The Invisible Funnel: How Kate Kordsmeier Turns Feedback Forms Into Client Retention

Monica Froese [00:00:00]:
Hello and welcome back to the Empowered Business Podcast. I’m Monica Froese, and today I have a confession to make. Over 200 people filled out the welcome survey for the Empowered Business Lab AI, and I never responded to a single one. Not one. And I know I’m not alone because almost every business owner I know collects intake forms, feedback surveys, and check-in forms that go straight into a void. Today’s episode was recorded live at my AI Exposed event. And my guest is Kate Kortzmeier of Success with Soul. Kate built what she calls an invisible funnel.

Monica Froese [00:00:35]:
Every single form her clients fill out gets a personalized, thoughtful response drafted by AI and reviewed by a human before it ever goes out. Her clients tell her things like, this made me cry, and you have a customer for life. It drives retention and it starts sales conversations. It generates testimonials. And it’s been running strong for 2 years. And here’s the part I love. Kate is a self-described low-capacity entrepreneur. Chronic illness, 2 little kids, no big team, and no social media.

Monica Froese [00:01:05]:
Then halfway through, we did something completely unplanned. We rebuilt her entire workflow live in Claude Cowork, cut Zapier out of the process, and it took about 10 minutes. Kate’s Invisible Funnel Prompt Pack is linked in the show notes so you can set this up for yourself. Let’s get into it.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:01:24]:
Kate, welcome to AI Exposed. I’m so excited to have you.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:01:28]:
Me too. Happy to be here.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:01:30]:
So what exactly are you going to be talking to us about today?

Kate Kordsmeier [00:01:35]:
Yes. So I created this system almost 2 years ago now, but it is still running strong. And it is my automated workflow to make sure that everybody who submits a intake form, a check-in form, any sort of feedback form to us that we are able to personally respond using AI with a very customized response. I like to think of it as human first, AI second, human last touch. So it does involve some manual work, but I think that’s what makes the magic. And yeah, this is how I get my clients to feel really seen and heard and valued. And also it starts conversations that often lead to more sales.

Monica Froese [00:02:20]:
More sales.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:02:20]:
Yes.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:02:21]:
Okay.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:02:21]:
So before we jump into— because you coined it invisible funnel, right?

Kate Kordsmeier [00:02:25]:
Yes. Okay.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:02:26]:
So before we jump into what an invisible funnel is, the actual practicalities behind it, want to tell us a little bit about yourself, your business?

Kate Kordsmeier [00:02:34]:
Yeah.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:02:35]:
So people know. Okay.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:02:37]:
Well, I’m Kate Kordsmeier. I live in Atlanta, but I’m actually spending the month of June in Santa Fe right now. So greetings from my Airbnb. And my business is Success with Soul. I really help people grow high-profit, low-maintenance businesses without social media and without a big team, especially now. I think I am a very low-capacity entrepreneur. I have chronic illness, I have neurodivergence, I’ve got 2 kids, small kids, 6 and 7 years old, and I don’t have 50 hours a week to be putting into my business. So thanks to AI, I’ve been able to outsource a lot of that without having to outsource it to a very expensive payroll team, which is what I used to do.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:03:19]:
And it was very high pressure and stressful and not sustainable. So I’m very grateful for AI. I would have to agree. And so one thought that I had when I even first created this, and again, it was 2 years ago, so AI was much less like acceptable to use. And before we were doing this, nobody was getting responses. We had hundreds of intake forms and onboarding forms and other things that we were collecting student feedback and stuff from, and we were never responding to them at all.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:03:50]:
I don’t respond to ’em.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:03:51]:
Yeah.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:03:51]:
Uh-oh.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:03:52]:
So that was why when I created this, I was like, well, even if it’s not A+, the best thing a human could produce, it’s better than nothing. And that’s what they were getting before.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:04:03]:
So you’re talking about like, for example, in the Empowered Business Lab AI, I have, I just looked at this the other day. I think over 200 people responded to the welcome survey alone. Yeah. I never respond to those. Sometimes I even forget to go back and read it until a year later.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:04:18]:
Before AI, I was barely doing anything with it. Then I started, oh, well, let me export everybody’s forms and have AI summarize what are the themes. That thing, that was very helpful to better understand who my customers actually were. Then it was like step 2 is I should really respond to these. Sometimes people are asking questions in there. If they don’t, especially for some of my larger programs like MBA, it’s like, this is huge. People often feel overwhelmed. They don’t know where to start.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:04:44]:
And so. We can tell them and we can train our AI to know where to start based on what they say. And if they’re struggling with this, start here. If they’re struggling with that, go here. And so yeah, now it went from doing nothing to analyzing the data to now starting these conversations. And Rachel says, I think she does at least 20 forms a week at a minimum. So we get, cuz we also added once we saw the feedback, cuz we would send these responses out and then our customers would get back to us and be like, I I have never received a response like this from a coach before. People were saying, this made me cry.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:05:24]:
This was so meaningful to me. You have a customer for life. So then, I have goosebumps saying it myself right now. Then, I was like, oh my gosh, we need to do more of this. So, some of my memberships and stuff, we added monthly intake forms or monthly check-in forms too. So, every month, check in. Tell us what’s going on. What are you struggling with? What’s a win? It’s great for getting testimonials.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:05:46]:
And then we also continue the conversation. It helps with retention. It just does so many things.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:05:51]:
I feel so called out right now. I can’t even, I’m just thinking of all of the missed opportunity over the last 10 years, the amount of forms that people have filled out. It never—

Kate Kordsmeier [00:06:03]:
Well, I think that’s the thing. I focus so much. I’m not on social media. I’m not DMing with people there, which is sometimes where some of those signals might be happening, right? And so I was like, I need to find a better way to start conversations with people. And, and depending on the form, now it’s a selling point. Now you get monthly free coaching from us because you fill out your monthly check-in form and you get a response from our coach with personalized feedback on your exact situation. Now this is a value add to the membership. Okay.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:06:34]:
Let’s, I wanna talk about how the whole thing functions, obviously, but I’m just so When I, when I hear something and I’m just like, oh no, this is going to be a whole thing now for me.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:06:45]:
Yeah.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:06:46]:
So let’s, let me ask you this first. Name like all the types of forms that this process sits behind. Okay.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:06:54]:
So I have, and I’m just, oh, I can’t. Okay. I have a couple of things to share and we can get into whatever we need to, but I want to share.

Monica Froese [00:07:05]:
Yes.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:07:06]:
So this is, I call ’em like invisible funnels or feedback loops. And so I always have intake forms and exit surveys on all of my not one-time, one-off payment things. So I have intake forms literally on every single product I sell, and I have a shop model similar to Monica, so I don’t have as many products anymore, but I probably have 2 dozen. So every single one of my products has an intake form now, and then my memberships, things that people would potentially leave have exit surveys as well. And those are really helpful too, because of course you understand why people are leaving, but then you can start talking to them about it. And maybe they’re leaving because they didn’t understand how something worked, or they didn’t realize that the call was at this time. And so actually they could make it. And so whatever.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:07:53]:
So I have those 2. Then I have the, I just call them like conversation starters. And so this is our monthly check-in forms. So I added this to, I have 2 memberships. So both of my memberships have monthly check-in forms. And then I also added it to the Mindful Business Academy, which is like my all-access pass offer. So it’s how you get everything in my shop bundled for a discounted price. So I have a monthly check-in form there because it’s lifetime access.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:08:19]:
And so literally we get responses from people who bought 3 years ago and then they’ll be like, this is what I’m struggling with. And it’s, oh my gosh, this is what our, the Room membership solves. And then they are like, oh, I didn’t know about this. Let me join. And so all of And all of these like often result in either people staying in the membership because they feel like they’re getting support and they feel actually seen and valued. People buying, like we’re doing cross-sells or upsells into things. And so, yeah, so we have the check-in forms. I don’t have those in all of my programs, like in all of my courses.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:08:52]:
That feels like if we’re already getting like at least 2 dozen a week, I’m like, I don’t know that we could keep up.

Monica Froese [00:08:57]:
Yeah.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:08:57]:
With that level unless we really were just like it’s all AI and there’s no human in the loop. And then I also have video ask on all of my sales pages, and so we have that hooked up as well so that when people leave a video ask, whether it’s a video, audio, or written message, we have the funnel sorry the automation set up so that it can also respond to them with a Gmail draft as well. And anytime we use like any sort of chatbots or whatever, like we have. A regular chatbot on our, just our main homepage. And when people send a message through it, they can, they’re obviously talking with AI, but then it, we will send them a personalized Gmail email that says, hey, I know you were chatting with the bot. I hope that it was great. I know sometimes you just need to talk to a human though. So here’s a real human here to talk to you about blah, blah, blah, whatever you were saying in your, in your conversation.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:09:52]:
So those are the main ones.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:09:54]:
I, so I have always done intake and exit surveys, never followed up. Well, I can’t say never followed up with it, but definitely over the year, I think I was better at it honestly in the early years of my business. And then it just, I almost, it’s almost like there’s so many moving parts as your business gets bigger that things just fall off your radar. So I get that. I feel like that’s going to be an easy win for me actually.

Monica Froese [00:10:16]:
Yes.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:10:17]:
Tell me more about what you ask in the check-in survey.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:10:22]:
Okay. Well, I could show you exactly. And here’s our monthly check-in form. Okay. So they choose their name and then put the date and we ask them, how did you feel this month about your business? And then how satisfied are you with your progress in the program? What was your revenue this month? And usually we will, the, a lot of people answer every single month. So we’re able to then look back and say, oh wow, your revenue has grown by X percent since last time. This is for MBA, so we teach a lot of different things. So we also ask them, what have you accomplished inside the program? And they can just check, oh, I did this and that.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:11:02]:
I might get rid of this. Honestly, I don’t know that that is that helpful anymore, but we had, like I said, I really haven’t touched this in 2 years. It’s just, this is working well. I’m not gonna mess with it. What are you celebrating this month? Again, this often results in lots of good testimonials because they are sharing Wins that they had. A lot of times when they share this, they don’t just say, I made more money than before. They’re like, I followed your friends and family template for this thing and I made my first $1,000 or something. Great for testimonials.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:11:30]:
Did you achieve the goals you set for yourself last month? What are your goals for next month? So just seeing like, where are you at? And then again, this helps us direct them to, this might help you achieve this goal so we can cross-sell, upsell, or retain. Did you know our next Get It Done Week is actually gonna be on this exact thing? Where are you stuck and what’s one thing we can do to support you? And then anything else you’d like us to know.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:11:55]:
What gets people to fill this out? This is a pretty long form.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:11:58]:
Yeah, I think people fill it out because they know that they get a personalized response back. And so they’re doing it because they actually do have questions and are like, I am stuck on this thing, what should I do? Or— Yeah, we don’t have any other incentives right now other than Free coaching.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:12:18]:
Wow. And how do you, and how do you present it to them?

Kate Kordsmeier [00:12:24]:
Inside the mindful, if you fill out this form, you’ll get KK credit to spend on anything we sell in the shop. So that is one way that we incentivize, but this is more like we’re asking for testimonials, not just like we just want to hear what’s going on with you. So here’s the monthly check-in form. And so this is what we say. Most programs don’t do this. Most courses give you a curriculum and a dead Facebook group and call it support. But in this program, we’re actually giving you real personalized one-on-one coaching every single month for free. And so then it’s just fill out this form here, and then the form is embedded into our portal and that’s it.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:13:04]:
That’s all we’re doing.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:13:05]:
We do— So you don’t bring it up in emails again every month? Okay.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:13:09]:
I was gonna say we do that. So we have an automation. I use Kartra and we just have a Like an automated sequence in there that says like on the, at the end of every month, basically like the last week of the month, send the thing that says, hey, reminder, fill out your monthly check-in form. This is how you get free coaching. This is how we can support you if you’re feeling stuck especially. We’ll get back and give you advice. And, and I think we send that out 2 or 3 times over the last week of the month. And then it just, at the end of those 3 emails, it just loops back.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:13:41]:
to the starting, like the start trigger of the sequence. And then it just does it again at the end of the next month and it’ll remove them. Of course, if they leave the program, then they’re not still getting monthly check-in form requests. But yeah, that’s how we, so I think the emails are probably where most people are seeing it and then filling it out. I doubt people are like coming into the portal every month to do this.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:14:04]:
But it also encourages them then to get back to the portal. And then be like, oh, now I can, I should resume progress. Because that’s one of the biggest things about courses too, is completion rate is really hard. We have a question in the chat. Does this mean that every single enroller of this course gets to fill this out every month for free coaching? Did I get this right? She got this right.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:14:26]:
You got this right. That’s exactly it. It’s free email coaching every single month.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:14:32]:
Well, I’m mind blown. So now I’m very, I know you’re going to show us the whole process. So we’ll actually see some of the examples of the— what coaching they get back out of this that’s so compelling that they come back every month to do it.

Monica Froese [00:14:43]:
Yeah.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:14:44]:
Okay, well, let’s talk about it.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:14:46]:
Okay, let’s see. I have not updated this in 2 years other than we’ve tweaked the prompt a little bit as we’ve learned, okay, we need to train this better on this. I still use ChatGPT for this. I don’t use ChatGPT for anything else anymore. I’m like all Claude. I was actually looking right before this, I was like, I wonder if we should change it. And Zapier does have AI, the AI, I forget what they called it. It was something AI by Zapier.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:15:10]:
And so when you do that, you can actually choose the model. And so I think I would switch it so that it would be using my Anthropic. I haven’t, I’ve never connected my Claude to Zapier though. So you could set it up this way. Um, or I’ll show you how I currently have it set up. So basically what happens is the start trigger is a new record. So somebody fills out the form and we have Separate zaps for every single form type, right? So we have intake form for this program. So if we have three programs that we have intake forms, each one has their own zap workflow.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:15:44]:
Same thing for monthly check-in forms, whatever. So basically, we you do the form in Airtable like I just showed you here. This is what the form looks like when a new record is created. The this is going to flow. The next thing it’s going to do is it’s going we say review, and then we just put all of the fields in here for what the Answered. This is the intake form, so there’s a lot of questions on the intake form, so this one is bigger. And then our current prompt just says, use their— review their responses and now use their responses to draft a conversational warm email reply to welcome them into the Mindful Business Academy, make them feel really seen and heard, answer any questions they ask. Definitely add constraints here.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:16:26]:
When we first started doing this, it would be like, we’d love to hop on a call with you and chat more about this. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no. We don’t do that. So do not suggest we get on a call. Don’t make any promises about other things we’re gonna do for them or anything like that. And then it just start the email with, hi there, first name. Then we just have a, like the instructions here and it just says you’re acting as Rachel, who is the accountability coach for this offer. This is the tone and style.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:16:54]:
Here’s the scope of functionality. This is kind of the broad abilities, whatever. And then we just say, so here’s an example response so you can see how we would normally reply. So here’s an example from her. Hi, I want to acknowledge how I came into this, and after reading your intake form, it’s clear that blah blah blah. I’m genuinely excited for you as you get settled. Here’s how I’d love for you to focus your next steps. So let’s start with this, move into that, add this in when you’re ready.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:17:24]:
And then we’re gonna usually give them some either mindset reflections or journal prompts or something like that, because a lot of times in their intake form they’re telling us, I’m really struggling with this, or I’m challenged by this thing. Don’t forget you have this kind of support inside the program. And then we list out some of the support that they get, and that’s basically it. So we just give them a, a, the prompt is very simple overall of just welcome them in, read their form, actually respond to the specific things that they’re saying. So we’re not sending the same things to everybody.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:17:56]:
Mm-hmm.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:17:56]:
And then we gave them more examples of other, and then here you can see like where we’ve trained it. So if they’re seasoned and they already have an offer, then here’s where we’re gonna send them. If they’re overwhelmed or capacity is low, we recommend starting with one of these courses instead if they haven’t started yet. So we gave, these are the things that we would direct them to. More examples. Question for you. Yeah.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:18:19]:
So this is connected to your OpenAI API key, correct?

Kate Kordsmeier [00:18:23]:
Correct.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:18:23]:
Through Zapier, you can connect your API key for any of the open models to Zapier. But correct me if I’m wrong, since this is not— when you use the API keys, it’s not accessing your main chat account, therefore it only knows what you have in this prompt. It’s not educated on anything else with your business.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:18:48]:
Exactly. At the bottom here, these were just more examples of other emails we’ve sent. At the bottom here, you can see that it says, assistant name and assistant instructions. And so when you create, you can create a custom assistant in the OpenAI Playground, I believe is what it’s called. And you could give it more knowledge files and instructions and stuff like that. We didn’t find that to be necessary once we started. The prompt was enough that it was getting it, it was getting it right. And honestly, as anybody who’s had lots of clients knows, Everybody struggles with the same stuff.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:19:25]:
So even though there are, it is a custom response, a lot of, there’s, it’s usually one of 5 things that we’re gonna respond with, you know?

Kate Kordsmeier [00:19:32]:
Yes.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:19:33]:
So it didn’t feel like we needed it to be trained more extensively, but you definitely could. And that’s why I liked this idea of using the Prompt Builder in AI by Zapier, because you could upload some knowledge sources and it looked like there was a little bit more, it seemed just maybe a little bit easier than doing it in the OpenAI playground. But again, that’s not how I have it. I just have a simple prompt and then assistant instructions just saying, this is who you are and you’ve just reviewed their intake form and you want to support them with a reply that makes them feel valued.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:20:07]:
In the chat, but with the prompt, is it not missing out on pertinent details of your business? That’s exactly what I was thinking because I’m like, this is wild that it can get so close without it knowing all this History on you?

Kate Kordsmeier [00:20:20]:
Yeah, I guess not. Before Rachel was doing it, I was doing it and I didn’t feel like it didn’t understand who I was or background details of my business. I think giving them 5 examples of previous emails that I had sent out that were just truly human written really helped. And like I said, there’s, it’s not that different from person to person. But we do say here, I think there’s something, yeah, it says we specialize in coaching online business owners on building profitable, sustainable businesses without social, build self-trust, take bold aligned action, generate revenue through consistent visibility and sales efforts. And yeah, that was enough. And then it’s reviewing what the person, like what the questions are and how the person responded. And so it’s just been enough, I guess.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:21:10]:
I haven’t felt the need to give it more, but, and again, it’s not about me, it’s about the client.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:21:16]:
We got another question about this, and I wanna piggyback on this too. I’m wondering, do your clients care that it’s AI generated or do they think it’s coming from a person?

Kate Kordsmeier [00:21:27]:
So we don’t say it’s AI generated. It does. So I’ll show you how the rest of the workflow so you can see what it does, but basically After that, it’s gonna go find the record again in Airtable just so that we can, this is the same record that was created. We just need to get the email address and then it creates a draft. And so we have the subject line that we just set up, the from name, and then the body is just the reply that was generated from that AI step. And it doesn’t say this was generated by AI or anything like that. And a human is reviewing it at the end. And one of the things that Rachel does do when she reviews it is she actually reads their intake form also.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:22:09]:
So she’s not only looking at what it says, she will read their intake form to make sure that it actually makes sense for what they said. I think this has not been an issue for a long time, but when I first set this up, sometimes it would be like, you did not focus on the right things about their intake form at all. It was missing things or it was mis-recommending a next step. Again, we’ve tweaked the prompt now that it doesn’t do that, but.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:22:35]:
Okay.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:22:35]:
So I would say it probably takes Rachel 5, 2 to 5 minutes per form to, what she does is she will then cut, log into our Gmail account and there’ll be like 50 drafts created for her, right? And then she goes in and looks at each one. She’ll pull that person’s form, she’ll read it, she’ll read the response and then send it off.

Monica Froese [00:22:56]:
People are definitely very focused on, wow, this is only prompt-based with not a ton of knowledge of your business. Do you find that it is easier on intake forms because it’s more like versus like the midweek or the—

Kate Kordsmeier [00:23:14]:
The monthly check-in form?

Monica Froese [00:23:15]:
Yeah, the monthly check-in. Because I feel like the monthly check-in can probably be a lot more varied than an intake form for a specific program.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:23:22]:
It definitely could be more varied, but I don’t know. Again, you would be surprised. People are so much more similar than they are different. And so much of what people write in about is the same thing. They’re struggling with fear of being seen. They’re struggling with not wanting to be salesy. They’re struggling with being consistent. And so honestly, it’s once we trained it how to respond to those struggles, it’s, it just gets it.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:23:50]:
As this made me cry. I’ve never felt so supported in a program before.

Monica Froese [00:23:55]:
So Kate, think about this. And again, you did this 2 years ago. We know our options 2 years ago were nothing like it is today. But now that we are all in on Claude, and that’s basically all we’ve talked about this week with everyone else, Mm-hmm. And I have mentioned Claude has helped me eliminate almost all my Zap usage. I went from paying $130 a month to I’m stuck on the $30 plan because you can’t go below that. And I still need Zaps for some things that I just can’t eliminate yet, but Yeah. What if— so what if you had a scheduled task in Cowork that went in, looked for these responses, and then it drafted a reply from your Claude account for, for, uh, Rachel to review? It would cut out Zapier, those Zaps completely, and it would have your business knowledge then.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:24:50]:
Well, right, because I’ve— Monica and I are in a mastermind together, and I— we’ve been talking about this and eliminating Zapier and And yeah, of course I’d love to cut back on costs. I don’t know how much it would cost me in Claude usage to do the same thing. So, you know. So this, it makes me wanna do it right now. Okay, so what we’re gonna do here is literally come into Claude Cowork and create a new project.

Monica Froese [00:25:18]:
Look at this. We’re gonna do, we’re gonna do this in real time.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:25:21]:
We’re gonna do it in real time.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:25:22]:
Why not? Yes.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:25:23]:
And we could just call this MBA intake and check-in forms. I might do that. I might just have one project for, maybe it’s just gonna be all client intake and change forms, right? Okay. So I think what I would do to start is I’m gonna come back to my, to this and I’m gonna copy. Can I do that from here? Let’s see. I was just gonna say I already have the prompt.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:25:49]:
Okay.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:25:49]:
I already have the prompt. Why is it not letting me select? Goodness gracious. Okay.

Monica Froese [00:25:57]:
Right-click, select all, maybe. Oh, you might have to be in edit mode.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:26:02]:
Oh, good idea.

Monica Froese [00:26:04]:
Okay.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:26:05]:
Let’s see. Let’s edit this Zap. I’m gonna come in here.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:26:08]:
There we go. All right.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:26:10]:
Thank you. So I’m just gonna say something to it. Like, I currently have a Zapier workflow set up to respond to all of my client intake and check-in forms based on this prompt. And I want to eliminate Zapier and instead run this through a scheduled task in Claude that a few times a week it will go into my Airtable, find new forms that need to be responded to, and then draft replies in Gmail for all of them. Okay, so right now, because I already have my Airtable connected as an MCP to my Claude account. This is gonna make it really easy. It’s an Airtable. It found my MBA clients intake monthly check-in form.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:26:58]:
Okay. The landmine. Neither your intake has a field that tracks replied, drafted. So this is basically what you were just saying, Monica.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:27:06]:
Yeah.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:27:06]:
Like we need to see what you actually wrote back to them. Zapier handled new by firing on submission in real time. A scheduled task that wakes up a few times a week. Oh, can’t rely on that. I see. It needs a way to tell which forms it’s already handled. Or it’ll redraft the same reply on every run. Okay.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:27:22]:
That makes sense, right? Because there’s not the start trigger of new form received.

Monica Froese [00:27:26]:
Right.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:27:27]:
Okay. So I think we would just add a tracking field. What’s in scope for this? Both intake and check-in.

Monica Froese [00:27:36]:
Oh, hold on. You’re talking about the trigger to kick it off. Couldn’t it be the email lands in your account? We get every Airtable form that gets filled out for me, a copy goes into our email account.

Monica Froese [00:27:47]:
Couldn’t the trigger be every day it looks for an Airtable form?

Kate Kordsmeier [00:27:53]:
Oh, okay. I like that. So let’s go back.

Monica Froese [00:27:56]:
That’s how I would build mine. And I really do. Yeah. Once you do the replies, especially for the monthly people that are filling it out, having all that information in Airtable just makes your Airtable— like pulling that is so content rich. Then when you need, you know, when you’re promoting the different programs, you can actually give, you can say synthesize. the coaching I did over the last 12 months for this program and what have people accomplished.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:28:21]:
Yeah. Okay. Actually though, I see Sophia saying this in the chat and I think this is right. Here’s the exact prompt I was using before. I’m gonna turn it into a skill to respond to, and then we’re gonna schedule the task so that it runs the skill. But because I did this in a project, I did that for a reason because I felt A, it can keep all of this stuff organized together and B, I I can point this now at my computer where I have the backup of our entire MBA program, and then it will be able to pull exactly from there. So it can be like in this lesson on halfway down the page, it says blah, blah, blah. So it’s not even just saying take the Tripwire Toolkit course.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:29:05]:
It’s like it knows exactly what’s in those programs. So let’s see, I could easily do this by saying, Let’s choose a folder. And I have this right now. So I have on my desktop, I have a, for ChatGPT, here’s all of my HTML backups for all of the courses. So now I’ve pointed it at that. So now it knows every single course and exactly what’s in all of it.

Monica Froese [00:29:34]:
Just an FYI. Yeah, that’s, you can do that, but I, you’re It’s the only ones you’re putting on your own website are when it needs an output from Claude.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:29:49]:
Yeah, essentially. Yeah. If you can’t put it on your own website without using your API key, if it generates something.

Monica Froese [00:29:58]:
Okay. I follow. So it, Cowork got you to the point of scheduling the task, right?

Kate Kordsmeier [00:30:03]:
Yeah. So let’s go back. Here’s where we are. Baselining every existing row is already drafted. So that’s good because I think that probably is more or less true. Tracking fields created. Okay. This would be heavy ID transcription.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:30:19]:
So I think this is just more for the history, not for the new stuff. And then server-side filtering works. Now creating the scheduled task. Okay. So I chose to do it Tuesdays and Thursdays. I’m going to change this because I always try to have my scheduled tasks run during non-peak hours so that I’m not Using more usage. And then I might say to it, I wanna create a skill that you can use every time you’re drafting based on that prompt that I gave you. Plus, because this is for MBA specifically, I have given you all of the HTML backup files of the entire course so you can get really granular and hyper-specific with your responses.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:31:02]:
Also, let me know if there’s anything you would suggest I change about the prompt to get better output. So I’m just reading what this said now. I know we’re at time.

Monica Froese [00:31:13]:
We can go a couple minutes over. I just have to have transition time.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:31:16]:
Yeah.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:31:18]:
So Zapier is replaced by a scheduled task in Claude Cowork. That’s great. It’s gonna drop personalized drafts in Gmail. The new form problem. Your tables had no way to mark a form as already answered. So we added that box. Great. The backfill landmine, I’m not gonna worry about that cuz we’re not, we’ve already done all of those.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:31:37]:
So I think I’ll just go in and double check that things are marked appropriately after this. The draft follows the voice and yeah, quick win. So 2 things, turn off the old Zap, hit run now to see it. Okay, so I’m gonna give it that. I should have done that a second ago, but I’m gonna give it this. Thing about the skill, just so we can make sure too that the skill is gonna be the best that it could be. But it seems like it, it really understands. And if we look at this, oh no, it’s not there.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:32:09]:
Let’s see. Let’s look at what this says. So hit, this is the new prompt basically that Claude wrote based on my old thing. So you’re drafting personalized email replies to Kate’s new client intake forms and monthly check-in forms. Create drafts, never send.

Monica Froese [00:32:32]:
Kate, when you think about how long all those, those pro— those workflows took you to set up the first time, isn’t it incredible how much faster it can go now with this?

Kate Kordsmeier [00:32:40]:
Oh my gosh, yes. So much faster.

Monica Froese [00:32:43]:
And how much better it probably is gonna end up being.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:32:46]:
I know, I know. I think having that prompt, and we have that, my freebie for this is the Invisible Funnel Prompt Pack, so you can get The Prompt Pack, which gives you the different prompts that you could use for an intake form, for a check-in form.

Monica Froese [00:33:01]:
Is that inside of AI Your Inbox? Because that’s what I have as your freebie.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:33:05]:
Oh shoot.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:33:06]:
No.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:33:06]:
Well, I can give it to you separately. I thought it would, I thought it came with my presentation because it is a thing that goes—

Monica Froese [00:33:12]:
Do you have a link for it that you wanna drop? Yeah.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:33:15]:
Let me drop it.

Monica Froese [00:33:17]:
I, I’m, let me just check in the backend, but I think all I have, I think that’s what I have for you.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:33:22]:
That could be right. I might have just spoken out of turn here.

Monica Froese [00:33:25]:
Are curious how you hide your API code when you self-host so they can’t grab it essentially out of the HTML.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:33:33]:
I believe there’s something in Claude you can tell it that it— so that it stays hidden and it’s not accessible to anybody else.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:33:42]:
Oh, that’s all I’ve done. Yeah.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:33:44]:
Okay. I might have to email the link to you after. I’m not exactly sure where it is, but I do have this so that you have the prompts. to set this up for yourself so that you can, whether you’re doing an intake or check-in feedback loop form or whatever.

Monica Froese [00:34:00]:
Yeah, if you wanna just follow up in the group and start a post with it so people can—

Kate Kordsmeier [00:34:03]:
Oh, sure.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:34:04]:
Yeah, that works.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:34:05]:
That’ll be great. Okay, so we’ll just summarize this real quick, but we just reset up this whole thing in a few minutes inside of Claude, and it knows how to read through the form, it knows how to pull the form, it knows how to review, and then here’s The intake welcome email. So it’s detecting the program. It’s giving them a welcome acknowledgement, customized where to start roadmap, all of that. Okay. So that’s great. So then, oh, I need to go to the project.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:34:37]:
That’s why projects client intake form. So, all right. So this is creating the skill now for it. And it says the course files aren’t actually here. Your project folder outputs are all empty. Hmm. Okay. So I’ll check that later, but But in theory, you could do that.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:34:54]:
It’s asking me a few questions about this, but this is all just specific to my offers and stuff. So it could do the same thing for you if you update your backup files and stuff.

Monica Froese [00:35:02]:
I’m guessing AI Your Inbox— what is AI Your Inbox, the freebie?

Kate Kordsmeier [00:35:07]:
Yeah, AI Your Inbox is how to use different AI tools to manage, triage your inbox, draft responses. It’s not, it’s not related to this. invisible funnels thing.

Monica Froese [00:35:20]:
It’s—

Kate Kordsmeier [00:35:20]:
that’s not gonna teach you how to do those invisible funnels. We have different lessons inside of that course to help you cut down the amount of time you have to spend in your inbox each week.

Monica Froese [00:35:31]:
Okay, awesome.

Monica Froese [00:35:32]:
And then what is it that you’re gonna drop in the group after this? The prompts that I use to create the invisible funnel workflow.

Monica Froese [00:35:42]:
Okay. So for anyone who is here now watching on replay or listening to the replay, because we’re going to broadcast this on the podcast as well. When, okay, you’re going to pull from the Airtable record, you’re just going to explain all that to Cowork, give it the prompt path, and work with Cowork to get a scheduled task done. It really, you just saw it prompts all along the way of this is what I need from you. So.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:36:09]:
I just find, and we’ve talked about this before too, like people think you have to be so much more tech savvy to do this. And I constantly will be asked, but how did you know what to ask Claude? And sometimes you don’t even know. I just go to Claude and I say, I wanna set up something that when somebody responds to a form, we draft a Gmail response to after reviewing it. And that’s all you tell it. It could create something amazing for you with something that simple. You don’t have to know all of the code. You don’t have to know all of the—

Kate Kordsmeier [00:36:42]:
Yeah.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:36:43]:
the way to develop things. You don’t even have to know how the workflow is going to work. You can just ask Claude to do it for you.

Monica Froese [00:36:50]:
Yeah, and I talked about this on the connector session too, because before MCPs became a thing, I did— I could not figure out Airtable. I don’t know why. I am pretty tech savvy and I have set up very elaborate funnels in my business, and yet it just didn’t click for me until the AI could go out and do stuff for me. And then, and then once I I saw my information coming to life inside of Airtable, I was like, oh, oh, okay, now I get it. And, and, but if I could— and I didn’t even know what I was asking it to do.

Monica Froese [00:37:22]:
all I knew was that if I was going to keep running events like this, that I had to get a more centralized place to host all the information. And I was so resistant to Airtable. So I— when I went to go set up, I think the last event the, which was the first big event I did in this group, was called AI That Sells. I did the intake form in Google Forms and I quickly was like, this is gonna get so messy where all this information’s going to live. So at that point, Airtable released their MCP. So I just started talking in plain English of, I’m running this event, this is the information I need to capture, this is the stuff I need. And it just went out and did it for me. And I, so I didn’t have to figure out where all the settings were in Airtable and all of that.

Monica Froese [00:38:04]:
Right. And And funny enough, I got an email from Airtable saying I’m one of their MCP power users. Who would’ve thought that was in my field? I’m like, but the thing is, I don’t even need to know how to use it cuz I just go to Claude and I’m like, go to this work, this workspace or this, the, the base, go to this Airtable base and this is what I need from it, XYZ, and it pulls it. Or I need you to update XYZ and it does it. And I don’t even have to figure out where all the settings are in there. Right.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:38:30]:
And I don’t know if you guys just watched me do this too, but this is something else that people forget they can do. Like, this is saying, oh, your HTML files aren’t there. And so I just took a screenshot and I’m like, yes, they are. And it’s like, oh, you’re right. Sorry. Let me go find it now. But sometimes we think like we have to figure this out and it’s like, no, I, I just had to give it to it so that it could do it.

Monica Froese [00:38:51]:
This is awesome. Just to reiterate, Kate’s gonna leave the link to the prompts. in the school community. She’s just going to create a new post after we’re done on the call, and so you can grab it there. Rachel, have the responses been up-leveled since then? Because I’m going to guess this is gonna probably compare— it was already good enough, right?

Kate Kordsmeier [00:39:13]:
Right.

Monica Froese [00:39:13]:
I feel like this is probably gonna knock the socks off of people.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:39:16]:
Yeah, and maybe it will get to a point— I don’t know, this is going back to your point— I was going to say maybe it will be so good that we do Remove the human review element. But there’s a part of me that’s just, I don’t know, I just, I like there being a human last touch on certain things.

Monica Froese [00:39:32]:
Yeah.

Monica Froese [00:39:32]:
Well, and I think because you’re also positioning it, well, here’s the thing. I do think because you’re positioning it as coaching, if you’re not gonna have a human in the loop, you’re probably, it would probably be, and I know how you are with, in line with your integrity, you’d probably put a notice that like it is coaching via like a bot essentially.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:39:51]:
Right.

Monica Froese [00:39:52]:
But when you do have human in the loop, I don’t feel like you need to say that because literally the human’s making sure that it’s—

Monica Froese [00:39:58]:
Right.

Monica Froese [00:39:59]:
It’s saying exactly like what you would coach in this scenario.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:40:03]:
Right. And I think I like that still because we already have a chatbot inside of these programs that is trained on all the material. So they could just use the chatbot and not fill out the forms. But the whole point of the forms is to start human-to-human conversations. And so I think we would lose that if we were just like, oh, it just automatically gives them an AI-generated response within seconds of filling out the form.

Monica Froese [00:40:29]:
Agreed. In this time that we’ve been just chatting, her coworker has gone on to create a skill that has check-in replies, like, so her examples. It has also created a skill with her entire course roadmap or map of all of her course content because she fed it all of the HTML of her course content. So now these skills can be called upon when this task runs and the drafts are being done for Rachel to review. It’s going to call on these skills and have all of this context that before, when she was using Zapier, it just had a prompt and it had email examples, but it had no reference to what was inside of her course whatsoever. So now you can imagine these responses, like she was saying earlier, can map You can go, this is a specific spot you can find in the course that will help you overcome whatever you’re dealing with. This is, I feel I’m, I honestly, Kate, I was blown away that it would work just on a prompt without your business knowledge.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:41:27]:
Yeah.

Monica Froese [00:41:28]:
But I just feel like this is going to be so much better. And again, I hope everyone realizes Kate and I did not come on this call with the, I just happened, I just picked at questions and I’m just like, well, what if we did it this way? What if we did it that way? And we redid the whole workflow impromptu. And, and while we’re talking, if she had just sat down and did this with no distraction, you would’ve been done in under 10 minutes.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:41:53]:
Oh yeah. Yeah, definitely. And the thing that takes the longest is just Claude doing its thing, right? So it’s like I could go away and do something else and then come back and be like, wow, that’s done. That just is blowing me away.

Monica Froese [00:42:05]:
Yeah. Plus now I’m sure that this is gonna be a whole training that Kate puts together. So when she puts it together, she’ll come and post and let you guys know how to get it.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:42:13]:
Yes.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:42:14]:
Thank you.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:42:14]:
I appreciate that.

Monica Froese [00:42:16]:
All right. Well, I, we, I think I have to end now because we do have another presentation starting at 2, and I need to eat something.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:42:23]:
Okay.

Monica Froese [00:42:24]:
Talking all day.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:42:24]:
Thanks for having me. I’ll definitely post in the Skool channel, y’all. So make sure you go there to find the prompt pack that I’m talking about.

Monica Froese [00:42:31]:
Yes. And we’ll make sure to put it on in the podcast show notes if you’re listening on the podcast. A lot of bandwidth being taken from you, even if you’re the one that’s going to review the drafts and you don’t have a Rachel or a Natalie. Yeah.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:42:42]:
It’s still— And one last thing I’ll say too, ’cause people were asking this, are people pissed that it’s AI? Nobody to my knowledge has ever said or even asked, was this generated by AI? So I think, A, people don’t care. What people want is the result, is the feeling, is the— it’s that thing. They don’t really care how you got to it. And so again, before this, they were getting nothing. Now they’re getting something and it’s just getting better and better. Yeah. And that’s really interesting to hear. I’m sure that some people have thought, oh, this was AI.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:43:17]:
Yeah.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:43:17]:
There’s tells, you know, a lot of times you can tell. And a lot of times it’s like, I would never be that thorough. I, I couldn’t do that personally to all of, for all of my clients. I would never have time to do anything else.

Monica Froese [00:43:29]:
I, I really truly feel like though, what AI helps us as coaches to be able to do is actually help you more because it— we, we’re humans, we have the same 24 hours in the day. So if AI helps us get to the answer faster so we can help you more thoroughly and more in depth, like, why— like, right, to me this is a win-win for everyone, you know?

Kate Kordsmeier [00:43:55]:
I love that, right? And that’s what we do is we answer your question, we point you in the next right direction, and then if you write back to us Now we’re human to human having a conversation, right? And so, yeah, I think this is, I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever created in my business. I’ve, I’ve talked about it on a lot of summits before, but I’m glad that it seems to really be resonating with everybody here.

Monica Froese [00:44:19]:
Yeah, honestly, I’m gonna, I am gonna go grab a cheesesteak before the next one.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:44:23]:
Go eat.

Monica Froese [00:44:24]:
All right, Kate. Okay.

Monica Froese [00:44:24]:
Talk to you later.

Kate Kordsmeier [00:44:25]:
Bye everybody. Thank you so much.