7 Things We Stopped Doing Manually Using Claude Connectors

Monica Froese [00:00:00]:
If you’ve been hearing the term MCP connectors lately and wondering what it actually means for your business, this episode is for you. Welcome back to the Empowered Business Podcast. I got together with five of my closest business friends, all women who run online businesses, and we recorded a conversation about how we are using MCP connectors inside our cloud accounts to automate workflows that we used to do manually. Some of us were spending hours every week on things that now just happen, and a few of the examples we share in this episode made the whole group stop and stare at each other. Before I introduce everyone, let me give you the quick version of what an MCP connector is. It is an open standard created by Anthropic, the company behind Claude, and it allows Claude to securely connect to your external tools. So instead of copying and pasting data between apps or logging into five different platforms to pull reports, Claude can go get that information for you, take action inside those tools, and bring everything back into one place. In this conversation, we get into Kit, Airtable, Fathom, Meta, Shopify, Google Calendar, and more.

Monica Froese [00:01:06]:
We talk about the specific workflows we have built, what they have replaced, and how we are thinking differently about the tools we choose to use in our businesses now that connectors exist. All right, let’s jump in to today’s episode with my friends, Destiny Kap, Stephanie Blake, Ruth Pound White, Liz Stapleton, and Jodi Bourne. Okay, welcome everyone to another roundtable with my friends in my peer mastermind called the Weird Hermits. This is a group of 11 of us, there’s six of us here right now and we are here to talk about mcts in Claude, also known as connectors. And really it allows us to automate a lot of our workflows and that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. So before we kick it off, I just want to go around the room and have everyone introduce themselves. So I will call on you first. Destiny.

Dr. Destini Copp [00:01:55]:
Hi, my name is Destiny Kopp and I run two brands. One is my B2C brand called Hobby School. And then I have my personal brand, my destinycop.com brand which is the Creators MBA where I help digital product entrepreneurs get that consistent revenue in their business.

Steph Blake [00:02:12]:
Hi everyone, I am Steph Blake. It’s what I do in my B2B business is really focus on helping entrepreneurs simplify and automate their businesses so that they can work 20 hours per week or less. And I also created a tool called Block Builder which you have probably heard about by now as well.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:02:31]:
Hi everyone. I am Ruth Poundwhite and I support business owners with their soulful sales and aligned AI to help you sell and use AI in a way that’s supports your capacity, your values and your personality.

Monica Froese [00:02:46]:
Love it.

Liz Stapleton [00:02:47]:
Liz My name is Liz Stapleton. I run two B2B brands. First is ElizabethStapleton.com where I use my attorney, my background as an attorney to help online entrepreneurs understand the legal side of running an online business. And then over at Creator Ops Hub I help creators systemize and organize and scale with automations and systems that keep their life in check so they’re not stressing and digging around everywhere.

Monica Froese [00:03:12]:
Love that. Jodi.

Jodi Bourne [00:03:14]:
I’m Jodi Bourne have two B2B businesses as well. One is I’ve I help host the vacation rentals, glamping resorts and boutique hotels, elevate their brand and get more bookings and through that I started Born Strategic AI Solutions and that’s where I’m helping people build out custom skill builds typically around getting found by AI, but all sorts of skill builds, blogging and all of that.

Monica Froese [00:03:42]:
And I’m Monica Froese and going along with our theme here. I also have two brands. My B2B brand is Empowered Business where I help content creators create high converting digital products and also start their e commerce shops on Shopify. And B2C is Redefining Mom where I’m now helping moms get started with AI. Okay, so to kick it off, I think I want to preface this with saying everyone in this room was before even AI really became a thing. Definitely before automations became accessible on AI, we were all at various levels of automation. I will be the first to say that I had not automated very much. The extent of my automating was what I could figure out in Zapier, however you want to say it.

Monica Froese [00:04:25]:
And it wasn’t. It really wasn’t helping me save time. I can say that maybe a little bit of time, but nothing was really automated and a lot of my data was useless to me because even though I love spreadsheets, I had, I had to manually update everything. So I was definitely behind, I think. And now I feel like AI has put us on a pretty even level playing field with what we can access in a way that’s very easy to understand. Okay, so let’s start by defining what an MCP is. And I think the easiest way to do this is actually just to read the definitions from Google because otherwise we might just botch it. So I pulled it up before we started recording and what an MCP is.

Monica Froese [00:05:08]:
It’s an Open standard created by Anthropic, which Anthropic created CLAUDE AI and it allows AI assistants to securely connect to external tools, databases and data sources. It eliminates the need for custom integrations letting AI systems easily plug into various systems to read, run code or retrieve real time context. And what I think is really important about this is mcps. It’s like a two way conversation. You can ask the MCP tool to go out and do stuff for you in these external tools and also bring information back to you, which is really cool. So I think where I’d like to start is to go around the room and talk about what MCPS you’re using currently in your business. What are you using in your business right now that’s the most impactful? So let’s go around the room and talk about that. Who wants to go first?

Steph Blake [00:06:03]:
I use a lot of different connectors in my CLAUDE accounts. I use CLAUDE specifically for everything with the exception of image generation. I use ChatGPT for that because it is so good. So I’ve not created images in ChatGPT lately, go use that. But for my CLAUDE connectors specifically, the ones that I use that save me the most time is airtable, Fathom, Gmail and now very recently Kit as of a couple of days ago and then also as of yesterday the Meta Ads connector as well. And I would say and I think everybody here is on Kit for their email, right? I think that I can say for everybody here in the room that has been one of the most impactful connectors for our businesses because it gives us so much data from our emails which I don’t know about you guys, but I was just not looking at before I had an Airtable spreadsheet but I had a team member go in and manually update that and half the time the data wasn’t correct. So that has probably been my favorite one Bad and Airtable. I use a lot of them together.

Steph Blake [00:07:05]:
But I would say probably Kit and airtable are my favorite.

Monica Froese [00:07:08]:
What I find interesting about the Kit MCP is that it uncovers data that I it was not accessible in our accounts. It there really was no way to see that. And it also identifies patterns very simplistic way that I used it and somebody in the group actually made me think of this. I think it might have been Ruth. But the other day I went in and said hey, out of my community members. So I have a paid community called the Empowered business society. There’s 119, 120 people in there. I wanted to know the commonalities how long have they been on my list? What other things have they purchased for me? What is their lifetime value? There.

Monica Froese [00:07:46]:
There was really no way for me to holistically look at that. I’ve sold 100 different products over the years that people have been on my list. And it bucketized it. And it also makes it look pretty. And then it helps me understand the types of people that are buying into these programs. So I can. My warmer people, I can message a little bit differently and bucketize them a little differently.

Steph Blake [00:08:08]:
I just also want to quickly give a shout out to Destiny because she put together a great blog post on how to create a dashboard from Kit. It was on my list and then she shared and I was like, oh my gosh, I’m just copying everything that Destiny said.

Monica Froese [00:08:19]:
It was great.

Steph Blake [00:08:20]:
So Monica, we should link to that.

Monica Froese [00:08:21]:
We should. And at the. When we linked to it, I actually took that article, put it into my cowork, asked it to analyze what Destiny was doing. It built me a dashboard based on her blog post and well, no, I have it. And actually, do you want to talk about what your dashboard does, Destiny? And also maybe what live artifacts are. Because I feel like fits in here.

Dr. Destini Copp [00:08:42]:
Yeah. So I just really, when I got access to the kit ncp, I just started playing around with it. So I just had it connect to it. And literally everything you said in that transcript, I took that and put it into Claude and I said I now have access to help me analyze this and build all of this out. So that’s basically just so you guys know where that dashboard came from. And it just went into my account. It just started pulling everything and just started really digging into a broadcast and what was going on with my subscribers. And I don’t have it in front of me right now.

Dr. Destini Copp [00:09:20]:
It just gave me such a wealth of information and it gave me some areas that I really needed to go back in and maybe take a look at. For instance, I’ll give you a specific here. In my kid, on both of my accounts, I have a pretty strong aggressive, I should say cold subscriber sequence. So people coming in and if they’re not engaging, it basically kicks them out. And what I realized after really looking at that data, I was probably being more aggressive than what I needed to be. So it helped me go in and just look at those cold subscriber emails and adjust how aggressive I’m being there. So I’m anxious to give that some time, like six months to roll and go back and analyze it. But the other thing that I did that I thought was really cool.

Dr. Destini Copp [00:10:13]:
And it really, it just came out of that transcript was I set up a Monday report that went back and it’s basically analyzing everything that happened the week before in my brands, my emails, and just basically saying, okay, here’s where people are coming from. So it’s doing a lot of that analysis too, which I need that I haven’t had that in the past. I always commit to go and do that on a regular basis and because it wasn’t readily available to me, I just let it fall by the wayside. So I don’t know. I’m with Steph and I’m looking at all the connectors in my account and there’s some that I really like. Like I’m going to dig into the Shopify one, the Meta Ads one that I started digging into was really cool. I have the HTML pop, I have Descript, I have Canva Gamma is another one I use a lot. But that Kit MCP is I think going to really move the needle in my business.

Monica Froese [00:11:08]:
And the dashboard that you built, is it a live artifact?

Steph Blake [00:11:12]:
Yes.

Dr. Destini Copp [00:11:13]:
Basically it can go in and anytime that I need it to update, it will update the challenge that I have. And I know that a lot of people here have multiple businesses. I have two separate kits account and it only allows me to connect one. It only allows me to connect one of the accounts at a time. So if I need to go in and do an analysis of my other account, I have to disconnect it and go in and connect it again with just campaign. So I’m hoping that they’re going to be able to fix that, but I’m just living with it at the point.

Liz Stapleton [00:11:47]:
Not that, not to try to troubleshoot, but I also have multiple Kit accounts and I actually hadn’t thought of this, but could you keep the one you have connected in Claude and go to Codex and connect the other one and then have the Codex just pull the data to send a Claude?

Dr. Destini Copp [00:12:02]:
You probably could. I haven’t done a lot of work in Codex yet, but that’s definitely something to check into Marc and then let me know.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:12:09]:
Liz, I will say that Zapier lets you do MCP connections, so what you can do is connect Zapier to Claude. I have this with my Gmail, so I want it to use different accounts in Gmail. It does confuse it sometimes, but one of them is connected via the direct Claude Gmail connector and one of them is connected via the Zapier MCP connected to Claude. So it’s getting a Bit technical, but there are workarounds. But this is all such new stuff, right? I’m sure that they are going to keep iterating and improving and this is definitely going to be a problem for a lot of us who have multiple accounts and these things.

Monica Froese [00:12:48]:
The other thing I did so I didn’t even have to use Kodak. I just went into normal chatgpt and I connected my B2C account for kit and that I chose Claude. I want my main brand to be there where the most of my money is coming in. So that’s why I didn’t connect the redefining mom brand. But I still want the same insights I could get. And ChatGPT did a great job at breaking down very similar insights that Claude did. So that’s another way you can still leverage when you have two different accounts. With my Shopify mcp, I actually and I haven’t run into any issues, but when I’m analyzing different shops, I just reconnect it to whatever shop I need to analyze for whatever I’m doing at that moment.

Steph Blake [00:13:30]:
So.

Monica Froese [00:13:31]:
So that’s another thing you can do. All right, so what other MCPs do we want to talk about? Wants to.

Liz Stapleton [00:13:39]:
I’ll jump in. So I already talked about Kit a little bit. I actually haven’t dived into the Kit MCP as much as you guys have a lot of this stuff. I’d been heavily using the Kit API before connecting it to airtable. So I already had my data set. But actually analyzing it, something I’m starting to do, I do that you can create create sequences with it. So it’s helping to automate. When I set up a JV workshop is okay, go create the sequence and create the email to ensure the onboarding of the workshop or whatever.

Liz Stapleton [00:14:08]:
And then like Steph, I also do a lot of airtable and what I love about Airtable is pretty much in every thing I’m doing, whether it’s Codex, whether it’s Cowork. And now I’m starting to mess around with Anti Gravity a little bit, which is Google’s version of Cowork and Codex that isn’t quite as good, but it’s still interesting. I use airtable so it’s a single source of truth. So I’m never having to go dig be like where was the chat I was doing this in? Right. So it just is always pulling it into some airtable base that I have. So then it’s easy for me to find and view later or to connect and be like, oh, I think that’s in that one, can you go pull there and have it pull in things from multiple airtable bases if need be. And then the other one I use a lot is ClickUp. So anytime I need to do stuff is creating my tasks.

Liz Stapleton [00:14:51]:
So I have quite a few automations. I use both Claude cowork and codecs for it. Mostly I use cloud cowork for actually writing things where it’s more creative outputs. And then Codex can do a lot of other things, work with the image generation, create a featured image. It’s all in an airtable base because that’s what I had set up before all these tools came out. But it will go into ClickUp and be like, okay, within all the blog posts and the statuses, here’s what you need to do for each one.

Monica Froese [00:15:15]:
And then I just have to go

Liz Stapleton [00:15:16]:
click and look at that exact thing and check it off my list. So it’s just making it easy for me to look at my day and be like, okay, this is what I have to get up and I don’t have to go digging or wondering. But it has been super helpful. So airtable and ClickUp I’d say are probably my most used just because it’s keeping all my stuff centralized, it’s keeping all my tasks in one place, keeping all my data and information in another and single source of truth approach.

Monica Froese [00:15:42]:
So I think one of the things that’s important for people to know is so we can send data out, get data back, but these tools can stack on top of each other. So when I’m thinking about how am I going to track my churn for my membership and have a good grasp on my data for that, it was very manual. And now with these MCPs, the things I would have to do like untagging in kit, making sure that the form always matched who was in there, what happens when someone churns. All I have to do now is download the CSV of active members, put it in and this automation kicks off from a scale. So I have a skill that’s basically saying when I drop the CSV for active members, it will do a series of tasks for me. It will call the airtable mcp, update the database, it then updates, it goes to my HTML pub and it updates my member dashboard like my visual member dashboard for me to see it and then it does all that kit work, all of which was pretty much manual for me before this. And now I just have to drop a CSV, walk away from my computer and come back to a very pretty dashboard.

Liz Stapleton [00:16:47]:
I just remembered A kit MCP I actually do use quite a lot is for updating snippets. So my email template has these three sections and I basically it’s where I’m sharing events I’m part of. Those are where the mentions, the blurbs, affiliate products, whatever and I have an airtable base that’s scheduled and then every day the codex goes in. It looks hey, do I need to update any of the snippets? Have the dates changed and I’ll just go do it if need be. So I love that.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:17:15]:
Liz, thank you for sharing that. And Destiny shared before how we take these transcripts and we get stuff out of them. Like when you have you can have our fathom notetaker can be connected to Claude, can be connected to whatever you can get it to work just from the chat. It’s amazing. I want to zoom out a bit and there’s so many cool use cases but for me, what’s such a game changer? As someone who like Monica said right at the start like some of us are less, we’re a bit more behind in terms of the automating. I would count myself with that Also I tend to get really overwhelmed with loads of information or when there’s multi steps where I have to go to different tools all the time. Keeping it in a central place for me has just been so amazing for my brain and being able to ask questions. Literally the other day I went in and I said okay, check my kit account who signed up as a paying member for my latest launch and tell me like how long they’ve been in my world or what they have in common and all of that.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:18:14]:
But that for me is the biggest game changer and what I will say is so many cool use cases that you’re all sharing. My biggest hack for this, as someone who is not an expert in terms of tech and automation, is to voice record speak out loud your entire process and just brain dump it. Even speaking, it’s so much easier than typing. Doesn’t matter if you say it in the wrong order, it doesn’t matter if you get it wrong and think of something later. And then the AI tool of choice that you are using will put it into an order. You can get it to search for the connected. So I had a process where in one of my offers I’m doing regular updates and then every time I record a audio update it has to be transcribed, it has to go to a podcast, has to go to an email, has to go to a member area. This is a lot of steps.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:18:57]:
And I just verbalized it all. And some of the tools I use don’t have the connectors, but some of them do. But it’s still put it into a process. And I’ve handed off as much as I can and even the bits that I have to do manually. It makes it very easy. And just tell me, here’s the link. Go do that one little thing. So for me is such a game changer.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:19:16]:
All of this stuff when we are individual business owners is in our heads taking up space and energy. And it’s just exhausting sometimes trying to figure it out. And we don’t even know what we don’t know. And it’s just making it so much less overwhelming and more powerful. Insights than ever.

Steph Blake [00:19:34]:
Totally agree.

Monica Froese [00:19:35]:
And he said recently he was like, if you can dream it, you can build it now. And so now when I think of something and I’m like, I don’t know how to do that. I don’t even know if that’s possible. Just go ask AI if it can

Monica Froese [00:19:48]:
do it for you.

Monica Froese [00:19:49]:
And oftentimes now it will come back and say it can. So, Jodi, what about you? How are you using mcps?

Jodi Bourne [00:19:55]:
I watched a video a couple weeks ago and the guy said, think of an MCP as your extra hand. And that kind of clicked really well for me. Oh yeah, there’s so much I could do with an extra physical hand. So one of my favorite things that I just developed this week, late last week. So I have a lot of meetings. Cause I have client calls and I’m teaching a group. And I now have. It’s connected to the Fathom, which is what I use for my.

Jodi Bourne [00:20:22]:
For my meeting transcriber. As soon as it checks every hour for a new call, which I’m probably going to change that up to twice a day because every hour is a little much. It checks for a new call. And I have. I created my own skill for called the transcript debrief. So it pulls out any testimonials from a client, a to do list for me, a to do list for my assistant, a to do list for the client, a brief summary that I call client facing summary. And then Jody facing summary. And then it drafts my email to the client with the to do list and puts Hannah’s tasks into asana and schedules them all in four minutes.

Jodi Bourne [00:21:04]:
And watching do y’ all find this like watching them run? You’re just like, I’m just gonna sit back and drink some wine and watch

Steph Blake [00:21:12]:
my little assistant run over.

Monica Froese [00:21:14]:
Mine was the last event that I ran when I was sitting there holding my cat, petting the cat and my presentation was being built in front of me with my speaking note and I’m like, what in the world is happening right now? And it looks, it’s incredible and incredible. A lot of this. I think everyone, I want everyone to remember that I get really good presentations out of it. Keep in mind it’s really as good as our inputs too. We know our topics, we’re feeding it the information. I fed it dozens and dozens of my transcripts to understand how I talk in my inflection so that my speaking notes come back. I’ve spent a lot of time educating it on my brand standards and different things I like to see in presentations, feeding it presentations that I’ve built from scratch over the years. So we have to remember that too.

Monica Froese [00:22:03]:
We used to say incorporate. Yeah like we used to say incorporate junk in, junk out when we were talking about data. Same thing with AI junk in, junk out. So we still have to spend that time educating anyone else ever.

Liz Stapleton [00:22:15]:
Because I know I used. I know Monica used to work corporate. I used to work corporate. I think most of us at some point had a corporate job. We’re like, oh my God, my job would have been so much easier.

Monica Froese [00:22:25]:
I’m really wondering how obsolete that’s going to be with these MCTs. I don’t know. So yes, I do think how incredible the amount of spreadsheets I used to work in corporate and vlookups and all this stuff.

Steph Blake [00:22:36]:
My corporate job is obsolete now. I went to school for graphic design. That’s not a thing anymore.

Monica Froese [00:22:41]:
That’s.

Steph Blake [00:22:41]:
That was before canva aging myself. And I also did pr. I did corporate management, like all aerobike can definitely take over the job that I used to have. But one thing that I wanted to add on to what you said, Monica, about pulling your brand voices is one thing I started doing is adding literally every single one of my calls from fathom into airtable. So it’s not only it literally pull. It doesn’t pull a full transcript because it’s too long, but cloud will go through and it will pull out the most important pieces and it’ll give me talking points for future emails. And it’s a whole spreadsheet that it pulls together and that has been so great for writing emails, writing sales pages. Cause I just say reference my fathom airtable base and it has literally me speaking.

Steph Blake [00:23:26]:
It has my tone of voice it can pull. It knows when it’s me talking in there and that just I don’t even have to upload anything, I don’t have to upload the brand standards. It’s just literally pulling from it. And if something in my life changes, then it’s going to know that too. It’s just all reflected in there.

Monica Froese [00:23:40]:
So I use a lot of different MCPs and it’s really hard to narrow down a saver because I really think they all work in conjunction with each other in a lot of ways. But I am going to pick that meta ad one that recently I got access to both my account and the reason I’m going to pick this one and talk about it is because I think it’s going to demonstrate a few different things that I want to cover in terms of skills, kicking off workflows, tasks in cowork, kicking off workflows, and then also what these live artifacts are. When I taught ads for a long time and I find that I’m pretty good at ads and I understand how to read the data and lo and behold, I’m again mind blown by the data I can get out of my ad account that I don’t even know if I knew how to find all this data it’s giving to me now. So when I got access to the meta ads mcp, I simply open my flawed desktop app at I went to cowork, I said hey, you’re connected to the meta ads mcp. I want to run a report on these ads I’m running right now in my account. I didn’t tell it what data I wanted, I just asked for a report of how they are performing and it created this thing called a live artifact which lives in the cloud, desktop and live artifacts can be they basically every time you click on it, it pulls a fresh feed from that mcp so it’s always updated. So just to give an idea of what this could do. So I just, while you all were talking had it pull fresh data and it’s telling me today so far we’re like halfway through the day on the east coast.

Monica Froese [00:25:10]:
I’ve spent $75.50, I’ve reached 1,217 people, I’ve had 77 clicks and a click through rate of 22.25% ending a $2.54 cost per lead on my carousel ad. But my video ad is giving me $4.13 and the analysis was the static ad campaign is a clear winner delivering 20 leads at $2.54 and a CPM of 49:28. Meanwhile, the video ad is underperforming significantly Despite a higher click through rate, it costs 62% more per lead and carries a 46% higher cost CPM indicating either audience mismatch or poor click to conversion quality on video Creative and then it gave me four next steps to take right now to improve my ads. Everyone we’re all looking into it like it’s so good.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:26:00]:
Monica that’s so I’m just even loading the ads manager is so clunky and slow and then reordering all the columns and all of that. That is just brilliant.

Jodi Bourne [00:26:10]:
Monica I have a client that just told me that her ads team told her not to connect the meta mcp. I told her I think it’s because they don’t want you to see that data is agree they probably don’t want you that deep in that data. So connect and see what it’s telling you because she could be spending a

Monica Froese [00:26:31]:
lot of money in audience buckets she didn’t know she was doing. There could be tons of things she could improve creatively. Even the fact it I never would have even thought about the fact that there’s a mismatch with the video to the landing page and it connected those dots. I didn’t even have to think it’s just like here it’s the disconnect. Go fix it or allocate your ad spend to the ad that’s getting half the lead cost.

Steph Blake [00:26:55]:
I most wonder if it could replace a tool like Kairos. I have not played with it but it seems like I can. And if anybody has used that that is not achievable.

Monica Froese [00:27:03]:
It gives you $400 a month.

Liz Stapleton [00:27:05]:
Yeah.

Jodi Bourne [00:27:06]:
So great if it could also it hasn’t. There’s not a Google Analytics MCP yet. But when that happens and you can connect the Facebook analytics and the email analytics and the Google Analytics all together and just have a normal conversation about analytics without blowing your mind.

Monica Froese [00:27:22]:
I paid once for someone to build me a $6,000 dashboard that broke all the time. It all the time. It never really it was supposed to connect my Shopify data, my buy part data, my Google Analytics search counsel and I paid all this money for it and it broke constantly. I never ended up using it. It was a sunk cop. And now I’m looking at these live Artemis types going what? You just press a couple buttons and there it is. I would like to give some examples of how it Destiny wants to say something.

Dr. Destini Copp [00:27:54]:
I just want to comment Steph on what you just said or what you just mentioned about Ira. So I built a dashboard in Manus because that’s what Jordan said. That’s what she recommended because she had left Hiros and went to build that dashboard there. I basically had it already and then I got the meta as NCMC connector. I’m like I don’t even need that anymore because this is giving me what I need.

Monica Froese [00:28:21]:
Yes. So does anyone have a good example of a workflow that they kick off either by a skill like my example that I gave with I give it a CSV and the skill knows to pick it up and runs the skill dictates the entire workflow and what tools to call in. Does anyone have an example of that or a scheduled test that they run out of cowork that it kicks off and these automated workflows happen.

Liz Stapleton [00:28:48]:
I have so many so one that is where I kicked it off which is it’s very simple but it’s. That’s how I’m backing up on my third part learn courses is I just say go back up this course and then it knows to use computer use to go open the page and edit pull all the lesson content, put it into airtable. I have an airtable based connects it from the course to the module to the lesson to the asset and so it’s pulling everything in and that’s something I manually kick off and that’s the only time I really keep an eye on as it’s running because it is doing computer use. But then I’ve got another one which is anytime I have a customer support ticket and I think this topic covered at your summit that’s coming up is it will see that it I have an automation airtable that pulls together when you purchase their data and then it sends it over to a different airtable base because I don’t want to be giving the AI my customer personal information and it looks at the purchaser data of what products they bought and when it looks at their ticket issue and it can see all the past tickets I’ve had find one that was similar so that when it’s drafting a response it’s actually close to what I’ve done before but it’s able to see what AI had drafted in the past versus what I actually sent. So I can see where I made corrections. So it’s constantly getting better and then it will draft a response that I can then review and send as a B. So just each day it checked is there a new ticket I have the same thing is each day it checks does it. Do I have any people trying to redeem their creator cash the credit in my business are There any new videos in our video creation workflow that I can take on? Is there any blog post in the blog post workflow that I can take action on? Whether that’s an airtable, whether that’s doing research, whether that’s an outline, generating images, sending it over to WordPress, recording what Google folder link is for the video so that when I send it to make it can upload it to YouTube.

Liz Stapleton [00:30:39]:
So it’s constantly doing a bunch of different things. It checks for the kit promotion snippets. I’m working on building out one where I’m like go check these Facebook groups to see if there’s bundles or collaborations that would be a good fit for me. So it’s. I have so many.

Monica Froese [00:30:54]:
What other ones are we using?

Steph Blake [00:30:58]:
I have a lot as well. I just. I had to pull my screen up because I couldn’t remember, but I would say so. Every month we do events for my B2C brand and I have all of that completely automated with scheduled tasks and connectors. So for example, we need resources created for our affiliates, right? Like swipe, copy images, all of that. So it says on the first day of the month at 2am it will kick off and it will automatically create all of that content and throw it into your table. Mark Citize Published done. I don’t have to do anything on the fifth day of the month because I didn’t want them all in the same time.

Steph Blake [00:31:30]:
I like to spread things around for my usage that one will also write I think we probably have 20 to 25 emails like for all of the different elements that one also kicks off. All of those HTML generated emails are automatically added into airtable. My fathom. I mentioned that previously. So every day that will go into fathom, see what happened in the last 24 hours and then it will pull all of that into my airtable base, assigning due dates to different tasks that I have. So again, for our monthly events we have a template and ClickUp and it will just duplicate that template and assign due dates to all of. There’s. There’s not many tasks on there anymore, but I think there’s probably like 20 tasks and it’ll assign due dates to everything.

Steph Blake [00:32:12]:
Again, all of this we were previously doing manually before. I don’t even know how much time has been saved, like hundreds of hours. It’s.

Monica Froese [00:32:20]:
Are you still working with someone or have these taken over the automated workflow?

Steph Blake [00:32:25]:
It has taken over 90% of the work. There are still some manual things that need to be done. Like we have to Set up an automation to deliver like the resource or whatever. So there are some pieces and that’s where the ClickUp task comes in is where like those only man, those manual only tasks need to be created. So that’s when it creates that click of task. It will assign the due date to him and then he’ll go in do it. And he also handles customer support because I don’t want to do that. That’s like the most important piece that he does now.

Steph Blake [00:32:55]:
But all of the tech stuff is pretty much automated.

Monica Froese [00:32:58]:
That’s awesome. Anyone else want to share what automations they’re using?

Jodi Bourne [00:33:03]:
So I’m teaching teaching Claude to a group of people right now and I’m basically building their, helping them build a team of employees. So I have a client that’s in that group. She uses mailchimp. And so we’ve created this blogging thing. I’ve watched it work four times. So she has a 12 month calendar, we’ve done all of her foundational documents, it’s all in Claude. So this is an automated task. Every week it writes a blog based on her 12 month plan.

Jodi Bourne [00:33:33]:
Takes the blog, writes the email, sends it to mailchimp and then it gives her three or four outputs for social media as well. And she is. So we just tested it, she and I together twice, two weeks in a row and it’s absolutely fantastic. So now she’s going to set it up on her system. But the content is what is amazing because the skill itself is based on the skills that I’ve written and provided to her. But it goes in and does the extra research and then it flags her in the chat, in the what extra research was done, what things that they may have made up or what needs her review so that before the blog even publishes, before the email. But anyway, so just creating the email and it’s HTML so it’s beautiful. That’s just this beautiful output.

Jodi Bourne [00:34:22]:
She’s so impressed and I’m impressed that this can be, this is, can be her workflow from now on every Monday morning is just click a button, her social’s written, her email’s written, her blog is written and she can just go about the rest of her day with a margarita or whatever.

Monica Froese [00:34:41]:
I’ll share one because my community wants me to keep them updated on AI news and that is very hard to do. So I came up with an automation, it’s called Daily AI Angles. And so I’ve really never had the information was all over the place I would say. But now that I have finally gotten on board with airtable. And I didn’t really understand how it functioned until I got the mcp. I created a centralized database of all of my products that live in Shopify, ThriveCart. I have products in school. They’re all over the place.

Monica Froese [00:35:16]:
And so that has links of what the product’s about. And every day the Gmail connector goes and pulls down my daily AI newsletters that I’m subscribed to. It researches certain websites for new AI news. It pulls that information together. It benchmarks it against my airtable with all my products. It gives me ideas of how to sell my products based on the current AI news. It then drafts a weekly school post that I can put up for my community, letting them know the top like five to six things that they should pay attention to in the AI space. And it knows to look for the angles of how it is for creators.

Monica Froese [00:35:58]:
But what I really loved about it was because of the kit NCP doing analysis for me. One of the things it said is your strongest emails are when you tie your products to the current AI environment and what’s going on that’s timely. So like today is a great example. I was writing my Friday newsletter and I said, here are the three things I need to talk about and today’s email. Can you tie an AI news story to it based on the research that was already done by this daily task that’s been running based on a skill for my newsletter, it wrote the entire thing in my voice. So it’s just incredible. When I think back to when I was writing these newsletters, even six months ago, it was taking. I would, I send it at 3pm on Friday.

Monica Froese [00:36:42]:
I would start writing it at 8am after taking my kids to school. And I would sometimes be done with it just under the deadline to get it out. Yeah.

Steph Blake [00:36:49]:
And I think the cool thing is there’s no end in sight. At least not to me. It’s like you said before Onyx, if you can dram it, you can build it. And that is, I 100% agree with that. This is so ridiculous. But one day I was like playing around with different AI images. Instead of doing a photo shoot, I was to see what kind of photos I can come up with. You know, sometimes the teeth are funky or the hand is funky.

Steph Blake [00:37:13]:
So I went into Huffable and I created an app that literally fixes that. It fixes the funky teeth or the funky like hands so it looks normal. And I was like, this is insane. There were other tools on the Internet and they were charging you $99 a month to do that. And I was like, I built this in five minutes. It was crazy. And I think that. I think it’s important for everybody to think from this different mindset of how can we simplify this? What can we automate? You don’t have to be working as hard as we’re doing, especially not now because it just makes it so easy.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:37:46]:
I feel like it’s just allowing me to be. To be the bigger picture strategy. It’s allowing me to focus on that and creativity. Whereas I can see how much the bottleneck is was me having to. Not my. By my own fault. But there’s so much on our shoulders.

Monica Froese [00:38:03]:
When we’re running a whole business.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:38:05]:
We are good at a certain thing, but then we have to get good at all these million other tasks we have to do in our business. And I’m just. I feel like I’ve unlocked or potentially

Liz Stapleton [00:38:14]:
unleashed a sense of my creativity and just.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:38:18]:
Yeah, I’m a strategist and it’s just.

Monica Froese [00:38:19]:
It’s incredible.

Steph Blake [00:38:20]:
Yeah. It’s just.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:38:21]:
It’s just so.

Steph Blake [00:38:23]:
It’s like it unlocks this new level of genius that you can tap into now that you don’t have to worry about all this other stuff.

Jodi Bourne [00:38:30]:
It’s so cool.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:38:31]:
Yeah.

Jodi Bourne [00:38:31]:
One of the things that I just. Personal things like bank banking now PLA created a spreadsheet for me. I still don’t let it connect with my bank. I know it’s about to now there’s an. I think Plaid has an MCP for bank connection connections. But what used to take something I dreaded. I hate banking stuff. I hate accounting.

Jodi Bourne [00:38:55]:
Something I dreaded is now literally just going to my bank, downloading my thing for the week. My transactions. I put them in my Google Drive and I have this nice spreadsheet of. And this little email that tell our little message that tells me what I spent too much money on or what I forgot to pay for or whatever.

Steph Blake [00:39:15]:
It’s just.

Jodi Bourne [00:39:15]:
It’s crazy. So I’m using. That’s what I’m using dispatch for. I just dispatched my grocery list to Instacart. I ordered groceries and had them delivered yesterday just by talking into my phone and having my whole list ordered through Instacart. And it was just. That’s just. I can do it from anywhere you’re driving down the road.

Jodi Bourne [00:39:37]:
It’s so crazy. And all those time savers, they free up all this mental crap. So it. Even if you’re not using it for business, just playing with it to see what you can use it for is so powerful.

Monica Froese [00:39:51]:
I was telling Steph yesterday that. So I’ve been using AI for the last two years to understand my macros and my kids dietary preferences, allergies, all of that stuff. Now because of these connectors I. So I have a project that has all this knowledge about me and the girls and all that, but now it knows my ex and I trade our switch our schedules a decent amount. We work well together like that. It knows to go check my calendar, what days cause it’s clearly labeled when I have them, when he has the girls, it know. So it knows what days I have the girls. And then I simply take a picture of my pantry and my fridge and my freezer and it builds my macro friendly meal plans.

Monica Froese [00:40:34]:
It’s one of the things I struggled with is I was cooking for me and I don’t, I can’t eat good portions and I was wasting so much food and I, I could not get that under control. So it helped me to understand. I got it said get a food fail. And it helps me weigh everything out by freezer, everything in ways that I can cook so I’m not overcooking. And it builds these elaborate meal plans, tells me what my macros are going to be. It knows what different chicken nugget brands my, my little one will eat or won’t eat. And now with the MCP to Instacart, same thing. Now it builds my list for me in Instacart.

Monica Froese [00:41:08]:
I’m like, what world? I thought Instacart was life changing when it came out during COVID I’m like I’m never gonna have to go to a grocery store again. And now it’s like I don’t even have to tell it what I want.

Steph Blake [00:41:19]:
I haven’t used that one yet, but I will because I use Instacart. We use Instagram three times a week because I have boys and they eat a lot even though they’re three and seven.

Monica Froese [00:41:27]:
I don’t want to know what’s going

Steph Blake [00:41:28]:
to be like when they’re teenagers.

Jodi Bourne [00:41:29]:
It’s.

Steph Blake [00:41:30]:
That’s awesome.

Monica Froese [00:41:31]:
Yeah.

Jodi Bourne [00:41:31]:
I just told Claude the other day we want, I want a, a Cobb salad. And the only thing I have right now is chicken. And it put everything in the cart and all. It was a buy button that I had to click and wait, you just

Steph Blake [00:41:45]:
told it you want to eat this food? And it put all. Okay, all right, all right. I don’t have to ask me the

Jodi Bourne [00:41:52]:
question what he said, I want a Cobb salad tonight. I need to order from Instacart, can you send the list? And it said, what ingredients do you have on hand? And I said, no, the only thing I have on hand is an avocado, but I don’t think it’s ripe enough. And the chicken breast thawed out and it built the rest of it. It asked me, do you want to make your own dressing or do you want to buy a dressing? I said, I’ll make my own. So you need lemons? Yes, I need lemons. Do you have olive oil? Yes, I do, but I need a high quality olive oil. And then it ran with it.

Dr. Destini Copp [00:42:22]:
It actually has got to do a show on just all the personal stuff.

Monica Froese [00:42:26]:
I. I agree. We will schedule that. It told me what to order on Amazon to organize my. Because I started freeze packing in these smaller portions, how I could organize it so when I take a picture, it understands what meats I have and also the volume of the meats of how it to organize it. It’s I. My, my girls do know they are not allowed to touch the top of the freezer and mess up mom’s organizational system.

Steph Blake [00:42:53]:
Is there an Amazon mcp?

Jodi Bourne [00:42:55]:
There’s not.

Monica Froese [00:42:55]:
I

Ruth Poundwhite [00:42:57]:
think this is what I’m thinking. We are we going to look and make buying choices depending on what has an mcp and because it’s very easy to think, especially when we’re stacking them up. Very easy to think, oh, just doing this one bit manually is okay, or just doing this other bit manually. But actually when you do stack them up and when there is an MCP for each step of it, it’s whoa, it’s incredible. Part one of my workflows. I do have to still do this stuff manually because there’s no mcp. But it makes me think, would it be worth me changing to different software because then I can totally automate it or how long are we going to wait? Because I’m sure that a lot of these companies are working on it behind the scenes just like Kit was. And then it suddenly came out like our minds are blown.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:43:38]:
But yeah, I’m definitely, it’s definitely a factor now in what we’re using.

Monica Froese [00:43:44]:
I had a plan.

Jodi Bourne [00:43:45]:
She downloaded two years worth of her Amazon shopping list or her purchase history and they used it for their vacation glamping business. And it analyzed everything she bought and then told her whether she should switch to Costco or Sam’s delivery instead of Amazon and gave her the different things that she should buy from Costco vs Sam’s vs Amazon and then also how to schedule it out so that all her inventory stayed on, on track. And, you know, she thought of that on her own. I was like, this is brilliant.

Monica Froese [00:44:21]:
I agree. Okay, this has been a very fun conversation. So I’m going to go around to everyone and we’re going to just let you know how you can connect with all of us. So I’ll go first. You can find [email protected] I publish all my podcasts on the podcast feed there. You can copy the transcript, put it into your Claude or even chatgpt, although I recommend Claude because it really allows you to connect all these things together and ask it based on what it knows about you. How can it take the ideas from our call and build them into your business? I, Destiny said she did that based on one of our call transcripts last week. That’s got me onto fathom.

Monica Froese [00:44:59]:
But before I was not saving my calls and now I’m like, oh, I can see the power of this by saving all of our calls. That’s where you can find me. Destiny, how about you?

Dr. Destini Copp [00:45:08]:
Yeah, so destinycop.com, creators NBA podcast. I also do the transcripts just like Monica does there. And I also have a school community called the Creators MBA Boardroom.

Monica Froese [00:45:20]:
Love that, Steph.

Steph Blake [00:45:22]:
Yeah. So you can find [email protected]. everything that you need to see is there. Keep it simple,

Monica Froese [00:45:30]:
ruth.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:45:33]:
I’[email protected] I run the Soulful Sales show podcast and the quite the ambitious community.

Liz Stapleton [00:45:39]:
I’m actually going to direct you guys to my YouTube channel for creator Ops Hub. Just search that and it has a video on how I’m using Codex and airtable. Got my ThriveCart Learn courses. So if you guys are in ThriveCart, you know what’s happening, you can check that video.

Monica Froese [00:45:55]:
Awesome.

Jodi Bourne [00:45:55]:
Jodi, you can probably find me [email protected] and then in the third of my website. I have both brands down there where you can switch to back and forth.

Monica Froese [00:46:06]:
Awesome. Thank you ladies so much for joining me for this conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it and I always like picking your brains because you are all brilliant.

Jodi Bourne [00:46:16]:
It’s been fun.