If You Don't Understand This, You'll Never Make AI Work

0:00Isaac's 8 figureure business finds factories to make custom products for [music] big brands. But every proposal takes his team days and by the time it's ready, some buyers already gone. So I sat down with Isaac to find his biggest bottleneck and design the AI system that turns those days into minutes. Okay, so first things first, let's figure out the shape of the business. And I want to start with your socials and then we'll go into how those socials feed into the business and then breaking down the business model so both myself and uh guys watching can know how this thing

0:27works. So you have the sourcing guy. Yeah. At the sourcing guy. At the sourcing guy. And that's on Instagram. Tik Tok. YouTube. Yeah. Okay. So Instagram we have how many? 450,000. Tik Tok we have 210,000. And then YouTube I think 11,000. So we have short form content and then long form content. What sort of numbers are we doing in terms of like pieces per per month? I'd say on short form it'd be probably like eight and long form one good month one. Right now we just have a big backlog. So we're lower on the backlog of short form and that's where I want to start getting a lot more creative cuz

1:04right now I have a little bit of an issue where I have to go to China every time I want to shoot a short form. What's your target here? Like where would you like to be sitting at per month? I'd like to be at two long form and I'd love to get to 13 short form. 13. All of this is feeding into the

1:19business. What is the business? Imprint Genius. So we have imprint genius. Yeah. And so that is a sourcing agency, right? Exactly. Sourcing agency works where clients come to us with requests to source different types of products and our job is to go and source that product for them and deliver the product at the right quality, the right price point, and the

1:39right time frame. And so walk me through an example of a flow through here. So the sourcing guy is my personal brand. I'm able to go and build that personal brand and build confidence in people that watch me that this guy knows what he's talking about. Then they through my social media, they go through my link in bio. They discover my sourcing agency. They go to the website, say, "Okay, this is the type of company I want to work with. I need help sourcing products." Then they're going to go and do an inquiry, tell us about their project, and then my team will then jump in, talk to them, and see if

2:04they're a good fit to actually work with them. Okay, let's map that out quickly. Mhm. Step one would be they see your content, view content, and we have like a curvy line gets to link in bio. Yeah. link in bio and that's going to take them to the website. Got a landing page website. Cool. And then is there a form? Is there

2:24like bookm? Yeah. We don't do book a call just because majority of people that reach out to us are just unqualified. Yeah. If you had to eyeball it or guess it, estimate it. How many are going here and how many would go directly to it? I'd say majority of people DM me, but majority of people that actually want to do business together like and are more serious are going to go through the funnel of going to the website because they're going to look at my brand my

2:46agency first. make sure I'm legit. So we can have here which is DM. What is your ideal client? Ideal client we have two personas. One is going to be like large corporate client that needs procurement. So typically it's a lot of like corporate merchandise like a Microsoft or Google, right? We're going to go and develop out

3:06their new line of hoodies or backpacks. And then other then we have retail. So selling to like a TJ Maxx, Bloomingdales, like large retailer, helping them with large scale sourcing. So hey, we need a million dollars with a Kashmir jacket. Some of them done the most cost effective way. The other one is going to be actual brands. So whether that be like e-commerce brands or e-com or

3:27Yeah. How big are those? Ideally $10 million plus brands. We've obviously worked with with you know 100 plus million dollar brands as well but like once you're growing above 10 million I think the brands really understand the benefit of bringing in third parties to hop in especially new categories. I think we'll circle back to that but it's good to know if got corporate retail and then ecom and then after that form is it you hopping on a call is one of your team hopping on a call is it an

3:50email back and forth. So it starts as an email back and forth to getting a little more information. We do need to probably improve our form to collect more information from the brands, but typically it goes into our Slack. We have a channel for leads and then there's a couple key people on the team that kind of handle inbound sales and based off of the size of the order and the type of order, right? Is this corporate merchandise? Is this large scale apparel? Is it supplements? that person that is in charge of that kind of area of the business will go in and feel that and talk to that lead and see if

4:24it's a good fit. Okay. So little thing there we could we could look at already is if we improve the form or sort of rethink the form what's the best way to get the best optin rate but also the quality of information making it easy for them to get their input in. So bit of email correspond or arise slack bit of email correspondence and then I take ebook a call or is it then like some yeah typically it's booking a call or they're doing an exist another form that's collecting a lot more information about the projects or vacations they need you know tech packs or they're

4:53going to hop on a call with one of us and we're going to kind of edit out and see if it's a good fit. Does that depend on the size? If they're really big you just immediately hop on a call if they got you. If it's big enough, we're just going to try to start building a relationship as soon as possible. We want them to understand that we're just not another Chinese

5:08sourcing agency. Nothing against Chinese sourcing agencies, but a lot of customers are going to utilize us cuz they want to work with a US-based company and be able to talk to us any hour of the day. Everybody's having to stay up all night. And yeah, I I totally could understand that. Email to form to call and then it starts

5:23the sourcing process, right? And then the sourcing process. So, some clients if depending on the complexity of the project, we send the proposal, they sign like a basic contract, then we um charge some level of deposit, call like $500 to $1,000 to engage for us to start the work. If the client says the pricing looks good, the product looks good, everything looks good, let's order samples, then we're going to go and order samples for them, either blank samples or custom samples, then they receive the custom sample. If that all

5:51looks good, then in theory, we're good. Let's order. We're going to have to source it internally and then build a presentation for the client proposing product. What we're trying to do as well is I'm calling it be more proactive instead of reactive. So, right now it's all based off of like what's the client sending to us and then can we source the exact thing they're asking for. Now, we're trying to be more proactive and saying, "Okay, well, I know you want this specific product, but here's a bunch of [music] other products that we think could also be really good for your brand, or here are other variations of

6:28product we've already sourced." Let's say they're looking for a mug and they give us like a a basic mug. We can obviously source a basic mug, but we can also go and pitch them be like, "Oh, what what if we do like a diecast mug with like your logo?" And then that what that's going to create is a higher likelihood of them moving to sampling at least for one item. But so this presentation piece, yeah, is I guess that's the assembly of all of the previous sourcing data that was collected, right? This is the most amount of work by far because it's the assembly of let's say factories and pricing details

6:57we've already done, but we also have to calculate the know tariffs change, duties change, shipping prices change, all these different variables are consistently changing. So we have to go and recalculate that across all the products as well as look at maybe we've sourced it before at 100 units, but now they want 10,000 units. So we might we have to get new quotes from the factory make sure the pricing see how we can negotiate get pricing lower maybe we're going to work on a lower margin because it's a way higher volumes before the build presentation I just want to sort of chunk this out because if we can

7:25figure out what roles do [music] certain things then we can say okay let's make a skill for this and so we can assemble around this key role if we can give them a flexible workspace that's plugged into all of your business data and and your platforms and knows how to create presentations in your style and their job can just be spinning up a couple sessions being like, "Okay, cool. We've got this. I've got this pack back from someone. I'm ready to make a presentation. They go through that and it takes them 30 minutes rather than 6 hours." [music] Then I mean, you could even add another skill or layer on top

7:54here. I mean, you sure you could have a presentation skill. Yeah. But you could also have like a check brand or something and it would do a deep research on the brand over the past 30 days or something. See anything in the socials, anything they put out that could maybe trigger and you say, "Oh, I see I launched a new line for this. Why don't we we've got and then it looks at the database, looks at the past products you've done and says and finds past

8:14presentations for other clients as well. And it's like here's an idea, here's three different things we could suggest them. Do you want me to make proposals for each of those? Yeah. And then you just like fire them more. That's unbelievable. Well, I think what's really important here is that because this process can take so long, this this whole process from sourcing to building presentation, sometimes you can lose a client, right, in that time frame if you're not communicating with them

8:35effectively, right? Speed to speedily. So what we can do is is if we can obviously we have the slow route which we can automate a lot of I think with with AI as well but lead comes in and then automatically go and build a fast as instant proposal with products we've already done. So they say, "Yeah, look, we want to make drinkware. We want the specific drinkware." We go, "Okay, great." Like, in the meantime, while we're working on this, this might take a couple days. Here's a bunch of really awesome mugs and and I we saw that you guys also launched your protein product and here are some workout gear and and

9:10all these other products to do and it's all customized with their logo. Chew on this for a few days. Right now, we delivered you something and a couple days we'll get back to you with this. And a lot of times I think what's going to happen is they're going to get the new presentation and go wait these products are way better than whatever we

9:25ever been thinking. Scrap this, right? And then that saves us a huge amount of time and headache. One thing that just came to mind form research slack. We can set up agent that's based in your Slack where you'll be able to reply to one of those form submissions coming in and go at my agent whatever we end up calling it. I think this product would be really good. this this and it will go and find those in the database and be able to send them off as soon as you can make that reply or at least send them back in the channel for you to review and you

9:53go, "Yep, that's good. Send it." So just way faster. We'll have it slack based. Yeah, this is this is looking good. Whereabouts is your data living right now? What are your main tools? ASA I'd say is the biggest tool that we use. So we're managing all the the production and day-to-day steps and then a project based communication for the

10:12most part is going to happen on a sauna. We use HubSpot for as like our CRM to manage new leads. Slack. Any other key ones? What's your core recording software? Right now we use Bubbles, but I probably want to use a more AI native one. I'm happy to switch. All right. Any other key? You say you've got a database of supplies. Is that HubSpot or is that Asana or is that

10:35floating around? It's kind of floating around. We have in notion. We have a we have a decent database in notion. being able to push this into a proper data structure and like plugging it in and making everything sort of keep it up to date. Yeah, it's going to be great. Right now, a lot of it's organized in notion pretty well because a part of

10:50like my high ticket program. Yeah. Is they get access to my factory database. To be honest, I need to go through and really sit down with the team and understand like when are they going to the database. I think that sometimes it might be so hard to scan through the database. Yeah. That if they might know the factories and they might ask someone else us on the team like, "Hey, do we have a good factory for [music] cashmere hats, right? But if they don't, right, then they might just go and start

11:13automatically sourcing the product." Got you. Then there's another software called Common Skew. Common Skew is a promotional product industry specific software. [music] They were like the first ones to really like build software around the promotional products industry. [music] So sometimes we'll we'll build presentations on there, utilize the bill entry, and that's integrated into our

11:33our Quickbook. So that's actually a pretty good base to be working from. Yeah. But we want to look at what the biggest unlock here for this week is going to be. You've obviously been adjacent to AI and trying stuff out in your business. Where do you see across the different like business lines you have? Where's the biggest opportunity that you'd really be itching to get into this this week? [music] would be the coolest gamecher would be to be able to create fully custom presentations all with AI, ideally with pricing built into them as

11:58well as utilizing video based mock-ups. I haven't seen anyone in the sourcing industry or in the merch industry really utilize custom video as a way to showcase product. And I think that if we are the first ones to do that, we're going to have there's going to be so much shock factor to it. [music] I would be able to pick up a lot of clients and

12:19make industry. I think the mockups is a great idea, cheaper, better. Yeah, bottleneck buster as a signal that I'm pointing right now. That's really the key thing that we're going to be driving for this week. There's a lot of organizational stuff that we'll try to do sort of time permitting, but bottleneck busting is like what is the key piece here that we're really going to be able to push at the end of the week on that is going to be like the the biggest change in your business. So yeah, I'm already thinking we've got like Higsfield API and stuff like that will be a key thing here

12:50and that would be image video gen and so that's going to take in rough outline of the system that I have in my head is form whether we optimize that form a bit. I think probably in between the form would have some kind of researchy step. Well, I think it'd be cool say like your brand like just by your website and it's able to pull like

13:11Yeah. a lot of the brand assets and colors and different things and then make the merchandise based off of that. Boom. There you go. Excellent idea. Well, this will also look up the DB, try to match some products potentially. Yeah. And then this will probably pop it into Slack and then once you've approved it, it'll push it into there. That'll come

13:27back into Slack for approval. Yes. No. All the like feedback. Easy as that. fast, cheaper, better, bottleneck, faster that will sit within in Slack [music] in this case, which should be really nice, but then it does some separate or custom surface which is going to speed things up a lot. Yeah. [music] So, Slack can actually be a really good hub if you have to write a back end that's connected to your data. So, I'm pretty happy with that. I'll digest some of this, go through with the team and really break down probably need to get keys and access to a bunch of your uh tools so that we can do a have a scan of

13:58the data. But I think if we can just get this and we can do some calculations and quantifying just how much this could really do for you. But um I'm pretty bullish on that. [music] That's looking at eyeballing it. Not not too difficult. Definitely something we can get done within the week. Do you think this week we'll have time to work on any type of automation across like the sourcing guy [music] or or like any type of centralized brain type of That's uh we do have a platform for the for the second brain and that's kind of a lot of the organizational stuff I was

14:27talking about. Yeah. Um, but yes, there will be definitely be a data layer and a second brain that we're having to create to make all of this work. Can't wait. Let's do it, brother.