Marisa Shadrick :
You and I both heard a lot of buzz around AI, from large companies integrating into their business workflow to the solo business owner using it for their everyday task. Well, today, I have a special guest, Dan Sanchez. And if you don’t know who Dan is, he is an AI marketer consultant, a creator with a passion for diving into the latest technology innovations. I heard him speak at Social Media Marketing World, and he also works with Michael Stelzner at Social Media Examiner, and he’s a contributor in their program AI Society. Well, Dan specializes in developing cutting edge marketing strategies that leverages artificial intelligence to enhance customer engagement and drive business growth. I know you’ll get a lot out of this episode as Dan begins to share a lot of his AI insights and tips, so stay tuned. Hello, Dan. Welcome to Amplify Your Authority Podcast.

Marisa Shadrick :
So glad to have you here.

Dan Sanchez :
Thanks for having me on.

Marisa Shadrick :
Yes. I thought it’d be interesting to share how we met, because that was recent. We met in San Diego at, a huge conference, right? Social Media Marketing World. And you were one of the speakers there. And it was great kind of connecting with you before the conference started. We started chatting, and I could probably talk to you for a long time and geek out on AI. But, but we both live in Tennessee. We found that out.

Marisa Shadrick :
Did you happen to, fly back from San Diego for all those tornado warnings, or did you come in later after that?

Dan Sanchez :
I came in right, like, before all that happened. So I came back right away after the conference because I got family. I have four kids here in Tennessee. My wife likes me to be back as as fast as I’m able to be back because it’s it’s crazy here.

Marisa Shadrick :
Absolutely. So what’s the age range of the kids?

Dan Sanchez :
Oldest is 12. My youngest is two.

Marisa Shadrick :
So Oh my gosh.

Dan Sanchez :
I got a range.

Marisa Shadrick :
How adorable. Oh my goodness. So have you lived in Tennessee for a long time?

Dan Sanchez :
No. Three years. I moved here from Minnesota. But before Minnesota, I’ve lived all over the Midwest, and I actually grew up in LA.

Marisa Shadrick :
Okay. I grew up in LA too. I think we we discussed that too. LA was my old stomping ground when I was a kid. So awesome. Well, you know a lot about AI. And so we’re gonna give everyone kind of, a little bit of of a taste of your journey with AI so that they can see the possibilities because some people are just not on board yet, or maybe they’re dipping their toe a little bit. And I think the conversation will help maybe ease any concerns that may have and maybe even see the potential of using AI.

Marisa Shadrick :
And we can stay specifically with ChatGPT. That’s my favorite. But if you wanna talk about some of the others, that’s fine too. But what was something when you were exploring AI, what was an moment or the moment you realized this is something that will really help in business?

Dan Sanchez :
There’s so many different points that got me into AI. It took some some hard things that were going on my life at the time. It took some ahas. It took me seeing AI. I was working at a tech company beforehand and seeing all the things they were doing with this. I’m like, wow. This is really cool. But one of the things that I think is more interesting is I was working at a podcast agency called Sweet Fish, and we were crushing it.

Dan Sanchez :
We were the number one b to b podcast agency in the world, had over a hundred shows we were managing. And we were like, how can we grow next? And started I started doing the marketing thing where I’m like, okay. Like, if we’re planning out five, ten years, like, who would beat us and how would they beat us? How can we start thinking about that ahead of time? I started thinking about what can we do to prepare in order to, like, disrupt ourselves so that somebody else can’t do it. And after looking at all the different service models and all the different competitors, I realized that tech SaaS, like, serve, software as a service was gonna be the one to disrupt us. It wasn’t going to be a podcast service agency. It wasn’t going to be people. It was going to be technology.

Marisa Shadrick :
Mhmm.

Dan Sanchez :
And I started looking into that. I started diving into it, trying to figure out, like, what that would be. We even started developing some tools in house. In the long end of it, Sweet Fish ended up going upmarket to do what AI couldn’t do. I left and started going downmarket to figure out what I could start leveraging what kind of technology I could leverage in order to make the process better and faster. And that was just kind of the beginning of my AI journey. Once ChatGPT was out and running around and we were able to I was able to start experimenting with it. That became more and more of the this is going to be the solution.

Dan Sanchez :
This is how we can actually make content production easier, faster. So all you have to do is talk into the microphone, hit publish, and all of a sudden your voice and your ideas and your opinions can be everywhere.

Marisa Shadrick :
Yeah. Was that a hard transition leaving and pretty much going on your own?

Dan Sanchez :
Yeah. I had some bumpy roads. I actually went first in I wanted to go from agency. I went in house, worked for a tech company that only that went for a short time, and then I went solo after that. And that period was really difficult. I think rolling up your sleeves to become a solo consultant was really hard because that was before AI was taking off.

Marisa Shadrick :
Mhmm.

Dan Sanchez :
And before it was actually even truly, like, as useful as it is today. Like, the the first year of ChatGPT was really exciting, but anybody using AI today is like, oh, it’s so much better than what we had at the beginning. Right? You look back to, like, four o back when it first came out. You’re like, man, it was bad. And it was so smooth. Even the four, not even four o, like four, just four, was was so bad compared to what we have today. And there wasn’t as much hype as there was. There wasn’t really a market for it.

Dan Sanchez :
So I was peddling all kinds of other things of podcast work or marketing automation work and all kinds of marketing consultant odds and ends. And I couldn’t quite figure out what to even label myself as. And I had this, like, moment in December of twenty twenty three, where I was like, okay. Like, what am I gonna be known as? What do I wanna be known for? And that’s when I decided, like, AI is the thing. There’s no market here right now, but there will be. I’m confident that there will be.

Marisa Shadrick :
Yes.

Dan Sanchez :
I’m like, I’ve had this feeling a few times before. I’ve, like, doubled down on WordPress before that became a thing, and I doubled down on marketing automation before that became a really big thing. And I’ve had a few other instances like that where I’m like, this is going to be it. I have to get into this now. So I started a podcast up called the AI driven marketer, and I went hard. And I was doing an episode or two a week, and I went all year. Hardly had any traction for ten months. It wasn’t until later on that I actually started building an audience, and it actually started growing to something slightly more substantial.

Dan Sanchez :
This this show is still pretty small compared to, like, major shows today.

Marisa Shadrick :
But you’ve done really well with that. And you’re speaking the heart of a solopreneur. So I’m glad you’re sharing that because I think that would be an encouragement to my audience. Because a lot of times they don’t know what they want to be known for. And they think that they’re the ones that struggle and everybody else doesn’t, and it is a journey. And so I think that’s really yeah. It’s a real encouragement.

Dan Sanchez :
It’s really hard. Yeah. Yeah.

Marisa Shadrick :
It is.

Dan Sanchez :
Where, like, you and everybody else I know, like, we all start dozens of different things. We try different things and we pivot. We try something and we launch this offer. It didn’t work. And we try this thing and we start we’re all in on this new topic and we start a whole blog or a podcast or YouTube channel on it, and then it fit phase like, phases out. It just doesn’t go anywhere. This was the first major time where I’d gone independently apart from my employer and doubled down on something, and it actually, like, it finally clicked. But Yeah.

Dan Sanchez :
Yeah. I mean, it also had to do, like, 60 episodes before it finally clicked. So, like, I had to go a long ways into it before the audience started showing up and staying.

Marisa Shadrick :
Yeah. And that’s the thing. You need to commit and just continue doing what you’re doing. And you’re not gonna see necessarily the results right away, but you’ve gotta just trust that it will come as you continue to create content, whether it’s a podcast or whatever it is that you decide you wanna do for long form content. But now you are very much involved with a social media examiner. You wanna tell everybody about that?

Dan Sanchez :
Yeah. So that was fun. I I’d been on a guest on other podcasts like this one before, but I was a guest on man, it’s always the thing I love about podcast is, like, the best way to get to know people. Yeah. And you don’t know who you’re gonna get to meet, and these shows, like, are are meeting now. But now when we see each other on LinkedIn or whatever platform or or even in person, like, it’ll be different because we’ve had this talk now. Yeah.

Marisa Shadrick :
That’s what

Dan Sanchez :
I love about podcasting. So I was on a different podcast. I was a guest on, Mike Altman’s show. He had just started an AI show, and Michael Stelzner was listening to that one looking for, people to recruit for his own show. My episode came along his ears, and he had his assistant reach out to me in September. We booked a show for his show, AI Explored, and that came out in October when he found out I was independent. He’s like and he’s he’s in Nashville too. So, since he was local, he’s like, hey, man.

Dan Sanchez :
We should have lunch. You know how a lunch conversation turned to chatting, and then he extended a full time offer for me to come join him. At the time, my show was almost nothing. So, like, it it was starting to build at that point, but I knew by joining forces with him, it would just be better for both of us, because he wanted someone that could be, like, an in house, subject matter expert on AI. And I was excited about joining him, getting in front of the social media examiner platform and being able to speak at the conference. The conference was actually, like, not even supposed to happen, but that was kind of a happy accident right at the end.

Marisa Shadrick :
Yeah. That’s wonderful. And you do a great job. And, you know, to connect and I think the moral of the story is you never know who’s listening. Right? Yeah. So that was almost a serendipitous moment, but it worked out so well. And you’re so well suited for that. You’re so well suited.

Marisa Shadrick :
And you seem to have a really good dynamic with Michael Stelzner as well. So that’s always nice, because I attended the q and a that you both did together in at the conference, and that was great, hearing the dial the different perspectives. So it was really, really good. Awesome. So, you talked a little bit about the challenges. Now what are some things today that you’re pleasantly surprised and really enjoying about AI? What’s coming to mind? Because there’s so many angles, so many directions we can go. But what’s something that’s really exciting you right now? Gosh.

Dan Sanchez :
It has just gotten so good recently. I know. It’s so good. It makes me look back to even a year ago or even, I think, six months ago. I’m like, man, hey. I sucked sucked six months ago, and now it’s so good. The o three model for reasoning has just become, like, such a go to for me. Even this weekend, it blew me away.

Dan Sanchez :
I I had a moment where I was sitting on my front porch and looking at my my lawn because it’s springtime, and all the weeds are taking over my lawn. I even have Bermuda, which is a weed net in itself. No. It’s still getting dominated by all the weeds here in Tennessee. And I was looking at it. I’m like, man, I’ve been meaning to do something about this. I could hire somebody. I don’t even know who to call.

Dan Sanchez :
I just I need help. I took a picture of my lawn just sitting there on my porch with my, with my phone, send it to 0303 has this ability to see photos really well. Now I can really analyze photos, find details. I’m like, chat g p t. I don’t know how to fix my lawn. It’s being taken over. All I do is mow it, but I need to do I know I need to do more stuff. I need to put chemicals, something.

Dan Sanchez :
I don’t know. But here’s my lawn. Help me identify what’s wrong with it. What what kind of weeds I got going on? Help me build a plan to fix it. It sees it, identifies all the weeds. Yeah. And it’s like, this is fixable. Like, or mute as a bully if you give it the proper just a little bit of attention.

Dan Sanchez :
It builds a plan for me. I’m like, great. Where can I buy the stuff you’re recommending? I have a Home Depot I can drive to. So it goes and searches Home Depot’s website, finds me all the stuff, links to it all. I go to Home Depot. One of the things are not there. It’s, like, oh, okay. This other thing’s suitable.

Dan Sanchez :
Get that. And I got that. I get home. I have a one of those little, like, things you push, you know, that’s sprit sprinkles out the whatever the chemicals are. I don’t know. Yeah. All the pellets. I I bought it used.

Dan Sanchez :
I don’t even know if it works. I don’t even know it’s the right thing. I take a picture. It’s a bad photo. It still recognizes it, understands what make it is, what model it is. And it’s like, hey, you need to check these two things on it. If those work, then you’re good to go. So I check it.

Dan Sanchez :
It works. I’m like, it it gives me the sequence of what I need to do, when I need to do it, how I need to do it, and just kinda walks me through the whole process. Yeah. This is kinda technical.

Marisa Shadrick :
I know. It even

Dan Sanchez :
did a search for my address, found my land plot from the county, subtracted the, house, like, where the house sits and estimated, like, how much square footage a lawn I had and tell me how many bags of everything I needed to buy. This is the day and age we live in when it comes to AI. And this is going to be the norm of how we operate with AI.

Marisa Shadrick :
I love it.

Dan Sanchez :
There’s a few factors in that that are important for marketers or any anybody in business right now. One, it made product recommendations to me.

Marisa Shadrick :
Mhmm.

Dan Sanchez :
Didn’t care. I just bought what it recommended because it sounded right. It felt right. And gosh, dang it. Like, I’m pretty confident, like, I bought the right stuff, but it could be wrong. I don’t know. Didn’t matter. I made it.

Dan Sanchez :
I it sounded right. I went and bought it. Didn’t question it. I bought whatever it told me to buy. That’s gonna have a big impact on buyers in the future. Oh, yeah. The other thing is this is gonna be a big impact on how we operate as professionals or even as people. We’re all gonna have this world class executive assistant being able to handle all the problems we throw at it.

Dan Sanchez :
Right now I had to prompt it to get that conversation started in the future it will be prompting us it’ll be we’ll have our morning briefing and it’ll be almost like think of like you watch like a movie with this like high level executive who’s walking into a car, maybe his executive assistants, and they’re briefing that person on the days what’s gonna happen that day, decisions that need to be made, and questions for them. Right? That’s gonna be AI for all of us. Yeah. It’s starting to feel like that already with o three. And we’re starting to get on to this point where it’s starting to feel more, you know, agentic or this thing that actually has the capacity to do a lot for you.

Marisa Shadrick :
Absolutely. So I love that you’re using it in your personal life because I do as well. And I do a similar thing. You know, if if I didn’t go to the store and I only have a few things in the freezer or in the pantry, I’ll just ask Chachapiti this is what I have. It already knows, like, it’s for dinner for two, and it knows what things we like and what we don’t. And it will take what I have on hand, and it will create a whole menu. And I’ll I’ll say the same thing. I don’t have that ingredient.

Marisa Shadrick :
Okay. No problem. Let me substitute it with this. Do you have this? And I go, yes. So it’s the same type of thing. And I recently just wrote a song for my son-in-law who turned 50 and a real milestone, right? I can’t, when none of us can believe he turned 50, but in any event, I wrote a song and it was kind of like, a little bit of humor in it, but heartfelt at the same thing. And everyone was like amazed and it took like, nothing to create it. So we’re using it now in our personal life.

Marisa Shadrick :
But in business life, how is it helping people as far as their ROI? Have you heard from different businesses or solopreneurs how it’s really helping them get clients or increase revenue, those type of things.

Dan Sanchez :
There’s a ton ton of different ways it can help. The the easiest way to start is just by speeding things up and cost savings, essentially. Yeah. I remember I did a custom GPT project a year ago for a business consultant who did strategic planning for companies. He specifically hired to do scenario planning, like intense scenario planning. So companies could plan for, like, okay, if x happens in the economy and this major trend takes off, what’s the intersection of those two things? But it’s something that would take him roughly a week or two to do. You’re talking, like, forty to sixty man hours worth of intense work from a highly specialized consultant or himself. Not easy work to be able to build out those scenarios.

Dan Sanchez :
Together, we built a custom GPT that takes that forty to sixty man hours and makes it easy enough to do in fifteen minutes.

Marisa Shadrick :
Yeah. That’s beautiful. It I mean, that’s the name of the game. Right?

Dan Sanchez :
Fast. He just does it live with clients as a service. And we can they can explore different paths together because the custom GPT will plan for the two intersections and using his data and using his method will paint a picture and tell a story. And that’s the best part about this generative AI thing is it can Mhmm. Make up stuff and tell stories, especially if you give it direction to run-in. It was very good at scenario planning. Yeah. So that’s, like, a great example because we all have things like that in our businesses.

Dan Sanchez :
Yeah. One of my favorite custom GPTs actually is a is a showrunner for a podcast. Because every time you have a new guest on, you gotta do some research on them. You gotta think about what angle you’re gonna take with them. You gotta think about the title. You gotta think about the questions. But my show runner, which is, myshowrunner.com, like, you can literally just go and grab this custom GPT or the instructions and customize it for yourself. Mhmm.

Dan Sanchez :
It does all that for you. Instead of it taking thirty, forty five minutes, it gets it done in five. You could literally sit down ten minutes before you’re about to record an interview and be fully prepared in order to ask customized questions that are best for your show and that per particular person. Yeah. So those speeds that that speed of being able to execute results, sometimes even better than you would have been able to do before like that kind of consultant. I was talking about. He’s got a totally different process. He’s not just taking it and then delivering them a PDF with all the stuff and presenting it.

Dan Sanchez :
He’s doing it live with clients right there, planning for the scenarios, helping them think about the possibilities of the future so that then they can work together on coming up with plans to be prepared for them. It’s it’s not only faster, it’s actually better.

Marisa Shadrick :
And

Dan Sanchez :
that’s how people are actually using it, not just to speed up the time to results for their clients, but actually improving the whole process in and of itself. Yeah. Of course, there’s some things you can do be doing in marketing too. Like, I think everybody needs to be leveraging, conversational conversation marketing with AI. It’s like one of the easiest ones. Still, a lot of people don’t do it. You should everybody should have a chatbot that’s trained on your business with your most frequently asked questions that books appointments for you. Mhmm.

Dan Sanchez :
Why doesn’t everybody have one of those now? Like, everybody needs this. It’s low hanging fruit because everybody has questions. Not everybody wants to take the time to navigate the website, and chat bots have gotten so good now. You could do the same thing with inbound phone calls. I used to work for a college where we recruit students. And the most painful thing I had to deal with is we were too successful in generating leads. I couldn’t call them all. I wish we would have had then what we have today with an like a phone call center.

Dan Sanchez :
Like, I I didn’t even have enough man hours to book inbound. I’d miss inbound phone calls. You’re like, those are warm leads calling in. Can’t take them. Yeah. Because the people calling outbound were too busy, and I didn’t have enough of them calling outbound. Oh, nightmare. We don’t have those problems anymore.

Marisa Shadrick :
Yeah. I think it’s just if you can imagine it, you can probably figure out a way how AI can help. Because everything that you said from just analyzing images, even, you’d appreciate this. My husband, he’s in sales and he has a compensation plan. And there’s different ways that you can hit bonus and so forth. Yep. And so I put that into chat g p t and I had had it analyze the compensation plan and give a strategy as how my husband could leverage the compensation plan so he can make the most money in the year. And my husband had already done this and calculated everything.

Marisa Shadrick :
It was within a dollar difference.

Dan Sanchez :
Yeah.

Marisa Shadrick :
It’s like blew him away. That’s when he became a believer and decided, wow, this is something that I should take a look at. He’s in perplexity and of course I love perplexity, but he’s using that a lot now, but that’s huge for him because he didn’t think he could really accomplish anything. And I don’t think people realize the potential and what’s ahead, what’s coming ahead, and how helpful it could be specifically for solo business owners who wear so many hats. So important.

Dan Sanchez :
AI is incredibly good today. But I used to say this, and I still say this, like, if all AI innovation stopped and what we have today is the best that it gets, we will unlock at least eight to ten years of innovation off the back of what we currently have. Yeah. Because, like, think about how long how much innovation we had off the back of iPhones, like, specifically three gs. When they started putting GPS units in iPhones, we unlocked a lot of different new business models. We had a lot of innovation off the back of iPhone or mobile first tech and all kinds of companies. Uber couldn’t exist without smartphones. Right? There’s a lot of companies like that that, like, blew up and became known and became useful off the back of mobile phones.

Marisa Shadrick :
Mhmm.

Dan Sanchez :
Just a few different pieces of technology come under one roof. And then it stopped. It just got incrementally better, but no real new things have come out with smartphones in a long time. Right?

Marisa Shadrick :
Yeah.

Dan Sanchez :
AI will have just as much innovation over the next ten years, And that’s if it doesn’t stop getting better.

Marisa Shadrick :
Yeah. But it will.

Dan Sanchez :
It’s gonna

Marisa Shadrick :
start better. On some use cases. Now, you also have written a children’s book. Right?

Dan Sanchez :
Mhmm. You

Marisa Shadrick :
wanna tell us a little bit about that?

Dan Sanchez :
I just

Marisa Shadrick :
want people to understand the use case, the potential of Yeah. What we can do with AI.

Dan Sanchez :
There’s so many use cases. In fact and that’s just one tiny little fraction of a use case. I’ve I’ve created, worked with, children’s book illustrator to publish a children’s book. I’ve done two. One called I wanna be a marketer when I grow up and one called how to grow an audience. It’s for kids because, of course, a lot of kids wanna be YouTubers and grow an audience. But a lot of kids, I think selfishly, I just want to take kids to know more about marketing because nobody goes there’s a lot of people that get into marketing, but nobody, like, thought about they would them doing that in high school.

Marisa Shadrick :
Mhmm. Yeah.

Dan Sanchez :
Right? It’s one of those careers people fall in love with later or find out that it’s, you know, just a really good thing. But I found out what chat g p t’s new image maker now that it can handle lots of text. I’m like, oh, I wonder if I can recreate a whole kids book with just chat g p t’s image maker and chat g p t itself and it can’t. I came up with the whole storyline. I said like, hey, I wanna come up with a creative story about it being I’ll be the main character, but I I want it to be about AI not being the hero, but being the superpower of the character. So the book was called Captain Creative and the AI Sidekick. Yeah. That’s really And it was it was a fun book.

Dan Sanchez :
Of course, I brought my my son and my daughter into it as Sala and Noah. But it started laying out the pages and there was not some inconsistencies across the characters, but it was more consistent than I’d ever seen AI do before. And it’s still fun to read and actually go through. And And that’s just one tiny little use case. There’s there’s we will spend the next six to eight months, like, looking for more use cases for that one tool, ChatChippity’s new image generator, because it’s so versatile.

Marisa Shadrick :
Yeah. By the inconsistencies, you mean the character may be looking different with each illustration. It’s getting better.

Dan Sanchez :
Yeah. Like the girl from one shot one page to the next, her hair her hairstyle changed right from just being down to ponytail to frazzled. The boy’s hair kinda changed a little bit. You know, like, the shirt changes from thing to thing. So, like, little things change. Most of the time, most people wouldn’t even know if you were going fast, but people with attention to detail would notice those kinds of things.

Marisa Shadrick :
Yeah. A while ago, I think it was, like, a year and a half ago, I was trying to do something like that. And it was a little story about a farm and, these two adults, and there was a little girl, and there were goats. And in one of the images, the little girl ended up with a goat head. You know, it was so bad. Yeah.

Dan Sanchez :
It used to be really bad. Now it’s now it’s pretty good, but not perfect.

Marisa Shadrick :
Yeah. It was strange. And then some images with multiple, you know, like, six, seven fingers on one hand and things like that. But it’s so much better, like you said, so much better now than it was before. So if anybody got discouraged before, they should check out AI. At least Chat2PT because it’s so much better than it was before. So, looking ahead a little bit, there’s some buzz about AI agents. Now I know you did, a YouTube I think it was a podcast that you have on YouTube, five stages of AI agents and how marketers can prepare now.

Marisa Shadrick :
I’m gonna put a link to that so people can watch that and listen to it. But can you give just an explanation of what this is and why we should pay attention? What are a AI agents?

Dan Sanchez :
AR agents are is essentially AI that has reasoning ability. It’s very smart and has access to tools and the ability to use them on your behalf. Right? It it is it can be it has autonomy. It can do things by itself. You know? So you can schedule it to go and do something. And then every Monday at at 05:30AM, it goes and does all the things. And it might not always do it in the same order either. It does it in the order that makes sense, just like an employee would.

Dan Sanchez :
You’re like, employee, you’re responsible for doing x, every Monday. We need to have a a a, b, and c done. AI agents will do that. The, what a lot of people are calling AI agents now though, are not AI agents. They are just automation with a little bit of AI sprinkled in it. And there’s a massive difference why I did that whole episode because people don’t realize people are slapping the word agent on everything and not everything’s actually an agent. In fact, there’s very few true agents out there right now. Most of them are automation or automation with AI or something that’s starting to seem like an agent.

Dan Sanchez :
The closest thing that I’ve seen to agents, are more like previews of what they will be, but they’re not currently good yet. Like, Chat GPT has a program called operator that’s starting to feel very agentic because you can send it to go and book a reservation for you at a at a restaurant.

Marisa Shadrick :
Mhmm.

Dan Sanchez :
And if you think about it, that’s a fairly complex task because it has to make a lot of decisions in order to book a restaurant for you. Right? It has to know, like, when, where, like, find out if there’s availability, be able to report back to you on it. Right now, it can go and do it, but it’s gonna have to ask you a hundred and one questions along the way. And it takes so long for it to do it, that it’s it’s it doesn’t save you any time. It’s actually kind of a hindrance. It’s kind of annoying. But pretty soon, it’ll be fast. It’ll remember your preferences, and it’ll just do it.

Dan Sanchez :
Mhmm. That’s an agent. So if you wanna see an example of agent, just look up demos of, like, operator or Manus is, like, the Chinese version of that. Also not good enough, in my opinion, to do anything well. So but the tech is there, and it will get better. And eventually, they’ll have enough compute server space for everybody to have access to it. So I’m thinking by the end of the year, we’ll actually be able to see this in action, and it’ll start working well. Now when we’re talking about, like, using agents to, like, book you a dinner reservation, you’re, like, okay, that’s not helpful for my business.

Dan Sanchez :
Think about the implications. Yeah. I used to run an internship at that college I mentioned where I had 20 no. Had yeah, 24 students working under me and they did a variety different things I always had to onboard them as freshmen train them in something over a couple of weeks and I would get them into something very narrow of something fairly repetitive they’d have to do the same thing every day or like every week and I train them that one little skill. I almost had like a like a manufacturing plant mentality. Like, hey, you do this part. You do this part. You do this part.

Dan Sanchez :
And then we’ll we’ll complete the task of writing an SEO rich blog post. Right? That experience has probably given me the, like, the clearest understanding of what agents is are going to be. Because I got really good at finding things for those students to do and making them very productive. I’m now looking at these agents and looking at their capabilities, and I’m like, my gosh. It’s like having a bunch of interns, except it’s smarter and can operate twenty four seven, three 60 five. And if I could just give it the operating procedure on what to do, how to do it, and when to do it, and a decision tree of maybe like hey if you run into this do that if you run into this do it this way it’ll be able to do it yeah for a fraction of the cost of having an employee do it and probably more reliably especially if you can really define how what needs to happen That’s gonna be a game changer for businesses. And now it has access to a a web browser like I do. That means it can log into my CRM and do the things that I couldn’t do through the API.

Dan Sanchez :
It can go ahead and copy and paste over my my blog post that got published. And maybe I use some traditional marking automation for that to get it there. But now that next part, it always takes a minute to actually, like, copy and paste it over because that one tool I have has no good API on it. But that’s okay. My agent can actually go and do that for me. Every Tuesday, every time it sees this happen, it’ll go and do that. Double check it. Make sure it checks with me first, and then it sends it.

Dan Sanchez :
Right? There’s all these different tasks and things that agents will be able to fill in the gaps for that I think is really exciting. There’s gonna

Marisa Shadrick :
be a lot of sales entrepreneurs out

Dan Sanchez :
there crushing

Marisa Shadrick :
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Dan Sanchez :
A team of 30 agents.

Marisa Shadrick :
Now I know what most people are probably thinking, that technology learning curve, because I think some people that maybe aren’t even using ChatGPT, it it’s just so easy to use. It’s very conversational. You can even just start saying, I don’t know where to start. You could start there and have it just begin to dialogue with you. For those people that feel a little nervous about technology, coding, all this other stuff, What would you say? Is it something that most people would be able to use once it’s here, once we can use AI agents? I think, yes. But I’d love to hear your input.

Dan Sanchez :
I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. But let let me tell you why. Okay. Right now, some things are harder than others. It’s pretty dang easy compared to learning how to code or build a website or even setting up and dealing with WordPress. If you’ve you’ve installed a WordPress site, you know, it’s it’s a freaking pain. Right? There are some things using chat CPT is pretty easy, and then there’s other things that are kinda hard. That is to your advantage right now.

Dan Sanchez :
If you were like, oh, but it’s too hard, I’m like, yeah. And when it’s really easy to the point where my five year old could do it, then guess what? Everybody can

Marisa Shadrick :
do it. Everybody.

Dan Sanchez :
Yeah. So the fact that some things are harder actually to your advantage if you’re motivated to learn how to do it now, like, if you want it to be so easy that all you have to do is be like, hey, Chad GPT, make me a marketing campaign and make it successful. That’s a problem. Yes. It’s easy, but now, like, it it doesn’t matter anymore, like, because everybody can do it. So, like, you kinda have to weigh these things. Like, yes, we want it to be ultimate easy, but at the same time, we want it to be hard enough that we can actually still have a competitive advantage somewhere. So where’s your competitive advantage gonna be when marketing so easy that you just had to literally wake up, push a button and call it done? Yeah.

Dan Sanchez :
Well That’s

Marisa Shadrick :
a great point.

Dan Sanchez :
Gonna be you’re gonna you have to move the hard somewhere. So figure out where your heart’s gonna be. I actually think that it’s not that hard to learn the technical part of it. Right now building automations, especially building agents or like what we can do with agents and, something like make.com or nan, which are some automation platforms fairly hard. Like, I’m pretty technical and it took me some time. But at the same time, I’m glad it took me some time because that means, like, not everybody can replicate some of the sequences and the marketing things that I’ve put together. That’s true. It won’t be that that forever forever.

Dan Sanchez :
Pretty soon, I’ll just be able to tell my agent, hey, go make a sequence so that every time x happens, this is the steps. I don’t want you to do it every time. I want you to build a marketing automation sequence for it because that’s more consistent than an agent would be. Yeah. Sometimes you want you don’t wanna use AI if a computer can do, because computers are actually more consistent than AI can be. Even AI uses computers now. If you notice chat GPT, when you ask it to do math, pulls out essentially a calculator and starts using it to figure it out because it can’t add and subtract. So they’ve trained it to be like, hey, when you’re doing math, like, pull out this code program and start calculating it in there and then figure it out, which is really interesting.

Marisa Shadrick :
Yeah. So I love that. I think you, kinda nailed some misconceptions in the way we view AI and the complexity, which really, if you just spend some time with it. And I guess if you’re interested to really leverage AI and you spend some time because in the beginning, we all spent some time, even with Chatt GPT, trying to figure out how to write better prompts and so forth. But Yeah. The outcome got better and better and better, especially when we gave it knowledge, when we started creating custom GPTs. You know, we realized the potential of in the beginning, yeah, it was a little clunky. It’s like anything.

Marisa Shadrick :
You know, you teach a teenager how to drive. It’s pretty clunky. Right? But after a while, they master that skill. And I I feel like people can develop this skill and be able to, build on it. And Yeah. It doesn’t become as scary as it may feel right now.

Dan Sanchez :
It’s one of the few tools that will tell you how to use it if you not all the time. I will say that AI is really bad at understanding its own capabilities. But if you ask for ideas on how to use it in your specific context, it’s usually pretty good at it. But then, like, YouTube, just go to YouTube and be like, how to get started with chat g p t. Watch the video, try some of the stuff, watch five videos. Yeah. Like, you can watch five, six videos in the time it would take you to watch one episode of that thing you’re binging binging right now, and get ahead on AI more than most people, because most people don’t even take that amount of time to learn a new thing.

Marisa Shadrick :
Yeah. And I found perplexity is pretty helpful when you’re trying to maybe compare some online tools, or how does something work, or where do you unsubscribe for this? I can’t find it in the darn thing. It can tell you exactly where to go. Go here, here, here, here. Done. And so perplexity has been a real help for me in using perplexity, and ChatGPT is probably two of my favorites. But I use other AI tools just because, I love seeing what the potential is, but also just figuring out how I can help my audience. Maybe if somebody is not a ChatGPT person, but maybe they like Claude, The principles are the same as far as how you’re gonna use them.

Marisa Shadrick :
Right? You just have to modify it to that particular tool. So That’s right.

Dan Sanchez :
I usually tell people just to pick one of those big ones and just double down on that one tool. Forget all the rest. Forget the hype. Forget almost all every other tool. Like and it’s one of the things I asked a lot of people at the conference when they asked me. I got a I got a variety of questions from people, but the most common one said in a lot of different ways was, where am I at and what should I be learning next? And one of my first questions to assess where they’re at is if they were paying for a chat GPT or some tool that’s like it. If they weren’t paying for it, then they’re probably a beginner. And they haven’t found enough use cases to make it worth paying the $22 a month a no brainer.

Dan Sanchez :
If you are paying for it, are you using a custom GPT? Because that’s the next level. Have you built a dozen custom GPTs? Once you’ve maxed out once you’ve built a dozen, you’ve probably run through all the different ways you can build them.

Marisa Shadrick :
Mhmm.

Dan Sanchez :
From there, you move on to marketing automation, and using AI in automation. But that was usually how I would assess people.

Marisa Shadrick :
No. I totally agree. And I think with the use of ChatGPT, you begin to see that you’re ready for a custom GPT by just using it. And you realize, okay. It’s time to create a custom GPT, and it doesn’t feel as difficult because you’ve been using it already. You got a feel for it. And then you can customize it to remove emojis and and dashes or whatever you want, whatever style you want, and it becomes better at the output. So, yeah, because there’s a certain style that I like, and it can write just the way you want.

Marisa Shadrick :
And if you give it all that information, all the knowledge, it becomes even better. I I just love it. So when you’re looking at all these AI tools, and I know, I agree, I think people should focus on one because it’s learning. And the more you spend time with that one, it’s gonna learn more, and it’s going to produce better output. If you’re here, there, and everywhere, you’re not really deep diving on one. So I totally agree with that. But as you are looking at, different AI tools, how do you because I know you’ve done a lot of different things. Because I I follow you.

Marisa Shadrick :
I listen to your podcast and so forth. How do you check out all these AI tools and not become overwhelmed? Is it because you love it, or is it because you just wanna stay on the cutting edge, just kinda interested?

Dan Sanchez :
I think I’ve developed a good filter because a lot of people get overwhelmed by the news. I’m actually watching a few different sources. Mhmm. And I’m looking for things that seem applicable to me now. Like, what are the things I’m going through right now? And then is it applicable there? I’m also paying attention for, like, news of tools that I’m already using. Like, I’m already big into chat g p t. So news about Claude matters less to me than chat g p t news because I’m in chat g p t. So if it releases something new, I’ll probably get to test it out.

Dan Sanchez :
Yeah. Yeah. Otherwise, most tools are just previews of what’s to come. So they’re not even useful yet. Most people digging into tools right away do a pretty good job of breaking them down. And I don’t ever consider myself the first, first wave in. There’s a certain type of creator that’s like the first evaluators. As soon as the tool comes out, they wanna they wanna be the one breaking the news on how it is.

Dan Sanchez :
I’m never that person. I’m always second wave. I let those people vet it. I watch a few tutorials on how they’re doing it and just kind of stay informed. And then I evaluate whether it’s actually gonna be helpful for marketers. I let them be the crash dummies. And sometimes they are. And if they are, if they’re those people, they’re going so fast that they can’t go deep on any of these things because something’s gonna come out next week and they have to go figure that out.

Dan Sanchez :
I’ll I’ll be the one to slow down. If they’re doing 10 tools, I will pick one of their 10 tools and go a little bit deeper on it. And then even all of those, only a handful of those that I even check out are worth, like, spending a significant amount of time or money on. So there’s actually not a lot of tools that I’m, like, thinking about all the time. The one just crossed the line for me recently that I’m like, oh, this tool is now useful, and I might start using it regularly because it’s pretty good now.

Marisa Shadrick :
Yeah. I think that’s good advice because, we can if we let ourselves get overwhelmed. And I I’m the same way. Same thing with social media. I focus on one platform, LinkedIn. Same. Because it’s just it’s just too much.

Dan Sanchez :
It’s too much.

Marisa Shadrick :
And you don’t really well, that’s another story. But you have to figure out where you can show up and be there to build relationships and really focus. I can’t do it on multiple social media platforms. I can only do it on one and try to do it well in one place. And it’s the same thing with AI tools. So what excites you right now about the future with AI? What are you looking forward for, and what are you chomping at the bit to see happen with

Dan Sanchez :
AI? I’m looking for AI tools to interact with my CRM more. This is the one thing that I’m really excited about, that I haven’t seen a lot of CRMs really do well. I don’t I haven’t stayed up to date as much with HubSpot, but as far as I know, the AI tools I’ve seen from them, they’re they’re okay. I feel like that that platform has not been my favorite for a while now. The one I’m most excited about because of the price of it, because it’s fairly feature rich and they’re doing a really good job of baking AI into it is high level. But there’s even still things that I wanna see more of in there. But more specifically in the automation builder. Like, this is where I think a lot of gains can be had is, like, if a contact is passing through your CRM and you you know, you have these marketing automation, do you have the drip sequences? How can you be using AI to customize it so you can generate more leads out of all these contacts you have running through your CRM? Man, that’s exciting.

Dan Sanchez :
When I can actually communicate with an agent about what’s going on with different contacts at different times and following up with them and creating custom plans for each one, I’m like, this is around the corner. This is gonna be coming within a couple of years. But we’re gonna be taking little baby steps on the way there. So I’m really excited about that frontier, about seeing chat the the brilliance that is ChatCPT come into where the data for my business is actually happening.

Marisa Shadrick :
Agreed. It’s exciting time. We’re we’re seeing innovation, and things are just changing. I mean, it doesn’t take three months anymore. It’s like things are happening at such a rapid pace. And something when it first came out, and I thought, oh, this isn’t gonna go anywhere. It’s terrible, is now so I’m eating my words because when it first came out, it was a little bit clunky. But it is so much better now.

Marisa Shadrick :
So if you’ve never tried ChatGPT, I would encourage our listeners to just try it. And you can try the free version, but, I think the paid, like Dan said, is a no brainer. The paid version, because it’s only $20 a month, right now anyway, at the time of this recording, It is you it’ll you’ll more than make your money up for the $20 investment. So, Dan, when you’re not working and looking at AI’s tools, what do you what do you do on your own time? I know you have a family.

Dan Sanchez :
I feel like marketing is my hobby and my work, but

Marisa Shadrick :
I know.

Dan Sanchez :
It really does. My wife will be like, yeah. It’s a little much, but I love it. I don’t know what to do. But after that, like, I love running, so I’m I’m an avid runner. I love putting those running shoes on spending some time, but I’m also listening to marketing podcast while I’m running. So am I working or am I running? I also also like kids. I have kids at home.

Dan Sanchez :
I homeschool and I am very involved in their their lives. And we do a lot of soccer right now. We’re in soccer season. They three out three out of the four of them play soccer. So I’m at I’ve become one of those parents that go to soccer your kid’s soccer game, and I can’t even sit down. I’m pacing. I’m yelling. I’m jumping up into the air.

Dan Sanchez :
I never thought that would be me, but that’s

Marisa Shadrick :
it. Yeah. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. And the time goes by so quickly that you have to enjoy that. So Yeah. Yeah. Family and, AI, it’s the same thing.

Marisa Shadrick :
I I love learning about it. I think that’s why I don’t mind going deep, because I’ve always loved technology. I mean, when things were moving into computers, I was on it. I had a portable laptop, which you would call laptop, that weighed, like, 30 pounds back in the day, and it had a screen about yay big. And I thought it was the greatest thing ever invented that I could take this thing from work and home and back and forth. I thought it was so great. And I’ve just watched technology just evolve, and I just love it. And so I think that’s what keeps me excited is to see the innovation and the things that are coming and the things that can really help solo business owners.

Marisa Shadrick :
Now you have something to share with our audience today, something, a free resource. Do you wanna tell us a little bit about that? Like, what what did, you know, caused you to create it and tell us a little bit about what it’s about?

Dan Sanchez :
Yeah. It’s just a free course, classic email drip sequence. And it’s one of my favorite things to tell people about one because it’s free, but two because most people need to go through the same steps in order to really get a good handle on AI. And in fact, I I called it the AI fundamentals course, but a lot of people who, like, consider themselves inner like intermediate said like, hey, man, this isn’t it’s saying a fundamentals course. Like I learned a lot more in this than I thought I would. And what it does is kind of breaks you down how to think about chat gpt specifically. I’d had to pick one tool, so I double down on chat gpt how to think about it systematically. Episode one talks about super prompts and then it goes into chain prompting not chain of thought prompting but actually chain prompting thinking about things sequentially and then taking that same mentality and starting to build your first custom g p t a simple one and then to a like a more elaborate custom GPT.

Dan Sanchez :
And these are the building blocks that I think we all kind of have to go with in order to really level up on how to use AI not just for ones and twos things but how to use it to build whole systems cause if you can get a system and you can get a I to perform consistently in that system. You’re starting to set the groundwork for building agents for building a I employees and scaling your company in a way that was never possible just a few years ago but you actually have to take the time to walk through these steps. And that’s what I wanted to do was make a course. It’s just five days, five videos. And I even use AI capture a little bit of information about you on the form. And then you’ll see that every lesson underneath the video is customized just for you, your role, your audience, and who what you’re selling to them. So watch the videos. You follow along with the custom action plan that comes with every single lesson, and hopefully it can help you level up in your AI game.

Marisa Shadrick :
So it has a little bit like a quiz element to it where you answer and then the response is customized to the user. Right?

Dan Sanchez :
Yes. That’s right. I mean, it’s not a quiz. It’s more of like a survey where I ask you just for your Mhmm. Your title, your product, and who you sell to. But and it’s it’s actually pretty simple, but I include it in in the course itself. I’m like, hey, do you wanna figure out how I built this? And I will actually show you step by step how I built the course using AI. It’s not super elaborate.

Dan Sanchez :
So, essentially, I just take the transcript of every single lesson, send it off to chat GPT through high level with the few like, hey. Customize this lesson. I create a custom action plan for this lesson using these three things that we know about this user. Insert name, job description, product, audience, and then it just comes back and delivers it. Bam. And I had to test it a lot in order to really hone in that prompt. But once it was then, I I built it almost a year ago, and it’s been working for me ever since.

Marisa Shadrick :
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well, thank you for sharing that. I’ll make sure the link is in the show notes as well so that people can try it out, test it out, and begin to get more involved with ChatGPT. So I’m excited about that, and I’m excited that you shared so much today. Thank you so much for being on the show, because and especially the fact that you shared some of the challenges, because I think it’s important for people to know that it’s not just them. And you too shall overcome this. You know, if you just stick to it, that AI can really be a real support and a help with especially for solo business owners with the content creation, with so many things, and just producing blog posts or social posts.

Marisa Shadrick :
I love what you said about systems. If we start thinking about systems and thinking beyond just creating content for today, thinking about systems and preparing for those AI agents. So thank you so much, Dan, for sharing all your knowledge and wisdom and insights. Thank you. Alrighty. So until next time, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. And until next time, take care.

Marisa Shadrick :
Bye bye.