Danan @ eCom Triage: Welcome back to the next episode of the e comm growth show. I'm your host, Danan Coleman, founder of ecom triage, co-founder of Catalog Defender. I am the founder of Ecom.events, and I will have a new announcement for you extremely soon. As I now own a company that I think is going to help help us all. So yeah, that'll be exciting. Now, this episode is quite unique. Because I do not know the agenda. I am not setting the stage. It's all gonna be held on Andrew's shoulders. So if you were with us, I think it was a couple of weeks ago. He and I have known each other for five plus years, I think. We met in San Diego.
Andrew Erickson: Mm-hmm.
Danan @ eCom Triage: And Andrew, do you remember the name of of that? Was it None of us?
Andrew Erickson: It was either San Diego event was either traffic and conversion or it would have been a Titan event. It was Titan tra titan conver traffic and conversion. Yeah, that's a good one.
Danan @ eCom Triage: That's it. Yeah. Yeah. It was tr yeah. So we met at traffic and conversion and but yeah, so recently we got reconnected in Nashville and we all went to we we went to lunch with a bunch of other people and we just all sat down and started talking AI and and the ethics of it and the capabilities and all that stuff. And so we kind of left a conversation in Nashville. That we're picking up today. And so, Andrew, if you would please take the reins on this and tell us what are we discussing? And and and this for for the record, everyone, I don't know what he has in mind.
Andrew Erickson: Yeah, I'm really excited. So Danan and asked me to come on and just say, hey, we're what are some really cool hacks and really useful things that we can do with AI for e-commerce sellers? And that's that's my domain. That's my game. So I I'm like, okay, let me put together the top seven things that you can do with AI to optimize and grow your e-commerce brand.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Love it. All right, cool. So now I today I don't use AI to manage my brand. And the reason that I don't do it is because my brand does not really require management. Doesn't require it. Now, could I optimize things? Absolutely. I guarantee you I've got the worst, the worst as as of right now, the worst supplement listing on Amazon.
Andrew Erickson: okay.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yep, yep. but it converts at forty percent so we don't touch it. So well
Andrew Erickson: That's not the worst. That's the best. I only care about conversion.
Danan @ eCom Triage: yeah, that's true. And but the the the reason why it converts that that high is because it's all brand search so we're not doing any advertising or anything like that. So of course sales are not in the millions a month, you know. But anyhow, why don't you tell us what we're talking about today? We got seven areas.
Andrew Erickson: Yes. So set so these
Danan @ eCom Triage: That we're gonna talk about.
Andrew Erickson: seven business seven areas. I'm gonna say half of them are just gonna be basic business things. these are the processes now that we're in the now we're the end of twenty twenty six, coming into twenty twenty seven, these are things that you really need to be doing just for basic businesses, right? These are basic human organizations, right? And then
Danan @ eCom Triage: Cool. Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: so it should apply to everyone, of course. and then and then the other half of them are gonna be really specific to private label businesses. So I will get started first with a really easy one. That is meeting minute capture. So having AIs come
Danan @ eCom Triage: yeah.
Andrew Erickson: onto your meetings and record them. they're really good at transcribing now and also knowing who's talking and the context around who's talking and bringing that information in and just having a storage system, like a storage and processing system for your for your meeting minutes and for your for your all your actions and stuff. I personally use Fathom for for my meeting recorder.
Danan @ eCom Triage: I do too.
Andrew Erickson: And it I love it. It's great. It works really well. we have different flows. And so I have a skill. A skill is just a set prompt, right? that that processes the meetings. And I and I have like like four or five different skills for the type of meeting. So we can have status meetings, we have L ten meetings, which is like a type of business meeting for if you run a EOS entrepreneur operating system, one for sales calls, seller calls. These all these different things like that. And so the AIs will automatically figure out what kind of classify this. And then depending on what classification the meeting is, it then processes that information and stores it. and so that's the first one. That's an easy one. And I think every business everywhere should be doing that.
Danan @ eCom Triage: I fully agree with you. So I also use Fathom, but I'll tell you one thing I really like about Fathom that most of the other note takers don't have is that it also captures video, right? and I have it capture video as well. Now, with that being said, I haven't had a need because I do a lot of screen sharing and stuff like that, and these are client meetings and or prospect meetings, but I haven't had to use the video at all for
Andrew Erickson: Yeah, me too.
Danan @ eCom Triage: over a year. And it's it's very, you know, data dense. And so think we all probably use those of us that are AI forward, we're all using dictation software as well, right? So like I've got three. One of them is WhisperFlow, which I'm gonna advise against because I'm about to give you a different one. that
Andrew Erickson: okay, let's hear.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah, and the this dude, this is crazy what it's can do and what it's about to do. and then I have another one which is called Voice Inc., which is a one time purchase and it's like a hundred bucks, you get three seats. But it's not very good, but it's all it's native on your device, and so it doesn't put stuff up to the cloud and then back, so there's not that time delay. But if you watch Nate Herc, do you know who Nate Herc is on YouTube?
Andrew Erickson: Yep. Yeah, I love him.
Danan @ eCom Triage: So he's got Glaido right? And Glaido is his voice dictation software that he invested in. But I'm gonna put this in the chat for you. This is a and I'll put this in the description of the video, everyone. I have an invitation link that'll get you a free month of Pro. But here's the thing it is lightning fast. Lightning fast. So One of the problems that I have is that if I'm on an airplane and I want to dictate something, obviously, you know, can't do it that loud anyhow, but the c the connection to the internet just ruins the whole dictation thing, right? Glaido is so freaking fast that by the time you take your finger off the button, it's basically already into the text field.
Andrew Erickson: Wow.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Not only that, so so there's the dictation side, but then there's command side. So you can set up MCPs inside of Glaido to Claude, to Grok, to your freaking Apple home, whatever has an MCP. And because Glaido is always on with a hotkey, you can say, hey, turn off the office lights. Hey, create a task and click up for me that does blah blah blah blah blah with this date. And so it's like Having Siri only, it's connected to whatever you want it to be connected to. And so you have these two different methods that you can do this. Now it's not conversational, but you can also say, hey, open up Claude and start a search about this thing, and I need to know about this sort of contract and go look at my Google Drive and find this thing and blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you can pick it up. in Claude or in Codex or Grok or whatever. and WhisperFlow is twelve dollars a month. This is seventeen. and they're they're iterating on it. So I was anyhow. yeah.
Andrew Erickson: Love it. That's cool. I'm gonna check that out.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah. So I agree with you on on one hundred percent on the note taking and this would be another thing that is a huge, huge, huge major game changer for me.
Andrew Erickson: Killer. Love it. So number two on my list is product development. So this is one, it's a little bit trickier to do this one. So I'll explain a few of the features and tools that you can use to help with this and also put a little caveats around what you might not be able to do with this. so I've found that taking your entire catalog, assuming you have more than, you know, whatever, half a dozen products and uploading all of your data into Claude or your AI of choice, and then kind of help an Giving it that context, help me come with more product ideas that are variations on what we have inside of our brand. Also, of course, mining reviews. So if you can go and pull reviews from your top competitors, and also yourself and find places where you can optimize and also putting in brand analytics in into your into your just pulling all that data down and say, help me come up with the ideas. And then so all those things are those are things we've been doing for a long time. But here's one thing I'll I'll get to A B testing later, but coming up with a bunch of product, coming up with a bunch of product ideas. And then we're gonna, I'm gonna talk about how to A B test them later, but coming up with a bunch of ideas so that we can test them before we go to market with them. So just
Danan @ eCom Triage: Mm.
Andrew Erickson: just just honestly brainstorming, talking about things, looking at margins, looking at what you need to do for for product development. And of course also there's a tool if you want to go with an actual tool, there's a tool called ASIO or Axio. ACO A C C I O Yeah,
Danan @ eCom Triage: A A C C I L.
Andrew Erickson: it's it's like owned by Alibaba and so the whole Alibaba
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: algorithm and supplier data whatever system back end is built into it and it works really well for product development and finding suppliers and stuff.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Cool. while we are discussing this, I'm gonna go to my chief BizBot on Grok because I have two recommendations that are AI forward sourcing. but let me let me see if I can find them. I I I talked to so many people and so many companies, I forget the names of the people and the companies. I just know in my mind that the concept exists and I need to go find it. But so you're using ASIO and is that is there an MCP from clo from whoever into that so you can connect it?
Andrew Erickson: Yeah, ASIO is like it's its own sort of system by that has its own AI harness and everything. and it but I'm not sure if you can connect it as an MCP directly into Claude. that's a good question. But but it it's like its own site that has a full AI chat and a full everything built into it.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah, okay. Well, if the great thing about where we're at with AI today is that if there is no MCP or there's no API endpoints that you can extract this data from, you can just use computer use through Codex or Claude and Chrome for Claude or Grokbots with Grok and you can just tell it to go look for you. And it can go do the research and you can deploy them to do it for you.
Andrew Erickson: Quick Google search says, Yes, there is an MCP where you can connect ASIO to Claude. So yes. There you go.
Danan @ eCom Triage: There we go. There you go. Also, there's an MCP that Amazon just came out with that connects to your Seller Central, but that data is limited in that it does not have access to any of your ad stuff because Amazon in their infinite wisdom and it always being day one seems to maintain the confusion of day one where people don't talk to each other and don't know what others are doing. So the the API for ads is different than that of the rest of certain your your d sales data in Seller Central. But if you've got it, you you've got some of it. So you can definitely do some really crazy things if you got those connected. Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: Love it. Number three on my list is listing images and listing copy. So the new models, chat GPT's model, which is GPT two point five is the name of the model, but just the standard chat GPT stuff, the codex stuff. The models are the images are very good. also you can connect Higgs field, which is a like an image and video generating site. can connect that in also as an MCP, of course, and start creating images that you can for especially your main image. We found we we A B test the heck out of our main images. And so
Danan @ eCom Triage: Mm-hmm.
Andrew Erickson: we'll we'll generate this is before AI. I had a human generating 20 main images for every single product. It's part of our launch process. we would generate 20 main images, and then from those 20, I would down select to about 10, and then we would A B test the heck out of every single. Main image, but we want to generate those images. And of course, I had a human doing it. It would take a week and cost hundreds of dollars for a human to do it. That's even a VA in the Philippines, right? And
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: now, of course, the AIs are so incredibly good at doing this kind of stuff that you can just do it through the AI. and so that creating those images, A plus content also can be done very easily. all the copy, of course, and I again I also I also generate the copy and A B test it as
Danan @ eCom Triage: Okay, cool. So you're not just testing the the image, you're testing copy image. That gives you a lot of scenarios to run through. How long does it take you to to land on this?
Andrew Erickson: On a on a well, number four is A B testing. So
Danan @ eCom Triage: Okay.
Andrew Erickson: number eight no so there's lots of ways of doing it. Yeah.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Actually, Andrew, sorry, before we get into that, Grok just got back to me. Okay, so Ricky Ho is the founder of Source Ready, and it is
Andrew Erickson: huh.
Danan @ eCom Triage: an AI sourcing platform that blew my mind. Think so Alibaba gives you a list of different companies, right? But Ricky is, if I remember correctly, and and he's been on the podcast. So in in fact, all three of these people that I'm going to mention have been on the podcast. Go find the source ready. It's source ready, one more one word. episode 52. And it's all about AI sourcing agents. And but he's multi-generational sourcing. And so they have put not only what's on Alibaba and India Mart and stuff like that, but their own catalog that they've been developing for literally generations. yeah.
Andrew Erickson: Love it. Amazing.
Danan @ eCom Triage: So the next one is his name's Edward Har Hariono. And he has Saudera, and that's AI native sourcing agency for Indonesian factories. So his he's third or fourth generation Indonesian sourcing and manufacturing, mostly manufacturing. so there's a lot that you can do. I I everyone sources from China, but you know, when when the tariffs went bonkers, we all started looking in other places. And so, we know you and I both people all over the world that can help. Sourcing in India and China and all that stuff. And then the last person, this is actually not not AI, but it's Leiden Smithers, episode sixty one. Edward, by the way, is episode 77. And then Leiden's episode 61, and he sources from China. So and see so yeah.
Andrew Erickson: Leiden's a great friend of mine. Leiden's an incredible, amazing guy.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah. Cool. All right, let's go into A B testing. This is gonna be this is
Andrew Erickson: Yeah, number four.
Danan @ eCom Triage: like a just a nonstop value driven podcast, man.
Andrew Erickson: Love it. so there's lots of ways to A B test, but I gotta say I A B test the heck out of things. And I made a site that A B tests everything for you. It generates mi images for you as well. and that's optimizehero.ai. And so we use real
Danan @ eCom Triage: Right. yeah, you talked about that in the last episode.
Andrew Erickson: Yeah, we use real humans. So it's so this is the it's an AI, you know, it's a website, it's AI first site, but we use real humans to do to take surveys and give results. And so we we have a group of people that we access and we we send real, again, real humans, right? And we validate the real humans. And what what what we do is we find we A B test the heck out of main images, right? So we'll generate eight main images and just say, like, tell me which ones you would if you saw these on Amazon or saw these on Shopify or saw these on Facebook, which one would you would you click on? and that we found really good results from. And when you Dan, when you said the how long did this take, we I've been doing this process for a decade. Now, right? Well, really, since COVID is when we start getting really serious about A-B testing. And what we did our process before was that we had a human graphic designer who would generate 20 main images, like I mentioned before. I would pick about a dozen. I would take another human who would then upload that into a survey, into a thing. It would take maybe two or three hours to build a Google form. And it was just a whole bunch of random pictures and stuff. And then we'd send that out to a group of people to to test. And then we would get the results.
Danan @ eCom Triage: I see. So you weren't putting these up on Amazon to test what converted the best. You were drilling down. Yeah, not yet. Got it, got it, got it. Yep.
Andrew Erickson: Not yet. That's part of our process though. That's that's that's later on in this process. So we A B test quickly with humans, right? and so these these of course to generate those images would take days, maybe a week to to generate the images, and then we would then test. And the testing takes about two or three hours to have results come in. And then
Danan @ eCom Triage: Okay.
Andrew Erickson: we have and then of course, and we had to read all those results, and then I would then take that those results and give Andrew would give advice to the graphic designer and have the graphic design designer read everything as well. And come up with new ideas, right? So for example, we would do an image of the kind of the close-up, you know, close up at a at an angle, and then maybe a hand holding the thing, and then packaging included the way if it's a kit, you have like different setups on how you can kind of arrange the stuff.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yep.
Andrew Erickson: little, you know, there's are some of these things are little TOS. you're you're kind of pushing the TOS here, but like adding ribbons, adding hanging tags, adding these different things. and then of course we we do we go we kind of do a spray and pray on the first one. And then we would figure out like, okay, well, people really like packaging. So we're going to take, we're gonna, you know, the first result, we're gonna have these spray and pit pray, these six different, six different eight, you know, six different concepts. and we found that okay, actually people really like the packaging one. So we're gonna lean into that. We're gonna make another 20 variations of the packaging. So we're gonna try.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Wow.
Andrew Erickson: you know, bright blue, green, that we're gonna use like a keyword on the on the packaging. We're gonna kind of zoom in, or sometimes we put like little faces on the packaging, whatever it is. So we really test the heck out of it and and lean into it. And every and you get, you you you test it, you get the results, and then we then we we then generate more results based off of more more input or you know, more things to test based off of the previous test results. So we used to do that, and that was something that we would spend, two or three weeks and human hours and hundreds, thousands of dollars on in human hours and in A B testing platforms. And instead, I'm like, let me just build a tool that does this. Optimize hero.ai,
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: it will just generate main images for you. And then you can instead of having a human do it, that generates images for free. And we use Gemini and GPT, you know, the chat GPT, we use the top models and that they we every month they change, so we change the top models and it just randomly picks Yeah.
Danan @ eCom Triage: But but you have to pay th you have to pay for that through API tokens.
Andrew Erickson: Yeah. So the we we generate the images for free. And then to download an image, you
Danan @ eCom Triage: huh.
Andrew Erickson: it's just it's just one credit. And credit's roughly a dollar, depending on how many credits you buy, right?
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: but the big thing is A B the A B testing. So we're generating images so that people can A B test it, right? And so there is a cost associated with that, but it's cheaper than all the other A-B testing platforms that we've seen. And so it's just like a it's a fun, and then and we have AI built in. So it looks at the results of what people have said. And then it re-generates images based off of the results. So instead of what we used to do, we used to take
Danan @ eCom Triage: wow.
Andrew Erickson: weeks and thousands of dollars. We can get it done inside of a day, right? So generate in morning,
Danan @ eCom Triage: Wow.
Andrew Erickson: test by lunchtime, you have results, generate more images, test again. And then by the afternoon, you have a double or triple tested, a b tested image.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Okay.
Andrew Erickson: then from there, we now have cheap, fast A-B testing. That gets
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: us to manage my experiments on Amazon. And of course, Shopify and these other tools have these things too, but but Amazon has managed my experiments. And
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: then that's that's where we do the, you know, the two the two main images for Amazon. And then we get real customer data with real people putting real credit cards in. So that the humans testing a survey, it gets you far, but of course it doesn't get you all the way. Right. And that's why
Danan @ eCom Triage: Mm-hmm.
Andrew Erickson: I like the it's the yes and do we do we just do the surveying? Or do we just do managed experiments? The answer is we do both. It's a yes and. And that is where we dramatically increase our conversion rates by doing
Danan @ eCom Triage: You and I need to have a serious conversation outside of this podcast about that because I got something that I think might we might be able to lean real well into each other with it. But anyhow, all right, cool. So that was what was that? Number four or five? That was four. Four. All right.
Andrew Erickson: That's four. Number five, PPC. AIs love data and PPC is so much data. So
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: we love so you know just download it. You can just manually download reports and just ask
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: you know, GPT or Claude or your AI of choice to analyze the the results, right? And so the that gets you far. You you can do that for free. I also have
Danan @ eCom Triage: Mm-hmm.
Andrew Erickson: Sophie Society is is a a company run by Chris Rawlings. He has a big, big organization and they have a setup, an MCP setup and and a set of skills that are really good at doing PPC management. And so
Danan @ eCom Triage: Okay.
Andrew Erickson: that you know, mining keywords inside research term reports, optimizing bids, day parting, that kind of stuff works really well with PPC. it's it's like all these things. It's it's can you automate the entire thing? The answer is not really. everything that
Danan @ eCom Triage: Well, you could
Andrew Erickson: you can. It
Danan @ eCom Triage: But it's a terrible idea.
Andrew Erickson: yeah, yeah, sure. Yes, you can you can automate it. And I've found that still even with as smart as these AIs are, there's this thing I call the automation cocktail or the AI cocktail. 80, 90 percent AI. Plus 10, 20% human, an expert human with intuition and and expertise and backgrounds and understanding and c contextual awareness of of the situation, of the products, of the of the history and stuff. That 10% plus AI, that is the cocktail we're going for. It's not a hundred percent human, not a hundred percent AI. It's ninety percent AI, ten percent human. So I still
Danan @ eCom Triage: Okay.
Andrew Erickson: find that works really well inside of P PC.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Cool. Now, a lot of people don't know this, but my days in software for Amazon sellers started at Managed by Stats. so this was, let's see, we're talking six years ago, Managed by Stats had something called PPC AI. Yep,
Andrew Erickson: Yeah.
Danan @ eCom Triage: and it was an AI driven PPC service. Way back when, right? And the back end of that was nineteen and which, you know, not a lot of people know about what that is, except for people that were in the software. It's a it's a think of it as like a back end supporting software. Honestly, I don't even know what they're up to today, but at that time it was like maybe fifty fifty, fifty percent AI, fifty percent human. And so the fact that you're saying ninety ten is in stark contrast to how I knew it to be when we were playing with AI with PPC. Like at that time it was mathematical org algorithms to make decisions and it was fifty fifty.
Andrew Erickson: Yeah, we're we're living in the singularity right now. We're living in a space
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: where these AIs are incre becoming incredibly smart. And if you're not
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah, weekly.
Andrew Erickson: changing your processes and and systems based off of these things, you are you're definitely gonna be left behind. Or spending a lot extra time you don't need to spending on things.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Agreed. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Time and then of course money, because time is money, right? So you're you you just said earlier in point number three that you took weeks of work, thousands of dollars, shortened that down, truncated that down to a day and a few bucks. I mean that
Andrew Erickson: Exactly.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Right there. This is where we are. And this is what Andrew's talking about is like I think with us with our systems, there needs to be a human in the loop, at least right now. The day's gonna come where you can just say, I've got fifty grand, go make me a business that makes me twenty percent, blah blah blah, and then your AI will go do it and maybe work, you know. But Everything that Andrew's talking about is about optimizing and speed of service and speed to market, which you know, if you can take your time. But you know what, Andrew? You know what this is? So when you and I started on Amazon, we still had silver bullet products, right? Where we just put a product up and you made a couple million dollars, right?
Andrew Erickson: Mm-hmm. Yep.
Danan @ eCom Triage: We're coming back to that when it comes to the efficiencies and management of things because Selling on Amazon has become so much more sophisticated, it's no longer just a part time multi million dollar job. But let's go on to the next point.
Andrew Erickson: Yes, love it. the next thing I'm going to have in here, this is another kind of businessy one, is email triage and replies. So I found
Danan @ eCom Triage: yeah.
Andrew Erickson: that if you set so I have Claude scheduled task for my personal email and I also use a Hermes agent, just like an AI thingy, Hermes agent for my other emails. And it w goes through every two hours and and triages and labels everything in my inbox and it makes and then it sorts everything. And of course you can use Google la Google rules for this kind of stuff, automations.
Danan @ eCom Triage: I I don't like
Andrew Erickson: The Google automations?
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: Yeah, I found that the A because the AIs were reading the email and they're like, Okay, well, this was this seems really important. This one doesn't seem important. And yeah, you can put basic rules on things, but that so that now that's that's the first step for automation, email automation, right? You can also do drafted replies and you wanna create your own style. I always say be concise, keep my replies under five hundred characters, or under a thousand characters, something like that. Cause I never write four paragraphs in an email, right? They know that's my AI. thing doing that so I'm like keep it keep replies under 500 characters right at a 10th grade reading level that I guess that's how Andrew speaks and reads because like I don't read I don't have like I will philosophize and further the further the contraption around the triage right I'm like I I don't I just I don't know I'm just I'll I'll help I'll sorry about that I'll fix it later right like that's how I talk so
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Andrew Erickson: so replies and of course I I don't actually have it send on my behalf I just have it draft replies And then the last
Danan @ eCom Triage: Agreed.
Andrew Erickson: thing inside of email, and this is where people have probably other heard the other tips. This is one I love. I have twice weekly, right? So Monday and Thursday for me, I have AI summarize all my emails and put all of the summaries and everything that's going on into an LLM wiki. And what that is, is a a really simple setup. Where you just have 50 to 100 files that organize everything inside of a project, inside of a inside of one domain. And so I have every business I own has its own LLM wiki. And then every or twice a week, I have my my email summary. And it really helps everything inside the business stay have up-to-date context. And so and
Danan @ eCom Triage: I like it.
Andrew Erickson: and And I use GitHub to to host that LLM wiki. And there's a whole thing we could talk about how to set that up, but like that
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: I found works really well.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Interesting. Okay, cool. So let me expand on this. now Google natively has automations that you can create. It works with Gemini. And if we're talking about a personal email, it does a pretty good job. Once you get into business email, you have a lot more context behind things. And so I have an agent that runs on my personal, my business, and my support email. Every hour and it logs it. It looks at the email history of that email. And if it's a if this is the first email in the string, it goes and finds the customer on Go High Level and looks at the past history of email conversations. It has access to all of their dashboards and it'll go. If someone says, Hey, how many reviews did you remove so far? It'll go. And look at their dashboard and say, hey, we've removed this many reviews. These are the ones, and these are the dates
Andrew Erickson: Killer.
Danan @ eCom Triage: we removed them. Yep. And if it's not, if the person's not in high level or there's no notes in there or no past emails, it then goes to Fathom and finds an a meeting that we've had and looks at the transcript and then it drafts a reply. But it still doesn't send it because we change 100% of every email. That AI drafts for me a hundred percent.
Andrew Erickson: Yeah, this is where we need to find the edge of where the humans need to be included, right? and I've I still have a rule that I the AI can draft things for me, but I I need Andrew needs to push the send button just because people need to trust that my email is me. no I know everyone should also trust that AI is held me for all the things. but it is a The email coming from my personal email is is I'm actually hitting the green button to send it. Yeah.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah. And and that's me as well. but but also I'll just be dictating to Grok so groc bot or Claude, they're both connected to my my whole operating system. I've got a whole OS. I'm sure you do too. and I'll also say, Hey, yeah, go ahead and send Blah an email telling him this, that, and the other, and go get the data from over here and when you've got it, go ahead and send it. You you can tell it's not me sending it, Despite me having a year's worth of this is my tone of voice, this is how I talk, and which is built on you know, fifty thousand emails that I've sent, it still likes to inject its own personality, its own AI personality. So
Andrew Erickson: It's fun it's funny how we're doing that on my team in Slack. And what I tell people is I say, Hey, you know, I really want you I first of all these messages have to be concise. know that I'm using my yes, AI's helping me, but Andrew's using his human neurons to read this messages you're sending in Slack. And
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: I do not like messages over like five hundred a thousand characters. Like seeing five paragraphs, I'm like, God, I can't. Like the the amount of processing power it takes me to read this is not it's not good. I our goal is to make everyone work better and faster more efficiently, especially me. Please don't make
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: me do a lot of work to read your stupid Claude export thing. And so I always say if you
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Andrew Erickson: do, if it is really important that I read these five parac or if it's is if the five paragraphs are necessary, put it in a quote block so I know it's
Danan @ eCom Triage: Mm-hmm.
Andrew Erickson: clawed. And I want you to put like a human, you know, like you know, two or three sentence summary or a human, you know. I want you to write with your fingertips, right? As much as I love AI, I'm like, I need there's some humans here, right? I need
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: some, I need two or three sentences with your human fingertips and then a quote block for the for the if you need to send a big chunk. and also I've gotten into the habit of just creating like artic artifacts or or like handoff documents from Claude. And we'll
Danan @ eCom Triage: Uh-huh.
Andrew Erickson: say, like, I made this handoff doc. You know, my AI made a handoff document for your AI. And here's what I hope you can do with this. That works really well also. But yeah, it's it's it's interesting having to navigate how to communicate well on a team.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah. I have I will spend an inordinate amount of time making my staff more efficient. Because if they are more efficient, like my job is I work for my staff, right? I make sure that they have everything that they need to do the best possible job that they can do. And like for instance, I've got, you know, we We have For right now, let's just call it four companies in the Amazon space, right? That's four different verticals that need to be handled, right? Two of them have customers, three of them? Four of them. Whatever. Anyhow, they've they've got customers, they've got they've got tasks that need to be completed. And so I spend tons of time finding tools to optimize their job. And so there's a lot of people that are employees who are like, my God, you're gonna optimize me out of a job. But no, you're getting more work and you're going to be able to do more faster, more efficiently, and more effectively with better quality. And that's what I spend a lot of time on. And so, I try not to do my emails. My executive assistant handles all my emails. And I used to be on calls with him for. Hours every single day manually like telling him what to write and stuff like that. Now he can go an entire week without me having to tell him anything on how to handle stuff except for maybe a couple of emails. Like when it comes to lawyers and stuff like that, he's like, nah, I'm not touching that. You that's that's Danin, you know.
Andrew Erickson: Sure.
Danan @ eCom Triage: or or like contract stuff, you know. but when it comes to just the day-to-day management of my business. He's pretty much got it in hand. And that that's
Andrew Erickson: Love it.
Danan @ eCom Triage: come from making him more efficient, teaching him how to do it. I built him a chat a GPT, which is chat GPT is freaking sunsetting GPTs, by the way. yes. Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: really? I didn't hear that.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah, they need to be converted to something else. I don't even remember, but I'm I'm moving away from Chat GPT.
Andrew Erickson: They're b they're basically skills, right? I feel like the GPTs are replaced by skills, so it makes sense to me. I had
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah. Yeah, it is basically a skill, yeah.
Andrew Erickson: a I had like a really popular GPT that went pretty viral. It's like three years ago.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: and it was listing call we called it listify AI. And so it writes Amazon copy for you. but again, those kind of things like
Danan @ eCom Triage: I think I remember that actually.
Andrew Erickson: yeah, and it worked great. We A B tested the heck out of it and it worked great. so But those things are, the a skill file, it's pretty good, that kind of stuff. The next thing to add on our list here is inventory management and supply chain management and forecasting. That is something that these AIs are really good at grabbing the data. there's a lot of
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: context you need around that. so we actually built a tool called inventoryhero.ai. And so it it it's a tool, it's a full MC of MCP access. It uses your your past history, top competitors, and top keywords to forecast out your sales,
Danan @ eCom Triage: Mm.
Andrew Erickson: your your next two years of sales. So it it does seasonal adjustments and then it figures out what you need to order when, and then it tracks every single order, pulls in Amazon, Amazon tracking labels, and we just expanded out to Walmart and TikTok as well. So pull
Danan @ eCom Triage: Nice.
Andrew Erickson: all that stuff in, and then of course it and then organizes the things coming from China. And so and and any anywhere, coming from anywhere, but coming from your manufacturing
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: plant, manufacturing facility. And so yeah, it's great. And so there's there's all sorts of things you can do inside of that space to like really level up your game for supply chain management.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah, I love it. And by the way, Chat GPT, you have to migrate your GPTs to plugins by December eleventh.
Andrew Erickson: interesting.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah. I made I made a GPT that I was particularly proud of that was roughly a one paragraph prompt, but I recreated Oregon Trail. Yeah, but you Yeah, I did. I did get dysentery. Two of my
Andrew Erickson: Fun. Did you get dysentery while you're doing it?
Danan @ eCom Triage: oxen died and I ran out of money and was attacked. But you can go anywhere in the world. So you can say, I need to take a a ship to China to to Thailand, to China, to England, whatever. And it's
Andrew Erickson: You you got malaria on the trail to Zimbabwe or something?
Danan @ eCom Triage: No, no, I didn't get malaria. I just died of dysentery. It was like it was very
Andrew Erickson: Yeah.
Danan @ eCom Triage: immediate. Yeah, my oxen got stuck, one of my wheels fell off, I died of dysentery.
Andrew Erickson: You should build a a twenty first century version and say instead of the Oregon Trail, it's like the the Mars rocket path or something and you you get you get
Danan @ eCom Triage: I can do that. I can do that.
Andrew Erickson: Martian Martian virus on the way to on the on the on the while you're passing the moon on the way to Mars or something.
Danan @ eCom Triage: I I'll make I'll make a a current one and just everyone will die from AI from Skynet taking over and blowing up the world.
Andrew Erickson: Yeah.
Danan @ eCom Triage: All right, what's the next one?
Andrew Erickson: Next one. the so after supply chain management is bookkeeping and taxes.
Danan @ eCom Triage: yeah.
Andrew Erickson: it is really good at this. again, I still believe in having humans help. If you have a really basic personal income tax return that you can use turbo tax for, I'm sure AI AIs can do that for you. my stuff is like stupid complicated, unfortunately. I'm trying to simplify
Danan @ eCom Triage: Same.
Andrew Erickson: a little bit, but I ended up spending, you know, I ended up downloading every single CSV and PDF export from all my banks. I have bank accounts for every single business and every single org. And I have, you know, I I try to keep things clean, but yeah, it's kind of hard. You know, if I have like travel, a trip, I don't have like a physical card for my for some of my businesses don't have a physical card. So I put on my personal card and I have to transfer it over and stuff. But you guys are really good at
Danan @ eCom Triage: yeah that
Andrew Erickson: measuring that and seeing that and pulling it in. And so like Help me optimize my taxes, look at it, analyze, pull things together, ask me questions around travel, ask me questions around this. okay. Now that
Danan @ eCom Triage: Mm-hmm.
Andrew Erickson: we now we have our basics, know, I created a handoff for my accountant. The accountant went through and like she did her thing, and then she asked me questions. And of course I had the AI help me answer the questions. and then when she f created a draft return, my CPA is great. I use junglebooks.net. they they have a they handed me back the tax return and like okay, ready to go. And I still I took it again and I put it into Claude and also double checked it with codex with ChatGPT, Astra model, whatever the latest greatest one is right now. and it
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Asterisk, I think.
Andrew Erickson: found another issue. The tax ret the accountant did a great job. I found another issue where where the things didn't quite add up. And it found another ten thousand dollars on top of what my CPA had already prepared
Danan @ eCom Triage: Damn.
Andrew Erickson: in returns. And so I was just shocked at how great it worked. And so it yeah, doing that kind of stuff. I haven't given it like write or actual read access to my bank accounts and my QuickBooks yet. I wouldn't give it.
Danan @ eCom Triage: I'm about to do that, I think.
Andrew Erickson: Yeah, I found that I don't know. I mean I I I'm like bullish on AI, but also It's not doesn't take so long for me just to download the PDF, Like,
Danan @ eCom Triage: But if you could automate it.
Andrew Erickson: yeah, yeah. and then you know and the the nice thing is that you have that baseline, like, okay, help me help me just collect everything I need, right? To handle the account. Okay, now double check the account. Okay, now I'm starting to say, look at my spend, look at my look at what I what I'm focusing my energy on, look at my emails and figure out what we can cut, what can we optimize, what can we do better.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Sure.
Andrew Erickson: hey, here's here's our income. Here's my here, all the context around what the real estate projects I have and the investments I have and the businesses I have. Help me do tax prep for next year in terms of like what kind of accounts can I set up. And so now I'm going through and setting up a a solo 401k and all these different things like that that are like really awesome ways that you would have to, you know, I kind of know the concepts. Like I do a lot of personal finance concepts, but like just it's hard to go through the whole thing and know everything. thing what to do and the AIs make that
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: stuff incredibly easy.
Danan @ eCom Triage: I hope my CFO's listening to this because this is exactly what she needs to hear. It's like we do our best to have the cleanest possible books. And for that reason, we basically run all finances up to a singular source so that it's just easy to manage. But we're now at the point where we've got several different businesses where we can't do that. So you start adding those complications. And let's say I go on a trip, I go, well, shoot, which which card do I use for this business trip? Right? because there's overlap. I we're we're gonna go to Salt Lake City for a summit next year but it's legitimately two different businesses going on this trip. It's both me. balloons. it's both me, but two different businesses. How do I split those finances? There's just anyhow, so yeah, just using the AI and and this is why I'm about to let it go into my credit cards and my bank accounts. And because
Andrew Erickson: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Danan @ eCom Triage: we have like, I don't know, ten freaking bank accounts, something like that. And it gets crazy basically. And AI loving data, it can yeah.
Andrew Erickson: And you know, of course, a lot of people are gonna be there's there's some security risks here. And so I, you know, I that's there's that's why I like the read-only stuff. and AIs
Danan @ eCom Triage: Definitely, yeah.
Andrew Erickson: are actually pretty good at not screwing these things up, but they're they're non-deterministic, you know, they they they are variable, they can they can do things that so I I'm gonna put you know caution there. And also on top of that, if you have a really simple tax return and you just have like if I'm assuming if you're listening to this, you're probably not just a a basic W-2 employee.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: But if you have really simple tax return, you can probably do a lot of stuff by yourself. but if you do have a business and you do, you're moving some, moving some revenue, moving some having declaring some profit and you have complicated things, I still believe in using humans. I'm still bullish on humans. And having a good CPA in your in your corner is always gonna be valuable. And I'll tell you stuff that my CPA is very good at. Making sure that we don't do stupid things, right? And he's like,
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Andrew Erickson: Well, here's the risk, here's the reward, don't do this. this is your choice to do that kind of stuff. And and I find I still again, as much as I love AI, I still love having a human in my corner that I can go back and forth with the to kind of, you know, make sure we're we're not screwing things up royally.
Danan @ eCom Triage: It it's like the difference between book smarts and street smarts, right? Because
Andrew Erickson: Mm. Yep.
Danan @ eCom Triage: you can ingest as much data as you want, which is what AI is, but it doesn't mean that doing whatever you're about to do is the right decision based
Andrew Erickson: Yes.
Danan @ eCom Triage: on the based on the situation. And that that is something that AI will never have is Contextual awareness based on experience in other areas that lend into the decision making process of this scenario. gonna make that into a t-shirt. Yeah. Cool. What's okay with the we got one last one. All right, let's do it.
Andrew Erickson: Yes. Yeah. Context is king. the last one I will say. Yeah, last one is I like to think, yes, where can we optimize things? Where can we, you know, I I want to I want to think, you know, of course I I talked about bookkeeping, of course, I'm gonna find tax returns, you know, optimization tax return. look through your look through your credit card statements, see if you can find things to cancel and and stuff like that. So those are Those are good. Those are easy wins. hey, I save $50 by canceling that and $80 a month by canceling that. Those are meaningful. but on top of that, I want to think, I don't want to think how can I just make $80 a month by canceling the subscription or how can I replace this SaaS with this, with this software, this new thing, whatever. I'm not trying to save $50. I'm trying to think how can I grow and expand? Right.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Right.
Andrew Erickson: how can I, I don't wanna just add 1%. I don't want to reduce my expenses by 1%. I want to increase my revenue by 30%. Right. So I think the big one that helps a lot with that, if you are an e-commerce brand, is now we're in a really good position to start doing channel expansion. So if you are
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yes, I agree so much.
Andrew Erickson: if you are an Amazon seller getting on a TikTok shop and getting out of Shopify and getting on or pushing harder on Shopify, and most almost everyone Amazon has a Shopify, pushing harder on it and expanding out to
Danan @ eCom Triage: I I
Andrew Erickson: Walmart.
Danan @ eCom Triage: no they do not.
Andrew Erickson: Now the forms you have to fill out and the tracking and that kind of stuff is it's getting a lot easier. and that's
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: what we actually added. Now we're doing full omni-channel support inside of Inventory Hero. So you can do TikTok, Walmart, Shopify, and Amazon inside of there. And so, like r adding those new channels and looking for places where you can add 10, 20, 30, 40 percent in revenue. That's a place where I think we I want to start thinking how can I grow and expand? I'm not trying to just fire all my humans and have AI run my business, just just my my current business and make things like less and smaller and efficient and tighter. I want to make my business bigger and grander and more revenue and more people. I want to have, I wanna hire, you know, for every human I add, I want to add 10 AIs, right? But I'm
Danan @ eCom Triage: Sure. Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: still bullish on humans. So that that's my big like my takeaway is how can I get The maybe the mindset is that how can I increase my top line? How can I grow my business substantially? I think channel expansion is a way to do that, but I but I always want to end on instead of cutting and optimizing, how can we grow and expand?
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah, cool. I like it. And you said something earlier. You th you said you think that most people selling on Amazon are on Shopify? Not in my experience.
Andrew Erickson: really?
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah. Yeah. Cause I I think that you are connect the sellers that you're connected to are are I think I would argue that they're more sophisticated and have more experience than most. The majority of my customers are not at that level where they don't even have capacity to be on Shopify. They don't know how to run it. It's a different business model, right?
Andrew Erickson: It's very different.
Danan @ eCom Triage: and so I I found that very interesting that you said most are. And I'm like, not in my experience.
Andrew Erickson: okay. There you go.
Danan @ eCom Triage: But I but I happen to know who your community of sellers is, and all right, one last thing. I am speaking to a company. This is something that I've got my own account with them that I'm testing, but crazyvendor.io helps you to take an Amazon listing and just mention either my name Danan or the e-com growth show. I think he'll give you can't remember what it is, but you get something by mentioning my name. but it helps you take an Amazon listing and create these listings on Target and Walmart and all these other marketplaces without it being a copy paste of Amazon and it's all built properly. I have I'm in the works on testing it myself to get into Walmart specifically, but I I really like the guy. It's very interesting what he's built. And so that's that's another one for for everyone out there. But yeah, just mention my name and and you'll get something. So Andrew, this is awesome. I think dude, we could prop we could just take one area of a business and just riff on it. And and maybe we should do that. Maybe we should do a series where we get a couple more people in here to talk about this. Cause You and I are implementing AI into our businesses in different ways. Like I love your wiki idea. I just have one document that's somewhere in my computer that gives all the context on everything. But the wiki makes a lot more sense. It's much more Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: The wiki works really well. So if you want to search there there's a person called Carpathy, Andre Carpathy,
Danan @ eCom Triage: yeah.
Andrew Erickson: and he's he's kinda like an AI influencer guy, right? and he came up with this Carpathy L L wiki idea and it works fantastic. and I that's where I I've just been religious on that the last six months, or last whatever, five whatever, six months. And so it yeah, it gives you that. And and also I'll tell you another thing with with that, because I host it in GitHub. GitHub's like a like a cloud that saves data for you, right? set up as as as for for
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: sharing code, but it works great for sharing stuff like these LLM wikis. I the reason why I like GitHub so much for that kind of stuff is I I have first of all, I have a storage somewhere that's not my computer. I would just assume my computer's gonna die every night because it might, right? But then also I can share it. I can have I have a sh a shared LLM wiki with my with my team, right? So one that's
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah?
Andrew Erickson: relevant to them. And then I have like Hermes agents for this. And so I'll have like my email summary, right? But but now I have my Hermes agent has
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yep.
Andrew Erickson: it, my claw agent has it, and I can pull down that. Context whenever I need it, and it's stored for everyone. and so I just found that works really well to have that shared context.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yep, totally agree. Well, dude, thank you for again being on the podcast. let's stick around and let's let's discuss the two things I want to talk to you about. One, maybe doing a series of this, like a webinar series. and then two, what did I want to talk to you about? you're I forget the testing. Whatever. Anyhow, for those of you that are still here, yeah.
Andrew Erickson: Optimize hero dot AI.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Perfect. Thank you. Optimize here. So those of you who are stuck with us to the end, thanks for being here. We hope we got some you got some really good data out of this. This is just things to get you started. Andrew and I, neither of us are AI consultants, but he and I are both very AI forward and implementing this stuff into our business. Me on a daily basis. I can't speak to you, but I'm sure also on a daily basis. So we'll see you in the next episode.
Andrew Erickson: Thank you.
Andrew Erickson: Mm-hmm.
Danan @ eCom Triage: And Andrew, do you remember the name of of that? Was it None of us?
Andrew Erickson: It was either San Diego event was either traffic and conversion or it would have been a Titan event. It was Titan tra titan conver traffic and conversion. Yeah, that's a good one.
Danan @ eCom Triage: That's it. Yeah. Yeah. It was tr yeah. So we met at traffic and conversion and but yeah, so recently we got reconnected in Nashville and we all went to we we went to lunch with a bunch of other people and we just all sat down and started talking AI and and the ethics of it and the capabilities and all that stuff. And so we kind of left a conversation in Nashville. That we're picking up today. And so, Andrew, if you would please take the reins on this and tell us what are we discussing? And and and this for for the record, everyone, I don't know what he has in mind.
Andrew Erickson: Yeah, I'm really excited. So Danan and asked me to come on and just say, hey, we're what are some really cool hacks and really useful things that we can do with AI for e-commerce sellers? And that's that's my domain. That's my game. So I I'm like, okay, let me put together the top seven things that you can do with AI to optimize and grow your e-commerce brand.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Love it. All right, cool. So now I today I don't use AI to manage my brand. And the reason that I don't do it is because my brand does not really require management. Doesn't require it. Now, could I optimize things? Absolutely. I guarantee you I've got the worst, the worst as as of right now, the worst supplement listing on Amazon.
Andrew Erickson: okay.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yep, yep. but it converts at forty percent so we don't touch it. So well
Andrew Erickson: That's not the worst. That's the best. I only care about conversion.
Danan @ eCom Triage: yeah, that's true. And but the the the reason why it converts that that high is because it's all brand search so we're not doing any advertising or anything like that. So of course sales are not in the millions a month, you know. But anyhow, why don't you tell us what we're talking about today? We got seven areas.
Andrew Erickson: Yes. So set so these
Danan @ eCom Triage: That we're gonna talk about.
Andrew Erickson: seven business seven areas. I'm gonna say half of them are just gonna be basic business things. these are the processes now that we're in the now we're the end of twenty twenty six, coming into twenty twenty seven, these are things that you really need to be doing just for basic businesses, right? These are basic human organizations, right? And then
Danan @ eCom Triage: Cool. Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: so it should apply to everyone, of course. and then and then the other half of them are gonna be really specific to private label businesses. So I will get started first with a really easy one. That is meeting minute capture. So having AIs come
Danan @ eCom Triage: yeah.
Andrew Erickson: onto your meetings and record them. they're really good at transcribing now and also knowing who's talking and the context around who's talking and bringing that information in and just having a storage system, like a storage and processing system for your for your meeting minutes and for your for your all your actions and stuff. I personally use Fathom for for my meeting recorder.
Danan @ eCom Triage: I do too.
Andrew Erickson: And it I love it. It's great. It works really well. we have different flows. And so I have a skill. A skill is just a set prompt, right? that that processes the meetings. And I and I have like like four or five different skills for the type of meeting. So we can have status meetings, we have L ten meetings, which is like a type of business meeting for if you run a EOS entrepreneur operating system, one for sales calls, seller calls. These all these different things like that. And so the AIs will automatically figure out what kind of classify this. And then depending on what classification the meeting is, it then processes that information and stores it. and so that's the first one. That's an easy one. And I think every business everywhere should be doing that.
Danan @ eCom Triage: I fully agree with you. So I also use Fathom, but I'll tell you one thing I really like about Fathom that most of the other note takers don't have is that it also captures video, right? and I have it capture video as well. Now, with that being said, I haven't had a need because I do a lot of screen sharing and stuff like that, and these are client meetings and or prospect meetings, but I haven't had to use the video at all for
Andrew Erickson: Yeah, me too.
Danan @ eCom Triage: over a year. And it's it's very, you know, data dense. And so think we all probably use those of us that are AI forward, we're all using dictation software as well, right? So like I've got three. One of them is WhisperFlow, which I'm gonna advise against because I'm about to give you a different one. that
Andrew Erickson: okay, let's hear.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah, and the this dude, this is crazy what it's can do and what it's about to do. and then I have another one which is called Voice Inc., which is a one time purchase and it's like a hundred bucks, you get three seats. But it's not very good, but it's all it's native on your device, and so it doesn't put stuff up to the cloud and then back, so there's not that time delay. But if you watch Nate Herc, do you know who Nate Herc is on YouTube?
Andrew Erickson: Yep. Yeah, I love him.
Danan @ eCom Triage: So he's got Glaido right? And Glaido is his voice dictation software that he invested in. But I'm gonna put this in the chat for you. This is a and I'll put this in the description of the video, everyone. I have an invitation link that'll get you a free month of Pro. But here's the thing it is lightning fast. Lightning fast. So One of the problems that I have is that if I'm on an airplane and I want to dictate something, obviously, you know, can't do it that loud anyhow, but the c the connection to the internet just ruins the whole dictation thing, right? Glaido is so freaking fast that by the time you take your finger off the button, it's basically already into the text field.
Andrew Erickson: Wow.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Not only that, so so there's the dictation side, but then there's command side. So you can set up MCPs inside of Glaido to Claude, to Grok, to your freaking Apple home, whatever has an MCP. And because Glaido is always on with a hotkey, you can say, hey, turn off the office lights. Hey, create a task and click up for me that does blah blah blah blah blah with this date. And so it's like Having Siri only, it's connected to whatever you want it to be connected to. And so you have these two different methods that you can do this. Now it's not conversational, but you can also say, hey, open up Claude and start a search about this thing, and I need to know about this sort of contract and go look at my Google Drive and find this thing and blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you can pick it up. in Claude or in Codex or Grok or whatever. and WhisperFlow is twelve dollars a month. This is seventeen. and they're they're iterating on it. So I was anyhow. yeah.
Andrew Erickson: Love it. That's cool. I'm gonna check that out.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah. So I agree with you on on one hundred percent on the note taking and this would be another thing that is a huge, huge, huge major game changer for me.
Andrew Erickson: Killer. Love it. So number two on my list is product development. So this is one, it's a little bit trickier to do this one. So I'll explain a few of the features and tools that you can use to help with this and also put a little caveats around what you might not be able to do with this. so I've found that taking your entire catalog, assuming you have more than, you know, whatever, half a dozen products and uploading all of your data into Claude or your AI of choice, and then kind of help an Giving it that context, help me come with more product ideas that are variations on what we have inside of our brand. Also, of course, mining reviews. So if you can go and pull reviews from your top competitors, and also yourself and find places where you can optimize and also putting in brand analytics in into your into your just pulling all that data down and say, help me come up with the ideas. And then so all those things are those are things we've been doing for a long time. But here's one thing I'll I'll get to A B testing later, but coming up with a bunch of product, coming up with a bunch of product ideas. And then we're gonna, I'm gonna talk about how to A B test them later, but coming up with a bunch of ideas so that we can test them before we go to market with them. So just
Danan @ eCom Triage: Mm.
Andrew Erickson: just just honestly brainstorming, talking about things, looking at margins, looking at what you need to do for for product development. And of course also there's a tool if you want to go with an actual tool, there's a tool called ASIO or Axio. ACO A C C I O Yeah,
Danan @ eCom Triage: A A C C I L.
Andrew Erickson: it's it's like owned by Alibaba and so the whole Alibaba
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: algorithm and supplier data whatever system back end is built into it and it works really well for product development and finding suppliers and stuff.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Cool. while we are discussing this, I'm gonna go to my chief BizBot on Grok because I have two recommendations that are AI forward sourcing. but let me let me see if I can find them. I I I talked to so many people and so many companies, I forget the names of the people and the companies. I just know in my mind that the concept exists and I need to go find it. But so you're using ASIO and is that is there an MCP from clo from whoever into that so you can connect it?
Andrew Erickson: Yeah, ASIO is like it's its own sort of system by that has its own AI harness and everything. and it but I'm not sure if you can connect it as an MCP directly into Claude. that's a good question. But but it it's like its own site that has a full AI chat and a full everything built into it.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah, okay. Well, if the great thing about where we're at with AI today is that if there is no MCP or there's no API endpoints that you can extract this data from, you can just use computer use through Codex or Claude and Chrome for Claude or Grokbots with Grok and you can just tell it to go look for you. And it can go do the research and you can deploy them to do it for you.
Andrew Erickson: Quick Google search says, Yes, there is an MCP where you can connect ASIO to Claude. So yes. There you go.
Danan @ eCom Triage: There we go. There you go. Also, there's an MCP that Amazon just came out with that connects to your Seller Central, but that data is limited in that it does not have access to any of your ad stuff because Amazon in their infinite wisdom and it always being day one seems to maintain the confusion of day one where people don't talk to each other and don't know what others are doing. So the the API for ads is different than that of the rest of certain your your d sales data in Seller Central. But if you've got it, you you've got some of it. So you can definitely do some really crazy things if you got those connected. Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: Love it. Number three on my list is listing images and listing copy. So the new models, chat GPT's model, which is GPT two point five is the name of the model, but just the standard chat GPT stuff, the codex stuff. The models are the images are very good. also you can connect Higgs field, which is a like an image and video generating site. can connect that in also as an MCP, of course, and start creating images that you can for especially your main image. We found we we A B test the heck out of our main images. And so
Danan @ eCom Triage: Mm-hmm.
Andrew Erickson: we'll we'll generate this is before AI. I had a human generating 20 main images for every single product. It's part of our launch process. we would generate 20 main images, and then from those 20, I would down select to about 10, and then we would A B test the heck out of every single. Main image, but we want to generate those images. And of course, I had a human doing it. It would take a week and cost hundreds of dollars for a human to do it. That's even a VA in the Philippines, right? And
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: now, of course, the AIs are so incredibly good at doing this kind of stuff that you can just do it through the AI. and so that creating those images, A plus content also can be done very easily. all the copy, of course, and I again I also I also generate the copy and A B test it as
Danan @ eCom Triage: Okay, cool. So you're not just testing the the image, you're testing copy image. That gives you a lot of scenarios to run through. How long does it take you to to land on this?
Andrew Erickson: On a on a well, number four is A B testing. So
Danan @ eCom Triage: Okay.
Andrew Erickson: number eight no so there's lots of ways of doing it. Yeah.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Actually, Andrew, sorry, before we get into that, Grok just got back to me. Okay, so Ricky Ho is the founder of Source Ready, and it is
Andrew Erickson: huh.
Danan @ eCom Triage: an AI sourcing platform that blew my mind. Think so Alibaba gives you a list of different companies, right? But Ricky is, if I remember correctly, and and he's been on the podcast. So in in fact, all three of these people that I'm going to mention have been on the podcast. Go find the source ready. It's source ready, one more one word. episode 52. And it's all about AI sourcing agents. And but he's multi-generational sourcing. And so they have put not only what's on Alibaba and India Mart and stuff like that, but their own catalog that they've been developing for literally generations. yeah.
Andrew Erickson: Love it. Amazing.
Danan @ eCom Triage: So the next one is his name's Edward Har Hariono. And he has Saudera, and that's AI native sourcing agency for Indonesian factories. So his he's third or fourth generation Indonesian sourcing and manufacturing, mostly manufacturing. so there's a lot that you can do. I I everyone sources from China, but you know, when when the tariffs went bonkers, we all started looking in other places. And so, we know you and I both people all over the world that can help. Sourcing in India and China and all that stuff. And then the last person, this is actually not not AI, but it's Leiden Smithers, episode sixty one. Edward, by the way, is episode 77. And then Leiden's episode 61, and he sources from China. So and see so yeah.
Andrew Erickson: Leiden's a great friend of mine. Leiden's an incredible, amazing guy.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah. Cool. All right, let's go into A B testing. This is gonna be this is
Andrew Erickson: Yeah, number four.
Danan @ eCom Triage: like a just a nonstop value driven podcast, man.
Andrew Erickson: Love it. so there's lots of ways to A B test, but I gotta say I A B test the heck out of things. And I made a site that A B tests everything for you. It generates mi images for you as well. and that's optimizehero.ai. And so we use real
Danan @ eCom Triage: Right. yeah, you talked about that in the last episode.
Andrew Erickson: Yeah, we use real humans. So it's so this is the it's an AI, you know, it's a website, it's AI first site, but we use real humans to do to take surveys and give results. And so we we have a group of people that we access and we we send real, again, real humans, right? And we validate the real humans. And what what what we do is we find we A B test the heck out of main images, right? So we'll generate eight main images and just say, like, tell me which ones you would if you saw these on Amazon or saw these on Shopify or saw these on Facebook, which one would you would you click on? and that we found really good results from. And when you Dan, when you said the how long did this take, we I've been doing this process for a decade. Now, right? Well, really, since COVID is when we start getting really serious about A-B testing. And what we did our process before was that we had a human graphic designer who would generate 20 main images, like I mentioned before. I would pick about a dozen. I would take another human who would then upload that into a survey, into a thing. It would take maybe two or three hours to build a Google form. And it was just a whole bunch of random pictures and stuff. And then we'd send that out to a group of people to to test. And then we would get the results.
Danan @ eCom Triage: I see. So you weren't putting these up on Amazon to test what converted the best. You were drilling down. Yeah, not yet. Got it, got it, got it. Yep.
Andrew Erickson: Not yet. That's part of our process though. That's that's that's later on in this process. So we A B test quickly with humans, right? and so these these of course to generate those images would take days, maybe a week to to generate the images, and then we would then test. And the testing takes about two or three hours to have results come in. And then
Danan @ eCom Triage: Okay.
Andrew Erickson: we have and then of course, and we had to read all those results, and then I would then take that those results and give Andrew would give advice to the graphic designer and have the graphic design designer read everything as well. And come up with new ideas, right? So for example, we would do an image of the kind of the close-up, you know, close up at a at an angle, and then maybe a hand holding the thing, and then packaging included the way if it's a kit, you have like different setups on how you can kind of arrange the stuff.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yep.
Andrew Erickson: little, you know, there's are some of these things are little TOS. you're you're kind of pushing the TOS here, but like adding ribbons, adding hanging tags, adding these different things. and then of course we we do we go we kind of do a spray and pray on the first one. And then we would figure out like, okay, well, people really like packaging. So we're going to take, we're gonna, you know, the first result, we're gonna have these spray and pit pray, these six different, six different eight, you know, six different concepts. and we found that okay, actually people really like the packaging one. So we're gonna lean into that. We're gonna make another 20 variations of the packaging. So we're gonna try.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Wow.
Andrew Erickson: you know, bright blue, green, that we're gonna use like a keyword on the on the packaging. We're gonna kind of zoom in, or sometimes we put like little faces on the packaging, whatever it is. So we really test the heck out of it and and lean into it. And every and you get, you you you test it, you get the results, and then we then we we then generate more results based off of more more input or you know, more things to test based off of the previous test results. So we used to do that, and that was something that we would spend, two or three weeks and human hours and hundreds, thousands of dollars on in human hours and in A B testing platforms. And instead, I'm like, let me just build a tool that does this. Optimize hero.ai,
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: it will just generate main images for you. And then you can instead of having a human do it, that generates images for free. And we use Gemini and GPT, you know, the chat GPT, we use the top models and that they we every month they change, so we change the top models and it just randomly picks Yeah.
Danan @ eCom Triage: But but you have to pay th you have to pay for that through API tokens.
Andrew Erickson: Yeah. So the we we generate the images for free. And then to download an image, you
Danan @ eCom Triage: huh.
Andrew Erickson: it's just it's just one credit. And credit's roughly a dollar, depending on how many credits you buy, right?
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: but the big thing is A B the A B testing. So we're generating images so that people can A B test it, right? And so there is a cost associated with that, but it's cheaper than all the other A-B testing platforms that we've seen. And so it's just like a it's a fun, and then and we have AI built in. So it looks at the results of what people have said. And then it re-generates images based off of the results. So instead of what we used to do, we used to take
Danan @ eCom Triage: wow.
Andrew Erickson: weeks and thousands of dollars. We can get it done inside of a day, right? So generate in morning,
Danan @ eCom Triage: Wow.
Andrew Erickson: test by lunchtime, you have results, generate more images, test again. And then by the afternoon, you have a double or triple tested, a b tested image.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Okay.
Andrew Erickson: then from there, we now have cheap, fast A-B testing. That gets
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: us to manage my experiments on Amazon. And of course, Shopify and these other tools have these things too, but but Amazon has managed my experiments. And
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: then that's that's where we do the, you know, the two the two main images for Amazon. And then we get real customer data with real people putting real credit cards in. So that the humans testing a survey, it gets you far, but of course it doesn't get you all the way. Right. And that's why
Danan @ eCom Triage: Mm-hmm.
Andrew Erickson: I like the it's the yes and do we do we just do the surveying? Or do we just do managed experiments? The answer is we do both. It's a yes and. And that is where we dramatically increase our conversion rates by doing
Danan @ eCom Triage: You and I need to have a serious conversation outside of this podcast about that because I got something that I think might we might be able to lean real well into each other with it. But anyhow, all right, cool. So that was what was that? Number four or five? That was four. Four. All right.
Andrew Erickson: That's four. Number five, PPC. AIs love data and PPC is so much data. So
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: we love so you know just download it. You can just manually download reports and just ask
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: you know, GPT or Claude or your AI of choice to analyze the the results, right? And so the that gets you far. You you can do that for free. I also have
Danan @ eCom Triage: Mm-hmm.
Andrew Erickson: Sophie Society is is a a company run by Chris Rawlings. He has a big, big organization and they have a setup, an MCP setup and and a set of skills that are really good at doing PPC management. And so
Danan @ eCom Triage: Okay.
Andrew Erickson: that you know, mining keywords inside research term reports, optimizing bids, day parting, that kind of stuff works really well with PPC. it's it's like all these things. It's it's can you automate the entire thing? The answer is not really. everything that
Danan @ eCom Triage: Well, you could
Andrew Erickson: you can. It
Danan @ eCom Triage: But it's a terrible idea.
Andrew Erickson: yeah, yeah, sure. Yes, you can you can automate it. And I've found that still even with as smart as these AIs are, there's this thing I call the automation cocktail or the AI cocktail. 80, 90 percent AI. Plus 10, 20% human, an expert human with intuition and and expertise and backgrounds and understanding and c contextual awareness of of the situation, of the products, of the of the history and stuff. That 10% plus AI, that is the cocktail we're going for. It's not a hundred percent human, not a hundred percent AI. It's ninety percent AI, ten percent human. So I still
Danan @ eCom Triage: Okay.
Andrew Erickson: find that works really well inside of P PC.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Cool. Now, a lot of people don't know this, but my days in software for Amazon sellers started at Managed by Stats. so this was, let's see, we're talking six years ago, Managed by Stats had something called PPC AI. Yep,
Andrew Erickson: Yeah.
Danan @ eCom Triage: and it was an AI driven PPC service. Way back when, right? And the back end of that was nineteen and which, you know, not a lot of people know about what that is, except for people that were in the software. It's a it's a think of it as like a back end supporting software. Honestly, I don't even know what they're up to today, but at that time it was like maybe fifty fifty, fifty percent AI, fifty percent human. And so the fact that you're saying ninety ten is in stark contrast to how I knew it to be when we were playing with AI with PPC. Like at that time it was mathematical org algorithms to make decisions and it was fifty fifty.
Andrew Erickson: Yeah, we're we're living in the singularity right now. We're living in a space
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: where these AIs are incre becoming incredibly smart. And if you're not
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah, weekly.
Andrew Erickson: changing your processes and and systems based off of these things, you are you're definitely gonna be left behind. Or spending a lot extra time you don't need to spending on things.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Agreed. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Time and then of course money, because time is money, right? So you're you you just said earlier in point number three that you took weeks of work, thousands of dollars, shortened that down, truncated that down to a day and a few bucks. I mean that
Andrew Erickson: Exactly.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Right there. This is where we are. And this is what Andrew's talking about is like I think with us with our systems, there needs to be a human in the loop, at least right now. The day's gonna come where you can just say, I've got fifty grand, go make me a business that makes me twenty percent, blah blah blah, and then your AI will go do it and maybe work, you know. But Everything that Andrew's talking about is about optimizing and speed of service and speed to market, which you know, if you can take your time. But you know what, Andrew? You know what this is? So when you and I started on Amazon, we still had silver bullet products, right? Where we just put a product up and you made a couple million dollars, right?
Andrew Erickson: Mm-hmm. Yep.
Danan @ eCom Triage: We're coming back to that when it comes to the efficiencies and management of things because Selling on Amazon has become so much more sophisticated, it's no longer just a part time multi million dollar job. But let's go on to the next point.
Andrew Erickson: Yes, love it. the next thing I'm going to have in here, this is another kind of businessy one, is email triage and replies. So I found
Danan @ eCom Triage: yeah.
Andrew Erickson: that if you set so I have Claude scheduled task for my personal email and I also use a Hermes agent, just like an AI thingy, Hermes agent for my other emails. And it w goes through every two hours and and triages and labels everything in my inbox and it makes and then it sorts everything. And of course you can use Google la Google rules for this kind of stuff, automations.
Danan @ eCom Triage: I I don't like
Andrew Erickson: The Google automations?
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: Yeah, I found that the A because the AIs were reading the email and they're like, Okay, well, this was this seems really important. This one doesn't seem important. And yeah, you can put basic rules on things, but that so that now that's that's the first step for automation, email automation, right? You can also do drafted replies and you wanna create your own style. I always say be concise, keep my replies under five hundred characters, or under a thousand characters, something like that. Cause I never write four paragraphs in an email, right? They know that's my AI. thing doing that so I'm like keep it keep replies under 500 characters right at a 10th grade reading level that I guess that's how Andrew speaks and reads because like I don't read I don't have like I will philosophize and further the further the contraption around the triage right I'm like I I don't I just I don't know I'm just I'll I'll help I'll sorry about that I'll fix it later right like that's how I talk so
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Andrew Erickson: so replies and of course I I don't actually have it send on my behalf I just have it draft replies And then the last
Danan @ eCom Triage: Agreed.
Andrew Erickson: thing inside of email, and this is where people have probably other heard the other tips. This is one I love. I have twice weekly, right? So Monday and Thursday for me, I have AI summarize all my emails and put all of the summaries and everything that's going on into an LLM wiki. And what that is, is a a really simple setup. Where you just have 50 to 100 files that organize everything inside of a project, inside of a inside of one domain. And so I have every business I own has its own LLM wiki. And then every or twice a week, I have my my email summary. And it really helps everything inside the business stay have up-to-date context. And so and
Danan @ eCom Triage: I like it.
Andrew Erickson: and And I use GitHub to to host that LLM wiki. And there's a whole thing we could talk about how to set that up, but like that
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: I found works really well.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Interesting. Okay, cool. So let me expand on this. now Google natively has automations that you can create. It works with Gemini. And if we're talking about a personal email, it does a pretty good job. Once you get into business email, you have a lot more context behind things. And so I have an agent that runs on my personal, my business, and my support email. Every hour and it logs it. It looks at the email history of that email. And if it's a if this is the first email in the string, it goes and finds the customer on Go High Level and looks at the past history of email conversations. It has access to all of their dashboards and it'll go. If someone says, Hey, how many reviews did you remove so far? It'll go. And look at their dashboard and say, hey, we've removed this many reviews. These are the ones, and these are the dates
Andrew Erickson: Killer.
Danan @ eCom Triage: we removed them. Yep. And if it's not, if the person's not in high level or there's no notes in there or no past emails, it then goes to Fathom and finds an a meeting that we've had and looks at the transcript and then it drafts a reply. But it still doesn't send it because we change 100% of every email. That AI drafts for me a hundred percent.
Andrew Erickson: Yeah, this is where we need to find the edge of where the humans need to be included, right? and I've I still have a rule that I the AI can draft things for me, but I I need Andrew needs to push the send button just because people need to trust that my email is me. no I know everyone should also trust that AI is held me for all the things. but it is a The email coming from my personal email is is I'm actually hitting the green button to send it. Yeah.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah. And and that's me as well. but but also I'll just be dictating to Grok so groc bot or Claude, they're both connected to my my whole operating system. I've got a whole OS. I'm sure you do too. and I'll also say, Hey, yeah, go ahead and send Blah an email telling him this, that, and the other, and go get the data from over here and when you've got it, go ahead and send it. You you can tell it's not me sending it, Despite me having a year's worth of this is my tone of voice, this is how I talk, and which is built on you know, fifty thousand emails that I've sent, it still likes to inject its own personality, its own AI personality. So
Andrew Erickson: It's fun it's funny how we're doing that on my team in Slack. And what I tell people is I say, Hey, you know, I really want you I first of all these messages have to be concise. know that I'm using my yes, AI's helping me, but Andrew's using his human neurons to read this messages you're sending in Slack. And
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: I do not like messages over like five hundred a thousand characters. Like seeing five paragraphs, I'm like, God, I can't. Like the the amount of processing power it takes me to read this is not it's not good. I our goal is to make everyone work better and faster more efficiently, especially me. Please don't make
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: me do a lot of work to read your stupid Claude export thing. And so I always say if you
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Andrew Erickson: do, if it is really important that I read these five parac or if it's is if the five paragraphs are necessary, put it in a quote block so I know it's
Danan @ eCom Triage: Mm-hmm.
Andrew Erickson: clawed. And I want you to put like a human, you know, like you know, two or three sentence summary or a human, you know. I want you to write with your fingertips, right? As much as I love AI, I'm like, I need there's some humans here, right? I need
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: some, I need two or three sentences with your human fingertips and then a quote block for the for the if you need to send a big chunk. and also I've gotten into the habit of just creating like artic artifacts or or like handoff documents from Claude. And we'll
Danan @ eCom Triage: Uh-huh.
Andrew Erickson: say, like, I made this handoff doc. You know, my AI made a handoff document for your AI. And here's what I hope you can do with this. That works really well also. But yeah, it's it's it's interesting having to navigate how to communicate well on a team.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah. I have I will spend an inordinate amount of time making my staff more efficient. Because if they are more efficient, like my job is I work for my staff, right? I make sure that they have everything that they need to do the best possible job that they can do. And like for instance, I've got, you know, we We have For right now, let's just call it four companies in the Amazon space, right? That's four different verticals that need to be handled, right? Two of them have customers, three of them? Four of them. Whatever. Anyhow, they've they've got customers, they've got they've got tasks that need to be completed. And so I spend tons of time finding tools to optimize their job. And so there's a lot of people that are employees who are like, my God, you're gonna optimize me out of a job. But no, you're getting more work and you're going to be able to do more faster, more efficiently, and more effectively with better quality. And that's what I spend a lot of time on. And so, I try not to do my emails. My executive assistant handles all my emails. And I used to be on calls with him for. Hours every single day manually like telling him what to write and stuff like that. Now he can go an entire week without me having to tell him anything on how to handle stuff except for maybe a couple of emails. Like when it comes to lawyers and stuff like that, he's like, nah, I'm not touching that. You that's that's Danin, you know.
Andrew Erickson: Sure.
Danan @ eCom Triage: or or like contract stuff, you know. but when it comes to just the day-to-day management of my business. He's pretty much got it in hand. And that that's
Andrew Erickson: Love it.
Danan @ eCom Triage: come from making him more efficient, teaching him how to do it. I built him a chat a GPT, which is chat GPT is freaking sunsetting GPTs, by the way. yes. Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: really? I didn't hear that.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah, they need to be converted to something else. I don't even remember, but I'm I'm moving away from Chat GPT.
Andrew Erickson: They're b they're basically skills, right? I feel like the GPTs are replaced by skills, so it makes sense to me. I had
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah. Yeah, it is basically a skill, yeah.
Andrew Erickson: a I had like a really popular GPT that went pretty viral. It's like three years ago.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: and it was listing call we called it listify AI. And so it writes Amazon copy for you. but again, those kind of things like
Danan @ eCom Triage: I think I remember that actually.
Andrew Erickson: yeah, and it worked great. We A B tested the heck out of it and it worked great. so But those things are, the a skill file, it's pretty good, that kind of stuff. The next thing to add on our list here is inventory management and supply chain management and forecasting. That is something that these AIs are really good at grabbing the data. there's a lot of
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: context you need around that. so we actually built a tool called inventoryhero.ai. And so it it it's a tool, it's a full MC of MCP access. It uses your your past history, top competitors, and top keywords to forecast out your sales,
Danan @ eCom Triage: Mm.
Andrew Erickson: your your next two years of sales. So it it does seasonal adjustments and then it figures out what you need to order when, and then it tracks every single order, pulls in Amazon, Amazon tracking labels, and we just expanded out to Walmart and TikTok as well. So pull
Danan @ eCom Triage: Nice.
Andrew Erickson: all that stuff in, and then of course it and then organizes the things coming from China. And so and and any anywhere, coming from anywhere, but coming from your manufacturing
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: plant, manufacturing facility. And so yeah, it's great. And so there's there's all sorts of things you can do inside of that space to like really level up your game for supply chain management.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah, I love it. And by the way, Chat GPT, you have to migrate your GPTs to plugins by December eleventh.
Andrew Erickson: interesting.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah. I made I made a GPT that I was particularly proud of that was roughly a one paragraph prompt, but I recreated Oregon Trail. Yeah, but you Yeah, I did. I did get dysentery. Two of my
Andrew Erickson: Fun. Did you get dysentery while you're doing it?
Danan @ eCom Triage: oxen died and I ran out of money and was attacked. But you can go anywhere in the world. So you can say, I need to take a a ship to China to to Thailand, to China, to England, whatever. And it's
Andrew Erickson: You you got malaria on the trail to Zimbabwe or something?
Danan @ eCom Triage: No, no, I didn't get malaria. I just died of dysentery. It was like it was very
Andrew Erickson: Yeah.
Danan @ eCom Triage: immediate. Yeah, my oxen got stuck, one of my wheels fell off, I died of dysentery.
Andrew Erickson: You should build a a twenty first century version and say instead of the Oregon Trail, it's like the the Mars rocket path or something and you you get you get
Danan @ eCom Triage: I can do that. I can do that.
Andrew Erickson: Martian Martian virus on the way to on the on the on the while you're passing the moon on the way to Mars or something.
Danan @ eCom Triage: I I'll make I'll make a a current one and just everyone will die from AI from Skynet taking over and blowing up the world.
Andrew Erickson: Yeah.
Danan @ eCom Triage: All right, what's the next one?
Andrew Erickson: Next one. the so after supply chain management is bookkeeping and taxes.
Danan @ eCom Triage: yeah.
Andrew Erickson: it is really good at this. again, I still believe in having humans help. If you have a really basic personal income tax return that you can use turbo tax for, I'm sure AI AIs can do that for you. my stuff is like stupid complicated, unfortunately. I'm trying to simplify
Danan @ eCom Triage: Same.
Andrew Erickson: a little bit, but I ended up spending, you know, I ended up downloading every single CSV and PDF export from all my banks. I have bank accounts for every single business and every single org. And I have, you know, I I try to keep things clean, but yeah, it's kind of hard. You know, if I have like travel, a trip, I don't have like a physical card for my for some of my businesses don't have a physical card. So I put on my personal card and I have to transfer it over and stuff. But you guys are really good at
Danan @ eCom Triage: yeah that
Andrew Erickson: measuring that and seeing that and pulling it in. And so like Help me optimize my taxes, look at it, analyze, pull things together, ask me questions around travel, ask me questions around this. okay. Now that
Danan @ eCom Triage: Mm-hmm.
Andrew Erickson: we now we have our basics, know, I created a handoff for my accountant. The accountant went through and like she did her thing, and then she asked me questions. And of course I had the AI help me answer the questions. and then when she f created a draft return, my CPA is great. I use junglebooks.net. they they have a they handed me back the tax return and like okay, ready to go. And I still I took it again and I put it into Claude and also double checked it with codex with ChatGPT, Astra model, whatever the latest greatest one is right now. and it
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Asterisk, I think.
Andrew Erickson: found another issue. The tax ret the accountant did a great job. I found another issue where where the things didn't quite add up. And it found another ten thousand dollars on top of what my CPA had already prepared
Danan @ eCom Triage: Damn.
Andrew Erickson: in returns. And so I was just shocked at how great it worked. And so it yeah, doing that kind of stuff. I haven't given it like write or actual read access to my bank accounts and my QuickBooks yet. I wouldn't give it.
Danan @ eCom Triage: I'm about to do that, I think.
Andrew Erickson: Yeah, I found that I don't know. I mean I I I'm like bullish on AI, but also It's not doesn't take so long for me just to download the PDF, Like,
Danan @ eCom Triage: But if you could automate it.
Andrew Erickson: yeah, yeah. and then you know and the the nice thing is that you have that baseline, like, okay, help me help me just collect everything I need, right? To handle the account. Okay, now double check the account. Okay, now I'm starting to say, look at my spend, look at my look at what I what I'm focusing my energy on, look at my emails and figure out what we can cut, what can we optimize, what can we do better.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Sure.
Andrew Erickson: hey, here's here's our income. Here's my here, all the context around what the real estate projects I have and the investments I have and the businesses I have. Help me do tax prep for next year in terms of like what kind of accounts can I set up. And so now I'm going through and setting up a a solo 401k and all these different things like that that are like really awesome ways that you would have to, you know, I kind of know the concepts. Like I do a lot of personal finance concepts, but like just it's hard to go through the whole thing and know everything. thing what to do and the AIs make that
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: stuff incredibly easy.
Danan @ eCom Triage: I hope my CFO's listening to this because this is exactly what she needs to hear. It's like we do our best to have the cleanest possible books. And for that reason, we basically run all finances up to a singular source so that it's just easy to manage. But we're now at the point where we've got several different businesses where we can't do that. So you start adding those complications. And let's say I go on a trip, I go, well, shoot, which which card do I use for this business trip? Right? because there's overlap. I we're we're gonna go to Salt Lake City for a summit next year but it's legitimately two different businesses going on this trip. It's both me. balloons. it's both me, but two different businesses. How do I split those finances? There's just anyhow, so yeah, just using the AI and and this is why I'm about to let it go into my credit cards and my bank accounts. And because
Andrew Erickson: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Danan @ eCom Triage: we have like, I don't know, ten freaking bank accounts, something like that. And it gets crazy basically. And AI loving data, it can yeah.
Andrew Erickson: And you know, of course, a lot of people are gonna be there's there's some security risks here. And so I, you know, I that's there's that's why I like the read-only stuff. and AIs
Danan @ eCom Triage: Definitely, yeah.
Andrew Erickson: are actually pretty good at not screwing these things up, but they're they're non-deterministic, you know, they they they are variable, they can they can do things that so I I'm gonna put you know caution there. And also on top of that, if you have a really simple tax return and you just have like if I'm assuming if you're listening to this, you're probably not just a a basic W-2 employee.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: But if you have really simple tax return, you can probably do a lot of stuff by yourself. but if you do have a business and you do, you're moving some, moving some revenue, moving some having declaring some profit and you have complicated things, I still believe in using humans. I'm still bullish on humans. And having a good CPA in your in your corner is always gonna be valuable. And I'll tell you stuff that my CPA is very good at. Making sure that we don't do stupid things, right? And he's like,
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Andrew Erickson: Well, here's the risk, here's the reward, don't do this. this is your choice to do that kind of stuff. And and I find I still again, as much as I love AI, I still love having a human in my corner that I can go back and forth with the to kind of, you know, make sure we're we're not screwing things up royally.
Danan @ eCom Triage: It it's like the difference between book smarts and street smarts, right? Because
Andrew Erickson: Mm. Yep.
Danan @ eCom Triage: you can ingest as much data as you want, which is what AI is, but it doesn't mean that doing whatever you're about to do is the right decision based
Andrew Erickson: Yes.
Danan @ eCom Triage: on the based on the situation. And that that is something that AI will never have is Contextual awareness based on experience in other areas that lend into the decision making process of this scenario. gonna make that into a t-shirt. Yeah. Cool. What's okay with the we got one last one. All right, let's do it.
Andrew Erickson: Yes. Yeah. Context is king. the last one I will say. Yeah, last one is I like to think, yes, where can we optimize things? Where can we, you know, I I want to I want to think, you know, of course I I talked about bookkeeping, of course, I'm gonna find tax returns, you know, optimization tax return. look through your look through your credit card statements, see if you can find things to cancel and and stuff like that. So those are Those are good. Those are easy wins. hey, I save $50 by canceling that and $80 a month by canceling that. Those are meaningful. but on top of that, I want to think, I don't want to think how can I just make $80 a month by canceling the subscription or how can I replace this SaaS with this, with this software, this new thing, whatever. I'm not trying to save $50. I'm trying to think how can I grow and expand? Right.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Right.
Andrew Erickson: how can I, I don't wanna just add 1%. I don't want to reduce my expenses by 1%. I want to increase my revenue by 30%. Right. So I think the big one that helps a lot with that, if you are an e-commerce brand, is now we're in a really good position to start doing channel expansion. So if you are
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yes, I agree so much.
Andrew Erickson: if you are an Amazon seller getting on a TikTok shop and getting out of Shopify and getting on or pushing harder on Shopify, and most almost everyone Amazon has a Shopify, pushing harder on it and expanding out to
Danan @ eCom Triage: I I
Andrew Erickson: Walmart.
Danan @ eCom Triage: no they do not.
Andrew Erickson: Now the forms you have to fill out and the tracking and that kind of stuff is it's getting a lot easier. and that's
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: what we actually added. Now we're doing full omni-channel support inside of Inventory Hero. So you can do TikTok, Walmart, Shopify, and Amazon inside of there. And so, like r adding those new channels and looking for places where you can add 10, 20, 30, 40 percent in revenue. That's a place where I think we I want to start thinking how can I grow and expand? I'm not trying to just fire all my humans and have AI run my business, just just my my current business and make things like less and smaller and efficient and tighter. I want to make my business bigger and grander and more revenue and more people. I want to have, I wanna hire, you know, for every human I add, I want to add 10 AIs, right? But I'm
Danan @ eCom Triage: Sure. Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: still bullish on humans. So that that's my big like my takeaway is how can I get The maybe the mindset is that how can I increase my top line? How can I grow my business substantially? I think channel expansion is a way to do that, but I but I always want to end on instead of cutting and optimizing, how can we grow and expand?
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah, cool. I like it. And you said something earlier. You th you said you think that most people selling on Amazon are on Shopify? Not in my experience.
Andrew Erickson: really?
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah. Yeah. Cause I I think that you are connect the sellers that you're connected to are are I think I would argue that they're more sophisticated and have more experience than most. The majority of my customers are not at that level where they don't even have capacity to be on Shopify. They don't know how to run it. It's a different business model, right?
Andrew Erickson: It's very different.
Danan @ eCom Triage: and so I I found that very interesting that you said most are. And I'm like, not in my experience.
Andrew Erickson: okay. There you go.
Danan @ eCom Triage: But I but I happen to know who your community of sellers is, and all right, one last thing. I am speaking to a company. This is something that I've got my own account with them that I'm testing, but crazyvendor.io helps you to take an Amazon listing and just mention either my name Danan or the e-com growth show. I think he'll give you can't remember what it is, but you get something by mentioning my name. but it helps you take an Amazon listing and create these listings on Target and Walmart and all these other marketplaces without it being a copy paste of Amazon and it's all built properly. I have I'm in the works on testing it myself to get into Walmart specifically, but I I really like the guy. It's very interesting what he's built. And so that's that's another one for for everyone out there. But yeah, just mention my name and and you'll get something. So Andrew, this is awesome. I think dude, we could prop we could just take one area of a business and just riff on it. And and maybe we should do that. Maybe we should do a series where we get a couple more people in here to talk about this. Cause You and I are implementing AI into our businesses in different ways. Like I love your wiki idea. I just have one document that's somewhere in my computer that gives all the context on everything. But the wiki makes a lot more sense. It's much more Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: The wiki works really well. So if you want to search there there's a person called Carpathy, Andre Carpathy,
Danan @ eCom Triage: yeah.
Andrew Erickson: and he's he's kinda like an AI influencer guy, right? and he came up with this Carpathy L L wiki idea and it works fantastic. and I that's where I I've just been religious on that the last six months, or last whatever, five whatever, six months. And so it yeah, it gives you that. And and also I'll tell you another thing with with that, because I host it in GitHub. GitHub's like a like a cloud that saves data for you, right? set up as as as for for
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah.
Andrew Erickson: sharing code, but it works great for sharing stuff like these LLM wikis. I the reason why I like GitHub so much for that kind of stuff is I I have first of all, I have a storage somewhere that's not my computer. I would just assume my computer's gonna die every night because it might, right? But then also I can share it. I can have I have a sh a shared LLM wiki with my with my team, right? So one that's
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yeah?
Andrew Erickson: relevant to them. And then I have like Hermes agents for this. And so I'll have like my email summary, right? But but now I have my Hermes agent has
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yep.
Andrew Erickson: it, my claw agent has it, and I can pull down that. Context whenever I need it, and it's stored for everyone. and so I just found that works really well to have that shared context.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Yep, totally agree. Well, dude, thank you for again being on the podcast. let's stick around and let's let's discuss the two things I want to talk to you about. One, maybe doing a series of this, like a webinar series. and then two, what did I want to talk to you about? you're I forget the testing. Whatever. Anyhow, for those of you that are still here, yeah.
Andrew Erickson: Optimize hero dot AI.
Danan @ eCom Triage: Perfect. Thank you. Optimize here. So those of you who are stuck with us to the end, thanks for being here. We hope we got some you got some really good data out of this. This is just things to get you started. Andrew and I, neither of us are AI consultants, but he and I are both very AI forward and implementing this stuff into our business. Me on a daily basis. I can't speak to you, but I'm sure also on a daily basis. So we'll see you in the next episode.
Andrew Erickson: Thank you.
