How One Membership Pro Uses AI to Grow, Save Time, and Lead Smarter

[00:00] Micah: With membership sites, do you have any specific examples of AI usage today for any of your clients?

[00:06] Melodie: I think there's two ways of looking at AI and how it applies to membership. There's a basic AI application in any business right now of really making it so that you and your team are AI enhanced. And then on the actual implementation site, specifically for a membership site, it's the coach functionality where you can put your database of all of your content, all your PDFs and everything into an AI that isn't just like a chat GPT where it's searching the entire web, but like what you specifically want it to know. So it becomes like a clone of yourself. So we've seen that application. And then I love your plugin where you can have it so that if somebody were going through a program and you wanted them to have a specific prompt to say, okay, hey, work with the chat GPT on this. And take them through that experience that you can have that right on that page, which I think is just one of the coolest applications as well. One of the use cases is trying to help people to accomplish something in your course. So for instance, we do quite a bit with fitness people setting goals real hard, easier said really hard to actually do. And that's part of the reasons why coaches are so great is because they can probe and just ask some deeper questions. And what we've been working on is training the AIs to do that. Now you want more than just a chat AI. You want it to be a generative AI where it really is like probing a little bit deeper and deeper to get people actually to what they want. It might be helpful to give the difference between a chat bot and a generative AI. The way that I will generally see it is a chat bot. You'll see it like give you options where it'll be like, what can I help you with today? Subscriptions, membership, this, this, this, select this option. Great. What can we do here? So it's, it takes a lot more to set up honestly too, because you have to tell it exactly how the different decision tree works. Whereas with a generative AI, you just feed it a bunch of information. So the coach example that I was giving you earlier is an example of a generative AI. Like I just uploaded a bunch of stuff in there and it created melody.

[02:09] Micah: The melody clone is wild.

[02:11] Melodie: Like you can talk to it too. You can text it. We have this generative AI option right now.

[02:17] Micah: And literally you can sign up for this thing for a hundred bucks and it blows that chat bot out the water. I was thinking about how the internet killed courses delivered by CD or whatever it was, you know, videotapes. And I think AI is going to kind of kill these internet courses and not really killed, but they'll just evolve into it.

[02:36] Melodie: How do you see this in, let's say five years?

[02:39] Micah: Is it all sci-fi and VR and whatever, or is it largely the same as it is today? Do you think?

[02:44] Melodie: I'm shocked at the rate that AI is moving right now. I don't know how far off this vision is, but I see a world where courses are like we're talking right now. And it's taking me through an experience where it's teaching me the course content like we're chatting right now. I think that probably is the future that we're going towards based on what I'm seeing right now. It's a wild idea to me, but at one point in time, just being on a call right now, like what we are was a wild idea. The fact that you could have a phone in your pocket was a wild idea. So it's like, it's just advancing so quickly.

[03:19] Micah: What do you think is a mistake people are making above or below the million mark in the membership space? What's kind of a specific mistake you think they're making or something they're missing?

[03:30] Melodie: I think people are a little surface level with AI and that they think it's a magic bullet. It takes work. Even when I'm working with ChatGPT, like you've got to learn how to work with ChatGPT. I feel like we fall into the illusion of progress in a lot of different areas. I'm seeing a lot with AI. We're doing a lot of AI. We have all of these AI tools. Well, is it actually achieving anything for your business? Do you have more time? Do you have more space? Are you increasing the value for your team, for your customers, for yourself? And if you don't have clarity on what that actually means, you are falling into the illusion of progress. You have a lot of activity and a lot of outcome. I see this across the board with business in general. But I think it's happening more with AI because it's this new, hot, shiny object.

[04:13] Micah: So what do you see on the marketing side? How do people approach that instead of just, hey, give me a marketing? I'm a XYZ business. Give me a marketing plan.

[04:23] Melodie: You need to give it good stuff to begin with. And so if you just go into ChatGPT and you're like, give me a marketing plan, it's going to give you a generic marketing plan that anybody else can pull up. Which means you're not going to have a blue ocean strategy. You're going to be like everybody else. Which means that your competition is going to be a lot higher. And where ChatGPT and specifically with marketing can help is to help reflect back and refine out your messaging. So I put all of my sales calls into ChatGPT and I ask it to analyze the call, see how I did, and then reflect back how I could improve. AI has made me a better leader, a better marketer, a better salesperson. But you've got to be asking for the right questions to it. The thing to keep in mind with this, if you're a CEO or business owner, you should not be delegating this work out to your marketing person. You need to be doing this. And the reason why is because they're not going to be able to pick up on the nuance of if ChatGPT's got it right or wrong. You will be able to see it quite quickly if you have a good pulse on your business. But your marketing person just doesn't have the skills and experience to be able to see that. We're doing it right now for coaching with a team. So I think it can help as a business leader too because I don't have a ton of patients in general. And so it's like I've asked the team now, I was like, ask my clone before you ask me. The tool that we use allows me to see who asked it so I can follow up. And then I can see what my AI said. It's almost like training another team member. But it ultimately makes me more effective as a leader. And as a business owner and as a visionary of the company, because I have more time to do more of the thinking work. And the bigger your company gets, the more time you need to think.

[06:01] Micah: It's beautiful. Well, that's why I wanted to talk to you. I love that idea of kind of sharing your vision and yourself with the AI, not for customer access, but for employee access. I love that. What should membership site owners focus on the next six months?

[06:16] Melodie: You've got to start using it. I think that is the biggest hang up right now of I chat with a lot of my clients and they have not integrated chat,

[06:28] Micah: QBT and enhancing how they're working and giving themselves more time and using it to become a more strategic leader,

[06:36] Melodie: to become a stronger self leader, because ultimately that's going to make you more efficient and more effective within your role, which is going to open up more space for you to be able to grow your business. And where you get that time is looking at how to optimize and enhance yourself using AI and just really getting comfortable because the future belongs to people that are AI enhanced. I am 100% certain of that. I'm going to overtake all of my competitors who are not using AI to enhance themselves, their team and their offering. And that's not me being egotistical. That's just like, it's like people that got on the web when the web first came out. They were leaps and bounds ahead of the people that came in later. And that if you're not currently just understanding and wrapping your head around AI and how it can help you, one, to enhance yourself and then two, to your business. Start now, start today, because you've got to.

[07:32] Micah: Melody, thanks for coming on. Thanks for chatting. We'll put links to Melody under this video, but where can they connect with you?

[07:40] Melodie: Businesstechnicist.com or I'm on very active on LinkedIn as well with different articles. A lot of times talking about AI and then really understanding how we can still be a human first company in the age of AI.

[07:52] Micah: Being AI enhanced, humanness is not going away.

[07:56] Melodie: We're just going to be better because of AI if you have the right tools and thought processes behind it.

[08:01] Micah: Love it. Thanks again, Melody.

[08:02] Melodie: Thanks for having me.