speaker-1: What you’re saying is just take the demo on the brand side, is you’re gonna see some of your problems go away with AI, but you have to be open to talking to people. but you also have to be direct in saying this isn’t a good fit for us either in some of those situations. Honesty Commerce is a weekly podcast where we interview direct-to-consumer brand founders and leaders to find out what it takes to start, grow, and scale an online business today. Honesty Commerce is Proudly produced by Electric Eye, a Shopify Plus partner helping e-commerce brands sell more with strategic design and development. Visit electriqueye.io for more information. Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest E-Commerce. Today I’m welcoming back to the show the CEO of Ministry of Supply, a clothing brand that uses science to make the world’s most comfortable clothing. Amon, welcome back to the show.

speaker-0: Show. Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me.

speaker-1: Absolutely. ⁓ you were on the show, I’m gonna guess last year, but I have no concept of time. So it’s some sometime in twenty-four to twelve to thirty-six months, ⁓ just go search his name on the channel feed and you’ll find that. And that episode it is more of the founder’s story. but Amon and I recently reconnect reconnected and we wanted to talk about ⁓ something that we think is super interesting. and you know, to kind of give away the the whole thing here. Is how a a successful eight-figure brand is actually using AI in 2026. ⁓ Aman, I guess first talk to me about where you were when Chat GPT launched and what your first ideas were of it. That’s what I want to know first.

speaker-0: I love it. ⁓ first of all, thanks for again for having me on a second time. ⁓ it’s it’s a true privilege and and I appreciate these conversations. ⁓ can I answer a different question? Am I allowed to to pivot your question?

speaker-1: Sure, I’ll just ask a different question.

speaker-0: I like it. Well I’m I’m thinking about the the when you said when you first so chat certainly I think was was everybody’s kind of first moment of holy shit, right? ⁓ my like that was my first personal moment of this this could be something professionally, a shout out to Lovable for the actual kind of first moment of like, wait, this can actually change my life professionally too, right? And then eventually Claude came into the picture and and ⁓ blew everybody away. But I think ⁓ credit to Lovable, I think it was able to help create a vision for someone who’s not inherently a designer, right? I could take my brain and put it out there, even internally, to showcase what I had been thinking about.

speaker-1: For folks that aren’t familiar with what lovable is or does, what like what does that software do?

speaker-0: Yeah, so it it’s ⁓ you know, I I think there’s so many wonderful AI tools and a lot of them run on the same backbone, but specifically Lovable that we’ve enjoyed using now we use it publicly too for landing pages and sign up forms and mini quizzes and and ⁓ you know, I build all of my dashboards in Lovable now ’cause it’s just easy to sort of manipulate and see the outcome. But think you know, Cloud Interface with a constantly updating publicly available website. So create a you know Learn. MinistryofSplot.com is entirely lovable hosted. So anything we’ve you find there is something we built on Lovable using our brand book, but to be able to quickly throw together a an amazing campaign landing page or ⁓ you know, a friend got really sick and we built a a website for his family to to keep everyone in touch with with him and photos and updates on on Lovable. So a ton of use cases, but think LLM meets great quick visualization.

speaker-1: Yeah, I think that one of the big problems with AI, and this is even pre AI, ⁓ when I figured out how to like really harness Zapier, my it’s it exploded stuff that I was doing personally and at the agency. ⁓ but just to d dumb it down even further what Lovable does for for everybody with we whatever AI you’re using, ⁓ it just gives you code. And if you don’t know what to do with that code, you’re kind of just you got something, but it you it’s not production ready and it’s not on the internet and no one can can mess with it, I guess, is a simple way to put it. But if you get lovable and you connect it to your AI, it now publishes that app to something that’s just is online. And as you start connecting more pieces of the puzzle, it ⁓ you’re basically just building apps on the internet.

speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. Build anything you want. ⁓ and again I keep saying like as a person who has a terrible, you know ability to convey what’s in my mind visually, a lot of these tools have been empowering for, you know, anyone who feels like they have a vision and can’t show it. Right. So you can use AI to kind of show your creative director what you had in mind, you know, to give to give inspiration.

speaker-1: Absolutely. Now, ⁓ I gotta ask a direct question here for the listeners. What is your technical background? Are you a full stack developer? Do you have experience with large language models? Like what what what’s going on there?

speaker-0: None. I am an engineer by degree only. Beyond that, ⁓ I would say technically adventurous, but otherwise no. ⁓ have never I mean, I think the last time I I properly coded was when I was like twenty five as a as a hobby. So nothing nothing professionally or credentials wise.

speaker-1: ⁓ Absolutely. So ⁓ lovable makes you notice that this is a game changer, you know. And then obviously Claude comes along, and the more recent kind of opus and fable is insane. but so these things are here to stay, and they are definitely impacting how people work, especially on both sides of the coin, and it’s fun to hear how you’re using it as a brand and I’m gonna share how we’re using it as an agency as it comes up. but I guess what were some of the easier things that you found to kind of just give up reigns originally to to Claude or or whatever AI ⁓ you guys were using at the time? ⁓ what were some of the first things to go?

speaker-0: ⁓ to to be to be kind of pushed into the models you’re saying.

speaker-1: Yeah, or just to to to this is no longer a human’s problem. Yeah.

speaker-0: Yeah, you know what? It it’s really funny because I I don’t I I’ll I’ll I’ll give you my answer, then I’ll caveat by saying I’m not sure it’s the right answer, and that early on there was a fairly strong kind of say like anti-AI culture that was building within the company that that we you know, I don’t think we felt the need to get ahead of it. We thought it would kind work itself out and it eventually did, of course. But I think because of that, there was this kind of fierce protection of not wanting to use or celebrate AI early on and this fear that it was kind of threatening our jobs and threatening our humanity and threatening our our creative abilities. ⁓ rather than what I find for the most part is it is amplifying that and and where it is taking our jobs, it’s taking the worst part of it and opening up more space for you. So we had to kind of, I’d say before anything, we had to figure out how to ⁓ shift the company dynamic and culture to say AI is not for everything, everyone, everywhere, every time, but it’s got a lot of great spaces to plug into. So ⁓ because of that, ⁓ the answer to your question most directly is is analytics, right? We were using it very early on for taking kind of complex data. We were just running these massive matrixify ⁓ queries, dumping it into ⁓ chat at the time and and kind of pulling out insights and and that was kind of our our earliest use case of holy shit, this would have taken me fifteen, twenty hours to figure out an Excel and and here I did it in ten minutes.

speaker-1: Do you know what’s going on with Clavio? When is the last time you explored what it can do? Clavio has been shipping tons of new AI data and automation features designed to help e-commerce teams move faster, personalize better, and automate more of the work that used to take entire teams. Most brands are only using a fraction of what is already inside their Clavio account. Clavio is not just email and SMS anymore, it is your Customer data platform, your life cycle marketing engine, your analytics layer, and now your AI assisted execution layer all in one place. That means your customer data updates in real time. Your segments stay current automatically. Your flows and campaigns all run off the same source of truth. And now AI can help predict churn risk, forecast spin. Recommend next best products, generate campaign content, and optimize send timing across channels. The big unlock is speed and efficiency. There are fewer tools to manage, less dependency on engineering, less time moving data between systems, and a lower total cost of ownership across your marketing stack. And brands are seeing real results from leaning further into Clavio. Dollar Shave Club has reported over 30% reduction in total CRM stack costs after consolidating onto Clavio. Brands like Third Love have seen a 15x ROI from SMS after consolidating channels. And companies like Corksicle have grown flow revenue over 90% after bringing email and SMS together inside Clavio. Across our customer base, almost every single brand we work with today is using Clavio. That is just where serious e-commerce customer data and lifecycle infrastructures are living these days. If you’re already on Clavio but you feel like you’re not getting everything you can out of it, or you’re just running multiple tools and want to simplify without losing power, I think this is worth your time. You should head on over to Clavio.com slash honest to learn more. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.com slash honest to learn more about what Clavio can do for you today. Pulling the veil back on our ⁓ our strategy on how we run CRO. ⁓ everything in our stack. I actually got some of our preferred apps to build an MCP for us privately, and then they pushed it publicly. ⁓ so all of that information is available to our team within Claude. And 80% of CRO for everyone listening is customer surveys, analytics, and heat maps. So we dump all of those into Claude, and then we can really ⁓ you know we notice something that’s on our roadmap and we’re looking for supporting evidence and Claude can help us find it. ⁓ but having that all in one place and being able to have a human conversation with it, it makes it it it just makes Dominica’s job, who’s our our head CR over here, it just so much easier. And she is doing things that are just 10 times ahead of what I can even think about doing inside the because she is she is not only an expert at her job But now sh she knows how to ask the right questions to get the results ten times faster because all this stuff is like in the same place. And so I yeah.

speaker-0: And then reallocates that time to far more important things. I a good example I remember of exactly what I just said. We launched these things called mystery boxes, which were basically just like a way to kind of move a ton of inventory and still kind of s satiate and delight the customer. And we had no idea they were gonna go gangbusters and I think we sold a few thousand of these things. And these are a thousand bucks each and ⁓ and the promises that they’ll contain I think it was something like three thousand dollars of MSRP value and you’re getting it for a thousand. Now the challenge is how do you allocate inventory to that? And and it’s not an easy thing to do, right? There’s no automation. So we ran it one time, stopped it after an hour because it was just selling too much. And ⁓ and then prepared our CS team to run it a second time. The second time we ran it, we took all that, dumped it all in the chat. Again, this was kind of pre-quad and that which is funny that they have to qualify that. And And and had Chat kind of build a series of rules to allocate, you know, a massive pile of inventory and a massive pile of orders and say bring the two together. And ⁓ and what would have taken our head of customer service who was doing it manually, fifteen minutes per order times a thousand orders, but it was gonna block out our next month. it wasn’t quick or easy. I mean it probably still took us two days to kind of fine tune it so it would not, you know, just send you six pairs of pants, right? You have to build the rules to say, human merchandising is going to know how to make sure you get one top, one pant, one outerwear, one sock, one boxer. We’ve got to train the model to to to replicate that thinking. It took some time, but still a day or two. and and it’s saving Alvy a month, which she could then spend doing much more valuable projects. So a a good example of probably our first real use case.

speaker-1: I’m a huge fan of mystery boxes to help move inventory that’s kind of static. Was that one of the rules that was like allocate these kind of ⁓ random sizes of SKUs that we’re not reordering? Like get these gone first. ⁓ that’s an amazing use case. I mean, are you bringing the mystery box back for this this holiday season?

speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. You know, it’s so it’s tough ’cause like no ma I’m w as a as a receiver of a mystery box, I’m always thrilled, but I’ll say as a sender of them, the hit rate’s not great, you know. ‘Cause people I think have something in their mind of like, ⁓ I hope I get XYZ and it’s like well and just statistically you probably won’t. And so ⁓ so the feedback’s always a little mixed and so I think we’ll probably hold off a little bit.

speaker-1: What is the next big idea that could change your business? A pricing change? A new bundling strategy? Adding subscriptions? Tweaking your shipping offer? Most brands make these decisions based on gut feel. They roll out the change, hope for the best, and have no real idea if it helped or hurt their business. IntelliGems fixes that. It is an AI-powered testing platform that brings CRO level clarity to the decisions that actually move the needle. Not just button colors and headlines, but the big stuff. Pricing, offers, shipping, new apps, even major site changes. Brands like Ridge, Jones Road, and True Classics are using IntelliGems to test their most important decisions and see exactly how each one of those impacts profit before they commit. Momufuku used it to test promotional offers ahead of Black Friday and found the version that increased profit by about 28%. Mott and Bo ran structured pricing tests that drove roughly 30% more incremental profit. We use it at Electric Eye with almost every client we work with. And now IntelliGems has a free AI powered audit that gives you three specific ideas that you can test on your store today. No commitment, no credit card, just three opportunities worth exploring. Head to intelligents.io slash audit and get your free audit in just a few minutes. That’s intelligents.io slash audit. Intelligims.io slash audit. As somebody that opens ⁓ very expensive boxes of cardboard all the time, if you know what I’m talking about, ⁓ the hit rates are very, very random. And what it’s the it’s it’s the gambling part of it that people like. Yep. As we move beyond ⁓ kind of analytics and how Claude obviously shines with data sets, I I love the example of how it took ⁓ a big problem of allocating all this merchandise. into specific things and obviously it it the merchandise i is a ⁓ diminishing value as well. So that’s something smart that it had to kinda to rule out. ⁓ where else did it start to kinda just come in to the Ministry of Supply kind of ⁓ processy

speaker-0: Yeah, again, I think it was a lot of these things that like as I think about the earliest use cases, there’s a lot of things that had just kind of been shelved for you know lack of time that the effort would just be too hard. But a good example is our return rate creeping up over time. And we have all of this data on what’s being returned by who, when, what was the reason, you know, even if those reasons aren’t perfect, they’re still directionally correct. It’s just a massive amount of data that you’ve got coming from four different sources that hasn’t been triangulated. And all of a sudden our our chief of staff was saying, hey, wait a second, product’s been on the table for forever. Every quarter we punt it and say, we’ll do a we’ll do a returns deep dive later. So this is the time, right? And all of a sudden two days later we have this magical actionable plan on what to do. And our returning rate came down something like eight points that year. I think it was like tw 21% down to thirteen. and I always caution it’s like a zero percent return rate’s probably a bad thing ’cause it means people are not taking a chance on your product. And ⁓ and so I don’t know what the right answer was, but we were thrilled to see this kind of material impact by providing a better experience. So another good example of like it’s not that it took someone’s job, it’s that it just wouldn’t have happened, right? We would have never gotten the return rate down and and and we might not exist today if if you if you can’t figure out things like that, right?

speaker-1: Yeah. And and I mean that d eight point difference ⁓ is one hundred percent correlatable against the bottom line. Obviously you don’t need to share you don’t need to share any numbers there, but you can do some rough math on an eight figure business. Just imagine how many orders that they had to pay for shipping both ways. That just comes right out of the bottom line. Yeah. What about What about other areas of the business? You kind of mentioned customer service ⁓ a little bit ago about how she was building out these mystery boxes or how they were building out these mystery boxes. ⁓ have you guys embraced kind of the AI and live agent kind of commingling and existing together that I’ve seen some other brands kind of working with?

speaker-0: Yeah, you know w one of the things we’ve like figured out is the line between build it and buy it. I think early on our instinct was build it, right? We can build anything now. Why would we not, right?

speaker-1: I think that was I think that was just the the AI was making everybody overzealous and then you did start building stuff.

speaker-0: And overconfident. Yeah. And overconfident. Yeah. And there are some things that that we were able to build that we still use today. ⁓ we kind of have an internal tool called Ministry Production Systems, which is our forecasting tool. And that was completely built-in-house and it’s awesome. but more and more we figure that like getting AI specialists who are right priced given their AI powered, right? We’re not using a human, that finding software tools that were frankly ninety percent cheaper than their predecessor in that area, but way more powerful. I mean the example that comes to mind is a couple a company you may have come across called Ripple. And it’s a layer that sits on top of Clavio, but they’ve built this incredible they’ve done a lot of things really well. They’ve completely eradicated the concept of flows, ⁓ which now feels archaic, this idea of like you you abandon your cart, right? They completely ⁓ replaced that with these one-to-one journeys. But the more impressive thing is they they dropped an agent into our Slack that I probably talked to more than any other single individual. ⁓ the Ripple agent is controls all things email. I mean it re reports on every email after one, nine, and twenty-four hours. It runs our A-B tests, it reports on our A B tests, send time tests, subject line tests, ⁓ again sends out, you know, thousands, millions of emails a month, ⁓ one-to-one with your weather forecast and your email and your cart and your order history in mind, right? It’s just incredible to see like why would we want to build that? It exists today. ⁓ And there’s no reason for us to go and build it again. And yeah, no, if they were charging if they were charging what it would have cost to buy all of that five years ago with an eight person agency that was dedicated to you to get all that, we wouldn’t do it. You know, but now we can’t. Sorry to cut you off, Chase.

speaker-1: No, no, no, no. I mean, you kind of got to where my question was gonna be, which was now is this tool ⁓ are you doing it internally? Are you still running your email or is it completely running your email for you? Or is does someone still own your kind of retention and email stuff internally, or are you still working with a partner?

speaker-0: Yeah, well always I mean I think for any of these, right, we’ve got ⁓ an internal representative ⁓ who who naturally has to kind of control the AI here, but would say like we’re probably spending seventy percent less human time and deploying twice as many emails, right? and the quality of those emails is far greater too, right? ⁓ you know, we’re sending out more campaigns, but to hyper-targeted segments because now that doesn’t take more time to do, right? A men’s and women’s segment. two emails a day, right, instead of one because we can, right? And so ⁓ and that doesn’t mean we’re not still writing the copy, that doesn’t mean we’re just not we’re we’re st we’ve got a photo shoot in a month, right? We’re still doing all the things that it takes to make those great, but ⁓ the ability to deploy them you know s ⁓ accurately, strongly, carefully and and at volume is unreal. You

speaker-1: You have prepped all year and all that hard work is paying off. Your store is converting, the ads are working, and this is shaping up to be your best holiday season. But your 3PL can’t keep up. Orders are backing up, customers are asking where their stuff is, the reviews are starting to turn. All that hard work, all that momentum, undone by a fulfillment partner that can’t scale with you. This is a nightmare scenario and it happens to brands every holiday season. Enter eFulfillment service. EFulfment Service is the 3PL that scales with you. They are family owned, they’ve been in business for over 25 years, and they’re built specifically for growing direct-to-consumer brands. There are no setup fees, no minimums, and no long-term contracts. You only pay for what you use. If you’re scared your 3PL can’t keep up this holiday season, now is the time to reach out to eFulfillment service. Go to eFulfillmentservice.com/slash honest and get up to eight weeks of account fees completely waived. That’s EF. U L F I L L ⁓ E N T S E R V I C E dot com slash H O N E S T e Fulfillment Service dot com slash honest. ⁓ absolutely. And that’s something that I mean, we’re still talking with seven figure businesses all the time where email is still kind of an afterthought for them. And they’re like, we’re lucky if we send one a month. And I’m like, We’re not an email agency and I can tell you right now, with the power of AI, you can double your business just by taking this more seriously. yeah. Yeah, yeah. ⁓ but just with with marketing and advertising in mind, where else have you found efficiencies that are helping to get just more out of what a a standard human might have been doing just twenty four months ago?

speaker-0: Yeah, it’s so hard to answer this question without just sounding like I’m a billboard for like the twelve AI powered partners we use. I mean, I just gave a four minute commercial for Ripple here now in Lovable, right? I’m just ⁓ I’m a fan of all of these.

speaker-1: Well here’s the thing, it’s you can build these with Claude or Chat or whatever. It’s the it’s the ninety twenty or the eighty twenty rule here. It’s like you can spend less time and get it up and running and there are reasons to buy and not build, and that’s just that could be a whole other episode.

speaker-0: Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. ⁓ totally. But I you know, in more and more I’m finding that like if it’s gonna be a set it and forget it, build it. If it’s gonna require maintenance, ⁓ and and upkeep and evolution, then buy it. And that’s kind of the fine line we figured out is like the the ripple example is like ⁓ it’s do what they’re doing. not to say that I could even set it up initially, but its ability to kind of learn so quickly and become such a big part of our stack would be impossible to do on an ongoing basis, right? And so that’s really Buy it, right? ⁓ customers.ai, they do ⁓ third party ⁓ identity resolution for for ⁓ anonymous visitor. Actually they do first party too. ⁓ maybe we could build it, you know, once, but it wouldn’t be as good as their model, it wouldn’t evolve as fast as their model, and it might have compliance or legal issues, so it’s like, no, buy it, right? ⁓ so long as it’s reasonable, right? A lot of this stuff’s eighty, ninety percent cheaper than it was two years ago because they know that that repricing is coming.

speaker-1: Yeah. ⁓ it’s funny with talking about the tech stack. I don’t know if you experienced this, but we experienced this internally as we were looking at the tools that we were paying for. ⁓ and one of the things that we decided was if a tool can do multiple things, if we’re gonna get it connected into our AI stack, we should just use tools for more things. So we actually invested more in Google specifically and got rid of ⁓ We were using Fathom to record calls. We were using Calendly to schedule. And so we were going, we were investing more in specific things, ⁓ just to make it easier for the AI to find all the information and to to basically speed up ⁓ anything we were doing within our own systems. was there anything similar like that that you guys kind of stumbled upon?

speaker-0: Yeah, th that was actually the core of ⁓ what I mentioned earlier is our ministry production system was like w what we needed was like somewhere in between an Excel sheet and an ERP. An Excel sheet was too messy and an ERP was too heavy. And and but it had to be bespoke like an ERP, but it had to be quick and nimble like an Excel sheet. And so it was kind of this there’s no answer. For years we tested out ERP light or we tested out, you know, small solutions. So once we figured out we could kind of pack these things together. We built our ministry production systems largely in in ⁓ you know, using AI tools, right? We kind of vibe coded an entire production system where we could literally place POs, d you know, make box labels. We could do everything in one system.

speaker-1: That’s amazing. I’m sure that someone’s gonna reach out to you after this and be like, Can I see that? It might be a problem we have too. Is that ⁓ have you ever thought about the idea of kinda as folks say selling your sawdust or you think it’s too bespoke to what you guys are doing over there at Ministry of Supply?

speaker-0: You know, we have this moment of like, can we can we do it? You know, can we go commercialize this production system? And actually I’d be curious to ask you the same question on like your your hero homemade software. I think the problem is it’s one, I’d rather just teach you how to do it yourself and and own it because I don’t want maintain your system forever. and two, is it’s not our business, right? Like we sell clothes. ⁓ you know, we made this system to to sell more clothes. Let’s sell more clothes. So I think ⁓ it’s not where our heart is, but but there are many reasons not to commercialize it. But but that’s certainly one of ⁓ Have have you guys ever come across this? ⁓ I’m ⁓ I’m bounced the same question off.

speaker-1: Yeah, we have. ⁓ and we’ve gone down the rabbit hole a little bit like a few times. One of them was we had an internal theme framework that we had built out and we’re like, all right, let’s just put this in the Shopify theme store, you know, as an agency and having a theme. That, you know, that those are pretty dang close and that makes a lot of sense. But the timing was just off because The second we really got and took it seriously, ⁓ they announced online store two point zero and sections everywhere. And we’re like, well, now we just have to start over from scratch. So that got put on the shelf and we never revisited it because we couldn’t just refactor it with Claude and make our lives easier. ⁓ but but to to to something that you kind of mentioned, it’s like it isn’t our business and we Have done a good job. I mean, we still are entrepreneurs at heart. Shiny object syndrome is real. Like there are things that kind of take us away from what the main thing is. But w I always like to keep the main thing the main thing. We have some irons in the fires, me and my partner, of other things that are not the agency itself. ⁓ but the agency pays my mortgage and I need to focus on the agency. Yeah.

speaker-0: That’s it, right? That’s what I’m good at. That’s what I care about, right? I think there’s some level of like passion, purpose and focus, ⁓ not being distracted.

speaker-1: Exactly. And but you see all these like amazing stories about how things got spun off or about how some pivot haven’t happened. But that you know, there’s definitely some survivorship bias there. I think s some people might have tanked their ⁓ successful business by chasing some what if ⁓ and losing focus. And I actually have stories about that, but I’m not gonna share it here because it’s not my story to tell. so it does exist, you know what I mean? So I I mean I would I would be I’d be cautious about it, but also.

speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

speaker-1: you know, I think teaching people just how to do it and just putting that out there. And I think it kind of goes back to like this we we’ve had some interesting conversations lately. Obviously our clients or brands that exist in the ecosystem, ⁓ where they assume because AI exists that our prices should be lower. And ⁓ I think it’s a really interesting conversation that you and I can have because you’re obviously buying agency services all the time for random things. ⁓ our position is Our value just skyrocketed because of our efficiency and the time to value on the things that we’re doing for you. It has no you know, it’s not gonna necessarily make things cheaper. ⁓ you’re just gonna get more value faster.

speaker-0: Hundred percent. And I I love this phrase I heard someone use, which was ⁓ s services of software. I don’t know if you’ve heard this this phrase being ⁓ used. But I I loved it. I thought it was brilliant to say like now it’s kind of actually the people matter more ’cause something’s gotta guide and direct all this from happening, right? Like ⁓ now pure software plays, right? If you’re just giving me a you know a plain, straightforward, simple piece of software, I do expect that to come down over the coming years in price. Mm-hmm. ⁓ if you’re providing a service layer on top of it, that just became more valuable. I think you’re right. If there is a human involved, I value it more.

speaker-1: Yeah, I and I don’t ever like to take a rude position, but sometimes I like I’m like, try to do it yourself and then come back to me and I mean if you can do it and you figure it out, power to you, you just saved, you know, whatever that investment looks like. But I I think there is a bit of people that don’t actually interact with and try to use these tools just assume everything is perfect and everything is easy, ⁓ and that Claude isn’t dumb sometimes. I’ll th the things that it hallucinates still are hilarious to me.

speaker-0: Yeah, no, I get that. ⁓ and I ⁓ very much agree.

speaker-1: Hey, everybody, just a quick reminder. Please like this video and subscribe if you haven’t. We’re releasing interviews like this every week. So don’t miss out. Now back to the interview. What do you think the future looks like? ⁓ are you guys kind of paused on integrating AI into your systems? Are you still trying to find new ways to use it? Are you still looking to build out more tools like your internal system or you know, still testing new things that are coming up? I mean, I get an email every day from a new AI tool. it it’s a little bit wild, but you’re like, what are you what do you you know, let’s just time box it. We’re recording this in August, between now and the end of the year, Q four, twenty twenty six, where do you see you guys in AI kinda going?

speaker-0: I I I think you nailed it with that last piece there. Probably ten ten more demos, five more trials, and three more partners, right, that are doing something in our stack that is extremely valuable. we just talked to IntelliGems right before this call about you know setting up an automated kind of fully done for you CRO system. ⁓ that again is a fraction of what that would have cost five years ago where it’s got ninety percent AI, ten percent human driving constant guaranteed improvement. So you’re like What a joy. Let’s give it a shot. So I mean I think in in all these cases, just take the demo, right? take the warm intro ideally from someone who has had success. Mm-hmm. And then you know, take take the demo, take the trial and decide for yourself. But the only wrong answer right now is sitting still.

speaker-1: Yeah, I ⁓ there is a ⁓ podcast out there that I am a huge fan of. There’ll be maybe five people listening to this podcast where there is overlap, but it’s called Two Bobs and it’s about s agency owners. Blair ⁓ Blair Enns is one of the guys that wrote ⁓ pricing creativity. He’s a huge guy in kind of the consulting space. But anyways, ⁓ on that show, ⁓ they were talking about ⁓ you know, selling productized services and kind of just what the ecosystem looks like right now. ⁓ in 2026. And one of the things they said, it’s like the people that are winning are just getting the demo and showing people how they solved a similar problem for somebody else. And so I think what you’re saying is just take the demo on the brand side is you’re gonna see some of your problems go away with AI, but you have to be open to talking to people. ⁓ but you also have to be direct in saying this isn’t a good fit for us either in some of those situations.

speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I actually find that that that conversation is easier. The harder one is on the front side of it is getting kind of the team on board with this concept of quick low thought testing. And by low thought I mean like don’t don’t overthink it, right? We have capacity, we can get a test live. Give it a shot, right? Like, you know, we’re just we’re testing after sell products right now for post purchase upsells. Get it live, see what happens. Nothing’s gonna get hurt in two days of it being on the market as long as you installed it properly. If it didn’t work or Don’t cheese you, you some bad feedback, reconsider it, but just push it live and and test it out.

speaker-1: Absolutely. I mean, that’s the whole kind of startup s synopsis in a nutshell is just test it, learn, iterate. That’s basically startup one ⁓ one. ⁓ awesome. Aman, I can’t thank you enough for coming on the show today and sharing all these awesome insights. Anything I didn’t ask you about that you think would resonate with our audience.

speaker-0: No, t I’d say take the demo. Man, if if there’s one thing to come I I really like where we landed on this conversation, which is just just test. ⁓ I think there’s a ton of brilliant creators out there that are doing some amazing things that I couldn’t even dream of building myself. Like I said, even if we had the choice to build it or buy it, it wouldn’t make sense. ⁓ and and reward good work through trial.

speaker-1: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.

speaker-0: Thanks, I appreciate it.