AI for Operations: Building Better Internal Systems Behind the Scenes

[00:00:00] Katie Keith: Most AI conversations focus on development and marketing, but today we're talking about how AI is actually being used inside product businesses to replace internal tools, automate testing and remove friction from day-to-day operations. What is genuinely saving time and what is not worth the effort?

[00:00:28] Matt Cromwell: This is WP Product Talk, a place where every week we bring you insights, product marketing, business management, and growth, customer experience, product development, and more. It's your go-to podcast for WordPress product owners. Buy WordPress product owners and now enjoy the show.

[00:00:55] Katie Keith: Hi, I'm Katie Keith, founder and CEO at Barn, two plugins,

[00:01:00] Matt Cromwell: and I am Matt Cromwell, founder of Roots and Fruit.

[00:01:06] Katie Keith: Now before we get started, if you benefit from WP Product Talk, we'd love your support. The easiest way to show your support is just to hit subscribe right now. It only takes a second and it makes a big difference.

[00:01:18] Thank you.

[00:01:19] Matt Cromwell: Yes. And huge thanks to FIUs for being our exclusive growth partner. FIUs helps software makers grow, monetize, and succeed. Uh, FIUs is a merchant of record platform, not just a simple e-commerce platform. Uh, they handle everything around selling software, your checkout, your payments, your subscriptions, your licensing and updates, and global tax compliance.

[00:01:41] Nobody wants to deal with that. Uh, so they do all that. So you could focus on building amazing products instead.

[00:01:49] Katie Keith: Now before we get into today's topic, I know that you, Matt, have been working on something very exciting to benefit WordPress product makers, and I'd love to know a bit more about what you've been working on.

[00:02:01] Matt Cromwell: Thank you so much. Absolutely. I got to introduce myself today as the founder of Roots and Fruit. That's my new, uh, agency. Um, I launched it just a couple weeks ago. Um, as a lot of you know, I recently, well, it's now four or five months ago, uh, exited, uh, stellar WP and exited, uh, give WP my, my original, uh, WordPress product that I co-founded forever ago.

[00:02:26] Um, and, uh. I'm on this new journey to hopefully help democratize product growth. That's what I've been saying. Um, so it's a, a fractional, uh, chief Growth Officer, uh, agency. And, um, I've already picked up a couple clients. I also have a, uh, thing that I call solo lab. Uh, if you are a solo founder who is, uh, working on your own and you wanna have some accountability and some really good ideas and learn a little bit from me along the way.

[00:02:57] Um, I'm taking, uh, some signups right now. We're actually kicking off our very first solo lab with a group of four tomorrow, and, um, I'm excited about that as well. So, um, fractional growth stuff and solo lab, and you can find all the information [email protected].

[00:03:16] Katie Keith: Nice. I think that will be so useful to people because through my, um, things that I do and like this show and Twitter and everything, I so regularly get contacted by product people, particularly solopreneurs that have.

[00:03:31] Launched a products that want help basically, and they don't know where to get that help. So I think it's really cool that you've now built that service to help these people to grow their businesses, particularly if they're like a loan developer that isn't into marketing or something like that.

[00:03:46] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. I appreciate that and you have been encouraging me all along the way, which I also really appreciate. So

[00:03:53] Katie Keith: Yeah, well it's a, well, you are obviously the person to do it and it's definitely a gap, so I think it'll be really useful for people.

[00:04:00] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, check it out folks. Roots and fruit. Actually, you know what, uh, Katie and I, and I think Ian as well.

[00:04:07] Are also gonna be at a thing recently or coming up, um, in April, uh, checkout summit. Um, if you are, uh, doing anything at all with WooCommerce or with checkouts, you should check that out as well. And I'm gonna be there, I'm gonna be talking about Roots and fruit, a lot o over there. So lots of opportunities for everybody to, to learn more and level up.

[00:04:28] Katie Keith: Yeah, definitely. I'm looking forward to it. Now let's jump into today's topic. For this, we have invited Michael to the show. Welcome Michael.

[00:04:39] Michael Eisenwasser: Hello. Thank you for having me.

[00:04:41] Katie Keith: Hey, thanks

[00:04:41] Matt Cromwell: for being here.

[00:04:42] Katie Keith: Yeah, thanks so much for coming on. Um, could you tell everyone a bit about yourself before we get into the topic?

[00:04:49] Michael Eisenwasser: Sure. So, uh, my background, I, I was co-founder of Buddy Boss, for those of you who've used Buddy Boss to. Probably the most well known social networking platform on WordPress. And I ran that, uh, for about, uh, 14 years. And that was acquired in 2024. And right around that time when we launched Rapid Cloud, my next venture, which is a super high performance WordPress hosting company.

[00:05:13] If you have a dynamic site like a buddy boss site that also, um, an e-learning site, any site where lots of people are logging in and there's dynamic content, uh, rapid Cloud is super scalable. For that kind of audience, personal life. I'm, I'm a product guy. I love building and creating and, uh, in my home life, I, I'm a father of three girls, including a two month old baby girl.

[00:05:35] Matt Cromwell: Awesome.

[00:05:35] Michael Eisenwasser: So life, life is hectic, but uh, that's part of the fun.

[00:05:39] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. I'm also a father of three girls. And a boy, so

[00:05:45] Michael Eisenwasser: Wow.

[00:05:47] Katie Keith: You don't have a two month old though.

[00:05:49] Matt Cromwell: No, thank God. Oh my gosh.

[00:05:53] Katie Keith: Yeah. Well, thanks again for coming on. For everyone watching live on YouTube, please leave your comments and questions or feedback in the comments section and we'll try to get to it While we are live now, let's talk about AI used for internal tools. We generally structure this as a kind of show and tell where each of the three of us talk a bit about our experiences and advice about that.

[00:06:18] Now, Michael, should we get started with you and you can share about how you are using AI to run your business?

[00:06:24] Michael Eisenwasser: Sure. Be before I even get into specific tools. And as a sneak peek, we, we've built a, um, a tool that basically replaces Jira, a tool that replaces Figma. Things like we, we have all, all kinds of expensive tools we've built in-house, but high level.

[00:06:40] AI has transformed my whole way of working and my philosophy. So there, there's, I I was watching another, a YouTube video. Someone's talking about this, how there's, um, when you run a business, you have this cross between, you can either have a maker role or a manager role. And a lot of us who are developers start as makers and we like building.

[00:07:00] And then you start hiring people and before you know it, you get trapped as a pure manager, which is kind of what happened to me in, in Body Boss, we had over a hundred staff at one point in, in rapidly about 30. So you end up. Spending all your time managing and you have this craving to build and you don't have a creative outlet because anything you would wanna build would take a year or would require, you know what I mean?

[00:07:19] You just don't have the time to build something yourself, so you're just delegating everything. But AI has allowed me to build things personally, almost anything I could dream of, and to do it quickly and to do multiple things in parallel. And so it's transformed the whole way I view what's possible.

[00:07:35] 'cause now I can be a manager and a maker simultaneously. Absolutely. Um, so it's completely trans. It's, it's not just like it's a tech. It, it's, at the end of the day, it's not magical. It's a tool, but it's a tool that makes you just so powerful.

[00:07:48] Matt Cromwell: I love it. I have to say, Michael, when you and I were chatting about, uh, having you on the show, uh, the minute you said, yeah, we built the internal tool with AI to replace Jira, I was like, oh, you're coming on.

[00:07:59] Like,

[00:08:00] Michael Eisenwasser: cool,

[00:08:01] Matt Cromwell: let's talk about that.

[00:08:03] Michael Eisenwasser: Cool, cool. So, so I'll, I'll talk about that. So what led me, and that was one of the first, that was really the first AI project. I built myself end to end the full thing.

[00:08:13] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:13] Michael Eisenwasser: So what led me to do that was a sort of internal feeling of. Not being organized.

[00:08:20] Matt Cromwell: Hmm.

[00:08:21] Michael Eisenwasser: So you can imagine you have 30 people and you get on, you know, on a team, and you get on a call, you get on a, a, you know, Google meet and we talk about all these things and we're like, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this.

[00:08:31] And it's kind of just lost to the ether and it's like things get forgotten. And that would happen to my personal life too. I have, I, behind my monitor, I have a big blackboard that used to be full of to-do lists and now it's. Pretty much erased because of, because what the first challenge, I was like, there's just a lot of information, silos and information gets lost and that leads to a, a lack of productivity.

[00:08:52] And just trying to keep track of it all in my head consumes a lot of mental energy. So I was like, I wanna solve that first. So I did a two pro, I did my personal and I did through the business. So in the business, uh, we. We had a, we were, we were using Jira, which, you know, it's expensive, so

[00:09:08] Katie Keith: yeah,

[00:09:08] Michael Eisenwasser: you replace that, now it's free.

[00:09:10] But that wasn't the main motivator. The main motivator is like, I just wanna get way more organized. So you go into Jira and you have this huge board and things tend to just pile on the board, and it's not easy to archive them out. And so what ends up happening is you have an overflowing board and people stop even paying attention to the CanBan lanes.

[00:09:26] And so at one point we just had an epic that had all the important things that we wanted to do in one big epic.

[00:09:32] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:09:33] Michael Eisenwasser: So I was like, this is not good. So I, I had a vision in my mind of how I could make things way more, how, how I would love it to actually work. So I started just building, and so, and I learned a lot through that.

[00:09:45] So we have in, in our, we call it Pro Rapid Progress Tracker. It's an internal tool, and so you have. A board, it's like a card representing each project. And the idea is that each project is a mini project that is meant to be done and archived. So the board has its own can bin board in it, but it's also, um, designed in such a way that you, it's supposed to just be little task related to that one board.

[00:10:09] And as soon as you're done, you archive the board and it's outta sight outta mind and the whole team is in there doing this. And so at any moment I can go through and see what everyone's working on and so can everybody else.

[00:10:18] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, the, but the one thing that's interesting about this is that over all the last dozens of years, uh, yes, development teams have still asked this question.

[00:10:31] They've been like, well, why don't we just build that thing internally? Because they know that they could that, mm-hmm. Development teams always could have built these things. Now we could build it faster, but then once you've built it, now you have this. Technical debt that you own. And that's one thing that a lot of folks are still, like, kind of they're worried about talking about is like, now we're gonna all have like a million bespoke, uh, individual JIRAs of our own.

[00:10:57] And I go from this company to the next company and now I don't know how this other system works and it's weird and now I have to maintain it myself and blah, blah, blah, blah. What, what's your take on that? Uh, problem though.

[00:11:09] Michael Eisenwasser: I think it's easier to maintain the internal tool than to use the external tool.

[00:11:13] That's my personal opinion. So with Jira as an example, there's so much work you have to do to. Like some companies hire a Jira admin to manage the tool. Oh yeah. Like if you, if, if you build it with AI properly, a couple things. One, you build it along the way with markdown files that document the whole logic of the system so that the AI has context for how to these things.

[00:11:34] But the other thing is you don't have to maintain it. If you build it and it works, you can just leave it with, with an external tool. They're updating stuff. You're getting emails all the time. We're switching this, we're upgrading this, we're deprecating that we need you to update your APIs, an internal tool if it's working.

[00:11:49] You could just leave it and in five years from now, the tool's exactly the same as where you left it off? No, there's no external force in making you do anything, so, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. So, so in my opinion, it's once there, there's a, the upfront cost to doing it yourself is higher, but once you get, once you build it, everything tapers off and gets easier.

[00:12:11] Like, for example, when we have a customer support or when we, when we wanna report a, uh, product bug, we have a special board just for bugs, and it's got a special form in there that collects the information that we need for a bug that, and we couldn't do that in Jira. So like when you want to do creative solutions like that, you just do it properly instead of some hacky workaround.

[00:12:32] So with Jira, what we had. Is in order to capture the data in a way that everyone and our support team could use. 'cause we didn't want them all having to go into Learn, learn Jira. We had a form in Slack where we would a Slack workflow where they would collect all the information on you for the bug, and then it would send that into Jira and create a ticket.

[00:12:49] So that's like a hack workaround we had to maintain. Whereas now there's just the form is just built in the tool. And other things is, like in Jira, you can only assign something to one person. Almost everything we work on, you'd have like two or three people who are working on it. You'd have maybe a front end and two backends and maybe like a reviewer.

[00:13:05] So in my tool you can assign it to as many assignees as you want. So the pro task has four assignees and we all are emailed on everything, so we don't, whereas in Jira i'd, I'd have to make sure you'd have to, we'd have to put some notes about who else is on, on the task and like CC them in the comments and stuff.

[00:13:21] You know, all these hacky work runs you had to memorize and now you just do it clean. So. That's, that's how I think about it.

[00:13:29] Katie Keith: Yeah. We've got a quick comment, um, from, I'm not even gonna pronounce that many bees in one go saying, uh, progress tracker indeed is pretty helpful.

[00:13:39] Michael Eisenwasser: Should have,

[00:13:41] Katie Keith: how do you pronounce so many bees?

[00:13:43] Michael Eisenwasser: Uh, well, he normally doesn't have that many bees.

[00:13:45] Katie Keith: Yeah. Did he name wasn't available, was it?

[00:13:49] Michael Eisenwasser: I guess not. So that Shaza, who's it? In our marketing team, so yeah. Oh yeah. He, he, he likes the progress track. Everyone likes it. We're, we're way more organized as a team,

[00:13:59] Matt Cromwell: but I, I love it. I'm amazed. I like, I want it to, I want to have it now.

[00:14:03] Um, but I have to also say like. Better than Jira is a pretty low bar. I have to,

[00:14:09] Michael Eisenwasser: well, that's, there's a reason for that because they're, and I don't wanna, you know, bash them too much, but there, there are a lot of companies like this that are not optimizing for you anymore.

[00:14:18] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:14:18] Michael Eisenwasser: They're optimizing for a lot for, um, lock-in.

[00:14:21] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:14:21] Michael Eisenwasser: If you try to quit your Jira, you'll see how hard it is to get

[00:14:24] Matt Cromwell: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

[00:14:26] Michael Eisenwasser: It's, it's like shutting down a company with the IRS or something. It's so hard. Yeah. It's like they're optimizing for, for vendor lock-in and not for, um, SIMPL customer experience. Anymore, in my opinion. Yeah.

[00:14:37] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:14:37] Michael Eisenwasser: So. Um, yeah, but I mean, so that, that, again, that was the first project I ever built and it took me, well, it took about three weeks to get to a point where people could kind of start using it and then maybe like another month, maybe two months in total it just on the side to get it to the point where it could fully run.

[00:14:53] But that was the first thing I built if I had to rebuild it all from scratch. Now. I could do it in, in probably a few weeks, and I would do it using a different tech stacks like that, that is built on it's p it's a PHP app.

[00:15:04] Matt Cromwell: Hmm.

[00:15:05] Michael Eisenwasser: Why? Because I've used a WordPress and I was like, I, I, I wanna limit the amount of learning curve I have here.

[00:15:10] I just wanna take a stack I use already and do that. But the other thing, and, and that's a limiting factor, you end up, if you're a word person, person, it's like you just do everything in PHP because that's what you're used to. With ai, you don't, you don't need to know the, all, the whole programming language, you just need to know how to architect it.

[00:15:25] So if I were building that from scratch, I would use like the modern stack of like next JS and Superb base and stuff.

[00:15:30] Matt Cromwell: Yeah,

[00:15:31] Michael Eisenwasser: because it, it's super base handles all the authentication and everything. I don't get too technical here, but like basically AI allows you to use any tech stack you want so you can just take whatever's the best for that purpose and do it.

[00:15:41] It doesn't matter. A

[00:15:42] Matt Cromwell: hundred percent. Yeah. It's amazing.

[00:15:45] Katie Keith: So you

[00:15:45] Matt Cromwell: mentioned, do you have another really good example of what you built internally? I'm, I'm hyper curious. I

[00:15:50] Michael Eisenwasser: I have tons. Um, so I, on the topic of organization, I'll just touch on that. So my personal notes I do now in a tool called Obsidian.

[00:15:58] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:15:58] Michael Eisenwasser: And the reason I like obsidian it, it's just a note taker. I mean, if you use it, it feels like you're in any note taking app, but it saves each note as a markdown file. Yeah. You have, in the sidebar you have folders and files. It's, uh, if you go look on your computer, the actual folders and files are that are in the ui, you know, the, um, metaphor is real.

[00:16:18] You actually have it organized as those folders and files on your computer. It's marked on files. What does that mean? It means AI can run wild on it.

[00:16:26] Matt Cromwell: Yeah,

[00:16:26] Michael Eisenwasser: and you can put, put it in GitHub. So my personal notes. I write things by hand, but then periodically I just go in cloud code and have it reorganized my notes and move things around and optimize it.

[00:16:40] And I, and the AI has a CLA MD file. We can get into this technical stuff later if you wanna know, but it basically has instructions for how I like to organize things and how I like to work. Or maybe I start a new project and I'm building something and I'll, and I'll just prompt it. I want you to add notes for this in my obsidian.

[00:16:57] That explained the project and, and what to do in the terminal to start it up and all the context. And it can just go to that folder in my laptop and read the, read me and it knows how my notes work and just add them. So that's why my, I was thinking at the beginning of my blackboard full of notes is like empty now because I, I'm so organized and I, I don't even have to read my notes necessarily.

[00:17:18] I can, I can be working on a project and I can just ask the ai like, go into my obsidian folder and gimme the context for that note. Whatever.

[00:17:26] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:17:26] Michael Eisenwasser: Um, so that, yeah, that, that was the first priority for me was getting my personal notes, which is work and personal mixed and getting the business all organized so that the, the stuff in the ether that you have to remember is all organized.

[00:17:39] And now I can just. Focus and that you have a system for managing it.

[00:17:43] Matt Cromwell: Yep. Love it.

[00:17:45] Michael Eisenwasser: Um, yeah, go ahead. So

[00:17:48] Katie Keith: I have a question. Um, you mentioned the amount of time it took. Um, what was the opportunity cost of that? Because you remind me of the developers in my mass. To mind group for the last year late. So they have totally been geeking out on ai.

[00:18:04] Founders are developing software again, they're loving that, like you said earlier, they, they're makers again, they're so motivated, they're incredibly efficient, but they are building software, um, as much as running their companies now. Mm-hmm. So what else could you have done with that time, I wonder?

[00:18:23] Michael Eisenwasser: Alright, uh, imagine, um, the internet came out. You decided not to dabble with websites at all, or the iPhone came out, you said, I'm not gonna get a phone. That's, I like my old school. It's like this is a, um, disruptor. This is a complete shift in technology.

[00:18:40] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:18:40] Michael Eisenwasser: And we're in the early days of it right now.

[00:18:42] And what's the opportunity cost of not getting in on that is the way I view it. So like the, the, the time I spent doing that taught me so much. And you, when it comes to a, a technology,

[00:18:56] Matt Cromwell: oops.

[00:18:58] Katie Keith: Hang on. He's come back.

[00:19:01] Michael Eisenwasser: All right, we're back. So, when, when it comes to a technology that's this transformative and this new, what's the opportunity cost of, of not learning?

[00:19:09] It is how I do it. So I, I view that project as, um, something useful for the business, but also an excuse for me to just, I just, like, I need a project where I can learn how to use this stuff and build a whole thing end to end to see if it's possible, if I can actually do it.

[00:19:24] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:19:26] Michael Eisenwasser: Um, and, and now that I, and, and now that I know I can do it, I can start applying that to other stuff.

[00:19:31] So I've built, I mean, I've built, I have a mobile app in my pocket that I built end to end. I have, I mean, I like, once you get faster, you get faster. Yeah. And you have all these repos on your local, on your computer. So you build something, if you wanna build something similar, you don't need to start from scratch.

[00:19:47] You tell it, go look at that repo, and I wanna build something like that, but with, with this API, and it'll just like replicate.

[00:19:53] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:19:53] Michael Eisenwasser: So you, you get increasingly faster as you go.

[00:19:57] Matt Cromwell: Michael, what's your role at uh, rapid Cloud? Again,

[00:20:00] Michael Eisenwasser: general manager, basically, I, I run the company.

[00:20:03] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:20:03] Michael Eisenwasser: But, uh, with, with a personal focus on, on product.

[00:20:06] So, but now I'm doing more and more in marketing and things. I'm trying to get sort of like push everything, but. Uh, my background is mostly in product, so I, I spend a lot of time with the product team. Um. And, but yeah, that's,

[00:20:21] Matt Cromwell: that's,

[00:20:21] Michael Eisenwasser: that's it. Yeah. No,

[00:20:21] Matt Cromwell: I mean, I, I, I only asked, 'cause I think that what you're saying, tying, um, to Katie's question about opportunity cost, whether it's a win or a loss or whatnot, like I could totally see how you're investing in your knowledge of this technology that your whole team needs to be leveraging, uh, as well.

[00:20:39] Correct. And, um, you have to have an intimate knowledge, not just a surface knowledge of like. AI can, generally speaking, do these things. You, you wanna have a more intimate knowledge because also, honestly there is like a million different ways to implement AI in a million different applications. And I think like.

[00:20:59] Half a million of them are extremely wasteful or, you know, there's, there's good ways to leverage it and wasteful ways to leverage it. Um, and also ways it can, um, really get expensive very quickly as well. So mm-hmm. Having that intimate knowledge, I think helps you to be able to guide the team in a probably more informed manner, right?

[00:21:20] For

[00:21:20] Michael Eisenwasser: sure. Yes. And, and to inspire the team.

[00:21:22] Matt Cromwell: Oh, yeah. Nice. Yep.

[00:21:24] Michael Eisenwasser: So I, you know, we, we were building things. You, you have to get all your developers to use ai and now they are, but they're resistant to it because it's scary.

[00:21:33] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm.

[00:21:34] Michael Eisenwasser: But there's a, there's an ego thing for a developer. Mm-hmm. You know, not for a manager.

[00:21:37] A manager. We don't have it as much. We just want to go fast. Like for developers, there's an ego thing. It's like. I, I know how to do this, I don't need that. Mm-hmm. But it's like you're, you're, you're not realizing you're missing out on something that's gonna make you so much more powerful. Yeah. So, yeah, you're good at solving problems, but just level up and solve bigger problems.

[00:21:57] Let the AI. Take care of the little stuff.

[00:22:00] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:22:00] Michael Eisenwasser: You know what I mean?

[00:22:01] Matt Cromwell: The way that I've kind of been seeing is like, I feel like AI really came for the bloggers first. It was like, Hey, we can write these articles just as good or better than you guys can. But then we saw a bunch of AI slop, right? Um, and people are getting better at that.

[00:22:16] AI then came for technicians for support technicians, and I was like, we can answer these questions better than the technicians can. Um, and uh, and that has been actually really disruptive, but also a big opportunity as well, I think in a lot of ways. And then it is coming for developers, I feel like maybe around the same time as developers, it's also coming for marketers, uh, in the sense of like, it's not, marketers aren't just writing stuff.

[00:22:42] They're actually trying to create strategy and they have to interact with so many different APIs and everything. Um, it's, there's a lot of opportunity there as well. Um, and I think having that kind of, um, deep integrated knowledge of the possibilities is gonna help level up across the board, um,

[00:23:00] Michael Eisenwasser: for sure.

[00:23:01] And it, and it's coming for people le for paralegals, for, um, uh, accounting clerks. A anyone is doing like the, the, but I wouldn't, I don't think you can view it as it's coming from my job. Yeah, you can view it that way.

[00:23:15] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:23:15] Michael Eisenwasser: You can view it another way as. If I get good at this, it just makes me like 10 times more powerful at my job.

[00:23:20] A

[00:23:20] Matt Cromwell: hundred percent.

[00:23:20] Michael Eisenwasser: So what, what it's AI is, at least for now, taking care of a lot of the busy work. And so like, it's, it's not like you don't need support people in your, you know, we're talking to customers. You can't have all ai. Yeah. But what the AI can do is, like, if you ask a general question about the product.

[00:23:37] You don't need a person to answer that. The AI can be trained on your knowledge base and answer that.

[00:23:41] Matt Cromwell: Yep.

[00:23:42] Michael Eisenwasser: Right? Yep. The person comes in for the stuff that actually requires creativity.

[00:23:46] Matt Cromwell: Yep.

[00:23:46] Michael Eisenwasser: Like I have, I need help with this billing thing, or this thing on the side is broken, or whatever. That's what the person can come in and actually handle, like hard stuff.

[00:23:52] And I view the same thing with softwares. Like you can build, you can get more ambitious with what you're gonna do. It's like the idea of me replacing Jira on my own would've never occurred to me without ai. And even I could have had my team build it, but it's like, what a massive waste of everyone's time to spend six months building that.

[00:24:07] But if I can build it on my own for free or for like $200 in tokens, sure. Why not? Yeah,

[00:24:14] Matt Cromwell: absolutely.

[00:24:16] Michael Eisenwasser: Um, what else you want me to talk about? Other, other stuff we're building?

[00:24:22] Matt Cromwell: Um, I, I'll, I'll share a little bit of show and tell stuff. Sure. Um,

[00:24:25] Michael Eisenwasser: please.

[00:24:26] Matt Cromwell: I, I have been, um, on kind of like a new discovery of of, of who I am and what I do since I'm like in this new, uh, post, uh, give WP era, uh, for me, which is, I have to say it's like a little bit of an existential issue.

[00:24:40] It's like trying to think of myself, uh, as not myself, but, um, but it's been fun. Um, and it's given me a lot more time. Uh, I have a ton more time, uh, at the moment to learn all this stuff, and it's been cool. Um, but what I have, um, that, that was a little bit of my leading to this was like coming from marketers, if I'm gonna be focusing on growth, marketing is a major aspect of growth in general.

[00:25:05] Um, and so I've been trying to. Put together essentially how I want to, um, do some of the mar growth marketing work, um, with AI in one way or another. And what I've been finding overall is that there's a million tools out there that are targeting marketers right now. And I actually think they're a little bit predatory, uh, because a lot of the AI driven tools are relatively straightforward to do if you just have cursor or clot or whatever and you just tie it into.

[00:25:32] AI APIs, uh, or build in some ncps into it as well. Um, once you have those kinds of setups, which are dev heavy oriented setups, uh, but once those are there, you can do a lot of the work of these big, um, like the, uh, one of them that you'll see a lot is, uh, in marketing. They'll talk about fan out queries, um, that, uh, uh, when you ask AI.

[00:25:59] I need to know the best managed WordPress host, uh, right now. Uh, it will create all these extra queries called fan out queries, and those are exposed over the AI's API. They're not exposed in like Chat g PT or things like that, but as the AI is thinking, it's developing all these fan out queries and those you can find in the API.

[00:26:19] Um, and so there's all these tools. Now they're charging a ton of money. For fanout query generators, essentially. Um, and what they're doing is trying to get marketers who are, who know that they need to optimize for fanout queries to buy their platform, uh, because they don't know how to ping the API basically.

[00:26:38] Um. So I'm setting these things up locally and I'm creating a whole bunch of internal knowledge bases on my clients, uh, and their, their KPIs and all that kind of thing in order to be able to create documentation and strategies. Um, and I'm doing it all just from cursor alone basically. Um, I agree with Katie.

[00:26:56] I've been talking with a lot of developers, including the folks in, uh, her mastermind. Who are really excited about all kinds of, uh, new apps and softwares that are doing all kinds of crazy things. Um, but I actually think in many ways what AI's gonna do is actually make all that stuff a lot more minimalist in some ways.

[00:27:16] I really think the more and more that we interact with APIs, the less surfaces we have to deal with overall. Um, I, I, I don't know. I mean, I'm not, no crystal ball here, but I feel like there is a bit of, um, an opportunity with all of this to, to do fewer SAEs. To do a lot fewer services, uh, and to focus more on just being able to, um, leverage, um, a, uh, APIs locally, uh, and get the work done locally.

[00:27:48] I, I, I keep meaning to look into obsidian, like you're saying, because of it's a markdown focus. I think it's really amazing. I have, I'm such an old schooler. I still have like notepad plus plus that I mm-hmm. All my notes and stuff, like I, yeah. Tech space, you know what I mean? Not markdown based. Yeah. Um, but, um, I, I think that kind of internal, local knowledge is, is a way to level up, um, any of your skills.

[00:28:12] And that's what I keep finding too, is that, um, the. What's the best way to say it? The, the technology is changing, but the, the principles and practices of what makes good work doesn't change. Like we still have to do the right kinds of work. We still have to get good, disciplined, practical, high quality work out the door.

[00:28:35] Whether it's, whether it's like. Good. Um, email campaigns, whether it's good A CPC campaigns, uh, whether it's a good roadmap that actually serves the customer a lot better than Jira does, uh, and doesn't force lock in and things like that. I'm sorry. I will throw Jira under the bus every time I can. Uh, I, I, I think AI is.

[00:28:56] Accelerating our ability to do those things. Um, and so the expectations are higher. Um, but I actually think our ability to do it can be reduced down to like. Just cursor That's smart and pinging in the right areas. Um, I don't know. That's a little bit of, I don't have a lot to show. I mean, I have things to show, but it's too early to show them, so.

[00:29:19] Michael Eisenwasser: Mm-hmm.

[00:29:21] Matt Cromwell: I don't know. Katie, what do you think? I, we, we talked a little bit about this too, like you come at this also from a marketing perspective. Um, and, uh, and I'd love to hear what you at Barn two are doing on this front.

[00:29:33] Katie Keith: Yeah, I am more from a solely marketing perspective, whereas your developer and marketing, so you have the marketing knowledge of what fan out queries are and things, but the development knowledge to implement that as the founder.

[00:29:47] Um. And I think it's really key actually, that it seems to largely be the founders that are building these internal tools that like, um, Michael said, oh, I can do it for free. You just completely devalued your knowledge, uh, your, your time, rather. Oh, I can do it 200, um, dollars in to, in tokens and my time is free of what, two months or something?

[00:30:09] Um, initially, although you get the acting fast. Now, so, but yeah, that is what the founders are doing. They're not allocating it to their team. Even if they have a team, they are building these tools themselves. And this is giving me major imposter syndrome because I am not a developer and as founder, I have tried to.

[00:30:30] Vibe code some of these things. I had a personal tutorial from Zach Katz and Daniel Iser, the founders of Gravity Kit and Popup Maker, where they told me how to use Claude Code and Cursor and all of that. Then I spent several days trying. I could not do it because. Um, Michael made some good references earlier actually to the skills, the development knowledge you are putting in to telling me a, i what technologies to use.

[00:30:57] The architecture, probably things like security, best practices and so on as well. By being a developer, you know what to ask and when you're not, you don't know how to prompt it. Just like if a non marketer tried to replace some of the tools that Matt was talking about, they wouldn't get anywhere because they dunno what questions to ask.

[00:31:16] Yeah. Mm. So I think that AI for internal tools is really fairly limited to an additional enhancement of your existing skills because of the importance of good prompting and planning and. So really, um, I'm finding it really hard. I have built some stuff like I use Zapier with chat GPT modules to automate all our outreach.

[00:31:42] So that means like looking for Roundup articles, like Top 10 WooCommerce, product filter plugins or something like that. And or even automate checking like. Is our plugin already featured in the article, drafting an email for us to check. And so really saving time on things like outreach. And I use AI a lot for data analysis within VM two.

[00:32:07] Like I'll give it a bunch of data because I'm not a developer. I might even get it to go into, not go into my SQL, but tell me how to get the data. From the database and so on, and then analyze it. But I really feel like I am so behind because I'm not a developer and the developers don't realize that they are basically superheroes in this day and age because.

[00:32:31] They can reach this huge potential of AI and other people can't so that it's useful that other people are doing this stuff. And I wonder neither, you have talked about releasing these amazing tools that you've built, but what point did it become a product?

[00:32:48] Matt Cromwell: I want to double down a little bit on what you're saying because I think it's so important because I, I do, I hear so many developers saying how, oh, like there's no future for products.

[00:32:59] 'cause everybody's just gonna be, be able to build their own products. And I'm just like, do you talk to non-developers ever? Like

[00:33:05] Katie Keith: yeah,

[00:33:06] Matt Cromwell: they need products. They need what you can do. Like there's so much need. I actually think all of this is just amplifying the need. There's gonna be so many more products out.

[00:33:16] I mean the for every. Like 300, uh, SAEs that are born today, um, 600 are gonna die tomorrow. Like, uh, they're, they're going so fast right now. Um, but I think that, that, that, that's just the way that the market works right now at the moment. Um, but I do think that that. They're, they're, we're gonna get more and more and more of these products and they're gonna get more and more, uh, expectations on how good they need to be.

[00:33:42] Um, and there's a whole bunch of folks out there who don't know how to even manage their WordPress website at all. They need those products. They need them for sure. Um, for sure. So I think there's not less demand. I think there's gonna be more demand, but also higher expectations too. What do you think, Michael?

[00:34:00] Michael Eisenwasser: So, alright. First thing. Uh, touch on Katie's topic and then, and then what you're saying. So I, I agree with, with you, Katie, that sometimes I forget my background and why it's easy for me to do this because I have a background as a core, core of it all is I'm a, I'm a builder and a creator, not just a developer, just, I just make stuff and I've, I'm used to managing a team of developers.

[00:34:25] That skill of managing a team of developers translates one-to-one to ai. Because now instead of managing a team of developers, you're just managing a team of AI agents that are basically like developers. And so you can go back and forth between, I can ask, I can ask a, a human to help me with something. I can ask the AI to help me with something.

[00:34:42] It's the same skill.

[00:34:43] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:34:43] Michael Eisenwasser: Uh, just to just faster, right? So it does lend itself naturally to it. Um. I, I think there's room for products for SaaS products. I, I think Consum consumer products have a big future 'cause you know, you're just a consumer is probably not creating all kinds of stuff. And I think the general trend of business is going to move more and more towards solopreneurs.

[00:35:08] They're solopreneurs are extremely small teams and so tools that are, because you're gonna have, first off, a lot of people are gonna lose their jobs. Because of ai and simultaneously, a lot of people are gonna be empowered to do all kinds of stuff that they couldn't do before. So you're gonna have like job loss and also like massive amounts of creativity booming everywhere.

[00:35:27] So you have a lot of solopreneurs and small companies and those people I think are ripe for all kinds of SaaS products that they could use to optimize their business. But I do think if you're, if you have a SaaS that targets enterprise or like large companies. That you're in trouble.

[00:35:42] Matt Cromwell: Mm.

[00:35:43] Michael Eisenwasser: Because for them, they can always justify to build it themself.

[00:35:47] Matt Cromwell: Mm.

[00:35:47] Michael Eisenwasser: And they have somebody in their team who can do it. So like the companies that are charging per seat, if you're charging $50 a seat and your clients are paying for 50 seats at $50 a seat, you're in trouble. Because one day they're gonna, someone in their company who's good at AI is just gonna be like knocking on the manager's door and be like.

[00:36:05] Why are we paying for this? I will build it. You know, like everyone's gonna figure this out eventually.

[00:36:12] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:36:12] Michael Eisenwasser: Within, within the bigger companies that have dev teams.

[00:36:15] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:36:15] Michael Eisenwasser: So that's, that's my, I can't root a future, but that's my personal opinion of where things are gonna go.

[00:36:19] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Yeah, that's a good one. I, I think that there's also, there is a space in which folks are going to create more and more abilities for marketers and folks like Katie to be able to build tools and, and little apps, uh, with an interface and not have to have like clot or cursor or whatnot in their environment.

[00:36:41] So I, I do fear also for the. Opposite end of the enterprise, the, the utility types, um, those simple little tools that get things done. Um, I think especially, I, I joked on a podcast the other day, like, if you're building a alt text generator for WordPress, like why, uh, there's, there's like three dozen of them that were shipped to.org yesterday.

[00:37:04] Like, uh, there's too many at the moment. Uh, that type of utility is gonna probably go with the dinosaur soon as well. Um, but I do also hope that AI gets smart enough to be like, when a, when a user says, Hey, I want you to create a plugin that will let me. Switch to a different user in my WordPress environment, the AI would be like, why should I do that?

[00:37:25] Here's the plugin. Like, right, why should I reinvent the wheel a hundred times across 2000 different users, um, when I can just give you the plugin that already does it. Um,

[00:37:35] Michael Eisenwasser: correct. But pre, I mean just 'cause the AI can build something. PE people who don't, who haven't done this a lot, think that the AI is like magical.

[00:37:44] You can't just one shot a plugin. You can't just be like, make me a plugin that does that. You can. And it'll do something, but it's, it's not something you would want to use.

[00:37:54] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:37:55] Michael Eisenwasser: Um, so it still, you still have to micromanage the thing the whole way through. And if you want something that has good output and something that you can keep iterating on without massive technical debt, you have to kind of like do that.

[00:38:07] Um, and it is true that if somebody is managing it, they're constantly improving it and tweaking it and optimizing it and stuff like that. So like a lot of times a prebuilt. Solution is gonna be the best solution for you. It depends if your, if your needs are constantly evolving, sometimes that's where it it.

[00:38:25] If the tool needs to evolve on a regular basis, if it would be better off like that, then that's where it's really good to build it yourself. 'cause you can iterate on it and change it over time, you know, with. Basically no cost.

[00:38:36] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Yeah. I think, Katie, going back to your question about like releasing or out outsourcing or not outsourcing, releasing, uh, these internal tools and things like that, it, I love the question because what it highlights is that there is a vast difference between an internal tool that works and a product that's worth shipping.

[00:38:58] Um, and that's a subject that comes up on the show a lot. Um, like this, this, uh, a fan out query, uh, a EO logger thing that I built that, that the other tools are charging a lot of money for. It's functional and ugly. I would never ship it. It's, it worked for my purposes and that's all I needed. For right now.

[00:39:19] You know, I might wanna turn it into something like if I know, if I know I could get like a thousand users paying me 90 bucks a month tomorrow, like I should probably ship it right now. Um, but, um, you know, you know, I, it, it's not at that stage at all. There's a, there's just a huge difference and I've been telling a lot of folks this, there's such a big difference between, um, code.

[00:39:41] That works and a product. Um, and there, that used to be like a mentality I think that is very dev centric is that, oh, I, I, I'm a product builder because I code What customers don't buy code ever. Like they don't really care about the code. They're not analyzing the code. They don't care how beautiful and poetic your code is.

[00:40:02] Uh, they're buying experiences, uh, and that's so much larger than what we can generate. Um. Uh, now I'm Michael. I'm assuming that the tool, the Jira killer that you built, um, probably could become a product, um, if you give it another month at, at the most,

[00:40:20] Michael Eisenwasser: right? It could. It could. Well, are there a couple obstacles?

[00:40:24] So one, it's built for us.

[00:40:26] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:40:26] Michael Eisenwasser: So if you wanna make it a product, you have to have all kinds of settings and options and all kinds of stuff, which is possible, but you have to do that. But then the other missing part of the, I mean the main thing is you only have so much energy. So there's building the product and then there's go to market.

[00:40:40] So once to go to market is a whole nother conversation. Now you need marketing channels and you need to do marketing continuously. And the product itself is, it's can reach a level of maturity where it doesn't need to change that much. So like, let's say you spend two months building the product and you wanna make it something you're selling.

[00:40:57] Well now for a years potentially you're doing marketing and support and stuff around that product. So the build becomes only like 10% of the, the work eventually. So. I'm not gonna be marketing a thousand things. Like you have to pick and choose your battles, basically. You know, if you're, if you're gonna actually go live with something, it better be something you really feel like you have a go to market for.

[00:41:17] Yeah.

[00:41:17] Michael Eisenwasser: I don't feel like I have a go to market to sell a Jira competitor. I feel like there's big, big businesses there with huge marketing budgets that I would be competing up against. And I feel like, um, the, um. Yeah. I mean, that's the main thing. I, I don't, I don't feel like I would go to market to, to, to do that.

[00:41:35] And there's

[00:41:36] Matt Cromwell: yeah.

[00:41:37] Michael Eisenwasser: Uh, better things and it's not business you're in, you're not, there's better things. I'm not in that business. There's better things to focus on. So if things come up that, that I feel like there's a, there's a clear market for this and I have go to market channel for it, and there's a need and stuff, maybe I'll go for it.

[00:41:51] But like, it has to check out as a business. It's, it's not just because it's a useful tool. Yeah. Like you said, everyone can, not everyone, but like. Massive amounts of people are building useful tools all the time.

[00:42:02] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:42:02] Michael Eisenwasser: It doesn't mean you're, that there's a, a good, there's an easy way to, um. It's sell that and acquire customers.

[00:42:09] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. It's, it's fascinating because it makes it like the competition that we have as product builders now isn't other product builders anymore. It's teams that can build our product themselves. It's like we don't even get to see the competitor. We don't even know who the competitor is. We don't even know the functionality of the competitor because it's all internal tooling.

[00:42:33] Um, that, that, that competes with us. Um, uh, it it's really interesting.

[00:42:40] Michael Eisenwasser: Mm-hmm. So I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll just give some examples of a couple other projects we're working on to inspire people and just, just quickly, just high level and leave it at that. So, uh, 'cause you know. Um, we've, we've been going deep into all kinds of stuff, which is fun.

[00:42:55] Uh, so some other things we're working on. One is we've basically stopped using Figma. Totally.

[00:43:01] Matt Cromwell: Hmm.

[00:43:01] Michael Eisenwasser: So we used to do all our design work in Figma, and you'd have, you'd have, um, you know, every single design would be like that and you'd have spend a lot of time doing that. Uh, and everything would, you'd want everything perfect because you're gonna pass this on to a developer and they have to code it.

[00:43:18] No more. Now I have a, uh, interactive prototype of our product dashboard.

[00:43:24] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Got it.

[00:43:26] Michael Eisenwasser: That I just built through ai and when we wanna scope a new feature, I just go there and talk to the AI and play around and test interfaces until they find something that we like. And then when the developer needs to implement it in the real product, they can actually just play with it and copy the text right out of it.

[00:43:40] Matt Cromwell: Yep.

[00:43:41] Michael Eisenwasser: Yep. You know, so we do that, that's transformed things, made product development like way, way faster. Um, and we're also working on internal dashboards. So like imagine how much time it takes to configure something like Mixpanel and that you have to add stuff in the code and make the blocks and everything like that.

[00:43:59] We, I'm just building my own. That's hooked, right? And so now I can have dashboards for like every kind of information that ever wants. So these are just some examples of kind of things that once you get into it, you, you get creative and you start tackling things that seem. It opens up so many avenues.

[00:44:16] Matt Cromwell: A hundred

[00:44:16] Michael Eisenwasser: percent.

[00:44:16] Um, yeah.

[00:44:17] Matt Cromwell: I will say I just started, um, experimenting with Figma Make, which is uhhuh like an ai uh, uh, design generator, essentially. Yeah. It's pretty incredible because it doesn't just in output like SVGs or whatnot, it outputs all the code. It, it, it outputs a functional prototype of, of great. Um, it's pretty amazing.

[00:44:37] Yeah. Google AI Studio also does something very similar. I mean, bolt and lovable. These are all, uh, very similar things at this stage. Um, but uh, but I love that what you're talking about, 'cause it goes straight from like, why do you have to, um, do all of that design work if you can actually prototype it live?

[00:44:54] That's, that's great.

[00:44:55] Michael Eisenwasser: Yeah. And, and if you're, if you're building from AI from scratch, you can, you can go even another step, like you were talking about there, like. It doesn't even necessarily be, need to be a prototype. You, you could design it in such a way, and maybe it will, it would take work for us at this point to retransform everything.

[00:45:09] But you could go to have something where the prototype actually just gets shipped and no one even needs to copy it.

[00:45:15] Matt Cromwell: Mm.

[00:45:15] Michael Eisenwasser: You could take it all the way to there.

[00:45:17] Matt Cromwell: Mm. Yeah.

[00:45:18] Michael Eisenwasser: But then you're, you have to be more clean in the prototype. I don't mind my prototyping dirty code because it's not shipping,

[00:45:25] Matt Cromwell: so, yeah.

[00:45:25] Exactly. Yeah.

[00:45:26] Michael Eisenwasser: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:29] Katie Keith: Well, let's get to a couple of comments from people who are watching live. We've got inquest AI saying everyone is now a builder. The models are improving so quickly that you basically describe what you want and it will build it

[00:45:44] Matt Cromwell: well, that that's a, that's a little bit of what kind of like batting around and, um.

[00:45:51] Almost disagreeing with, um, I think, uh, if you're a developer, if you're a developer, you could do that, right?

[00:45:57] Katie Keith: It's ambiguous. You basically describe what you want. If you are a developer and you say, I want you to use this technology and follow these practices and structure it like this, then yes. If I just say from a functional perspective, then I know that what I get is gonna be unusable.

[00:46:13] It won't even work you. Um, but there you have to

[00:46:17] Michael Eisenwasser: know what to ask it. You have to know what to ask the ai. Yeah. So like you, you can ask, like, I don't come to it saying, this is the tech stack to use. Yeah. I say to the ai, this is what I'm trying to build, gimme options on different tech stacks and why I should use one of them.

[00:46:29] Yeah. And I ask more, what are the pros and cons of, of that text stack? What's gonna happen if I do that? And I just keep asking it. Appreciate it. Recommend. Yes. And then it recommends it. Like I, I started to train myself to just. Every single thing to ask the ai, especially now with, with, and I don't know when, when, like Cloud code now is so fricking smart.

[00:46:51] It's like you compare it now to six months ago, it's very different.

[00:46:54] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm.

[00:46:55] Michael Eisenwasser: So there was really a, a, a turning point maybe two or three months ago when Opus four or five came out, whereas it's just like, wow, this thing is smart. Yeah. And so it is reaching a point where I think you maybe, maybe you still feel today, like you need to be a developer, but I I, I do believe.

[00:47:11] We will pass a, a attorney if, if not now, then soon. It will pass a turning point where even if you're not thinking like a developer, it will just guide you so well Yeah, that you'll get sucked into it, I believe.

[00:47:22] Katie Keith: Interesting. It was a few months ago that I last tried, um, and couldn't produce anything workable.

[00:47:28] Um, so yeah, these things keep changing, but inquest AI's point is, I think distribution is the hard part. Code is commoditizing. I think that addresses my question about when do you release this as a product? Yes. Successful products are all about the execution. This is why I think people go too far with saying that there's no role for product, these sorts of products in the future because it's all about the execution.

[00:47:53] And we've got a very similar comment, um, on that point from Brenda O'Connell who says, customers don't buy code, they buy products, they. Experiences, um, sounds like helpful advice in today's market.

[00:48:06] Matt Cromwell: A hundred percent. That's

[00:48:07] Katie Keith: the thing we are providing thi we are thinking these things through for our customers.

[00:48:11] Even that's important. Um, when you're thinking through the requirements and building products, if they were doing it with ai, they would have to do all that research and have an understanding of the subject matter, which they don't wanna do. They've got better things be doing in their services. So what our plugin do does need to add that extra value it needs.

[00:48:31] To provide something that they couldn't just do in five minutes with ai.

[00:48:36] Matt Cromwell: Correct. Alright. Should we go on to best advice?

[00:48:42] Katie Keith: Yeah. So we wrap up every show with a quick round table question. What is your single one best piece of advice for anyone thinking about how to use AI for their internal tools? Do you wanna start, Michael?

[00:48:55] Michael Eisenwasser: Sure. Uh, when, when I started doing this, I was doing it in chat, GPT. And then eventually, and then I moved to Cursor and then I moved to cloud code. And what I found is, uh, right now I think cloud code is the smartest AI there is for building tech by like a large margin. So my advice would be start with cloud code.

[00:49:17] Um, and I think the easiest way to get started with that is to download vs code. And it's a, it's a desktop application and in VS code you can add the cloud, the official cloud code extension. And so then you have a UI where you can see the files and you have the chat on the side. And I would just tell people if you're like new to it all, start with that.

[00:49:37] 'cause you're using what I believe is the best model, but in it easy interface and uh, then just get very, and then. Every single thing that you're tempted to figure out on your own or to Google, ask the ai, retrain your mind and see where it goes. That would be my advice.

[00:49:57] Matt Cromwell: Love it. Um, my advice is similar, I would say, um, but, um, do everything locally as much as possible.

[00:50:07] Um, start with documentation. Um, start with knowledge, um, giving your AI as much knowledge as possible internally, um, and really spend the time invest it, because once that's done well and uh, deeply, then everything afterwards gets. A million times easier and much higher quality. Um, so that's, that's my advice.

[00:50:30] And honestly, you can use Cloud code with Cursor also. I'm, I'm a, I'm, so far, I'm a big Cursor fan. Mm-hmm. I like it. I feel like it fits me. Uh, I keep being really tempted to just be like, I'll just try this cloud code stuff. I can use Claude in Cursor. Like, it's all, it, it's just the interface and I like it better.

[00:50:48] Michael Eisenwasser: Similar experience. I, it's, it's personal preference I guess.

[00:50:51] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:50:51] Michael Eisenwasser: But either one of those things have a desktop app. With, with

[00:50:54] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:50:55] Michael Eisenwasser: You know, with, with the tool running it,

[00:50:57] Matt Cromwell: I've been trying anti-gravity also, and it's also really fascinating and everybody's like, oh, anti-gravity is free, blah, blah, blah. It is not free because it blows through tokens like crazy.

[00:51:06] Um, and they're, you have to, it, its actually really expensive. Um, model, once you get up to the, you

[00:51:12] Michael Eisenwasser: actually

[00:51:12] Matt Cromwell: need.

[00:51:13] Michael Eisenwasser: That's one of the things that's awesome about Claude. If you use a Claude directly, you're, you're not paying cursory paying them and their model. They're so generous. I mean, you pay like 25 a month, I think is the starting plan, 20 or 25.

[00:51:26] If you use a lot, you'll outdo that. But you can sit at a hundred a month for a long time and they reset your tokens every five hours. So if it's been like three hours and you've burn through all the tokens, it'll just tell you in two hours it resets. You take a break and you come back. And if that's still not enough, you could pay 200 a month, but like the, the amount of the amount they provide to you for a hundred a month is kind of obscene.

[00:51:49] If you compare it to lovable, you'd spend like $5,000 for the same hundred you spend at Claude. It's crazy.

[00:51:54] Matt Cromwell: That's amazing. Katie, what's your best advice?

[00:51:58] Katie Keith: My best advice is a bit higher level, which is if you are a founder looking at using AI to build internal tools, then think about the value of your time as a bigger picture thing.

[00:52:12] Um, at what point? Yes, definitely. You need to learn these technologies and see the opportunities. You also deserve to have a hobby and enjoy your work again. Um, but also think about the business impacts of all of this time. 'cause I think some people are spending a very, very large amount of time building things themselves.

[00:52:32] So think about the whole bigger picture and, um, prioritize just like you would with any other kind of work.

[00:52:38] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, a hundred percent for sure. It's good stuff.

[00:52:41] Katie Keith: Well, that's a wrap. Just going to put one more comment on before we finish, uh, great session and a really valuable discussion from all three of you packed with practical insights on how solopreneurs, marketers, and startups can truly leverage AI in their operations ku Cool.

[00:52:57] Matt Cromwell: I'm putting that on the website.

[00:52:59] Katie Keith: Yeah, that frame, that one your comment. Um, and Michael, thanks so much for joining us. Where can people find you online?

[00:53:08] Michael Eisenwasser: Uh, so Rapid Cloud, you can see in the RA yd Cloud is a website and I hang out, like if you wanna connect with me, I'm, I'm on LinkedIn, just connect with me on LinkedIn or send me a message

[00:53:23] Matt Cromwell: I.

[00:53:24] Excellent. Uh, folks, if you are enjoying these shows, do us a favor and hit that subscribe button on YouTube. It's literally free and easy, and it helps us, uh, support what we're doing here. And special thanks again to FIUs.

[00:53:38] Katie Keith: Yeah, and next week, actually no next week because it's the end of a season and we're having a couple of weeks off before we return.

[00:53:47] For the following season of WP Product Talk, which won't be long. So again, you need to follow us online so that you will be alerted when we release future episodes, which will be in like two weeks or so. It's not very long, so thank you so much for watching. Bye

[00:54:04] Matt Cromwell: bye

[00:54:05] Michael Eisenwasser: Bye. Thank you.