDrive, whatever. That was one we used a lot in our agency. So like when someone signs a proposal, setting them up as a client in some system, sending the request from content snare, creating folder structures, obviously that, that gets a bit more complicated. I can probably actually link in the show notes about that. I think I've got a video on how to set up exactly this kind of thing. And the reason I like the client onboarding workflow is because it's like, it's. You can build on it over time. So it might just be like proposal signed, put a message in Slack. That's it. That's it. And then you go later and you add another step that's like send the request in contents now and then you go later and you go create the folder or whatever. And so you can always build on things over time.
So I don't know.
[00:26:21] Speaker C: That's where this is probably one of most common use cases that we see. I was literally talking to a firm today, a client and our task for their onboarding workflow is like 11 steps. So to your point, there's a lot that sometimes needs to happen as they onboard client and the various apps they have to add them on and the people that need to re notify and the things we need to request from them with apps like yours. So definitely that's probably a quite a quick win for most people.
[00:26:52] Speaker B: Nice. So on the flip side of this, what's your favorite stuff to automate? Like the stuff that, whether it's like huge time savings or just like stuff you love doing.
[00:27:02] Speaker C: Honestly, I love to automate reporting. I guess I'm a numbers geek, but anything that's around reporting sales metrics, marketing metrics, operational metrics, time tracking metrics, revenue metrics, financial metrics, like that's reporting that you have to like just get a pool some for your business on a regular basis.
I just love to automate that stuff.
This is a way to just, you know, look at the numbers.
[00:27:30] Speaker B: What does it look like in an automation perspective? Like how, how are you building something like that? Is that pushing everything into that central spreadsheet that you mentioned before, which I was surprised at by the way, because there's so many like data storage type tools out there. You're using spreadsheets? Yes, often. Poor.
[00:27:43] Speaker C: Honestly, I'll say what I said earlier. We love to start simple until we cannot do that anymore.
Of course we've built these things for clients. Where to your point, what we're doing using make to go into QuickBooks and pull out the transactions, or to go into Clockify and build the time entries, or go into ClickUp and bring all the tasks or carbon and bring out the tasks.
But over time, of course we have to get fancy when we have to. For example, I have a firm that they are like an 8 favorite firm and they have time like a million time entries over the last five years. Like we're not gonna use the spreadsheet for it's gonna break at that point. So you do have a proper like SQL Warehouse in Amazon Redshift and you know it gets fancier over time but honestly we just stick with simple and just write it as long as we can, as hard as we can and you'll be surprised as far how far you can get it.
[00:28:38] Speaker B: Love it. Are you using Supabase for anything?
[00:28:41] Speaker C: Actually yes, it's part of the sort of the little template we have. I think it would be useful to sharing this with if you don't mind just.
[00:28:49] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. We'll go through all the tools. I actually want to know all the tools that are on there later because this is something I've been thinking a lot about is building actually. Yeah, let's do it.
[00:29:00] Speaker C: These are the tools we currently support or either have thoroughly test it.
The AI apps as I told you earlier, kind of be in the latest category but in the data storage tool. To your point, we start with a Google spreadsheet if now we kind of move on to Airtable or Supabase if we have to get a little bit more fancy and especially if you're working with some of those AI apps like Lobable and Replit, Supabase is what they support. So typically that's a good combination and beyond that kind of when you have to go developer mode, it's usually some sort of SQL database in some fancy Amazon or Google infrastructure or Microsoft infrastructure that you know, probably beyond the scope of the Scott start talking about the SQL and everything that goes along with that. But it's just effectively a database with no use limits.
[00:29:48] Speaker B: Yeah. So I mean we use Airtable a lot and I like Airtable because it's, it's like the UI is good and you can like. So I think other like non technical people can pick it up and that's what I've been looking for and it's the next step past airtable is like something that's still got a good UI that's not. That's got somewhat SQL capabilities. Right, right. Sukabase seems to maybe be there.
[00:30:13] Speaker C: I don't know, it's somewhat there but I'll say that you know the typical business user setting it up, it's not. It's going to struggle a little bit. I feel like maybe for a low quarter they could probably get their head around it.
But honestly it's getting easier by the day especially with AI and those tools like Flowable and Replit, they do a lot of the setup after you've. You've kind of do the initial turning on the database. You can literally prompt your way to hey, add this field or do this thing.
The AI will do it for you.
[00:30:46] Speaker B: I do, I don't know. Like I with the AI stuff I'm still like, I'm in the middle, like I'm not a skeptic and I'm like I use it all the time but I feel like every time I do anything code related with it I'm like there is no way a non technical person could handle this. Right. Like I said, like that's my experience anyway. I'd like to hear yours. But like I got it to write one script that was pulling data from API and putting it in a spreadsheet and it made two errors that were small.
But without knowing how APIs work, I would not have been able to find them. Like for example, one of them had used the wrong version of the API to talk to it was which was missing a couple of data points. And I was like looking at this thing being like what the hell? And it was hidden up in the very first line where it said like it was like V1 instead of V2 of the API. And I was like good luck for a non technical person to notice that. Right. So I don't know, like what's your experience here? Like do you think you need a bit of technical knowledge to be able to do this vibe code type stuff?
[00:31:44] Speaker C: I think you can start without it for sure and bang your head, your head against the wall a little bit if you're willing to spend that time.
Actually I have a friend in the space, it's called Brian Claire. He actually built a chrome extension for Carbon.
[00:31:59] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:31:59] Speaker C: Entirely by coded. He doesn't know how to code. He built it, now guess what, he's maintaining it. And I know he has developers on board building features on top of that. So once you have the prototype that works, the mvp, if you want to take it from there, you're probably going to need a developer to help you with that. But people can probably get started. I encourage everyone to do that because it's just open their eyes onto what kind of what's possible.
[00:32:23] Speaker B: And there are like lower again like the lower risk type stuff where things if they blow up aren't going to cause problems, you know, Like I feel like when you're getting into database type stuff or client information, you know, you could cause serious problems, right? Like with data loss or like doing the wrong thing, spamming by accident, whatever. Like and there's like a hall of fame of like massive fails in the VOD code space.
But like one that our sales guy Tom recently has been doing, and I know Trent from Vinyl has been doing it too, is just like landing pages. So, you know, it's like he will create a landing page for a specific webinar. Right. Like normally we just could not be bothered going and making a special page that after someone comes to a certain webinar, here's a page that we send everyone to with some information, a video, potentially the replay.
You can opt in for content, snare, whatever. Right. Like just some things that's completely read only. There's no database behind that. Right. There's no sort of. It's just like view this page, view this information and then click away to something else. That to me is like a really awesome use case. That's super low risk. Right. I like that. Like when I saw. And they actually look pretty good. Some of these landing pages, like, they're not perfect and they're not exactly on our brands, but they're like probably close enough for a single use landing page.
So yeah, I like that use case.
[00:33:43] Speaker C: Yeah, I like that too. And I think that to your point, like the things that we didn't have the time for or the money for now because they become so much faster to create, they become like at least suitable or something you're willing to consider automating.
[00:34:02] Speaker B: Nice. Just to quickly close the loop on reporting because you said that was your favorite stuff and you know, once all that data's in those tools like a spreadsheet or whatever, are you using a reporting layer tool on top of that or is it they literally just looking in the spreadsheet?
[00:34:16] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, we do use a reporting tool on top of that for the most part.
It's rare that maybe if a client, maybe for budget reasons, don't want us to do that and it's just going to use charts on Excel or something like that. But more often than not we are using a layer on top of that.
[00:34:32] Speaker B: What kind.
[00:34:33] Speaker C: What kind of tools we use for a while, Looker Studio, but since we've actually moved on to using Retool for Autoboard adwords and we actually considering using one of the AI apps instead, I don't think they're quite there yet in terms of the ability to have those queries. Like getting the data in the correct format can be a little bit more tricky.
But at least for now we're relying on root ritual primarily. I don't know if you're familiar with the tool.
[00:35:02] Speaker B: Heard it haven't used it. I use Looker a fair bit and it's super complicated.
[00:35:07] Speaker C: Yeah. And actually it's funny because Ritual is not really a business intelligence solution like Looker. It's more of an internal tool builder that happened to have a lot of shard functions that allow you to pretty much create any charts and actually they support just a specific, you know, this gets technical so we'll lose some people. But if this is like JavaScript library that you can effectively custom create any chart and it's just a lot less limitations that you would have on pretty much any other business intelligence tools. And guess what?
Those you know, code based ways to create a custom chart can be at least aided or assisted using AI. So I think people get their hand around it.
[00:35:57] Speaker B: I like that. Yeah, I mean I think that's what I wanted from this chat anyways. To start from. Yeah, like the basic stuff and get through to the advanced and there's a bit of something for everyone. Yeah, we might lose some people along but yeah, I don't know. I think, I think it's good for people to know especially like, you know, to be able to see where they can end up with this stuff and what it's like working with someone like you. So I think it's probably a good place now to sort of wrap up essentially. But like what?
Just a couple of quick questions.
What's your favorite tech or thing right now? Something you've spent money on?
[00:36:35] Speaker C: Honestly, I'll have to say site and some of. Okay, some of these AI back coding tools. I'm just literally waking up on Saturdays and Sundays throwing out a few prompts and just building internal stuff for myself or just personally.
[00:36:49] Speaker B: What kind of stuff have you built?
[00:36:52] Speaker C: A variety of things I've built like just our recruitment pipeline, kind of like a NTS of sorts. I've built a capacity planner for us internally.
I've built a couple of reporting things as well. I've built it a like estimator estimation tool for us to like estimate how long it might take to perform something cool for clients. We've done things like pricing calculators.
Relatively simple to put together. If you have the logic behind it. There's a lot you can do with it.
[00:37:26] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Love it. And then what are you excited about right now?
Let's say over the next 12 months.
[00:37:37] Speaker C: I don't know if this is cheating but internally I guess I'm excited to the bellaventary or existing team members because we made like 3 hires in the last 2 months.
Congrats so we're growing quickly. There's just a lot of demand for it. I think you kind of mentioned that at the, at the front end. And I'm just excited to, you know, get some help. I feel like I'm finally not the smartest person in the room.
Capable engineers, very capable consultants that have more experience than I have, and I'm excited just to development and get them productive.
[00:38:08] Speaker B: Perfect. I love that, man. And I'm just gonna, you know, hopefully not finish on too much of a negative here, but what are you scared about?
[00:38:18] Speaker C: What am I scared about? I'm scared about people believing that AI is a magic bullet. I'm scared about a massive bubble burst that might be coming up. And actually, I read this recently and I think this, this resonated with me. Microsoft in 1999 was worth $600 billion.
It took them 15 years to actually grow up to that valuation. After the crash in the dot com boom, I believe we might see something similar where I think that the, the tail, the.
I think the, the moral of the story is that AI might be the greatest thing in the world, like, just like the Internet was. But maybe I would call it a.
[00:39:00] Speaker B: Little bit too early.
I mean, I'm. I'm in that camp. Like I alluded to earlier. I think, I think we've been on a bit of an S curve with AI where. And we're like close to the sort of top of this, like, where it's flat for a while and then we have this huge acceleration and then it goes flat again. And I do feel like we're kind of towards that top of the S. Like the, the highly accelerating bit. Like, personally, like, AI hasn't really changed much for me in the last several months or six months or whatever, and I know that's a short period of time, but we, we have been accelerating before that very quickly.
I feel like, like LLMs. I don't.
I'm waiting for like the next AI tech, right? That's not LLMs, because I feel like right now we're shoehorning like this language, you know, essentially, like, I hate to call it this, but like auto predict on steroids, whatever, right?
[00:39:47] Speaker C: Like it's.
[00:39:48] Speaker B: We're shoehorning lots of random use cases into that, like, where. I feel like there's machine learning and AI has been around in many other forms. LLMs is just what everyone is talking about right now. So I don't know. I hope that I am scared. Like, if my answer to that question is, like, I'm scared about AI because I just don't know. Like, I don't know if it's gonna be better than I think it is or if it's gonna cause serious problems to society or what. Like, I just honestly don't know. But yeah, I guess. I guess time will tell and we'll see. You know, like, there could be. There's so many threats to every business from AI working at the same time. I'm also not that worried, like, right now.
[00:40:27] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, I'll say the same thing. I feel like it's because we were in the space and we're kind of adopting it. I honestly think I'm more scared about the people not doing anything about it more than anything. Because I feel like it is true that maybe it is not as there's a hype a little bit. Right. It's. It's a little bit more. It's being marketed as more than it actually is, but it is to some degree and I feel like people should pay attention and definitely not ignore it.
[00:40:55] Speaker B: Yeah, it's like you don't need to be completely obsessed with it and try every tool like a LinkedIn, you know, hype voice will tell you. But yeah, I think you need to be experimenting and playing around, seeing what's. What's possible and what's not, what doesn't work, you know?
Yeah, Awesome.
[00:41:11] Speaker C: I agree.
[00:41:13] Speaker B: Well, it's been great having you on. Where would you like people to go to find out more about working with you?
Yeah.
[00:41:20] Speaker C: So visit ABSA Co and you'll have the opportunity there to book a consultation if you feel like you're ready to talk to our team and see if we can help.
Otherwise there are some free use cases there that people can download just at least to get a better understanding of what's possible.
[00:41:35] Speaker B: Love it. Yeah. So that was Op Z er co.
We'll also link up to. Do you want people to follow you anywhere on socials?
[00:41:43] Speaker C: LinkedIn, it's probably the best place to do that. And also YouTube. So if you go to YouTube.com the handle is observe same opz and r c o. And I'm almost at a 500 subscribers, so I am almost there.
[00:42:00] Speaker B: Awesome, man. Well, we'll link all those up in the notes and thank you so much for coming on.
[00:42:07] Speaker C: A pleasure, man.
Thanks for having me.
