Interview with "Double Your Sales Club" Founder Tyler Garns on Memberships and AI

[00:00] Micah: Hey everybody, it's Micah Mitchell. I have with us Tyler from the Double Your Sales Club. And a lot of you might recognize Tyler. He has been a longtime heavyweight in the membership industry with Memberium specifically with Keep. So Tyler, welcome.

[00:15] Tyler: Thank you, Micah. It's great to be with you.

[00:18] Micah: Man, it's so exciting to talk to you because I think you are one of the not only most like creative smart people when it comes to marketing, but structurally smart people. When it comes to marketing. So I'm just going to, if it's okay, pepper you with questions around AI,

[00:36] Tyler: marketing, memberships. And then if there's anything else you want to, you know,

[00:40] Micah: talk about that I'm not asking about, feel free to add it in.

[00:44] Tyler: Yeah, fire away. Let's go for it.

[00:46] Micah: Sweet, sweet. So let's, let's start from the top. If somebody today is running a membership, what should they be thinking about now so that, and, you know, we'll keep it short term, even in a year, that membership is, is still successful or more successful. How do you think they should approach it in this world of AI?

[01:11] Tyler: I think that's a really interesting question. Because things are changing so fast, right? And, and all of kind of the online tech marketing world, it's all changing. So it's a really relevant question.

[01:24] Micah: And as you know, I kind of, I'll call it grew up in the automation space.

[01:31] Tyler: And, and I've long held a philosophy around automation, which is use automation to do all the things that a human can, can't do or can do that should be done by automation. So that, and this is the important part, so that your customers can get more personal human interaction and feel special, right? And so you hand, you have automation handle all this stuff for you that can be automated and doesn't impact the, the, the experience, but in fact, allows the humans on you, for you or your team to interact better with your customers. And I see the same thing happening with AI, right? People see what happened with, with automation is people went hog wild on automation. And then you have all these automated experiences that don't feel natural. And with AI, you see the same thing happening, everyone moving to AI and trying to leverage AI and cut costs or whatever, or, or just cause they want to use the latest tool and it creates unnatural experiences. And so I still hold the same philosophy now for like, coming back to your question for memberships and AI and automation and all the different, you know, technology you can put into your membership, utilize that technology to create more personal experiences or to allow for more personal connection, whether it's members to members or members to your, to you and your team, basically leverage all that technology to free your time up so that you can have these more personal interactions. And it becomes more and more and more important because everyone else is using technology to the hilt. So if you actually create an experience where your members have more interaction, more personal, real live interaction with you and your team, it will stand out in the crowd. I think that's just a really, really important aspect of all of this. People are craving that personal interaction. You know, we spend so much time on our phones and not talking to real people and stuff like that. It's just, people crave it. And they, I don't think they even realize they crave it until they see it and they experience it. And then they go, Oh, wow, this is cool. I want to be a part of this.

[03:40] Micah: Yeah. It makes me think a little bit of COVID where you couldn't meet or talk in person, et cetera. Now you can, but it's just a little more unique and special compared to so much of the other things. My mentor who isn't in this space, he's in like a physical goods space. But he was kind of saying it'll be business will be face-to-face hand-to-hand, basically just meaning like get on a plane, go somewhere. And then obviously zoom is great too, but it, it's kind of that like counter, I guess, way of thinking about it to where you add extra value in this time when it's so easy to not do that. Right. I love the comparison to automation as well. I think it's better than a lot of the comparisons people make to other, you know, technology changes where I really do think, and it really is technically, it's like, well, you're just automating some writing or some interpretation or things. It's not really intelligent or whatever yet. So I like that analogy. So can you give a example maybe, or not quite a use case, but just what is a specific example? Maybe bring that down to earth of, okay, let's use AI to do this thing so that now the human can add value over here.

[05:01] Tyler: Yeah, it's a good question. You and I were talking about this just a little bit before we started the recording, but the use of AI agents, if you're not familiar with that term, basically think of like a chat bot or whatever. But if I go to a website, for example, and I have a question, I might be able to start a conversation with an AI agent, where I ask that question and the agent responds based on some, you know, bank of information that that agent has been exposed to.

[05:34] Micah: And that can be helpful at the same time, just like when we all call, you know, the bank,

[05:40] Tyler: and the bank is like, hey, it's the automated thing, right? And it says, you know, say, you know, speak, you know, sit, well, it might say, say deposits for deposits, or say, you know, balance or whatever. And like, you say something, and it doesn't understand it. And then it comes back with something else silly. And you're like, get so frustrated, or it's like, press number one for this. And you're like, pushing the buttons. And you're like, you know, 10 levels deep into the phone tree. And you're in you still haven't gotten an answer. Like, you have to use these things in a way where it's like, okay, I realize I'm chatting with an AI agent. But as soon as I either take a particular step forward, or I, you know, I'm getting frustrated, then I should be able to interact with a human, right? So allow the AI agent to do that work on the front end, you're going to reduce the number of, you know, customer service reps, or whatever that you have, maybe at sales, if it's on the front end, you reduce the number of reps that you have on the front end. So you're leveraging the technology to cut costs, or you're just say, taking the same reps that you have and freeing them up

[06:42] Micah: to be able to have the deeper conversations with people. Yeah, that does make me think a little bit of what we do with Membarium, where we added a thing using DocSpot to our documentation, so people could interact with it. And we were careful about it. But the more we've used it, the more we've used it, the more I realized, you know, there's a phrase Dobbin used, which is, it's better than the alternative. And so for example, they have our AI agent at night, when there are no reps, better than the alternative, right? But during the day, when there is a rep who can jump in, there's a little bit of a different process where they can basically like move the chat into a ticket and a rep will kind of come online. And, and I think people realize they're chatting with an agent, and it might mess up, right. And we, we try to make the agent mostly point to our documentation rather than try to give an answer in case it gives something wrong. But yeah, it's interesting, you point that out. Yeah,

[07:39] Tyler: go ahead. Oh, I was gonna say, I think it's important to, to be really authentic with this stuff. So if you create an AI agent, have that agent introduce itself as an AI agent, don't try and be a human and trick people, right? Because people will figure it out. Like you said, people are pretty savvy to this stuff. Now, even if they're not, let's say it, let's say they, you know, someone gets on the site, they assume this is a real person. As soon as that interaction feels weird, then they either know, or they're just like, Hey, this person's an idiot. I don't want to do business with this company. Right? So I say have fun with it, like be authentic and be like, Hey, I'm such and such. I'm an AI agent. Please forgive me if I get things wrong. I'll get you up to human as soon as possible. Like, just, just have fun with it and let people know exactly what's happening. Like you said, it's better than the alternative. And I think people might get a little chuckle if you make it fun and, and interact in a, in kind of that fun way, instead of just being like, Hey, I'm trying to be

[08:37] Micah: a human and I'm not doing a very good job of it. I like that. Ben did something within one of our bots or whatever that has a couple of jokes while it's processing, right? About it, it being trained to be more human by learning patients and all this. I think it's, yeah, it at least it's better than just a progress bar, right? If it can come up with some, some weird AI jokes, some land, some don't, obviously. Tell me a little bit. So you mentioned to me that you have made something custom for your membership site, and I should let everybody know, in case you don't know Tyler, we've done some other calls with him. We'll link those below, but

[09:17] Tyler: he's, he's had a variety of, I guess you'd say positions, like you've done your own company,

[09:23] Micah: you've worked within bigger companies. So you just kind of have a breadth of knowledge, but particular to membership sites, you know, you were very successful with yours. You kind of sold that business. And then it sounds like you're starting another with some custom stuff. If you're okay to

[09:36] Tyler: share some of that, that would be great. Sure. Sure. So just to give a little bit of background for people who aren't familiar with the story, I owned an agency that focused on Infusionsoft and Keep customers. We did mostly custom work for those, for those clients. And while we were building that agency, we added on a membership that had training on Infusionsoft and eventually Keep. And we used Membarium for that. It was phenomenal. And then eventually we added some own, some of our own custom functionality to that membership, to allow our clients to go in and submit requests for, for the agency, essentially that we will fulfill. And, you know, essentially it was a glorified ticketing system, but it was, it was much more in depth than that. So that was kind of the, the genesis of it all. We sold that business, sold it back to Keep, actually. I became an employee of Keep and then Keep was acquired by a company called Thrive. And I'm still today an employee of Thrive. I'm a VP of digital marketing at Thrive, a public company. So, and then before all that, I was VP of marketing at,

[10:43] Micah: at Infusionsoft, the original name of Keep. So if that didn't confuse you, I know, I don't know what will. I was trying to get some context, but I think I actually just told a very convoluted story. So I think it's great. You filled in some gaps, but yeah, tell us about your, the site that you want

[11:01] Tyler: to build and how you want to use AI. Yeah. Yeah. So, so years ago at Infusionsoft, we did this thing where we made this claim, said, Hey, we can double the sales of a business in 90 days. And we made a big hoopla about it. It worked. You know, my intention as the marketing leader was, Hey, let's prove that this software works. What I, what I didn't fully appreciate until later when I

[11:28] Micah: was running my agency was that there were, it wasn't just the software. There were fundamental

[11:35] Tyler: marketing principles that we were employing that you can employ in any business with or without any particular software and they will work. Right. And so where I've shifted my focus now is the double your sales club. It's not fully launched yet. It'll be launching in late September, 2025, depending on when you listen to this, that may be in the future or in the past. I don't know. But, um, but, uh, late September, 2025, we'll relaunch the double your sales club. And so the focus is to help business owners learn and understand these fundamental print, fundamental principles of, of growing a business. And one of the hardest parts of all of that for most people is writing copy, right? I mean, I struggle with it. I'm sure you struggle with it. Everyone struggles with it. You sit down, you've got some great thing you want to promote and you open up, you know, your Google doc or whatever. And you're like, what the heck do I write? Where do I start? You might even go look at other sites that you'd like. They're like, oh, Hey, this is really compelling. That's really compelling. I'll use those as kind of, you know, swipe files or whatever. Then you go back to your blank document and you're like, wait, how do I do this? It's so, it's so difficult. Um, but like everything else, it actually can be

[12:45] Micah: formulaic. There are principles behind it. And so anything that's formulaic or systematic or has

[12:50] Tyler: formulas, you can use AI, uh, to follow those steps, those processes, those systems really, really well. So, um, you know, over the many, many years I ran that agency, you know, we built campaigns for everything, you know, opt-in funnels, book funnels, webinar funnels, anything you can think of sales processes. And, uh, so what we're doing is we're feeding all of that great content into AI and inside the membership. So for our members, they'll be able to use a tool where they can go and say, all right, I need a webinar funnel, or I have a five day challenge coming up and they'll select that. They'll answer a few questions behind the scenes. Our AI tool will apply all of the, the systems, the formulas, the strategies that, you know, we've learned and developed over the years. And they're also published in, you know, many books out there and experts who are experts in copywriting. I have studied these things for, for decades, honestly. And so we've put all that in there as training. So then it will spit out to you, okay, here's the landing page copy. Here are the emails to promote it. You know, once they opt in here, the follow-up emails and basically just give you all of that content. Um, but again, it's not just AI content, right? Cause you could go on to chat GPT and be like, Hey, write me a webinar funnel. And it's going to come up with something probably fairly generic and maybe not great, but utilizing an understanding of who your customers are, what their pains are, what their desired outcome is. And then the right copywriting formulas, it can generate really, really good, compelling copy. So that's, that's one of the things we're,

[14:28] Micah: we're doing with AI inside of our membership right now. Yeah. I think it's a dream come true for somebody like you, because you have had these formulas and you've had these worksheets. Like we, at one point, went through your program, uh, and filled out, you know, identifying all of the, um, traditional things you read from all the books, right? You kind of conglomerated it into one system. And, uh, but then you do all that and then it's still up to you to write it. So at least to let AI have like a first swipe at that is so nice. Cause often you'll get things out of it that you just need to tweak a little and it works. You know, you don't necessarily want to always go with it out of, out of the LLM. But, uh, yeah, I think your, your use case is pretty strong because it's a money making use case where if they come use your system and it knows enough about them to provide useful copy and they use it and make money, they're going to use your system more. So it's, it's a really nice, um, wheel. Tell me, um, so you, you actually came to part of the event we did, uh, you were kind of a, on a guest, uh, we were honored to have you. You were a panelist and everything. Um, and we were at that event really going over the basics and then pairing it kind of with some AI prompts, you know, so maybe an early version of what you're talking about as far as like, Hey, here's what to do. And here's how you like feed the LLM that, uh, over time now we've tried to get our plugin to really know more about the person. So they give it more. So it's a more informed prompt. But what I'm curious about, at least from what you saw, I know you only saw part of it. Um, how much of that, because it was basics. I think that was your remark was like, Oh, this is the kind of foundation, the basics. Is that stuff, uh, changing or is that stuff kind of just sitting there? And then what we're talking about with AI and automation is on top of it and I'm okay. You can, you can skewer what we talked about. I'd love an update. Uh, so yeah. Kind of how have your thoughts on,

[16:22] Tyler: on the basics evolved. Yeah, no, I, I, I thought the event was great by the way. Um, and for someone who was new to either memberships or to AI, I thought it was a phenomenal event. Um, if you're more of a membership expert and you used AI a lot, then a lot of would have, a lot of it would have been review. Um, now how is, how has that changed since then? I don't think it's fundamentally changed since the event. Um, what I think we're learning, or at least I'm learning more and more and more is that, um, the more detailed information you give in an AI prompt, the better the response you're going to get. But even more than that, the more, um, systems I'll call it, or the more formulaic information you give, uh, to AI, the better the response here. Here's an example. We were just talking about kind of marketing funnels and things like that. Most people, in their marketing tend to talk too much about the how, right? And so what I mean by that is, let's just take weight loss, for example, because it's a very simple example that everyone's familiar with. Most weight loss, uh, you know, websites or funnels that you run into do a pretty good job because it's very easy to do like before and after, right? You show before and after photos.

[17:39] Micah: Well, that's what everyone in their marketing should do before my product or service or whatever you

[17:45] Tyler: have these pains. After my product or service, you have this outcome, but what's in the middle?

[17:52] Micah: Well, for weight loss, it's a lot of pain, right? It's, you know, you need to eat this silly diet and

[17:58] Tyler: it's really disgusting and you're going to get super tired of it and you need to go lift weights and you got to do all this stuff. And that sounds terrible, but most people, because they're proud of their program, right? They want to go or their product or whatever. They want to go into the details on that stuff and it messes up the copy. It will cause conversion to dive big time if you focus too much on the how. And so if we train AI, for example, not just to get the inputs of like, Hey, tell me about your customer. Tell me about their problems. Tell me about whatever, but train it. Hey, do not teach, right? Only talk about the before and the after. Talk about the pains and the benefits. You know, don't do too much teaching. You give it the formulas to do that correctly. Then you get a much, much better output. And I think just the more we use AI, the more we're learning how to train it in the correct way. Because it's really easy to put something in, get a response. And if that response is better than what you would have come up with on your own, you think it's amazing. But in fact, it might not be that great if you don't know the formulas.

[19:01] Micah: Yeah, it kind of sounds good, but may not be effective sometimes, right?

[19:05] Tyler: Yes, exactly.

[19:09] Micah: So what is an example, either for yourself or a client, maybe even with a kind of larger marketing company, because I'm always curious about that, too, how does it differ? But what's an example of a process where you mentioned kind of, hey, it can generate all these things, but where you're working it into human interaction? And we mentioned kind of a ticketing system and whatnot. But I guess I'm just curious how people ride that line, almost like catching a wave a little bit to use one of your sports. How do they, how do they stay on it to where they're moving fast enough, they're adopting it quick enough, but they're not over adopting and looking silly, you know?

[19:56] Tyler: Yeah, it's a good question. A couple of things come to mind. One is, you know, if you're, if you're not, if you're behind the curve, right now, if you're not adopting it much, you know, you can access a lot of these tools for free. You know, most of them have some kind of free level or free trial version. Just go start to play, right? Just like anything else in your life and dedicate some time to it every day, you know, carve out 10 minutes, 15 minutes a day, and just go start to play with it, get familiar with it, you know, throw it all kinds of questions or scenarios or whatever, just to see what it can do. That will actually prompt your mind to go, oh, I hadn't thought of this, but maybe I could get it to do XYZ for me and my business, right? So just getting familiar, I think is step number one. Step number two is, if you're at the point where you're like, okay, I'm going to employ this in my business, or maybe you already have employed it in your business, just like you should do with any other product or service that you launch, before you do a full launch, get some customer feedback, get a beta group or something like that, and have them tell you, because you might have crafted an experience that in your mind seems amazing. But they go through it, and they come back to you and they say, yeah, you know, this is really clunky over here, or the, you know, the handoff between AI to the human just didn't work well. You know, I spent way too much time with AI trying to get it to do something before it handed me off to the human, and the interaction wasn't natural or whatever, right, you'll get the feedback that you need to dial it in. And I think that's so important, because we tend to, we tend to do this kind of stuff on our own. And we think it's amazing ourselves. And we launch it without getting that outside opinion and feedback. And I think that's just the best way to, to really know if you've nailed it or not.

[21:46] Micah: It makes a lot of sense, because you hear, and I assume you've heard, I've heard so many stories of people, you know, as AI is developing, like, I stayed up all night, and I built this, or I meant that, or I, you know, I built this whole business plan, and so on. Excuse me. And so yeah, I think taking it a little over time, you mentioned kind of putting in some time every day, an analogy, meaning versus like some sprint where you go off in a rabbit hole, and, and you think it's great when you come out the other side. But it's like, you might have had too many Red Bulls, actually, before getting customer feedback, right? Like you're saying. But just kind of getting reps in over time has been interesting. And as a, an example, with a plugin that we're working on, our core premise that we thought was so genius, as soon as we went out to clients, when the first one said, Oh, I'm not gonna use that, I'm gonna use this, we thought, Oh,

[22:41] Tyler: interesting, we didn't expect that. And then when basically five in a row, everybody said the same

[22:45] Micah: thing. It's like, Oh, we were way off, right? And we adjusted. And now, recent demos have gone differently, where they're like, Oh, cool, that was easy. And it's like,

[22:53] Tyler: okay, now we're on track. But we could have, we had to force it into the market, we had to basically

[23:00] Micah: say, Hey, this is beta, this is beginner, we're going to give you a 90 day trial, etc, etc, etc, just to get people engaged. Gerard Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad Ostblad

[23:36] Tyler: provide a really powerful false sense of security. And I'll give you an example and reasoning why.

[23:47] Micah: My son and I are going on this like once in a lifetime surf trip to Indonesia.

[23:52] Tyler: We're going to the Menowai Islands, if you're familiar with those. So it's a boat trip. We'll be on a boat for two weeks and you just surf all day, right? But there's a whole bunch of islands and there's surf spots all over the place. And for those that aren't familiar with surfing, every surf spot reacts differently to waves coming from a different direction. Some spots break with the west swell, some with the southwest swell. They also respond differently with different winds and whatever. You're like, where is Tyler going with this? Well, the reason this is important is because I realized we're going to be on this boat for two weeks and I'm like, I want to make sure we go to the right spots given the conditions every single day, right? And get the best waves of our lives. It's not an inexpensive trip. This is a lot of money and we're gone for two weeks. I want to make sure it's valuable. So I put together this little tool, a little software that allows us to basically select where's the swell direction coming from right now? What are the wind conditions right now? And there's a few other parameters that surfers would care about. And then it will filter down the surf spots and you can click on it and check out that spot and be like, okay, yeah, we want to go surf that spot. But I have a little bit of a coding background, as you know. I'm not like professionally trained or anything, but I've hacked through the last 20 years of a lot of stuff. But I also realized, hey, I can do this faster if I use AI. And so I was running into some errors here and there in my code. And in the process, I was trying to install a web server on my local computer and ran into some issues. So I kept feeding the information to AI. Hey, I ran into this problem. Here's the error. Here's what I'm trying to do. Almost every response that it had for me was, oh, Tyler, you're on the right track. Like it talks very positively to you and it talks very authoritatively. You're on the right track. It's just one step away. All you have to do is this. Now, a lot of times, even though it would say, all you have to do is this, I would follow its exact instructions and I would still have problems. And that's what I'm saying. It gives a false sense of security because the way it talks to you, right? And we assume, hey, this thing knows everything, right? And so we kind of take it as gospel. Oh, yeah, I have this error. This thing told me, oh, yeah, here's the exact fix for that error. I go and I implement it and it didn't work.

[26:16] Micah: I'm like, shoot, like there's, you have to realize that.

[26:19] Tyler: And you do realize after a while, like this thing doesn't know everything or it doesn't know the context of everything you're dealing with. And so, again, just to reiterate what you were saying, it's so important to get that real customer feedback. Even if, you know, technically AI helps you get everything right. If you haven't done the product research, right? And you're releasing a new product and no one wants it, you know, maybe it functionally works fine, but AI is not going to tell you if people want to buy it or not, right? So that's just an essential part of it always.

[26:49] Micah: Dude, it's interesting to me because I feel like this is a conversation that's been had so many times where it really is kind of like the principles, obviously, they don't really change with the technology. And yeah, just getting, you know, kind of like a lean startup approach to this, especially with AI where you can iterate what used to take a month and a lot of money. You might, you might iterate overnight, you know, but then get it to a real customer the next day. Um, I have seen more garbage come out of AI than good things, right? At this point, but I know it'll turn a corner. Maybe that's probably what some people are thinking. And I'd like to get your thoughts on this is, uh, you know, we're investing into this AI thing, not just for where it is now, but where we think it'll be soon or whatever. So, you know, to what degree is that on your mind? Hey, I'm going to build this knowing that, for example, the webinars that generates are going to be maybe like B plus A minus, but soon it'll be AA plus, you know, maybe, I don't know. Uh, what do you think about that?

[27:54] Tyler: Or how do you think about maybe when to get in and where it will be? It's a great question. Um, I believe that the reason I've been able to be effective at marketing is because my background is not in marketing. My background is actually in science. I have a degree in zoology with an emphasis in human biology. You know, let's just say I'm a scientist. By trade, like I learned to test and tweak and test and tweak and test and tweak. And the same thing applies with AI and the stuff that we get back from it. Right. So, um, as we launched the W sales club, my intention is that with our content generator, that everyone will be, you know, hopefully required. We got to figure out a way to do this in a way that works and is natural for the, for the members, but they're required to come back and give us some data on, you know, how well it worked. And then we can tweak our models. Right. And so that's the key is like, you gotta be able to test and tweak, test and tweak, test and tweak. If you assume that you can create something with AI and then just set it and forget it, trust me, it's not going to go well in the longterm, right? It might be something that, that works decently in the beginning, but you know, everything changes over time and we need to continually test and tweak always.

[29:08] Micah: Yeah. Uh, speaking of kind of change in AI with the models, it was originally chat GPT. Um, what are your thoughts on the different models? Are you, you know, have you picked a certain model for a certain task that you think is, is the winner you're going to stick with? Or do you think like, Hey, who knows, uh, I'm going to stick with all of them until something emerges. How do you go about that?

[29:35] Tyler: It's a really good question. Um, I honestly haven't done a lot of research on various different models. I've used primarily chat GPT, um, for content generation, as well as for coding help. Um, it's primarily where, where I played with, I played with some of the image, image and video creation stuff, but more at a very surface level, like, Hey, let's test this out. Let's see how it works. And, and that kind of stuff. Um, you know, what's really interesting though, too, is, uh, the more we get comfortable with these tools, the more we will use them in our lives. And I think that's where we have to be very, very cautious. I saw an article just this morning of a company that was using, uh, AI coding capability. So like what I do is I write my code or I ask it, Hey, write code. And then I go implement it. And then if I have errors, I copy and paste back in say, Hey, help me fix this air. Right. But you can actually set up AI to write and deploy code for you just as a, as a developer would. And so anyway, this company, uh, had an AI coder that, um, had access to their production database and the AI coder deleted 2,400 records of their clients and, and, uh, and customers. And then I can't, uh, I can't, uh, get access to your data and just deleted it. Like, but that happens because. Someone probably started using AI and was like, Hey, this is cool. Hey, it's working. Hey, I trust it. I'm going to put it in this environment, whatever. And we're, we're all going to be subject to that. Right.

[31:05] Micah: At some point we have to be able to say, all right, this thing is now accessing data.

[31:11] Tyler: I don't want it to access, or I know it's going to want to access data. I don't want to. And I think we need to figure out where to put up those barriers because it can get very interesting.

[31:21] Micah: Yeah. Let's, uh, let, let's talk about that for a second because I, you know, on the one hand, maybe we all need to watch all the Terminator movies and all the sci-fi. Right. And just kind of reinforce the fear, you know, be a little smart. Um, because yeah, with the, like you said, there's so much confidence in some of these things, especially when it's right. You're like, Whoa, if it can do this, it can do that. Um, and it sounds so confident. Um, I, I've even heard at one point, uh, kind of this idea that part of the reason it sounds that way when it's wrong is because there's so much false information on the internet that it digested that sounds that way. Right. So confident about being wrong, uh, which I was like, Oh, that's, um, but.

[32:04] Tyler: Yeah.

[32:05] Micah: As far as barriers go, what I'm kind of curious about specifically, let's say with the membership site is, let's say you do implement AI and you say, Hey, yeah, I'm going to let this, um, design webinar funnels in your case. How do you keep people from hijacking it? You know, do you have a worry about people hijacking it or maybe it somehow creating something that's really off the rails and hurts your business? You hope it doesn't, but is that a something you can guard against or just, yeah.

[32:32] Tyler: Yeah. It's a great question. In that particular case, there's two things. One is, um, it's inside our membership site, right? So there's a level of, of, you know, only certain people can access it and, uh, they have to be logged in. And then aside from that, when they actually utilize the tool, you know, we control the inputs that they put into it. So all of our prompting structure is on the backend, you know, customers can't see it. Um, they can't manipulate it and whatever. They can only type into the inputs that we give it, uh, or that we allow the customers to, to type into. You just gave me a, an interesting thought though, which is what if they start writing actual commands into that? Um, we probably need to do some kind of preliminary step to say, to review it, to say, Hey, is this a command? And if so, we need to spit back to the customer. Hey, you can't put that. Um, and if it's not, then we allow it to go through. And I hadn't thought about that, but that's absolutely something we need to implement. Cause you're right. It could be, it could be hijacked in various different ways.

[33:38] Micah: Yeah. And I mean, some of those might be nefarious. Some of them might just be wasteful. Um, but you know, Ben was even telling me, he's like, Oh yeah, I got the Amazon thing. That's supposed to do this to write me an ebook. And it's like, you know, just, just, just kind of like getting around. Well, what if you could do it? Could you do it for me because I'm a special customer of the company? Well, I guess. Okay. You know? Um, but yeah, especially when you let it access database and things like that.

[34:02] Tyler: Um, because ours, for example, uh, is writing to the database and it's writing particularly

[34:09] Micah: for that member. So that as they come back into the site, it remembers previous sessions and kind of, you know, builds on it. But it is scary, right? Just what you said, like, Oh, one of them just deleted a bunch of records. It's like, what if it optimizes the database one day? Right.

[34:24] Tyler: Yeah. Yeah. You gotta be careful with that stuff. So just, just curious, does your AI actually write directly to your database or does it come back with a response? And then you have code that writes that response to the database.

[34:38] Micah: So it is a plugin that is doing this, right? So the chat window is just an integration and the plugin is controlling, you know, it's basically saving the chat and then it'll pull the chat back out next time they come in.

[34:49] Tyler: Um, but yeah, it does, it does make me wonder.

[34:53] Micah: And especially as we go into agents, because I know that's, that's coming up next year. I think the theme of our event next year is going to be more around agents, agentics, whatnot, uh, in relation to memberships.

[35:04] Tyler: And so the more we empower those, the more, you know, I, I'm sure it'll settle down just

[35:09] Micah: like when you started giving employees digital access to things from home, right? People started to figure out how to do authentication better, but there's, there's definitely the, um, frontier of what's happening. That's going to be kind of messy, kind of interesting, but a lot of opportunity. Uh, I assume you are very opportunity minded about all of this. Uh, I am as well. It is though, and has been when I was first, when I, I guess when I was, when I was avoiding it and just kind of watching it and wondering, it was way scarier. And then once we embraced it, even though we hadn't solved everything, just being on the

[35:43] Tyler: path felt empowering, I would say. Yeah.

[35:46] Micah: Um, that's funny.

[35:47] Tyler: Cause I, I feel the opposite. I feel like in the beginning I was like, oh yeah, this is super cool. All the, all the people that are worried about it, they shouldn't worry one bit. And, uh, the more I get into it and I'm actually utilizing the more I start to get concerned. I mean, you just, you just brought up a great example of like inside of our content generator,

[36:05] Micah: could people enter a command and make it do something we don't want it to do?

[36:09] Tyler: That's, that starts to get me thinking. It's interesting.

[36:15] Micah: Yeah. It's, uh, like I said, we should, we should watch all the sci-fi. In fact, I only am partially kidding about that. In one of the Elon Musk books, it talks about how so much of what he's doing and how he thinks is because he read all this sci-fi. So it's not like he's coming up with things. He's more just like, why don't we have this yet? And that yet? And the other thing yet from, you know, the future. Um, but, but yeah, the, you know, the whole end of the world, things are good, uh, you know, good thing to avoid. And then within the membership site, let's say figuring out how to put those rails on.

[36:47] Tyler: And I think of it as kind of like a Russian nesting doll where, um, whatever they say,

[36:53] Micah: yeah, that needs to be reviewed. And you need to have a bunch of, at the end of all of that. And we kind of tested this to say, well, when you feed the AI things, what's it taking more seriously, the beginning of the paragraph or the end?

[37:03] Tyler: Cause if I say at the beginning, under no circumstances do this and somewhere in the

[37:07] Micah: middle, it says to do that, right? What, how does it think about that? Um, versus flipping it around. And so we kind of played with that to, to give the membership side owner a little bit of control where they can kind of say, Hey, general instructions should override kind of step level and responses and things.

[37:24] Tyler: Um, but it, it has been an interesting, um, it's like a, uh, creature that you're working

[37:31] Micah: with. It's not like a computer program. Exactly. Right. Um, it's not, I know at the end of the day, there's some database, right. And it's math and so on, but not like normal coding was. So, um, it's funny to hear you say like, Oh yeah, I'm, I'm a little more worried as we go. I feel that as well. Um, but I guess in the short term, we all get to, you know, as marketers and automation people capitalize on it a bit as to our customers. So share a little bit more about maybe the double your sales club, um, in this iteration, aside from, you know, AI powering it, what other things have changed, I guess, over the years, what, what maybe have you needed to add? Um, and I know we don't want to talk too much about the how necessarily. Right.

[38:16] Tyler: But, um, yeah, how has that evolved?

[38:19] Micah: How is, how has the actual doubling of sales evolved if it has, you know, the, the fundamental

[38:26] Tyler: principles are still the same. And that's what I find really, really fascinating. I mean, I, and I don't think they'll change ever. Right. So, so we'll just, we'll just talk through them.

[38:37] Micah: You know, this is, you're going to get a little, uh, a little taste of what's in the W sales club, uh, and the content. But, um, if you think about any business, they really all have to say, do the same thing.

[38:49] Tyler: You have to get traffic or, you know, if you're, if your business doesn't get web traffic, you still have to get traffic. However, that looks, whether it's, you know, listeners on the radio or people walking into your physical store or whatever that is, right. You have to get exposure. People have to be able to find you. You have to then capture those people so that you can follow up with them as leads. Then you have to convert them into a sale. And then once they're a customer, uh, you need to basically maximize opportunity with that customer or maximize value that you're providing to the customer, uh, which is, you know, upsells, referrals, testimonials, online reviews, you know, retention. If you have a membership model or subscription model, you know, all those types of things. So it's, it's really just those four things, get more traffic, capture more leads, convert

[39:35] Micah: more of them into sales and sell more things to the same people.

[39:40] Tyler: Every business has to do those four things. Uh, no matter what, no matter what kind of business you are. And so, you know, the systems, the reason most businesses don't function well in one or all of those areas is because they don't have systems in place. And that's what we do in the W sales club is help them implement the systems to make those things predictable. Right.

[40:02] Micah: So, um, in terms of, you know, your question, what has changed?

[40:07] Tyler: Those fundamentals haven't changed. I don't think they're ever going to change. Um, but what will change and what continues to change is how you do the things inside each of those systems. Right. So, I mean, back in the day, all we had was direct mail, then phones and then email and then text messages and, you know, now AI and whatever. So you'll, the technology we utilize to, uh, get each of those systems to function correctly will continue to change and evolve. I think that's actually the thing that messes most people up in today's world is they get caught up in the technology. They forget those fundamentals. They forget, Hey, I need to build a system in each of those.

[40:48] Micah: And they get chasing the latest tool, right?

[40:52] Tyler: Ooh, AI, Ooh, this social tool, or, you know, Ooh, this webinar funnel. And, uh, you know, you go to a conference, you hear some expert on stage, talk about their million dollar funnel and you need it too. And so they buy it and they implement it and it doesn't work. It's like, stay close to the fundamentals, then figure out how to actually execute the fundamentals, whether it's AI or something in the future, it doesn't matter. Um, those, those, you know, tactics will change, but the strategies basically stay the same forever. The principles.

[41:23] Micah: You know, this might be a silly, uh, analogy, but it makes me think of sports where they might be in kind of like different arenas or have new fancy shoes or there's cameras, but it's like the, the sport is largely similar, you know, the fundamentals of that sport.

[41:39] Tyler: Um, this has been really cool.

[41:42] Micah: Is there anything else you want to share with people who are, and let's, let's talk for a sec. We talk a lot about the beginners, but let's say people at the top end, people kind of doing well, because, um, for example, I know somebody who they had a great year last year. They're looking at a great year this year, along camp comes AI. And it's kind of like, Whoa, you know, how much, how much are our members going to be able to, let's say, just use some general model, um, that, that knows us at this point, based on all of our content that we've put out thinking that was good marketing. Right. Um, so yeah, let's say somebody kind of over a million with a membership who might feel that they actually have exposure of loss, not just opportunity. Uh, what are some thoughts for somebody like that?

[42:30] Tyler: So it's a good question. Um, and I'll, I'll back up with a little bit of a story here. My dad, um, was a, was a photographer for 40 years, commercial photographer. So he had a studio, he shot products, mainly cars, um, but all kinds of kind of high tech. And, you know, he was an expert at, at lighting, shiny things, cars and shiny equipment, whatever,

[42:54] Micah: which is very, very difficult to do without weird reflections and things like this.

[42:58] Tyler: The reason I bring him up is, um, I, I observed him do this over the years and actually talked to him about it. As I got older, I observed him reinvent himself many, many times over the years. Um, yeah, he, he was very, very well-known car photographer in LA. If you remember the Motor Trend magazine, like he shot the covers for that many, many times. Like he, he was kind of the guy, um, when it comes to, to car photography. Well, things changed, right? Just like we're, we're seeing in our lives that, you know, that, that technology changed and, uh, and not just technology, but techniques and also what the customers are looking for. And, you know, today it might be a, a nice well-lit studio shot and next month, maybe they want a, a shot of the car, you know, banking a hard turn out in the forest or something. You know, it's like the, the customer's needs change and the, the market changes and technology changes and whatever. So, you know, he of course started back in the film day. I remember asking him in high school, dad, do you think he'll ever go digital? It's like, no way, no way will film ever recreate the quality or will, will digital ever recreate, recreate the fall, the quality of film. Two years later, he's like all digital, right? Like, like that, that, that changed. Um, he became, he, he put himself back in school to learn Photoshop, became an expert in Photoshop to the point where he was billing a higher hourly rate for Photoshop work than he was for his photography work. You know, I just saw him like reinvent himself over and over and over to keep up with, with technology. And I think that's key, a key lesson for all of us, uh, in today's world, even aside from technology, just business in general, you will always hit plateaus. You had a good year last year. You had a good year this year. It might be a great year next year. Eventually you're going to hit a plateau guaranteed. You have to figure out how to reinvent yourself, reinvent the business to get out of those plateaus. That's just, that's just the nature of, of business and life. You know, you get comfortable and things will slow down. And if you want to keep growing, guess what? You're going to go through some pain, right? I mean, we all experienced that in the gym. You go in the gym and if, uh, if you start getting comfortable with your workouts, guess what? You got to change them up and then it gets painful again. And then you're like, oh shoot, I'm sore. I'm really sore again. Uh, you just have to keep changing it up. So, you know, for those companies that are more established, uh, that are doing well, they're looking at AI. Um, yeah, I think they just have to be looking at how can we reinvent ourselves to stay relevant, to create, um, new aspects of the business, of the market, of, um, you know, new, whether it's new products or new services, you know, you, you got to stay ahead of this stuff because it's all moving so fast and it's moving faster and faster and faster. Um, and so if you, if you don't stay relevant to your customers, which requires reinvention, you'll fall behind.

[46:00] Micah: It's a perfect place to end. Where can people connect with you?

[46:06] Tyler: Yeah. Um, just go to w sales club.com. And, uh, like I said, it's not launched yet, but you'll be able to, uh, opt in to get on the list and, uh, we'll get you information about that soon.

[46:18] Micah: Well, sweet. We'll put a link to that under the video. I'm sure we'll be using your product. I'm pretty interested in seeing how you do everything as well as actually retuning our marketing, which I'll be, you know, picking your brain on here soon as well. Tyler, thank you so much for joining us. Um, thank you for sharing your thoughts. Really appreciate your time.

[46:37] Tyler: Yeah, no worries. Thank you so much for having me on.