Todd Gagne:

Jonathan, welcome to the podcast.

Jonathan Mast:

Well, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here, Todd.

Todd Gagne:

Well, I appreciate it. I appreciate you making the time. As we were just kinda talking offline, I think you have a lot of interesting, both background and then some ideas about, like, how to be effective in this kind of AI environment. And, you know, people are like, lots of things are changing. And I think it it'll be interesting to talk to you about some of your experiences and and how you think some of these tools can be really applied to kind of software startups.

So I'm pretty excited about this conversation. Well, I

Jonathan Mast:

am too. I I love you know me, I love to talk AI. So, yeah, let's let's dive in.

Todd Gagne:

Well, good. Before we get to like all the tools and the fun stuff, maybe give me a little bit of background about how you got to where you're at today.

Jonathan Mast:

Sure. I'd be happy to. So I I I my background's in sales and marketing. I owned a digital marketing agency for about the past 15 years and stepped away from that, 2 years ago. And when AI came out, I just, I mean, I've been using AI like a lot of us for a long time, but when we actually got an interface that made it usable, and I'm like, oh my gosh, I can use this all the time.

For my ADD brain, it really kicked in, and I'm like, oh, this is amazing. I love this. And, the agency we'd had for about 15 years, I had just gotten to a point where I was like, I think it's time I take a step away and do something different. And, I at the time, and I still see it, there were really 22 camps in AI. One was, you know, oh, my gosh.

It's evil. Stay away. Don't get me anywhere close to it. And then the other was, you know, 18 year olds leaning on Lamborghinis and standing on by Learjets going, you're gonna make 1,000,000 of dollars with it. And and both of those, I thought, were equally ridiculous.

Todd Gagne:

Yep. And It's a big middle. I

Jonathan Mast:

Yeah. Exactly. And I I just felt this desire to say, you know, I I wanna help both businesses and their teams understand that this is such an amazing tool to amplify skill and experience and hopefully help them see how it is. Because I really saw it as an and I'm gonna use an AI phrase, but it's such a game changer in the industry. And, fortunately, I started building a community, grew that.

We've now got almost 500,000 people between my email list and my community that we talk to every day about AI prompting and how to use it. And we've really tried, Todd, to focus on practical day to day usage. So I've got a lot of great peers that are tremendous on the theory and tremendous on on all the deep heady stuff. Mhmm. That's not me.

I'm your sales and marketing guy. So I wanna know what can I do what can I use it for today? And so that's a lot of what we do when we work with with the people in our communities. What can we do today, this week, or maybe this month as opposed to, well, what's coming down the pipe that we wanna look at down the road? We're really looking for actionable strategies that we can help people implement today.

Todd Gagne:

So maybe I wanna back up. You kinda had a throwaway quote in there about how your brain thinks and how this was a game changer for maybe, meeting your kind of your thought process and then the tools being used. And maybe talk to me a little bit about, like, how, your traditional workflow worked and why that was maybe difficult for you to adhere to. Is it the discipline? Is it the consistency?

And then how does, like, AI change that for you into a positive?

Jonathan Mast:

Yeah. So I think the biggest thing for me is, I got diagnosed with ADD about, 12 years ago, so I'm I'm one of the official entrepreneurs can say I'm I don't think I have it. I know I do. Yay. It's a superpower now, but it gives one of the great things about ADD is I can hyperfocus, and but I can only hyperfocus for a short period of time.

In other words, I'm easily distracted. And whether that just be because I switched tabs in my browser or because I got a new idea, it's very easy to to be distracted. And what AI really allowed me to do better than anything I've ever had before is, you know, I literally from moving, I have boxes full of legal pads and steno pads of ideas that I've written down that I didn't have time to get to right now, but I'd write them down so I'd get to them later. They're still in the boxes. They're still on the steno pads, and most of them I've never gotten to.

AI gives me the ability to ideate and to try things out really quickly. So if I've got an idea, I can generally in that about 20 minute window that I can hyper focus, I can make progress and move that forward. And then I can determine what I wanna do with it. That makes a huge difference for me and just in my workflow in the way that I do things. And not everybody's ADD.

My my wife's an operations person, and I drive her crazy. But the way I think and the way that my brain works, AI was such a tremendous fit because it was a tool that I can use all day long and help me out, whether that's writing an email that I should have taken 3 minutes to write, but I didn't, or whether that's planning out an incredible marketing strategy that I had the idea up here, but never actually sat down for the 3 to 4 hours to plan it out and map it out and everything else. So for me, it was really that that taking the experience I had, but amplifying it and allowing me to do things and and get get further faster, if that makes sense.

Todd Gagne:

It does. And maybe I'll I'll string this along a little bit. I guess I have a hypothesis that's probably similar to what you're saying is I think that, AI is pretty good with knowledge. Right? They'll do some things for you, but the intelligence piece of this and so what I hear you saying a little bit is I have an idea and a framework to go this is where I'm going.

But, like, AI can fill in a lot of that stuff that would take you time and focus to go do. And so your superpower is understanding that frame that framework about where you want to go and then using AI tools to fill in some of that. And it won't be perfect. Don't get me wrong.

Jonathan Mast:

Oh, absolutely.

Todd Gagne:

People like you and I, I think, like, it it's basically a great rough draft that you can basically start to refine.

Jonathan Mast:

Yeah. And and what I found is, you know, I've always not always, but for the last 20 years, I've really tried to surround myself with a team that's good at the things I'm not good at. But one of the things I always struggled with there was taking the idea that I had and getting them enough information that they could run with it. Because in my mind, it all made sense. But oftentimes, when I tried to speak it, you know, I can't tell you how many times I've had conversations with my wife who, again, she's an operational genius.

And she's like, okay. Tell me about that. And the moment I hear the tell me about that, all the brilliance that's up here doesn't come out my mouth. And I'm like, oh, never mind. It's just too much work.

Even though I thought an AI kind of fills that gap in and allows me to very easily get enough information to my team that they can then execute on it or ask me the relevant questions that pertain to that. And it's it sounds weird, I'm sure, for people that don't live in that mind space, they don't get it. But for me, that was it's just I've got a very short attention span, and I've learned to embrace that instead of trying to fight it. For most of my career, I fought it. And I'm like, I gotta get better at this.

I gotta work at this. AI finally allowed me to go, you know what? It's okay that you can only concentrate for 15 to 20 minutes. But, boy, can I get a lot done in those 15 or 20 minutes? And in my case, often enough because I've surrounded myself with people that are good at things I'm not good at, that I can get it to a point that I can hand it off to them to complete.

And that that as a as a business owner and as an entrepreneur has really been an incredible feat for

Todd Gagne:

1. Yeah. I agree. Well, I appreciate you sharing because I don't think you're alone. I think there's lots of people, whether they've been diagnosed or not, that probably have the exact same problem.

And I think our society, know, we're just bombarded with stuff. So our attention span, even in the best cases, is not pretty good. And so Yeah. I think that that that's pretty insightful. Maybe to kinda, like, wrap this section, like, are there some use cases or things that you're using AI for that maybe, people would be surprised at?

I mean, there's a lot of things that I think we all know use cases for. But, like, are there some things that you've kind of gone, never thought it was good for this, and it's amazing because I applied it in this different way?

Jonathan Mast:

I I think, you know, I'm I'm always surprised by the things that AI does well, not not perfectly. I mean, you made a point of, like, it's not like it's perfect, but it it fills in so many gaps so quickly. For me, I also have a quest for learning. I love to learn new things. And one of the things I use AI for a lot is to help me learn at least enough to decide, do I wanna do a deep dive into it or not?

So Okay. You know, simple simple little things. A couple years ago, I thought it would be absolutely perfect if I learned how to smoke meat and become a great barbecuer. Then I bought, like, 4 books, and I opened the first one, and I'm like, oh, that looks too much detail. And I opened the second one, and that that looks like that's too much detail.

Where's the pictures? I I I bought a grill. I've got the smoker. I've got all that, and I never really did a whole lot with it. And when AI came on the scene, not immediately, but it just actually a couple months ago, my wife's like, hey.

What about the grill sitting in the shed that we don't ever use that we we bought? And I'm like, oh, yeah, that does sound like fun again. And I literally, because of AI, I was able to basically go in and and mind you, Todd, I've trained my AI model. So basically chat GPT. I've trained it on who I am.

I've told it I've got ADD, and these are my characteristics. And so when I go in and I say, you know, I bought a grill and I literally will say this. I bought a grill a couple years ago. I thought it'd be lots of fun to start smoking meat and doing barbecue and all that. I bought a couple books, and I opened them up, and I never got any for me because I couldn't find the pictures, and it didn't make sense to me.

And I'll I'll literally say that. Yep. But I I've got this amazing grill. I'd really like to learn how to use it. What would you what could I do in the next 20 minutes to begin getting better at this?

And you know what? I'll almost always get something great and actionable that fits for me. Now it wouldn't fit for my wife. She's got a different personality. She'd be, where's the owner's manual?

Because she's gonna sit down and read the whole thing before she fires it up. I'm the guy that opens up the box and throws the owner's manual aside and and really never care if I see it again. Yeah. Yeah. And and and, historically, I've been a YouTube video guy, but even that has gotten to the point that it's if you don't get into it right away, my my attention span's gone.

Sure. And AI gives me that tremendous opportunity to learn about almost anything. Probably the the most fun story, I have a 17 year old son, and he's into Dungeons and Dragons. And, about a year ago before he got his driver's license, I would take him over to his events that he'd play at and stuff. And as a dad, I'm like, you know, I really wanna figure out how to have a good conversation with my 16 year old because he's getting to that age where dad doesn't know anything.

And I I wanted to have that conversation. So on the way to pick him up was about a 15 minute drive. I literally had a conversation with Chad GPT. I'm like, I'm on my way to pick up my son. He's 16.

He's playing Dungeons and Dragons. He's really interested. I I wanna just know enough that I can engage him in a conversation. And so when I picked him up, you know, we did the normal, hey, how was it? And I got the typical 16 year old answer.

Fine. Fine. And then I'm like but then I asked a couple questions, and the most amazing thing happened. We had a 20 plus minute conversation. We were still talking about Dungeons and Dragons when we got home, and he was all smiles.

I was all smiles. We'd had a moment that I would have never been able to have because I'm not gonna read 10 books on Dungeons and Dragons. I'm not that interested in it. But because I'm interested in my son, I was definitely interested in taking the time to learn enough to carry on a conversation with him about it. And that's just a a super practical, applicable use that I don't think most people think about.

They go, oh, yeah. We know we can write content, and we know we can help with programming. We know we can do with this, but I don't think that's something a lot of people think about.

Todd Gagne:

Yeah. So I think there's 2 kind of insights on that one. I think the your son example is a really good one. I think what you ended up doing is you ended up saying, I wanna play in his field. Right?

Like, you're basically saying Exactly. Topic that he wants. And so you said you you put yourself in your shoes saying, I don't need to, like, impart this wisdom. I need to, like, participate in his life. Right?

And so that's one. And then I think the other theme that you kinda talked about in that section was you're building a way to learn that's on your the model that you want to learn at. Right? I think, like, schools, like, for example. I was not a great student, but I'd

Jonathan Mast:

love to be there.

Todd Gagne:

And so what I found was they teach one way. Right? And if you didn't learn that one way, a lot of it was rote memorization, then it didn't work. And so

Jonathan Mast:

Yes.

Todd Gagne:

And so I think what we're seeing is, I think you're starting to use these models to basically say, meet me at the way I wanna learn, and I'll interface with you. But then my learning curve is substantial. And I think Oh, yeah. What was what's exciting is you and I may have different learning styles, but we could take the same tool and basically align it with the way we learn. And then basically, we're off to the races.

I think the one thing that's unique though is you understand the way you wanna learn. And so and it basically just comes naturally. Right? Like, you're just talking to it. You're having a conversation.

I think people have to figure some of that out as they go to these tools.

Jonathan Mast:

Yeah. And, you know, but the neat thing about that is I didn't know at the beginning, Todd. I really stayed didn't know as well as I know now. And one of the things probably another way that I use it that I don't think people talk about as much is when I've got, something I'm trying to figure out, I will ask AI to serve as an interviewer and literally interview me to ask the questions it needs to help me achieve an objective. So in that case, it'd be like, I love to learn about things I'm interested in, but I'm not at all interested in learning things that don't I don't see the value in.

Love me too. And I'm not a memorization guy. I don't wanna memorize dates and times. And the only reason I remember when Columbus came to the United States is because I used to live and have an address that was one number off. And my my wife always used to remind me that I'm like, oh, is that one of those dates I forgot?

So that's just not me. I don't care about that stuff, but I love to learn. And so I regularly why I asked ChachiPT, I wanna learn about this. I don't really know what to do or where to start. You know a little bit about me.

I've told it about my personality and all that, but interview me. Ask me questions so you can figure out how to best teach me this topic, or give me advice on what I can do to learn that topic if you don't know everything. And because it's been trained on virtually every book and virtually every library and it has all this information, it does a very good job then of understanding that my personality and your personality and others, they are different. But then it knows, okay, in order to work the way your brain works, Jonathan, here are some things you can do in order to learn this. So that's probably another thing.

I love to have it interview me, to ask me questions, to solve my problem.

Todd Gagne:

So what do you think the progression of like that early experience to where it's at today? Like, where do you think the the are there some unique either questions or some moments that you think that, led up to it? My guess is it's a little bit scattershot. Right? It's asking you a bunch of questions and then, you know, out of 10, maybe 3 of them are, additive.

And then by the time you get to the, you know, doing a 100 of these, then you basically have a body of of of corpus of work that makes a lot more sense. Do do you have any sense of the things that actually were additive to that process as you went through it?

Jonathan Mast:

It's a good question. I I literally just when I would get done with those sessions, I would have it summarize it, and I put all of this into which is now probably an 80 or 90 page Google document. Okay. And that Google document just has become the Jonathan's database, you know, knowledge file that I keep uploading every every week or 2. I update it on in there, and so it has has that information about me and who I am.

And, you know, I just part of it, I think, was accepting that instead of trying to say, okay, this is how education systems work. Mhmm. This isn't how my brain works. So I I don't really care that that's how the education system works. And not that I don't respect it, but like you said, I mean, we've talked I've talked about this with my wife a lot.

You know, they expect 1st grade boys to sit quiet and or sit still and be quiet. I don't know 5 6 year old boys that are capable of sitting still and being quiet, at least for more than about 12 seconds. But it's really hard. And I get it. You can't teach 30 kids something if you've got 15 boys that are running around like little Indians, and the girls are looking at them like, who put aliens in my room with me?

So I understand that, but it doesn't help me as a 55 year old entrepreneur learn anything if I have to go read everything. You know, the other thing I love using AI for, we talked I used to learn by video. Now I take those same videos and I run them through AI. And again, because it knows who I am, give me the key takeaways and tell me the parts I'm most interested in. Now instead of watching a 40 minute video, I can watch 6 2 minute clips because AI tells me what parts I wanna watch.

And then if they're good, I may watch the whole thing. The whole thing. But if they're not, I can go grab that I want, I've got it, and I'm on.

Todd Gagne:

Oh, that's cool. Well, I think your journey is pretty interesting, and I think there's a lot of insight there that, other entrepreneurs can pick up from. So maybe let's go backwards a little bit to say, hey. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm listening to this.

This is interesting. I've dabbled a little bit with with chat gbt. It hasn't been part of my workflow. Where do I start? Right?

I I you see a lot of people that are skeptical. They've had either a negative experience. They hear, you know, you know, privacy issues, hallucinations. There's a whole bunch of stuff that basically makes them to say, I just gotta get my work done. I don't know if this is additive to, to going forward.

And so what would you say and where do they start?

Jonathan Mast:

First of all, don't try to master it. Just find something that you can do that will save you time. I find the the best way to get started is identifying something that you do on a regular basis that maybe you don't love doing that you could offload AI to help you do. It's it's the other thing is and understand that we're not using AI like some sentient robot that's gonna just take care of things for us. It's there to assist us in that process.

Mhmm. So whether that's me learning how to grill better and to do better barbecue or anything else, it wasn't there for me to go, oh, well, you just take care of that and take that brisket and take care of it for me. No. It was there to help me do and take care of it for me. No.

It was there to help me do that faster, more expediently, and to save me time in the process, hopefully by teaching me things that I didn't know. Kind of in the same way, Todd, that, you know, I've hired business coaches for most of my life because I believe that I would rather pay somebody to learn the things that I don't know versus having life's experience to go through them all on myself. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn't. But AI has got a lot of that knowledge, and then it can amplify my skill and experience when I dig into that.

So I my ADD brain already kicked in, and I forgot the question. But, hopefully, we were headed in the right direction there.

Todd Gagne:

Well, I think you're talking about, like, you know, just finding something. And so it could be as simple as, you know, I have to write this report for work or this email Oh, yeah.

Jonathan Mast:

How to get started. Yeah.

Todd Gagne:

Yeah. You gotta get started. And so you kind of talked about, just finding some low hanging fruit. Right? And so, you know, can it can it help you do it?

And so and and I think your comment about maybe things that you don't rush to do. Right? And so we have all those things where it's like, if there's 10 things in the list, one of the bottom 3. You know, we're looking at some of those because those are the ones you're not gonna get to, and you're probably not gonna put as much time and effort into it anyway as you want to. And so maybe that's not a bad place to start.

Jonathan Mast:

Yeah. The other thing I'd add to that, Todd, is that I know, especially as business people, we often see the latest and greatest software. And and of course, the moment you mention AI around your phone or use it or anything else, you're gonna start seeing ads for 100 of AI tools. Don't don't worry about all the tools. There will be a time in the future when you will go, oh, I I use AI to do this a lot, and this tool may help me do that.

But when you're getting started for that audience is out there, it says, okay, it's 2025. I really wanna get started with this. I'm a big proponent. Start with chat gpt. It's simple.

It's basic. Is it perfect? No. But it doesn't have to be. You know, it it's it's it's kinda like a car decision.

You know, I have friends that drive Chevys. I have friends that drive Fords. I have friends that drive Toyotas, and you can pick any brand. We all get to the restaurant when we go out to eat. We all get to church on Sundays.

We all get to where the the market when we need to go there. And yet, you know, the Ford guy and the Chevy guy will argue all day long about who's got the better truck. At the end of the day, they both get us where we need to go. We can do the same with ai. There's a lot of models, but there's some basic models that are out there, and Chatcheap t is one of the biggest and the most popular.

Just start there. Get comfortable with it and learn it. And then as you get more comfortable with it, you'll identify things that maybe ChatGPD doesn't well do as well as you'd like. And so you'll go to get a specialty tool for something. But don't feel you need to start there because it's it's a very easy area to get incredibly overwhelmed in, and that won't help you achieve your goals of of leveraging AI.

Todd Gagne:

Yeah. So I'm gonna basically recount one that I just did with an entrepreneur this morning. So, he's dabbled with it, and he's got some, some presentations for angel investment coming up. So the company's doing okay. They're getting ready to graduate.

And so he had written a pretty good business plan, 33 pages or something like that.

Jonathan Mast:

Nice.

Todd Gagne:

And so all we did was we loaded that into, a chat session. And then we said, for a Angel Investment, what are the steps, in the pitch that you need? Like, what slides do you need? And so it basically outlined exactly what they were, agnostic of his project. And we went through all of those saying, yeah.

That makes sense. Got a competition. We got some financials. We got the bios that we need. We got the ask and what the valuation is gonna be.

And then we basically said, okay. Take that outline, use, the the the, business plan that we have, and just fill out the outline. Don't make slides. Just fill out the outline. And so it did a pretty good job of getting key information into the slides, into the templated format.

Mhmm. And then the last step we did was we took that to Gamma, and we basically created a AI, PowerPoint presentation off of it. Nice. And so, you know, we did that in probably 20 minutes. And I think he would have said, hey, look, man.

That would have probably taken me at least a day and a half, 2 days to go do. And it's

Jonathan Mast:

not perfect.

Todd Gagne:

Right? It's probably 90% good, 85 to 90%. But, like, it's modified. It's just a a PowerPoint that we can do. There's some good stock pictures in it.

Some ones that we'd have to change out. But, like, that's a great example to your point where it's something that had been sitting on his plate for a long time. He's an analytical dude. He didn't wanna go do it. But when you showed him the tools, he was like, ah, you just made my life a lot easier.

Jonathan Mast:

Exactly. Exactly. And I think there's a lot of things like that exist when we open ourselves up to uncovering The other thing I think you brought in there is don't expect perfection. This is not a perfect tool. It's like, Ty, if you and I work on a project together, I'm not gonna be perfect.

You're not gonna be perfect. Right. But we have this expectation because it's on the computer that it should get everything perfect every single time. I always remind people that it's been trained on every book in every library. That doesn't mean just the book you agree with, by the way.

It's been trained on every book in every library. And if you've ever gone to the bookstore or the library, you've probably looked at a section and went, wow, there's books here that have differing and even diametrically opposed perspectives. It's been trained on both, but nobody told it which one you believe. That's right. So you need to let it know, hey, if like, for example, when I write about AI, I tell it, I don't wanna do any fear mongering.

I don't wanna do anything that makes it sound like it's a get rich quick scheme. I wanna talk about practical, positive ways that we can use AI. And then guess what? It focuses on the way I would talk about AI, and it and it works. And again, gets me 90 to 95% of the way where I'm going in, like you said, in minutes.

The other thing I'd add to that is that I think a lot of people expect it to be an easy button, meaning, oh, I should be able to do this, and it'll just take care of it. That's not really how AI works. AI is I like to refer to as an easier button. You talked about the presentation with gamma and all that. It didn't it you didn't just think and go, wow, I need to turn this into a report and a presentation that was done.

You still had to spend 20 minutes doing it, but it was 20 minutes instead of 20 hours.

Todd Gagne:

Right. And I think what I I guess maybe one of the things we were talking about this before we got on the actual podcast was there's a difference in how you think. Right? What we did as an example was you basically said, what does a world class, PowerPoint look like in an outline for it? Then you basically had to populate your information, then you actually made the PowerPoint.

Right? And so you're baking up something that's like, I just need a PowerPoint for this pitch deck that I'm gonna go do. And you basically broke it up into sections, and you leveraged it when it's good. But I think, like, that's something some people, they rush to the outcome versus breaking it up into smaller chunks and basically figuring out how to leverage this. Because I think what I found with chat and some of these other ones, the bigger the jump is, the more problematic it could be in getting the output you want.

If you do an incremental smaller chunks, it builds on each other and it validates they're moving in the right direction.

Jonathan Mast:

Right. Absolutely. Yes. Yep.

Todd Gagne:

And so how does that change? Like, how do you change your thinking process? I guess is what I'm trying to get at. Right? Because it's one thing as a tool.

But the second piece is you have to kind of reengineer the way you think about doing work.

Jonathan Mast:

You do. And I think, you know, again, the a big part to me is that it's it's understanding that it's a tool. It's not a replacement. I think it's it's the first part of that thought process that we're naturally about, okay, this is this is just gonna do this for me. And and that's not, for the most part how it works.

I mean we're getting Agenek AI now that's coming in which basically means we're combining AI and automations and by the end of the year we're gonna be this I mean today we can do some pretty cool stuff but you know, I often hear from people that, you know, AI is gonna take over. And and I'm like, let me give you an example. You can open up ChatGPT on your computer, and you can stare at it all day long, and nothing is gonna happen. Nothing's happening.

Todd Gagne:

Nothing's happened.

Jonathan Mast:

One of my peers just put out a video of it was probably a month or so now about about how they had watched the presentation that AI set up a brand new company corporation, LLC paperwork and all that, and registered it with the government with no interaction. I picked up the phone and I called him and I'm like, there was interaction. He goes, no, seriously there wasn't. And I said somebody had to tell it what the company name was. They had to tell him what state they were gonna file in.

They had to give him payment information so that they could pay the government to do it. It. Well, yeah. And I said, so it didn't do it on its

Todd Gagne:

own. Right. Right.

Jonathan Mast:

Well, but it did a lot of it. I says, there's but there's a huge difference between doing it on its own and doing a lot of it on its own. And I think that's as we develop our thought processes and our workflows, I think that's an important thing to keep in mind as well.

Todd Gagne:

Okay. Well, it's good. So let's maybe pivot to, how you think about using this in marketing. Your background is in marketing from an agency perspective. You know, you've got all sorts of I think when founders are starting, they're building you know, they've got, like, a a genesis of why they're doing it.

They start building some assets, and, you know, their digital brand. I mean, they're starting to talk about that. As I was telling you before, like, me writing a substack was part of this too, right, where it's trying to raise visibility for our program. You're trying to, like, have some thought leadership. So maybe talk to me a little bit about how, founders can leverage kind of this idea, this mentality to, really put it in and start to, like, think about this in a marketing perspective for their start up?

Jonathan Mast:

Well, I think there's a one of the the best things that I think AI allows us to do is to better understand our prospect and who we're going after. We we don't have to cast as wide of a net because we can cast 20 narrow nets that are more likely to capture what we're doing. I'm no longer have to say, okay, I don't have time to create 3 email campaigns because I've only got time to create 1 or the budget to create 1. I can now create one and then tell it, alright, we're gonna change the persona of who this is targeted for. I can segment my list, or I can segment my prospects, and I can do much more targeted marketing.

So I think that's one of the big difference that it makes. The other thing is that it understands psychographics and demographics and all that, of psychographics and demographics and all that quite well. And so if you're not a 100% sure, and I I'll admit, I'm not always a 100% sure on my audience. I think a lot of founders are not so sure on that. Use AI to help you understand that audience and the segments of your audience better because then it will again allow you to target better.

And the better we can target, the the better we are. You know, if I can if somebody looks at me today and had an ad that turned on and said, hey, Jonathan are is your name Jonathan, and are you wearing a burgundy hat that has La Paz, Mexico on it? I'd be like, hang on. How did they know? And I and I'd pay attention because that would be incredibly niche oriented targeting.

And while that's probably an extreme example, you know, certainly, we can do much more niche based and and segment based marketing with AI. And that, to me, I think, is is probably one of the biggest things. The other is just if you're not sure this sounds really trite. But if you're not sure what to do or you're stuck on something, ask GPT to ask you questions. We talked about that interview process to help you solve the problem.

Don't assume it knows everything. It's kinda like when I talk to my wife. I oftentimes assume she knows what I'm thinking, and I know she sometimes thinks that I know what she's thinking. But that never is the case. And AI is the same way.

The difference is it's so easy, especially if we're using our phones nowadays, to just have say, you know, ask me a question. And one of the things I use a lot, I use the voice feature, not actually the voice talk where it's talking back to me because, candidly, I'm not patient enough to wait for how long it takes. But I will press the the the dictate button on my phone, and I'll talk to it to give it my response, and then I'll let it respond. Then I'll have it read it back to me, and then I'll do the same. And because it's a natural language model, one, that's easy for how I think, but it also works really well because of the fact of how the model is written.

So if you're a founder that's out there and you're interested in leveraging this for marketing, 1st and foremost, have it really help you understand the different segments of your audience. And then secondarily, when you're trying to put your messaging together to get in front of that audience, whether that's an angel investor or whoever that may be. I mean, for that matter, you could be maybe you've got 3 angel investor meetings this month. Each one's got a different personality. Imagine allowing AI to go out and learn about that angel investor and then categorize and customize your pitch to that investor because pitching to Todd is gonna be slightly different than pitching to Jonathan.

And now with all the public information that's out there, that's that's literally possible to do. And it's you know, this morning is I can give an example. I'm doing a webinar on Monday with a peer of mine. He and I have known each other for years. I didn't wanna take the time to explain everything about JC to my AI so that it could do it.

So instead, I just turned on the search mode, and I said, here's how I'm doing it. I've got a a webinar coming up with JC on Monday. Here's what we're talking about. Here's what I need to do as far as creating marketing materials. I need to create some social media posts and stuff.

And I Oh, by the way, I'm gonna put together a form. And so, you know, give me a cool snippet I can use on the form. And I didn't have to tell it all about JC or even about myself. I literally just said go search, and it came back. And I told it begin by creating a comprehensive writer's background document on JC that I can give to my writing team.

And we go, what do you mean your writing team? Well, my writing team happens to be ChatGPT. But I had Chat GPT go create that, and then my next prompt was, alright. Now using that background information and all you know about JC, all you know about me because I've trained you on me, now help me write the the marketing content for what we're doing on Monday. And, oh, by the way, here are the audiences that we're reaching out to.

And I literally did a loom of it because I was gonna do a video. I don't know if I will now or not. But in 20 minutes, I had went from, oh, crap. I should have done that yesterday, to done graphics designed, social media posts for the next 3 days set up, 3 emails set up for me to send out, and and had proofread them, and then they were ready to go. And that's that's where it can be just amazing to me.

But sometimes we need to change our thought process a little bit because I may not think to say, okay, I'm gonna be doing Todd and I are gonna be doing a webinar. Go out and search for information on Todd so that you know who he is, so you can best represent him when you do this. That type of stuff, I don't know that we're thinking of all the time.

Todd Gagne:

So I'm curious. I mean, my my, you know, I have kind of a different workflow that's probably similar. But, you know, even preparation for this with you. Right? We I basically just created a notebook l m, you know, Google.

Yep. And I basically took a bunch of, you know, podcasts and web pages and stuff and put it all in there. And so I probably had 15, 17 different things. And so I said, you know, I have a podcast, for startups. What are 5 topics that Jonathan can talk about?

And we came back with 5, and that's when I basically wrote back to you saying, yeah, you'd be a good fit for us because it kind of overlaps your experience. I didn't know anything about you. It was just a cold email that came in. Right. And then from there, you can kind of blow out, you know, like a podcast script or whatever you need, with all the citations, which is super nice too.

And so you can kind of pick and choose. And so similar kind of idea. The tools are a little bit different, but like

Jonathan Mast:

Very similar.

Todd Gagne:

Very similar. Yeah. So let's go back, though. You know, you you made some comment about, knowing kind of what your ICP, your your ideal customer profile is, and then doing personalization. So we have a a company, internal to the program.

It's graduated already, but they're in, like, doing college camps, so sports camps. Mhmm. And so what they were doing was they were finding the coaches, and then they were basically doing some enrichment to figure out where was their emo model, what are the way to go to college. And then doing some custom work, in their email drip campaign to basically reference that or something about some news about their college that they were doing that was relevant. And you're you're right.

The engagement was much higher. What like, we used Clay. Like, Clay and Apollo were some of the tools that we used to basically do some of that enrichment, And then we ended up shipping that over to Bangladesh. We had a team that did some of that where they just filled in they just looked up the rest of it and figured it out. What do you, like, what do you recommend with some of that?

Because I think personalization is so powerful if you could do it right and it's not creepy.

Jonathan Mast:

Yeah. And and and that's one of the big things is is is it too creepy? You and but I would encourage most most startups, don't worry about getting too creepy because you've got a long way to go before you get too creepy, in most cases. I mean, there can be exceptions, but in most cases in the markets that we're going after, that You know, I think the tools you use is really I'm gonna go back to kind of that earlier conversation. The more you do it, you're like you have, you're gonna identify specific tools that are really applicable for the your process and the way you do it.

But if you're in startup mode and you're getting started with it, start you know, the big players are ChatGPT, Claude by Anthropic, and Google Gemini. You talked about using, you know, Google notebook LM, which is a Google product. That's fine. You could use Claude. You could use you know, as we're recording this, there's been all kinds of news the last couple days about the new Chinese models, and there's actually 3 of them out.

You can use those if you want. We can have a long discussion whether you should or not, but it doesn't. At the end of the day, they're all likely going to do what you want and get you where you need to go, or at least get you, I am my own country boy, they're gonna get within a bushel basket of where you want. You know, they're gonna get close. And to me, that's that's really what AI is about.

It's not about, again, starting and ending up with a perfect product without me being involved. It's about filling that middle gap from the idea to the editing part and getting all of that heavy lifting done very quickly so that now we as as founders and entrepreneurs can do what we're so good at, and we can get it across the finish line. But we didn't have to spend the 8 hours in the middle because in 8 minutes, AI was able to do a lot of that for us.

Todd Gagne:

Yeah. That's a good point. You know, we, have encouraged a lot of our entrepreneurs. If you're gonna spend $20 a month, look at something like Po. You know, so Po basically gives you, you know,

Jonathan Mast:

probably the top great idea.

Todd Gagne:

Yeah. 25 models or whatever. And that gives you, you know you can basically use Flux for image, you know, modeling. It's not gonna have every bell or whistle from each one of them, but the general components of it good. I'm kinda curious, like, you know, for my writing and stuff, I generally use Claude.

I I think that, like, it's a better Mhmm. It it just seems like whether it's my, what I'm comfortable with or what I've trained it with, it just seems like the response and the way that it works with me, that workflow just seems better than chat. I use a lot of o one for doing outlines. I think it's pretty good for that logic reasoning. So when I've got a topic that I'm trying to do and I'm trying to organize it, I usually use o one.

And then basically, if I'm doing something with the writing aspect of it, Claude's usually the one that helped me. And so I don't know if those are things that like, are there trends in your usage patterns across these that are some are better than others?

Jonathan Mast:

No. It's it's interesting you say that. My mine is very similar. The one thing I would add into that is I also use perplexity a lot, which is an AI based search engine. Yep.

And basically, I use perplexity to do my research. I'm sure there's people going, but, Jonathan, you can use GPT search. Yeah. You can. I just like perplexity, and so I use it to do a lot of my my research, and bring things in.

I don't use it even though I have the pro plan where I have Claude and and and Chatgpt and DeepSeek that are part of it. I don't use those to write content as a general rule, though. I then like you, I often go to 01 and Chatgpt and have it create my outlines. Mhmm. And that's just kind of a workflow.

If I'm creating something, I'm not just asking in one prompt to go create this entire marketing campaign. We're gonna begin by creating an outline. And then but even before that, we're gonna have research that's enabled. So, yeah, perplexity for research, o one for outlines. And like you, I'm a huge fan of Claude.

I like 3.5 Sonnet currently as we're recording this that I use to do most of the writing. But, again, I've trained that on my tone and style, so I can use a project inside Claude so that I don't have to remind it each time, here's how I want to sound, or here's what my voice and my brand and all that is. So, very, very similar to the way you do that. I was gonna say I was I had something great I was gonna add into that mix, but those are really, you know, welcome. There we are.

Though those are the 3 that I use the most often. I probably lean on Chat gbt a little bit more for short form content, not because I think it's so much better, but because, for those users who don't know, you can custom train a model inside of ChatGPT. It's called a custom GPT. And so for example, when I go to write social media posts, there's a process I wanted to follow. There's a framework I wanted to follow.

And I can put all of that into what's called a custom GPT, and I don't have to tell it that every time. It can literally say just give me a topic and it'll write a post about it. So because of the expediency of it, I do for short form content like that, social media, video scripts, those types of things. I tend to use ChatCPT more. I'd prefer to use Claude, but I don't have that ability Building.

Yep. To do that as easily. I mean, yes, I know I can, but it's not as easy to do that.

Todd Gagne:

Yeah. So, you know, we probably got, 5, 10 minutes left. I'm curious on, like, if you had to think about, like, 5 assets or, like, 5 things that, like, basically a a founder would have to do around marketing, and then basically walk through them about how to do that with AI and really kinda crashing it. I mean, you know, I I think they're always so busy. Right?

And so and I think Oh, yeah. Marketing, becomes an issue, but they kind of you know, like, I'm building I'm trying to find those first couple of customers. Oh, crap. I gotta do a bunch of marketing too, to support

Jonathan Mast:

the sales team. Exactly.

Todd Gagne:

And so what would you recommend with your experience from an agency perspective, working with entrepreneurs, and then this overlay of basically using AI to kinda crash some of that?

Jonathan Mast:

I think the first thing I would do is is learn how to do basic training of your AI model. And and and it's not like training a dog, but it's literally letting you know things like your personality and and giving it samples of maybe videos that you've done or speeches or anything like that. Let it know that. Do the same for your business so that it knows your brand and and understands that. And recommend that first, Todd, is everything else becomes so much more easy once we've got that part done.

There's it's it's relatively simple to do with 30 minutes and the average founder by talking to it, having it ask you some questions, and maybe uploading a podcast or 2 that you've been on or a webinar that you've done. And you can have a fairly well trained version that now will reflect your tone and style as you're working on that marketing content. The other thing that I highly recommend is that, again, in the context of what we're talking, have different conversations going. Much like texting, I can have different unique conversations going with it. And one of those should be as a marketing adviser.

So when you're when you're going in as a founder and going, I don't wanna do this marketing, have a chat going that's talking about just tell it, I need you to act as my marketing adviser or as a marketing consultant. And then within that chat, you do that. And then you start another chat, maybe if you're okay. The marketing consultant said we need to write an email campaign. Alright.

Start another chat. And in that chat, you're an expert email marketing copywriter, and I will need you to help me do the following. And maybe they said, alright, you need to build out a landing page. Okay? Let's start a new chat.

You're an expert at building landing pages that are highly converting and that cause visitors to turn into buyers. And then tell it what you need there. And just label it. I've got my marketing consultant. I've got my copywriter.

I've got my landing page, and you can have 20 of those. You could have 200 of those. And now as a founder, when I need to do something, if I'm not sure what to do, I'm gonna go to my consultant. I'm gonna ask them. And then when they tell me, well, you need to do this, oh, that's email.

I'm just gonna pop over to my email guy because Todd's the guy that gets email, and I name mine, by the way. That's just who I am. And so I can then go and and and do that. I think to get started, that would allow you to, 1, stay much more organized and to be much more effective. Chat gpt and all the other tools do have a limited memory.

So as soon some point, your conversation will get too long, and it'll start to forget things. It's easy to help it back out. But by splitting it up into separate discussions as opposed to having one super long conversation, ChatCPT will do a much better job of not getting confused and doing what you asked it to do.

Todd Gagne:

Yeah. I guess I could hear one of the the things that I would that that an entrepreneur would say is, maybe I don't have a great voice or brand that I'm trying to do right now. I'm maybe trying to copy somebody. And so, you know, even when I started writing, you know, I I really like Morgan Housel's, writing style. Yep.

Right? I think he does an amazing job of taking something that's kind of maybe dry. You know, Michael Lewis does this well too, and they spin something historical into what you're doing. Mhmm. And so, you know, I looked for things like that.

And And I even, like, I would have a section that I like, here's a here's a, like a paragraph I'm struggling with, how would, Morgan Housel rewrite that or what would they do differently? And it's amazing where it would basically say, okay, well, here's an idea that you can work with to do it. And so even if you don't have a strong brand and presence or style yet, as a lot of entrepreneurs don't, you could do something that basically is well known and you you basically could it's gotta be authentic, to to kinda what you're trying to get done. But it's interesting that you can pick some of those styles and apply them to the things you're looking forward to.

Jonathan Mast:

No. And that's a really good point. You know, if if you if you like reading a certain type of book or whatever, you go, man, I just love it when I see that. Maybe you watch somebody on YouTube. I'll pick on Gary Vaynerchuk just because he's probably somebody who heard of it.

If you like Gary's style, you can say use Gary Vee's style, and it will do that. Now if you don't like Gary Vee, then you can also do the you can do the opposite and go, I want this, but I don't want it to sound like Gary Vee, and it will do some differences from that. So, yeah, you can anybody that's reasonably well known, you can do that for, and it'll be effective. I do that when I write my ads. I'm not an ad copy guy, but I have a friend who's a brilliant ad copy guy, and he's fairly well known.

So when I'm writing my ads, I'm going use the style of Ken Moskowitz, and it does. And I get a better ad out of it because it knows him. It knows his work. Again, it's all public stuff that it's been trained on, and it can reference that and pull that in. And the other part I would add to that, Todd, is especially as a founder when you're new to this, don't give it one prompt.

Get your response back and go, well, crap. That wasn't what I wanted. If it's not, just like when you're working with somebody, continue the conversation. Continue on with that. If it gives you something that's only 50% of the way there, say, well, we got these parts right, but this part we missed on, I wanna change that.

It'll never get mad. It'll never be offended, and you can have it really refine stuff so quickly and so easily, that I'd encourage you, don't don't fall into that trap of, oh, I asked it a question. I didn't like the response. Well, then ask you to follow-up or give it more information.

Todd Gagne:

Yeah. Yeah. What do you think happens though? You know, Jonathan, it's like if we do this and you multiply this out, do we just have a lot of noise on the Internet? Right?

I mean, it's making it easier to build more content. Mhmm. And I think, well

Jonathan Mast:

Great question.

Todd Gagne:

What I think is happening is it's just harder to differentiate. Right? So lots of people are upping their game. The the cost to create content is going way down. And so you're just kind of flooding the goal with a bunch of this information.

And so from a buyer perspective, we're getting distinguished or understood. Like, how how do you use these tools to to basically stand out?

Jonathan Mast:

Juan, I think that's where authenticity comes through. You're absolutely right. We're going to have far, far more content. It was interesting. I was actually talking to a New York Times bestseller the other day.

I was on my podcast, and we were chatting. And he goes, well, don't forget. When the printing press first came out, everybody thought that it was going to flood the world with so much content that we wouldn't because, of course, in the old days, they had scribes that were copying all this over. All of a sudden, we had the printing press. Now do we have a lot of books?

Yeah. And you and I probably know that most authors don't make any money writing books. But the market has determined if you're good at what you do, your your book rises to the top. That's why we have bestseller list in that. And does marketing matter?

Yes, it does. But if you write a terrible book, it's like a great actor that does a terrible movie. How long does it take before we all go, oh, man, that was a stinker. And nobody goes to watch it because it was a bad movie. Yes, we have a lot more content.

But I think AI can still if you use it as an assistant, as somebody to collaborate with, as opposed to replacing you, it you can still leverage it to create great, helpful, authentic content for your audience. And here's the good news. Most of your competitors are too focused on doing it quick and easy, and that means their content that they create, their marketing campaigns, whatever, are not gonna be authentic. They're not gonna be helpful. They're not gonna resonate with the audience, and it's gonna make it easier for you.

And it's gonna be more unique because when your content does resonate with your audience, they're gonna know it.

Todd Gagne:

Yeah. And I maybe put I mean, I think you've said this. I'm just gonna maybe bring it out. So I think authentic is important. I think, I always think about this as, like, did I learn something?

Right? Is this value add? Right? And so, is this spam where you're just trying to get me to buy something? Or are you leading me through a process where I'm learning, and if I don't buy from you, I'm still engaging and I've ended up better?

So, you know, you could say some of it is challenger sales kind of methodology, but I think that's where good copy comes from, where it's like saying, you're not just selling your product, you're selling you're trying to figure out a solution to a problem that this individual has. And if they use your tool, great. If they figure it out on their own, awesome. But you've moved them along and you've added value.

Jonathan Mast:

Yeah. Answer questions and add value to your audience. Again, I'm kind of an old farm boy. We used to call it EIEIO marketing, and it stands for entertain, inspire, educate, and instruct. So if you did those one of those four things, and then the last part, the o, wasn't to be offensive, but to be outrageous.

In other words, don't be boring. Because there is so much content, you can't afford to be boring anymore. You have to be able to have a bit of a personality. Now, maybe your personality is the stuff that you're boring, and that might work for some people. But you need you you've got to be a bit outrageous.

But if you focus on this, your content should either entertain, inspire, educate, or instruct your audience. Don't fall into this standard entrepreneur trap of I need to talk all about my product because nobody cares about your product. They only care about what your product or service may do for them. They wanna, Zig Ziglar used to talk about the WIIFM. What's in it for me.

Your prospect cares about that, not about how great it is, not about what platform it's built on, not about how many hours you put into it. They want to know if I buy this, what is that going to do for me or for my business? And if you can remember that with your content, you'll be leaps and bounds ahead of your competitor.

Todd Gagne:

Yeah. Maybe the last part I put in this is get it super nichey. Right? I think, like, you know, try that until, like, you know, if if you have this, like, value add or you're entertaining, you don't need a huge audience. What you need to do is find the people that resonates with you.

And so I think sometimes you see founders put out stuff, and it's just too generic or it goes to too many people. What they need to really do is find your tribe. Like, who are the people that actually are gonna move the needle on this? And if you build a loyal following with that, you you can build a business around that. I think when you're trying to compete with everybody in a general scale, you're you're you're gonna probably lose or it's gonna be difficult to to differentiate.

Jonathan Mast:

100%. Yeah. I mean, they've always talked about there's riches in the niches and AI makes it easier to market to those niches because most businesses, we don't need a 1000000 customers. Most businesses, a few hundred would change our entire world.

Todd Gagne:

Yep. Yep. Exactly. Okay, Jonathan. Well, this has been a fun conversation.

Any any kind of closing thoughts or, anything else you'd like to add?

Jonathan Mast:

Sorry. I was looking for that cough button. I found it. I hope it's just in time.

Todd Gagne:

No problem. Problem.

Jonathan Mast:

So, you know, just thanks for having me on. I wanna encourage everybody listening to this, you know, as we're as we're going into 2025. If you haven't tried AI, you've been worried about it or whatever, it's not too late. This is the perfect time to start using it, to leverage your skill and experience, to leap ahead of your competition. If you've been using it, it's a perfect time to use it more, to to go a little bit deeper, to find more ways to do it.

And if you're just hesitant and you're like, I just can't do it, just begin with a simple step. You know, toddlers don't learn to run by running around the house from a dead stop. They stand up. They fall. They take a step.

They fall. They take 3 steps. They fall, and then they're running around the house. You're gonna do the same thing with AI, and that's okay.

Todd Gagne:

Yeah. Okay. Well, that's good. I think I think that's a great way to end it. If people wanted to kind of follow you or or learn more information about what you're doing, is there a good place to go do that?

Jonathan Mast:

Best way is just remember my name. It's Jonathan Mast. And if they go to jonathan mast.com/linktree, they'll find all the ways to connect with me. Anything else, I'm happy to help out any but any way I can.

Todd Gagne:

Okay. Well, great. Well, thanks again for taking the time and sharing your insight.

Jonathan Mast:

Absolutely. Thanks for having me on, Todd. It's been a pleasure.