Marketers, Stop Buying Tools & Start Building Them

Dan Sanchez: For the longest time, I've been a SaaS power user. All the different software service subscriptions I had, and I learned how to like make them do all kinds of wonderful things. But now more and more, I'm canceling my subscriptions. We are going from the age of the digital marketer to the age of the AI driven marketer. And one of the big things, one of the big differences between the two is that one buys tools and the other one builds them. So, welcome back to the AI Driven Marketer. I'm Dan Sanchez. My friends call me Danchez. And today I want to talk to you about all the different tools you probably should start considering to build yourself. And the cool thing is, not only is it cheaper, it's better because you can customize all these tools to do exactly what you need them to do when you need them to do it. It's wonderful. I will say that there's one major drawback to building your own marketing tools. And that you kind of have to know what you want to have happen. It helps to have been a pro with the other tools because you have a baseline understanding of like what you'd expect from the tools. and being good at knowing what process to follow is kind of the underlying skill you need to build the tool. But today I wanted to kind of showcase some ideas of things that I've been working on, some that I'm starting soon, and things other people have done to kind of give you like a schmorgis board of what's possible. So I know what as a marketer, I like to see what other people have done, not so I can do it exactly like they did, but so I can take some inspiration and maybe add my own twist to it. So let's dive into it. The first one is website. Like for the longest time I've been on WordPress. This is my new website. It started as a WordPress site, but now it's on a totally different system. It's actually built by ChatGPT sent up to GitHub and then pulled into Vercel and is hosted there. And it uses a database called Neon and a blob that's a new term for me, a blob within Vercel to store all the assets and images and stuff like that. And you could see if you look at my website, it doesn't look like one of those AI websites because I've added personality to it. I've added a lot more little pieces to it and funny little gifts and different things to make it not look like an AI website. But oftentimes there are open source solutions for Projects like a website. The one I use is called Payload. In fact, you can log into Payload here. I'm in the back end of Payload. If you've been in the back end of WordPress, it's kind of the same thing. You got a place for pages, posts, media, categories, users, and forms and all the different things. But all the page contents here, if AI died tomorrow, I'd still be able to manage my website and update it and move things around just like I would with WordPress because Payload is this open source JavaScript-based CMS that I can use to manage it. It's a content management system. It's open source. But Why not give it a head start by giving it something open source like payload in order to actually not have to vibe code and waste all your tokens building what's already been built and has already been perfected. And then it could just build on top of it and fork it and now it's your website and you can continue to develop it from there. The cool thing about having something like payload as a back end is it comes with a bunch of hidden features that AI knows about that you don't know about. It kind of creates a structure and a database and a way to organize the whole thing that kind of keeps it a little bit cleaner. Because us marketers, non developers, right, we don't know what we don't know when it comes to coding things. So starting with an open source solution kind of provides guidelines that helps AI stick to and not create like a mess of code in order to accomplish what you want to accomplish. So a website is no longer just a website here. Since you can code in any feature you want, you don't need a whole plugin repository like WordPress has where you have all these paid and free plugins to plug into it. No, you can code your own. Any feature you want on your website, it can be done. You just has to ask A AI to build it. Whether you're using Codex or Claude Code, you can build it. So and just say like you want a AI website. Not because of just the website part, but because it becomes a hub for all a lot of your other tools. It's just I guess I pay twenty dollars a month for Vercel and I pay for my chat GPT subscription. So I still have to pay for web hosting. And it's well worth it because it's not just hosting my website anymore, it's hosting all my tools. on top of the website, you could do this independently and I'm doing this with Trim Healthy Mama right now because they're still stuck on WordPress. but I'm building a a landing page builder and on for landing pages I just of course use my website, but it was awesome. Last week I talked about this little tool I made to make it easy to speed up human review on copy. but I made a little tool for it and you know, I published the episode and forgot to build out the process for which people could grab the skill. And I didn't realize it until after the episode was live and it was getting out there. People were starting to listen to it. And I was like, crap, ChatGPT. I mentioned that there was gonna be this little thing, this little giveaway. I need a landing page for it so people can opt in for it and subscribe to the newsletter and all that kind of stuff. And ChatGPT's like, I got you. And it just threw up the landing page really fast, connected it to high level. And this landing page looks great. If you're watching along with me, I'm kind of scrolling through the landing page. And it even has a little preview of the tool, like a screenshot of the tool. And I thought it was just an image. It's not. It's actually a little tiny interactive. It's not the full tool, but it's actually this fun little interaction thing where you can see and test out kind of what the tool looks like. it even says illustrate a preview. Open a card to see how the review is organized. It's a fantastic thing. And ChatGPT did this with me just giving it one little quick dictated prompt, like chat help. And it threw it together. I tested it. It works. It's got a thank you page. I'm like, my gosh, it's so easy to throw together a landing page now that's actually really good. so that you could be doing things like this more and more often. If you have a website, you could do it, but even if you have to keep your main site on something else, you can at least throw up a landing page builder, connect it to your CRM and give it the API key so that it can just, you don't have to build the forms in HubSpot or high level anymore. You could just have it build the forms itself and then just pass it through the pass it into your CRM through the API. It's much smoother. And then you don't have to do any of it. You could just tell it what and what to do and then fix it as it goes through. Way faster, way smoother, and honestly, just much, much better. Number three, I had the auto blogging tool, like this tool I already have built into this website to pull YouTube episodes. Where are you already putting content that you could be making blog posts with? Let me go back to the front end. You notice there's a page for every single episode that I publish. And including this one. This one, as soon as you're seeing it, probably has a page on my website because it's being pulled automatically. there's a whole blog post and in it you could see the title of the podcast. You know, it's got a little intro copy. It's got the embedded YouTube video, because this is a video podcast. If you didn't know, you could watch this over on YouTube. and then it has a link underneath the video. It's like, hey, get like it with a call to action to subscribe and to go to Apple, Spotify, or YouTube. It's got links. Then it has an article that was generated from the episode. If you wanna You know, kind of scan the episode. but there's an article here for those who like to read. There is the show description that came with the show. And then there are there is the transcript. And I put the transcript here for those who really want the transcript and mostly for bots to be able to know and scan my website and know what was said in the episode. In case they couldn't find that transcript elsewhere or didn't want to do the work, I'm giving them I'm giving humans and robots everything they need to understand what I said in the episode. And this page is created automatically. Why? Because I asked ChatGPT, hey, every time there's a new YouTube video, pull it. And then tr take the transcript that YouTube already generated and the show notes, store them in the word website, and then turn it into an article. So every time I publish the YouTube, it knows exactly what to do. And all that code runs on the website. That's not Codex. Codex coded it and now the code executes on the website. The website itself is the one checking and then running it through AI to create the article and then publish it. And it does it like clockwork. It is not reliant on codecs to do this stuff. It's just code operating in the background without me. That's cool. This is functionality I've wanted for years, years, people. Because once it polls the YouTube video, this is the next step. It actually turns it into a newsletter and then sends it out as a newsletter. And it has different requirements for the newsletter and the HTML it writes there, but then it sends it out through high level to my email list automatically. You could not have a newsletter, but I I think people like to subscribe and get things in different ways, so I'm gonna make it convenient to do that. And because it's all based on this human, very human, you know, content, I might have AI edit this video, but it is me talking. me coming up with the ideas and then fleshing it out with AI. AI doesn't even feed me a script. I'm just like mad living here going through this with you. so it keeps it human, but also lets AI repurpose it in a bunch of different ways. that's becoming a bigger and bigger play. But it needs to not just be chat GPT content. It needs to be based off your real world human experience. And that's what AI engines are looking for. But it is. You just have to have it have it repurposed and rewritten and it's still based on your personal human experience. So I put I do all this partly because I know it's good for the search engines and the AI engines that are ranking and indexing everything. And then number four was the automated social syndication. Again, it actually pulls the post and then turns it into a bunch of different social posts. And schedules it on high level. it has a fantastic social media tool. That way I don't have to vibe code all the different connections to all the different social platforms. I just have the website kick it from it writes the the social posts here and then schedules them in the high level campaign tool through high level's API and it's all stored securely and then passes it through and it knows what I want. It knows to break each episode. into three different posts and it schedules and sends one right away, one three days from now, one ten days from now. And all this happens on autopilot. And cool, it's in my social tool. So if I want to use this social tool manually sometimes, I still can. but it's scheduled here. Well, I have clips that get scheduled through here, but I have all the text posts that the website schedules through here too. Sometimes paired with the episode image, sometimes not. And all the statistics statistics are here so I can track it all because high level is a pretty robust social tool these days. And I can manage comments from here, do social listening, do everything that high level has to do. So I'm stacking a lot of these tools all in one website. You can build them as separate tools, or you can stack them into one website like I do, so that it kind of has access to what all the things are. Because one of the parts of the social, the the social post tool is that when it posts the first volley, I want it linked to link back to the episode. Well, where's the episode? I could post it to Apple, I could post it to YouTube, but better to send them to one of the pages that I develop automatically, right? One of these. pages where you can either get to it and either click through to Apple, Spotify, or YouTube, watch the YouTube video right there, or just get a glance and read it, or access the transcript if you so desire. So this is the home base where I send people from social to go and check out the episode. But it needs to know what this URL is, but since it's already based in the website, it knows what the URL is because it's already there in the same database. That's one of the advantages to building a lot of these tools into your website. The next thing I want to talk about is Buzz. this is not a tool that I've built, but it's something we're building internal internally at Trim Healthy Mamba because we don't want to pay for Slack anymore. Slack costs us probably fifteen grand a year, and it's actually unnecessary now. It's a pretty Slack is a great tool, but now there's an open source version of Slack out there called Buzz, which was put out there by the founder of Twitter as just an open source project you can fork over and then start to develop yourself, which is great. Because imagine if you could vibecode on top of Slack and repurpose it and have it do whatever you want and integrate your agents into it so they're part of the conversation too. That's buzz. And it's free. You could host it on your own web server and not pay for Slack anymore and do whatever you want with it. Have c clawed code or codecs or whatever, vibe code on top of it so it has your systems, your report cards and automated s things going on in there without having to pay for any more extra plugins or integrations or anything like that. That's something we're working on, Trim Healthy Mama. We're getting close to cutting over from Slack into Buzz. We're just transporting all the content over to Buzz right now. And then we're gonna kill Slack and just move over. Now, if you're gonna do something big across the company, you're probably gonna wanna work closely with IT on it. it's probably gonna be an IT led initiative like it is for us. And the last thing I wanted to talk about is a tool that I'm literally just started working on yesterday, but I thought it was interesting. And it actually came From an idea from another p another tool that I saw recently. Let me share my screen. Called USpot. USpot is kind of like the solopreneur version of a CRM from HubSpot. And it was a great idea. And I was like, this looks really cool. I'm like, I could see using this just for managing all the relationships in my life. not just my work relationships and things related to my business, but just all my relationships. Wouldn't it be nice if like you had some goals and objectives for building stronger relationships? professionally, but some personally, maybe some with different people in your community. But you know, life gets busy and you for you lose track of them all. You lose track of where was I at with that person? you know, it's been too long. I was like, you know, I really don't need to pay for an extra SAS. And this is a pretty simple CRM. I wonder if there's an open source CRM that I could start with and just build on top of and then build some of the AI lay layers in there that's following up and kind of scanning my relationships to see where I could, you know. Do with a phone call or a simple nudge in a text message or do something thoughtful for this other relationship that's kind of drifted a little bit too far. That's what I'm going to be vibe coding next. Just a little personal CRM that helps me manage all the relationships in my life so I can go beyond just the few dozen that I keep in touch with on a regular basis. Imagine if you could keep in touch with 100 or 200 people in a meaningful way, 300 people in a meaningful way. Wouldn't that change your life? I know a lot of my life has been impacted. based on the quality and the quantity of the relationships that I have. It's one of the reasons why I love podcasting is I love interviewing people because I get to build more relationships with more people. Something that James Carberry taught me long ago. and he's actually the first one that told me about trying to build like a personal CRM and I'm like, now we could just build it the way we want it. So it's something I'm working on. I will give you updates as we move along, but it just kind of goes to show you you don't need to buy the tools anymore. You could just build them for yourself. Now, there's some things that I have not been able to rebuild because they're just too complicated. Like this recording software I'm using called Riverside. I can't get away from it. And Riverside's become a very robust, wonderful tool. There's parts of Riverside that I vibe coded with clips and sharing on social and all that kind of stuff, but dealing with media I know is really difficult for code. I don't want to blow like two years worth of tokens trying to do it. So I pay for Riverside, I pay for high level, and I pay for ChatGPT. Those are like my main three tools. And everything else is going away in favor of me building my own custom tools, on top of open source systems so I can start from there, not starting from scratch. and then I'm just vibe coding the systems that I want to see in my life. I recommend you do the same. I think we're still early in this one. So if you're already doing this, I think you're well ahead. This is the next frontier for marketing with AI.