How can a solo ecommerce founder use AI instead of hiring?

Transcript

Charles Travers: Hey guys, welcome back to another week of e-commerce marketing chats with myself Charles and the main man Jimmy Jimmy mate what’s been going on?

Jimmy Dalgleish: Hey, how going? Been an interesting start to the call. Charles and his tech problems and not finding the blurred background, but on tech problems, actually, I’ve been wanting to ask you all this week because I know that you bought a new Mac mini to experiment with some AI stuff. like, I kind of want to be all this, this episode and say, well, hopefully you’ve tested it. Have you tested it yet or not?

Charles Travers: Yeah, a little bit, yeah. I’ve been using it mainly for clawed co-work. So I haven’t gone down, you know, a lot of people have bought it specifically for, was it open claw or? And I’m still, cause basically it’s been.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah.

Charles Travers: now acquired by OpenAR, as in it. So I’m kind of waiting for it to, the security aspect of it to be a little bit more secure. Now. because I’ve got a separate device with this Mac Mini, the whole point was to kind of separate things out. just to give people an idea in terms of setup, the reason I went for a separate device rather than using it on my main MacBook is because from a security perspective, I don’t want these AI agents getting access to personal information and all sorts of accounts and stuff. So it’s good to have it on a separate device, which is why I specifically bought this Mac Mini. What I would suggest is Keeping things separate. So when you’re setting it up, you create a brand new Apple ID you don’t use the same Apple ID account that you use for your main, you know MacBook if you’ve got one or your your main iPhone again, it just it just reduces any potential security risks but it was pretty straightforward to set up and I’m using it, I haven’t got any fancy Mac screen. I’m literally using my Zen screen ASUS. I think this was one of your suggestions, Jimmy, actually, back in the day. This little travel device. Yeah, it’s great.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, I still use I still use mine too. we need to hit up Azu Azuz and just say, Hey, sponsor the show. We’ve got to use your portable screen. So yeah, it’s handy for travel. Sure. Just to have that extra external screen. you are freelancing or just wanting to work remote and you like having the dual screen yet. It’s a great little thing. Super easy to carry too. It’s just, it’s like putting a, like a book in your backpack. It’s, it’s not, it’s not heavy. Um, it’s very compact and yeah, very easy to travel with.

Charles Travers: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, well, we’ll throw it. I’ll throw it in the show notes so people can go and have a look at it. But yeah, really highly recommend it and yeah, it served me well. So got that set up with ⁓ external Apple Magic keyboard and mouse. And yeah, pretty straightforward. If you’re used to having a MacBook. ⁓ any Apple devices then it’s the same interface. And yeah, downloaded Claude the desktop application, can now start using Claude Cowork. So I was just trying out a few different tasks. A couple of things that I found really useful was, You know, recently I’ve found that just being able to take different data points and then input them into Claude and then getting it to analyze and produce a certain outcome, I found is incredible. So like, for example, I probably spend at least a couple of hours every month or the beginning of the month for the previous month, I’ll analyze all my personal monthly expenses. And what I did this month was I just downloaded the CSV file from my bank account and credit card and I just uploaded them to Claude and said, look, create me ⁓ a personal finance spreadsheet. And it literally like did put something together, which would have taken me a while to put together. I just saved me time going through manually each different item ⁓ and documenting that. So something that would have taken me a couple of hours above now takes me a few minutes. It’s just, and the other thing I found valuable is… When I’m working with client websites is I’ll take three to five of their top competitors Websites and I’ll say Claude do me a competitor analysis against my clients website looking at everything from you SEO conversion rate optimization messaging Offer and it will produce me a really nice report That you know, it gives me some good data points and if you want to go more in depth then you could you could also you know

Jimmy Dalgleish: Interesting.

Charles Travers: Another thing that I’ve started to do was do some backlink competitor analysis. if you’re one great way that you can identify new backlinks is to look at what your competitors are doing. So what I did is you can export your competitor backlinks from something like SEMrush or Ahrefs and you can pull those into Claude and then it would analyze that against your backlink profile and then produce report. So like I did this for one of my clients and it produced me a spreadsheet with like the top priority links to go after and give me like kind of different levels. So like, you know, ⁓ editorial links. ⁓ Government or education dot edu links which are quite valuable blog posts and this is all pulling through from saying Four or five of your competitors and this is something you could do if you’ve got something like SEM rush. They have a competitor Analysis feature but this just pulls it through together and gives you a really nice report or on a spreadsheet as well. So that’s something that I’ve been kind of playing around with and just Claude Cowork’s been operating in the background while I’ve been doing another task. it’s, yeah, I feel it’s multitasking at its finest.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, it’s interesting. I’m not sure if you saw this week, Charles, but perplexity just introduced their own kind of open claw version. So apparently it’s really good. yeah, yeah, complete perplexity computer. But apparently at the moment, it’s only available on the $200 a month plant. So

Charles Travers: Is computer complexity? Is it perplexity computer or something?

Jimmy Dalgleish: But yeah, from all accounts, it’s good. So, but it just, it just shows like these main AI platforms. Like they’re, they’re coming and they’re all pushing to basically have agents working for you in the background. It’s coming fast. It’s even, even in the e-commerce coaching community that I’m a part of, like the owner of that has, has built out credible dashboards to students and

Charles Travers: Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: once they put in all their data in there, it’s giving them AI based recommendations, but he’s getting his coaches to like train the AI as well. ⁓ and there does need to be some guardrails put in and there’s limitations on the setup at the moment, but the, technology is just getting better and better. And then you’ve got kind of the best in the world, almost creating skills that you can like Claude skills for. account audits for Meta and Google. So you can basically take what the best people in the world have produced. And then tailor it a bit to your own nuances to how you want to either audit accounts or review what you’re doing on your e-commerce store regularly. it’s, it’s, don’t know why, but I just, haven’t been able to get all this AI stuff out of my head because it’s just like, what’s coming and like how many jobs are about to go. So yeah.

Charles Travers: Yeah, I posted about this in the week, like basically saying, look, the technology is amazing. And like I’m using it and I’m actively using it. But equally, it is a little bit concerning of how fast it’s coming and the sheer volume of professions and jobs that will be under threat because you know, the larger companies are starting to cut positions. And I think only the, you know, only the best will survive. And I think even in the Ecom space, speed of execution is even more important now because, you know, people are able to

Jimmy Dalgleish: massively.

Charles Travers: get econ brands off the ground fast and you know they’re able to use these tools to bring to market and if you’re not continuing to push forward and constantly getting things done then you’re going to have a lot more competitors in your market. So yeah it’s certainly interesting times trying to look at the ⁓ positives of it but yeah I’m the same Jimmy I’m equally like ⁓ okay where are we going with this and the impact that this is going to have from a society perspective when potentially well not even potentially I’m pretty certain we’re to have a large-scale mass unemployment at some point

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah. And like in my mind, and I hope this, I hope this motivates e-commerce store owners and service providers if they’re listening to this more than anything, but in my mind, it’s like, okay, I want to work as hard as possible now because who knows what the next five years look like. So it’s like, if you’ve got capacity and you’ve kind of been just cruising or you’ve been doing things that are, I guess, a half ass level, I think, Seeing what’s coming through is almost that fire under your ass to kind of say, okay, I need to just capitalize on all my skills now because who knows how much they’ll be worth like two years. they, I look, I look at like, I looked at web developers, especially, ⁓ just even people like myself who have never coded, ⁓ I shouldn’t say never coded a line in my life. Cause I’ve done a few lines in HTML, but like the basic of basic, but

Charles Travers: Probably bother me.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, I’ve never, I’ve never coded like an app or, or anything like that. I, I have zero need for a developer at all now, ⁓ for my own projects. still, still, I still have a user developer that Charles actually introduced me to for specific Shopify work just because one, they’re not my projects, they’re client projects. And if I go in there and play with the code with vibe coding and screw something up, it’s a bit. You know, you want someone that knows what they’re doing for that. But if you’re wanting to build out your own things then, or your own projects of any, of any type, then the need for a developer at the moment is almost zero. And just to, just to give you an example, I had a coaching call, like a group call last week, and we were talking about, uh, kind of how much you can afford to pay per click. Um, and for that traffic to still be profitable. And I knew I was going to talk about this. So I put it into Clawdon. I built out a calculator for the students in, I was timing it too. So it took me about three minutes to build the calculator and 12 minutes total to have from the idea to the calculator to live up on my website, 12 minutes for like a full, uh, the full calculator. think I, I think I might’ve mentioned it on the call last week. Um, it’s just like, can, you can. I’m not even scratching the surface with it because I’ve seen some of our mentors how they’re using it that what they’ve built from running their whole life they basically talk to their phone and it Manages everything for them like for example, it’s like hey, I’m you talking to your phone. Hey, I’m thinking about this project I think it should include this this and this this is what I want it to look like Make sure it has this feature this feature this feature And yeah, that’s what I’m thinking at the moment. Then they’ll stop talking to the phone. By the time they get back to the computer, all their AI agents have just taken exactly what they’ve said from their phone and they’ve built them out a prototype of the thing before they’ve even come back to the computer. It’s insane.

Charles Travers: Yeah, no, it really is. What you can do now is crazy. I think we’re all at the point where we all feel that we’re not up to speed with it. So if you are feeling like that, don’t worry, you’re not the only one. But what I would say is if you’re not using it every day now in the operations of your business. you are up against people that are doing that. And yeah, speed of execution, as we’ve mentioned many times is a key competitive advantage. So certainly be trying to integrate. Think about tasks that you do every week, manual tasks that take you a long time. Can you automate that? Can you?

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah.

Charles Travers: can you cut down the time and allows you to focus on things that actually make the biggest impact in your business and moves the needle with regards to kind of revenue and sales.

Jimmy Dalgleish: I saw, I saw a short video clip the other day by Alex Hormozi. and he’s, he’s basically said, and he, he admitted like, don’t always do this, but when I need to be pro productive, said, I have a timer that goes off every 15 minutes. And when it goes off, I have to tell the timer exactly what I’m doing. So imagine, imagine you’re in procrastination mode for whatever, ⁓ for whatever reason. And that’s that timer. ⁓ goes off and you’re just like, ⁓ I’m still stuck here watching YouTube or I’m still stuck here doing this. If you have to refocus every 15 minutes or you don’t want it to get you out of flow though. So if it went off, you just talk to your phone, hey, I’m still working on this, thanks. And then that’s done and you’re still kind of back in flow. I think I was thinking about just building an app that could they could do that. Like the timer goes off, talk to my phone, this is what I’m doing. And then it kind of collates everything that I’ve done for that day and kind of how measure your productivity basically. So yeah, it was just kind of another app that I’m just considering building for myself and potentially others could use it too. But yeah, are there any apps that the, or anything that you’re looking to build out Charles, either an e-commerce to help you with the SEO stuff or anything in that regards to, I guess, improve your efficiency?

Charles Travers: Yeah, I’m building out at the moment, I don’t want to share the exact details, but I’m building out a health directory at the moment, health clinic directory for a particular niche. And I’ve used ⁓ Claude code to do that. again, I built that, the majority of that was built within.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, okay.

Charles Travers: under less than 30 minutes. The problem I’ve got now is I need to find, I was asking it to pull images from, go out and source images from clinic websites and for whatever reason, the… server was blocking it. don’t know whether there, obviously there’s potentially a copyright issue there. So I’ve got to look at the best way to achieve that in a legal, in a legal way. But yeah, that’s just something I’m experimenting with and trying to build out these assets. I went down the route before of building out like a, these kind of a niche affiliate sites, but I was very on the, it was purely a content based site. So there was no real business behind it. And that actually got hit big time by a Google

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah.

Charles Travers: update a few years back where a lot of these kind of blogs content sites got heavily hit and it actually never really recovered. So I kind of scrapped that, but the directory routes, obviously there’s, there’s more of a, you know, a business behind it. So yeah, something I’m experimenting with at the moment.

Jimmy Dalgleish: ⁓ I’m not sure if I tagged you in it this week, Charles, but I saw a post by, actually I might try to bring it up because I think I’ll butcher it if I try to remember it word for word. But ⁓ it was a post by Alex Becker and he was talking specifically about SaaS. And for those who don’t know Alex Becker, he’s the owner of HiROS, which is ⁓ kind of a really ⁓ commonly used third party tracking tool in e-commerce and in just websites in general. kind of helps the mystery of attribution and tries to solve that problem. still don’t think it does it at a hundred percent, but I don’t think anything does, but it is a good tool to use to help you with your attribution and where your traffic’s coming from. he actually had a really interesting take on SAS if I can find it. where is it? But it essentially, I am gonna, oh, here it is. No, that’s the wrong one, sorry. I might come back to that. I’ll find it. Oh, wait, here we go, got it. Let me just read this out to the audience. So. Alex Becker wrote this in the post. wrote it on February 18th. So pretty recent, about two weeks ago. He the future of SaaS is simply this online set in stone apps are dead. The future will look like this. I bet, and I’m betting my entire net worth on it, creating something like Salesforce will be a prompt away. That said, people won’t do this. What they w what will happen is small teams will code up parts of Salesforce, all the apps, you know, and you can download and white label. likely for a recurring fee and then build on top of that. So he’s saying, for example, there will be an open source version made of Calendly, a MailChimp, ⁓ Kajabi, like any kind of major software that you can think of. He thinks small kind of teams will, will code up the basic version of that. And then you can pay like a recurring theme and then you can build on top of that. So it’s basically taking any SaaS product that you use and then ⁓ the value is not in the SAS product anymore. Cause like he said, you could build a whole SAS at the, basically the push of a prompt. ⁓ But where the value is, is having someone go fully through that prompt and give you all the ins and outs of creating a really good kind of baseline code and then you building on top of that. So it’s interesting. And he said, Hi Ross is already transitioning. So I don’t know. what that means, but I actually like the thought of that because you could almost get some of the best software out there in the world, tailor it to your own through these, um, LLMs. And then you could have your own software as a service, not to go out to the masses. Cause I think, I think that model will die. I that model, I think that model will die.

Charles Travers: Mm-hmm.

Jimmy Dalgleish: where I think there’s value in is if you, and where I’m seeing it already in the coaching community that I’m in, if you’ve got a really niche kind of group of customers or something like that, you can provide the solution that’s just going to serve their specific needs. Like it might be 50 people or so. ⁓ And you can serve the needs of those 50 people and have your own little recurring thing. It might be like, I don’t know, like a hundred dollars a month to use it. So you might have like a five K a month revenue stream just from this little app that you’ve created for 50 people. And I think you’re to, I think you’re going to see more and more of that. There’s going to be really specific software for really specific niches of the market. And it’s going to come from open source code where the template and all the hard parts are already built out. And then you can, you can build on top of that. kind of white label it and use it use it as your own.

Charles Travers: No, I think you’re right. The other area I think will evolve as well, and I’ve been thinking about more, like effectively productizing expertise. ⁓ through the form of AI agents. So you effectively package up your knowledge, ⁓ being you as a service provider and provide that to the market at a heavily reduced price on a recurring basis. And then effectively companies can hire your AI agent that has all your knowledge base and all your experience to go off and execute on their Google ads or their SEO or their CRO.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, I agree. think, I think, I think one thing to take from this call today, cause probably some people listening to this in the e-commerce space is probably like, ⁓ this has all been AI chat. How do I apply this to e-commerce? So I think just really bluntly, if you’re doing things regularly within your business that are taking a lot of time, like you need to analyze those. I’m, I’m talking about if you’re writing, if you’re spending like a week writing product descriptions for like a hundred different products or you’re optimizing the images and it’s taking forever. Like you need to, you need to start identifying, what is taking you considerably amount of time in your business. And you need to use these tools to solve that. So, and I think one of the biggest problems, especially for solo founders and e-commerce is they’re everything they’re, they’re the marketing director, they’re the CEO, they’re the CFO, they’re, they’re everything for their business. So. One of the biggest levers they can pull is getting back some of their time. ⁓ and I think this is why you and I talk about this a lot, cause we can both see it. We’re, we’re both solo, solo operating freelancers. So the option for us to, build and don’t get me wrong, the building part is time consuming, but it’s, one of those things you build at once and it saves you ⁓ time. Like almost infinitely ongoing. So. Even though you’re like, oh, why am I going to spend five hours to save myself a task that will take me one hour? The thought of it is you might have to do that one hour task like 10 times a month. So you’re investing five hours to sort it out and saving you 10 hours a month. Then all of a sudden you save yourself for like 120 hours a year. So, and that’s just for one task. So if you think about these different things that are compounding and taking you a lot of time. start to experiment with, especially Claude code. would start with, think, ⁓ as my recommendation, that’s what I’m using at the moment. I’m really hesitant to recommend any AI platform because by the time people listen to this, there’s probably already one that’s way better than the one that I was using like two weeks ago. So, cause I’ve jumped between Gemini, Chatjibit T, Perplexity, Claude. ⁓ like I’ve experimented with all of them at the moment. I’m sitting with Claude for anything that I’m building out. So, or Google AI studio too, I’m experimenting with a little bit as well, but yeah. Um, what, what AI program isn’t the important thing at the moment is just testing anyone. Like you could, you could still build an app in chat GPT. It doesn’t have to be Claude code. Um, but yeah, get experimenting. If you’ve got an idea, I especially e-commerce founders, a lot of them are so entrepreneurial anyway, if you’ve been sitting on an idea and you just haven’t had the tech founded to build it, just go experiment and try to build it. And you’ll be amazed with what you, what you can actually do. So, ⁓ yeah, it might, it might be an app for your e-commerce store. If you’re in the, if you’re in the health, if you’re in the health niche, like supplements or things like that, you might, you might have an app, ⁓ in the health space. and yeah, there’s just, there’s so much you can do. I just,

Charles Travers: Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: I think this episode is really important that people don’t sleep on the opportunity that is right in front of their eyes at the moment.

Charles Travers: No, I absolutely agree. I think it’s coming from, you know… doing everything yourself to actually being the orchestrator and the system operator. have to, you know, it’s, and we’re, you know, as service providers, we’re guilty of that. And I’m sure many e-commerce founders are that are trying to do everything with these AI tools. Now it’s more about what systems I can build in order to allow the AI to go up and do that for you rather than you doing it all yourself. So it’s just switching your, your mindset. and the way that you operate. And I think that would make a massive difference. And what I would suggest is there’s so many tools out there, pick one LLM AI tool and really try and focus and master that. Because like I said.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah.

Charles Travers: I’m the same. favorite at the moment is Claude, but equally they’re all competing on one month, chat GBT, do an upgrade and then Gem and I do one. And I think it’s best just to focus on one, master that and you will get the benefit from doing that. think rather than tinkering around with multiple different LLMs.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, I will say, I will say to Charles and I’ve had probably a few conversations about this offline as well, but, ⁓ I think one of my biggest bottlenecks is I’ve never wanted to build a team. I’ve tried several times. I’m just, I’m not great at managing people. ⁓ I’m not good at, ⁓ I shouldn’t, I wouldn’t say I’m not good at teaching them cause like I’m a coach. So I’m good at teaching people, but When I bring someone on, I try to bring them on with the skillset already. And then I just, I just think that they’re always going to be like me. Like, ⁓ you just give them a task and they’ll go out there and figure it out, but it’s not how the world works. Like they need systems and processes and like, that’s like, it’s not my game. don’t like that side of business. And that’s probably why I’m a solo operator, but I’ve been saying to Charles recently, you know, ⁓ all that thought about, ⁓ Do I have to build a team that’s completely gone now? Like with the technology, I know I don’t need a team. know I can build out exactly what I want to happen within my own business through kind of the agents and the, AI stuff that’s coming. So, and I think Charles, I remember you saying to me, cause Charles did have a team and he was managing people and Charles just said, you know, I’ll never go back to having a team with what’s coming.

Charles Travers: Yeah, well never say never, but yeah, certainly when I look at the tools available and ⁓ as much as there are some benefits of having a team, it comes with the headaches as well. yeah, I think many companies will probably be thinking the same thought.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah. And just so people are aware, Charles and I aren’t letting people off in the place of AI. We’re already solo operators. So I guess instead of bringing people on, we’re probably just the way we like to manage our business. We just know it’s a better fit if we manage that part of business ourselves. I think some people get a bit funny when they hear people ⁓ have found a tool to be able to get rid of some of their stuff. Like it’s not a great thing to hear. ⁓ But it’s reality and it’s what’s coming. So especially, I don’t like getting into politics, but the government in Victoria is trying to legislate that all small businesses have to legally allow their staff to work from home two days a week if they’re able. ⁓ Which just seems insane to me for small business, but that is just going to spur on their redundancies and massively increase their redundancies, especially in this AI space. It just seems like… one of the most ridiculous moves that the government could make in this particular space. Because if a business owner didn’t have, if they were coasting and if this comes in, it’s just going to give them a reason to reassess. And they’re to be like, well, if everyone’s going to work from home two days a week, we don’t need that. We’re just going to make them all redundant and then move over to these systems. So yeah, it seems insane to me, but Yeah, I don’t know.

Charles Travers: Yeah, yeah, I mean the power is absolutely it used to be it You know it was with the employee that the power is certainly with the employer whether people like it or not, you know ⁓ So yeah, we will see we will see

Jimmy Dalgleish: But yeah, we’ll try not to finish that call this week on politics, but I just, if anyone takes away anything from this call, jump on code code today and just build it. Just think of a random app or, or, or, or this might even be a one. Pick the app that you use the most, like a little niche app on your phone, whether like it’s a fitness app or a health tracker or whatever it is on your phone.

Charles Travers: Yeah, nah, we don’t hit.

Jimmy Dalgleish: And ask Cloud Code to build you your own version of it and see what it comes out with. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Charles Travers: Yeah, yeah, or even take a task that takes you X amount of hours a week that you hate doing and see if you can create, know, automate that process or create an app that does it for you. That’s another thing to look at.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Here’s a, is another, is another one that I liked too. So basically if you know that there’s a really high converting website in your niche, take a screenshot of the whole website and then take a screenshot of your whole website and say, ⁓ basically convert my website into like, ⁓ use the, all the conversion optimization features that are available on this website and draft me up a, like a rebuild of what my website would look like. and yeah, you can use that as a starting point to either start your own development or get a Shopify developer and say, Hey, this is what I my website to look like. And it just takes away the whole design side for you.

Charles Travers: Yeah, that’s a really great idea, Jimmy, actually. Good stuff.

Jimmy Dalgleish: ⁓ but yeah, a few, things that you guys can try and, yeah, we’ll, we’re trying to keep these calls to 30 minutes now. So we’ll, we’ll leave you with that. Go experiment, report back and, yeah, I hope you guys can all go out and build some fantastic little apps, improve your e-commerce business, improve your efficiency and chat to you next week. ⁓ check us out on Facebook, add Shopify marketing secrets or Check us out on everywhere else from the podcasting platforms at e-commerce marketing chats. We’ll catch you next week, guys.