Building The Future Of Learning Platforms & Community Experience | Bryan McAnulty

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #282, we welcomed Bryan McAnulty Founder of Heights Platform and LatchLoop based in Austin, TX.

Bryan has helped thousands of creators across 100+ countries transform their knowledge into thriving businesses. As a creator himself, he has been committed to empowering those with a passion for creation to learn and grow online.

In this episode, Bryan and Adrian chat through the Four CX Pillars: Team, Tools, Process & Feedback. Plus share some of the ideas that his team think through on a daily basis to build world class customer experiences.

**Episode #282 Highlight Reel:**

1.  Focusing on being proactive with all of your customers, regardless of LTV
2. Pro's & Con's of AI-driven customer support
3. Why customers value speed to solution more than anything 

Click here to learn more about Bryan McAnulty

Click here to learn more about Heights Platform

Click here to learn more about LatchLoop

Huge thanks to Bryan for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring his work and efforts in pushing the customer experience & contact center space into the future. 

For all of our Apple & Spotify podcast listener friends, make sure you are following CXC & please leave a 5 star review so we can find new members of the "CX Nation". 

You know what would be even better?

Go tell your friends or teammates about CXC's custom content, strategic partner solutions (Hubspot, Intercom, & Freshworks) & On-Demand services & invite them to join the CX Nation, a community of 15K+ customer focused business leaders!

Want to see how your customer experience compares to the world's top-performing customer focused companies? 

Thanks to all of you for being apart of the "CX Nation" and helping customer focused business leaders across the world make happiness a habit!

Transcript

Adrian (00:00.626)

All right, guys, thanks so much for listening to another episode of the CX Chronicles podcast. super excited for today's guest, guys. We have an awesome, an awesome guest joining us that's gonna talk about all things technology, AI. he has a super cool background, has built some really, really cool businesses. So I'm excited to to dig in with Brian McAnulty. Brian, say hello to the CX Nation, my friend.

Bryan McAnulty (00:23.02)

Hey everyone, Adrian, thanks for having me on.

Adrian (00:25.488)

Hundred percent. So Brian, you are in the Lone Star State, my friend, right? You're you're you're talking with state out of Austin, Texas, right?

Sweet man. So guys, Brian and I met a couple of weeks ago. hit it off. Brian's got a super cool background. He's done all sorts of awesome things in in product director roles. He he's absolutely an entrepreneur, he's built a bunch of different companies. and now he, like the rest of us, is trying to figure out how we navigate this wonderful world of technology and AI and do and guys, remember people, people, humans are still a big part of this for the now. and and those of us that are smart and paying attention and prepared and learning.

We got the best chance of be of sticking around the longest of being a part of what this looks like. But Brian, super pumped for you to join, man. Why don't you take the microphone, set the stages? We set all these episodes, stages. Give us a couple minutes, man. Introduce yourself. give the high-level background for how you got into what you're doing today as the founder of of of Heights platform and the founder of Latch. Then I definitely want to talk about some of the awesome content and stuff like that that you're doing, brother.

Bryan McAnulty (01:28.782)

Sure. Yeah. Thank you. So started my business way back in 2009. originally we were this kind of web design graphic design agency. that shifted in wanting to eventually build some of our own products and software. We tried a few different things. Some were more successful than others. that eventually led to in 2019, the release of Heights platform. And that's been largely our focus since then.

that and now latchloop.com as well, which I'll get into soon. But Heights platform, we are an online course creation and community building software. And we've helped now more than 10,000 creators and entrepreneurs build online knowledge businesses. So somebody who wants to have an online course business, a coaching product, community membership, digital downloads, all that kind of thing is all branded under your own website. So, like if you see somebody's site running, you don't know that they're using Heights platform. it's on their site. And so

I imagine the people watching and listening to this podcast, more so businesses. more common, like our customers would be like the kind of like solopreneur or things like that, a creator who wants to teach somebody about music or photography or this kind of thing. but we do see businesses use it both for like internal employee training and also for situations where maybe you've got a course that you want to offer to your customers kind of as like a lead and authority tool for your business.

Adrian (02:55.086)

I love it, man. That's awesome. what what made you want to get into this type of work? Was it something that you were doing when you were younger? Or was it something that you you know, you saw or you were exposed to when you when you were a kid that kind of made you want to get into this, or was was it just something you kinda stumbled into?

Bryan McAnulty (03:09.406)

yeah, it was really a combination of everything because I out of high school, I decided that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I spent a lot of time thinking about like what do I want to do. And I decided I didn't want to go to college. I wanted to try building this business thing. I was already doing some like freelance graphic and print design, web design and stuff on the side. And I thought, okay, I'm gonna try this. And then I decided to do the whole digital nomad thing and

And try to travel the world as I was doing it. I I really enjoyed that. I've been to more than 30 countries, more than a hundred cities. but I was back before digital nomad as like a term even existed. There was no Airbnb. a little over 30. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mostly through Europe and Asia. And I I still travel quite a bit, even though now I'm more settled down with a a family and everything here in Austin. But

Adrian (03:44.764)

Nice dude.

Adrian (03:48.816)

Wait, how many countries? How many countries, Brian?

Damn dude, that's fantastic. That's huge.

Adrian (04:04.461)

Hehehehe

Bryan McAnulty (04:06.273)

But yeah, love traveling. And in the process of that, I was trying other things in my business because I wanted to see like besides building software products, what else can I do? So I tried selling digital products and e commerce stores and all these things. And I was passionate about the online learning because I thought that okay, on one hand, this is something where you can build a business that you're making a positive impact. It's something you can do that's fulfilling. I felt that the education system as it was was not serving me well. I didn't

ever go to college. I didn't feel like it was going to help me by going to college compared to what I was trying to do. And I wanted to provide a better solution for the entrepreneurs I saw out there. At the time, digital marketers had these courses that were selling. They would do these webinars and things. And you buy their product and it's like a couple of videos behind a paywall. And they're excellent marketers. They have something very valuable to teach, but they didn't have a tool to be able to deliver that. So they're not expert like instructional designers and they shouldn't be expected to be.

Adrian (04:55.218)

Totally. Yeah. Sure.

Bryan McAnulty (05:05.067)

But I felt that there was a gap there in the market. And that's what Heights Platform was originally built to serve and built from the premise that we have these social media platforms like Facebook and all that designed to keep us glued to the screens so they can serve us more ads. And I thought, well, why can't we take some of the same principles, but then use it to help people learn instead? And so Heights platform, we started with like gamification of how people could complete the lessons.

a built-in community. So you have your own branded community. You didn't have to use like a Facebook group or something like that. And yeah, it's really been like the focus more so on the learning than the marketing side. since that and in the more recent years, now we've got AI. And AI kind of came at like the perfect time for us because we had these ideas of like how we wanted to serve customers better. And we didn't know how, like technically how we could ever accomplish that at a scale.

but then GPT-4 came out and it finally made some of these ideas possible. And so I feel like we kind of had an edge that we like already knew the thing that we were trying to build. And GPT-4 and subsequent models enabled that for us. and so yeah, now we we have AI embedded both internally in our systems of how we serve our customers and also in the product itself to help our customers be able to not have to learn how to use the software anymore.

They can have the AI set up and configure things for them, generate a new web page for an offer that they're trying to promote, things like this.

Adrian (06:37.414)

That's awesome, man. So a couple things. These are like these have been age-old problems in every business is learning how a tribal knowledge, for example, for for lack of a better term. Like and then especially as you and I've been talking about as we've get been getting to know each other the last couple of weeks.

And then de and then what what stage of the business are you at? Are you a small business? Are you growing? Are you trying to put together your first million dollars revenue? Are you starting to pick up steam? Are you already doing 10 north of 10 million dollars? Is your team starting to grow? We literally were just chatting about this before we hit we we jumped in and started recording, but like how big is your team getting? Do you have a hundred people? Do you have hundreds of people? Do you have thousands? And like

learning stuff or tribal knowledge or passing along the things that you need to know. And then as we as as everybody that's listening knows, as the as any business grows, silos or or just you know teams kind of moving into their own little camps, that's natural. It almost always happens. It's hard to it's hard it's hard to, you know, to to avoid. But passing or having the ability of passing information and knowledge on, man.

That's in that's incredible, right? So when you guys started this, was this more or when you when you started to build this, was this because you already saw the need for businesses to do this or w or would you try to fix a problem with with with something that you'd been seeing inside of inside of your inside of your career in your day to day? or was it a combination of both?

Bryan McAnulty (07:57.409)

Yeah, kind of a combination of both. and I would say that like what's interesting now is like, I don't think people, if if you're a business, if you want to use something like Heights platform to create a course and promote that and help educate your audience and provide value to your audience, it can can be a great lead tool. I was talking with another founder last week that he had a great idea of of how I should position this, which I I really liked is that if you want to show up in in AI search.

ChatGPT or something like that, if it sees you wrote blog post or something, it's like, okay, well, maybe they're kind of credible, but anybody could write a blog post. But if you're the company that has the online course about this thing, all of a sudden to in in AI's eyes, you are now have elevated the credibility of your business around that topic. but but I would say in general, what I found to be even more important now than ever is yeah not only like being able to communicate like this tacit knowledge that employees have within the organization, but

just writing out the SOPs and things and having that clear because if you're gonna leverage AI, that's what you have to have in the first place in order to get AI involved in it.

Bryan McAnulty (09:11.624)

I think you're muted.

Adrian (09:14.386)

Totally agree. and and and and and completely I mean there's just been so many times in in my career where not having either the playbook or not having the SOPs or not having just some of Brian, honestly, part of one of the big reasons why we started CX Chronicles, chronicling the history of a business, brother. Literally, like, and cause you know, for for me, like spent a lot of time in the in the in the in the ventures, the venture capital side of things where we were building the bonfire. So even more pertinent were

Making sure that people understood the high level on here's how we built the team and here's how the team is orchestrated and here's how we have offense and midfield and defense set out. Here's the tech stack. Like literally here's all the tools that we are now working in. Here's the processes. And like this was part of like when when when I, you know, when I started thinking about building this the the this business and building this this whole content branch and this whole this whole like community around the stuff, it's because I kept seeing time and time and time again, you know, a lot of executives will say, well, you gotta keep it super, you gotta see keep it super.

loose and be pliable early, right? You always gotta be kinda knowing where you s and I totally agree with that. W that doesn't enable some somebody on the team being able to chronicle and document and essentially capture and now fast forward to where we are now, brother. Think about it. The teams and the and the companies that have full blown

you know playbooks with all of this other complimentary content where they've got community where then there's been there's all this other subcontent that could be levered. Dude, these are some of the companies that got more than enough AI gasoline to drive straight through the next thousand days in terms of getting ahead on this stuff. So so really really cool. before we jump off of heights I just brought up the community building part.

This has become something that even at CXE Men, like with some of our clients and with with some of the folks in the community, a lot of people need help with this because it's a lot of people are also pushing out or reducing and almost smoothing some of their customer support and their customer experience because.

Adrian (11:15.364)

If more of their if most of their customers just can go somewhere and get the quick and dirty on an answer for an FAQ, and maybe sometimes that's community, because think about it. If you're a software company, maybe it's going and reading how the last ten

people got through a certain obstacle with implementation or they got through a certain obstacle with integrations or they got through a certain obstacle with hey, how the hell did we get our team to actually adopt? So maybe they're struggling with adoption. Community's cool man. You guys have a bunch of different things that the tool helps people with on the community building. Can you just talk about that for a second?

Bryan McAnulty (11:48.385)

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. so one of my favorite things that we introduced around the beginning of last year is this idea of public communities. And so you have the ability to like restrict access to any of the channels in your community in whatever way that you want. And so for those who who do not have a community or haven't used a tool like this, comparisons could be like something like Discord, where that's like that's an app that you have to download that's more focused on like gamers and a younger audience.

Then there's also like some people have tried to use Slack. I would never use Slack for this though, because you lose all the retained message unless you're on like the business plan for every single member. So if you want to spend millions of dollars a year to run your community, then you can use Slack. but yeah, a a tool with like Heights platform, the public community gives you the ability that imagine that you want to get content about your business out there. And previously we would have said, okay, well, let's write a blog and let's hope that.

Adrian (12:26.578)

Dude, yes.

Hundred percent, man.

Bryan McAnulty (12:45.92)

That somebody's going to spend time to read that. Let's hope that Google is going to show that to somebody and then it can do what it's supposed to do, right? But nowadays, if the content is already kind of like in the AI training data, then AI doesn't really care about surfacing that. And so what does the AI care to show people when it has to go and do a rev a web search? I would argue it's the stuff that's not in the AI training data. So like what are people talking about right now? And what are people's opinions on the specific thing?

And that's why like things like Reddit and stuff do well in AI search. And that's why that does well in like Google, even. And so why not have that for your own brand where you have these public community channels that when somebody asks a question, you can go and help them as you normally would. But now instead of only helping that one person and anybody else who sees it in the community, you have a landing page that exists for that post that somebody could be asking the same question and they find that in Chat GPT or Google.

Adrian (13:19.396)

Absolutely.

Bryan McAnulty (13:42.662)

And now they come across it, they can see your answer and everything. But if they want to see more, they have to click to join the community. And so being able to serve your customers now gets to potentially act as a lead magnet for your business.

Adrian (13:53.404)

Got it. Love it. Yeah, that's amazing, man. And I and I'm definitely seeing more and more directors and VPs of customer experience asking around different paths or different different ways that they can be doing this. there's a lot of questions we'll field about what what tools are best to do it. So super cool that you guys are are are are one of the are one of the potential solutions that can help us with this.

Brian, let's jump into like the first pillar of team and please keep talking about heights as you're kind of going through this, but like how over the years, so you you've been building heights now for for several years, how have you kind of thought about going about building your team? Or how have you sort of thought about how you had to put the right guys and gals around you to be able to continue to grow the business, to be able to find new potential prospects, be able to convert them into customers, to be able to keep all this stuff on the rails? How did you kind of think about that first pillar of team over the years?

Bryan McAnulty (14:45.969)

well, I would say that it's it's definitely shifted now with how fast like AI's capabilities are changing. so we're we're a small bootstrap company, we're under 10 people still, but now I feel less of a urge to grow in headcount and more just the importance of having good people in every single role that really know what they're doing and can kind of own that role. and so yeah, that that's kind of been the approach.

And I'd really I'd like to share a lot about I guess it's gonna it's gonna get more into the process of like what we do internally of how we're leveraging AI and how we can make each person have a a greater output than than what would have been possible from just one person. but but yeah, making sure like for us that like everybody is on board with that and we're all able to to move fast. And it's easy, easy for a small company like us to do because we only have a few people to to be able to get on board with that.

Adrian (15:29.476)

Sure. Yep.

Bryan McAnulty (15:45.411)

but yeah, I guess like where where's better to start? and like the the CX side of what we did, maybe.

Adrian (15:53.082)

Yeah, I th I love it. I mean, give give us a sense just for in terms of like 'cause now you've got you've had a cup you've built a few different different businesses. What were some of I guess the ma the the most important initial pieces? Was it sales and marketing to support you? Was it actually having somebody to be able to to to your point be able to respond or to be able to do engagement? I guess what were some of the the the the the the initial team bets that you knew that you needed to make that have have panned out?

Bryan McAnulty (16:13.225)

Yeah, so initially

Got it. Initially for us, it was like content and marketing and support. and support was really important for us early on because I knew that that was kind of like one of the levers of an advantage that we would have as the smaller bootstrap company versus the VC funded companies, we can overdeliver on good support and good service. And so I wanted to make sure that we're gonna be able to do that for our customers. And yeah, so putting a a lot of focus on on that and then yeah.

marketing and and and content to be able to drive new customers to us. That was definitely kind of the first two things.

Adrian (16:51.876)

I love it. Dude, like I can attest to guys like one of the things that Brian and I share in common is just Brian has also made an abundance of content. And one one quick thing I want to share is like for people to be thinking about like this idea of

How much time some of this stuff can take. I know, Brian, you can attest from from like on the early days when we were building CXC, but like in general, this is a pulse of work report that our friends at at GoTo put out earlier this year. But like 2.6 hours a day or 13 hours per week, employees estimate that they're spending on tasks that AI could handle. This lost time translates into a huge opportunity cost. 2.9 trillion is the amount that US businesses could gain from unlocking AI's potentials. I'm gonna I I'm showing

This and I'm talking about this because number one, me and you probably know more about this than any than than the most people in the world when it comes to content and podcasts, just because of the numbers that we're at. But like I remember in the early days, man, like me personally, the first hundred probably the first 75 to 100 episodes, dude. Hours, me, I've spent hours on

Doing the show card and the notes and the trying to put to trying to coddle together images. And I'm not, I'm not the I'm not the design. I was just trying to get it, get shit done, get shit out there, make sure that it and then that led to having an awesome person. Then fast forward now six years, Brian. Like now we've got tools like Riverside FM and Opus, where you and I are literally we're in a studio right now in Riverside, we get off this, we can start working our magic right after the call. And I I share that stat because like there's just no way that every one of us that's or everybody that's listening.

Right now, can't think of a few of the either a few of those items that relate directly to you, listener, to your role, to your day today. And I'm sure you're already jamming on it because you're probably not listening to a show like this unless you're already trying to get ahead and get ideas and starting to learn and starting to lever what other people are doing. But your team, right? Like we we've had the pleasure of working with with with over 150 companies here at CXC over the last six years, probably like and look, I know that every business is run a little bit different, every business grows a little bit different, but man, we see so many teams where

Adrian (18:56.432)

There could be all of these little adjustments that not only would make a major difference on the CX side of the game, but on the EX side of the game. So you get this, this, this, this compound interest on both sides of the ball.

That makes a huge, a huge difference. So so I I love and I and I I love that you are kind of one of the the the early pioneers in terms of keeping a smaller, leaner, sophisticated team levering some of these tools that are at our disposal and then obviously being able to really kind of you know grow in an a in a bit of an advantage in that way. let's move you said team. Let's jump right into that second pillar of team. Love for you to spend several minutes kind of talking about over the years how not just heights and not so and and not and not not just

what you guys are building with Lashley, but like how did you kind of put together your initial tech stack, Brian? Like if you every s every small business owner's got this problem, every early founder's got this problem. Like, how the hell do I know what tools are going to get me at least to the day that again, all of us have different goals and milestones for growth and things like that. But how'd you kind of think about where you wanted to spend your money early and what tools you wanted to build the backbone of heights on?

Bryan McAnulty (20:04.466)

Yeah. yeah, great question. I I think it's most relevant to only go back to like 2023 of like once AI existed, because I feel my answer today is completely different than what I did back then, before AI. and so because even in 2023, there were there were not options of what we needed. And a lot of it we built ourselves in-house. and so like we are a software team. That's one of the things that we can do.

Adrian (20:17.132)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bryan McAnulty (20:31.924)

But now I think there is more on the market today if you wanted to kind of buy this instead of build this. And so an example of this is with our customer support, as soon as we we understood like what could be done when like GPT-4 came out and all that, we were already working towards like how can we integrate this into our service? And I know so many people have thought like, okay, well, we're gonna we're gonna take our knowledge base and we're gonna take our

Our customer support emails and things like that. And we're gonna build this AI that's gonna be able to do customer service for us. And our approach with this is because we built and spent the time to kind of build it ourselves, we're still using our own solution for this. We're not using any like other off-the-shelf kind of things. though I do think the the the off-the-shelf kind of products now are good. but our approach was that our customer service lead, her role shifted from

answering customers' questions to like training and improving our AI. And we got to the point that like AI is doing thousands of customer questions for us per month. And customers were more happy because they're able to get these answers just immediately, even if the customer thought like, I want to deal with a real person, right? because a lot of people I think say that. but really what they want is just the the solution. And if you can get the solution to them faster, that's what's gonna help them.

But don't get me wrong, like we don't want to stop a customer from being able to get to a person whenever they do really want that. And I think that the way that we approach this is actually some of our advantage here. so a couple things. when we built this system originally, we designed it so that way the AI could be able to understand all of our knowledge base and the AI could be able to understand like a curated selection of past like customer email responses.

So it knew like what are the things that we said and how do we say it and all that. But the the differentiator that I think we had early on is our team would have to go in there and see, like, okay, what are people giving like a thumbs up or thumbs down? So, like, where's the AI not helping that we have to improve something, that it's wrong, or that's not the best answer, or something like this. And then the spot where I think we kind of innovated with that early on was that.

Adrian (22:43.729)

Yep.

Bryan McAnulty (22:52.638)

You know, if you ask like a chat bot, you're always trying to fight with a thing. No, get me a human. I'm gonna talk to a real person. And with with Heights AI inside Heights platform, what we did is that somebody can click to to talk to like a person at any time and email us. But what we actually do is the AI will actually escalate something to us proactively on its own, even without the customer asking. And so we may get an email that says, like from our AI saying,

Adrian (22:56.111)

Yeah.

Bryan McAnulty (23:22.248)

Hey, it seems like the customer had trouble with like this particular thing and I don't think I was able to help them. And then our team can step in and send that customer an email proactively and said, Hey, it looks like I'd say I might have had trouble helping you with this. if you want, you could go do this, this, and this. And now we get to serve them at a greater level without them even asking for it and provide just a better level of customer support than we could have before.

Adrian (23:45.296)

Yeah, it's a blend, brother. You see, you guys are ahead of it where it's it's it's it's a blend of it, right? It's not all or nothing. It's a blend of it. It's it's letting your it's letting your your your your artificial intelligence be another signal or indicative measure. like what you just said right there, that's an ending court situation. You just basically have you you for for for for no money outside the development of that bot or that or that that thought, that that that that that objective thought, you are literally.

Getting an Anding cord, right? The Toyota feature of any any any any man in a room who could pull the Anding cord and stop the line, right? That's a freaking game changer. No SBs can afford Andon systems. That's a come on. If anything, the founders or the the the owners, the men and women that own the damn things, we are the Anding cord. We like as things either come to us or so that's amazing. I think another thing that you just made me think about with that really quickly was there's this other piece of

Bryan McAnulty (24:16.522)

Mm-hmm.

Adrian (24:37.958)

Cause we work with a lot of these smaller businesses too, Brent. A lot of these these the the these emerging companies want to be tomorrow's leaders. There's this other mist of like people like me and you, we got to do in our career early or earlier in our career, lots of customer touches. Meaning, like you learned and you observed and you kind of understood usability or engagement or adoption by

talking to customers, watching customer signals, seeing things that were happening, right? This is before we were able to everybody was just able to bang out a cloud bot and throw it into action. But like there's another big game there. Meaning there I the we'll we'll we'll hear some of these and then we even have some of these awesome founders that come on the show. But like there is

a a an opportunity or there's a there's a there's a line is what I'm I'm trying to say where like you don't want to go too far. Meaning automating everything and avo and missing human touches if you're an or if you're a startup or if you're an early company you're trying to find product market fit. Guys, that's like

Bryan McAnulty (25:33.266)

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I I don't I don't want to get anybody good confused in in the way I I think about this. even even still to this day, I think I spend more time looking at the customer support inbox than my own inbox. I pretty much ignore my own email. but I want to see what what customers are saying and be able to help them. And what I would say is when you are looking at what is the right kind of mindset to have in approaching how to leverage AI in your business.

Adrian (25:46.32)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Bryan McAnulty (26:00.102)

If you're thinking about like, okay, well, we're going to use this thing, it's going save us costs. Like you've already lost. That is, that is not the way to think of it. It's okay, we're how are we going to use this thing to deliver an outcome that is just way beyond what we ever could have done before? Because that's what your competitors are going to be doing. And if you don't do that, then you're going to say, how can we save a little bit of money? A year passes, and then you see what they're now able to provide their customers. You say, okay. And

Adrian (26:24.966)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Bryan McAnulty (26:26.765)

So you we need to think about like how are we going to deliver a better outcome than ever before because of AI. And in the process, you're going to save a lot of money on the way that you used to do things just because of the nature. But there's all these things now that you can do that just weren't even possible before. And imagine all like the data that you can get on a specific customer that you don't have to go and manually find that that the AI can kind of be providing to you. So that way when you do get in touch with them.

And you do have that human connection, now you can serve them at a level where they feel like they're your only customer because of that information that you have.

Adrian (26:59.27)

Hundred percent, man. A hundred percent. I I I and I I love that. I love that thought. wha before I let you off the hook on tools, what was like in all the years and all the businesses you've been a part of building, and then obviously building heights, what was the best technology investment you've made? I know this is a hard one, but like you can answer it as simply as either the best tool that I ever had to buy or the best tool that we're using that we still use it. It can be like that, or it can be give us like a story or an example of something that

Like you now realize kind of what you were just getting at a second ago there, but like you now realize what might seem like a big cost, what seem like almost overkill for a small business, simply trying to get their product market feed, they're trying to get the front. What's like the best in technology investment that now at this point in your career that you've made?

Bryan McAnulty (27:39.401)

Mm.

Bryan McAnulty (27:47.71)

Yeah, that's a that's a great question. So maybe I'm biased, but but I really believe this is that it is the the tool that we built, Latchloop. because we built it for ourselves internally at first. And and what this is, is this is it started as a a coding agent. And we built this because at the time codex and cloud code didn't exist. so this this was back in like

Adrian (28:10.299)

Okay.

Bryan McAnulty (28:15.293)

February of last year, we started using it very heavily. And like, yeah, I didn't imagine we would be building this thing, but we thought, like, okay, we want to be able to use AI to build our own software faster. And my problem was that even the tools that did exist, we had things, there were things like cursor of of course that already existed to to build software with AI. but my problem with that was that how do I get like the team involved? And how do I, how do I automate things? And how do I have more than one of these AIs running at once?

Because the idea of like having to copy and paste stuff back and forth and sit there and wait for the agent to do something, it it already felt silly to me. And I think now like everyone can see that like we're realizing that the the AI can handle these longer tasks and be doing more things for us. And so yeah, Latch Loop started as this coding agent to build our software. now we use it as like a general agent too. But where it's different from a tool like codex or cloud code is that.

We have this approach that it's looks more like a project management system where you create a task, you're working on that task document, and then your team might be working on that with you. And then when you're ready, you have the AI go and build it or work on that thing. And so that has enabled our team who is non-technical to be able to say, Hey, I found a bug. And they can just communicate it to the agent and then they have a fix or they say, Hey, I've got this idea. They can communicate it to the agent and then they have the idea.

right there and made and a staging server is set up for them so they can go and present it to me or the rest of the team. And instead of the conversation being about, like maybe we could build this kind of thing and then and drawing up something before we decide if we're even going to prototype it. It's just like, no, here is the feature and we can take a look at it. And so the the automation of that and now everything that's doing for us, that's something where like, yeah, it felt expensive at first because we were spending

like my usage alone was about four thousand dollars per month in tokens of what I was putting through this thing. and it keeps increasing because the the tools, the agents, everything keeps getting better. The models keep getting better. because yeah, at that very end of last year, I think we started to see that GPT five released and and the model started really improving. I remember I was using like five hundred million or so tokens per month at that time.

Adrian (30:14.426)

Wow. Wow. Wow.

Bryan McAnulty (30:39.296)

and then the beginning of this year it was like a billion tokens per month, then it was two billion, now it's over three billion. And it just keeps going up, but I'm not spending more time working. And we're finding more ways of how AI can be doing more for us and working on these like longer horizon tasks. And so yeah, that that that that's the answer essentially.

Adrian (31:00.06)

Dude, it this is a first of all, this is awesome. And then guys, when you heard the news, Brian, what was it two two couple weeks ago? Apple Apple would be paying Google 10 billion annually for a custom one point two trillion parameter AI model. Okay. This echoes what kind of you're saying here, where like

SMBs don't necessarily have that option of just going and borrowing from another another giant, right? And then being able to pay that bill. But we're gonna have the same problem. Meaning the the SMBs that get overhooked, over addicted, overusage, whatever you want to call it. I'm I'm I'm just the dancing bear here, but like when they're if they're building complexity continues to get further and further, this is something that like will be an issue. So what I love about kind of what you did, what you built with Latch, brother, is like putting

prototyping in the hands of many. number one, downstream, dude, you're avoiding that. You're avoiding the issue that all of us will run into eventually, which is token spend and then guys, I hate to say it to you, but if you're crazy, if you're not already realizing tomorrow's leaders, the best and the brightest, the the the the Pareto, the 20% that ends up running the the you know, all all the the people are gonna be safe, regardless of what Elon is telling us. The people that are going to be safe. They're gonna be measured Brian probably on this. It's essentially their their output against

Spend of and then tokens is gonna expand into a variety of different things that we probably don't even know how to talk about yet. There'll be all these different tranches of token spend, it'll be its own market, if you will, like equities and derivatives of a different nature. Dude, this is interesting where you're getting ahead of that, where then you're you're democratizing the ability to prototype, you're simplifying how other because remember, dude, you've been coding for what did you show me the other day? Like you're you're you're an OG, you've been doing this since

Bryan McAnulty (32:41.724)

Yeah, a a long time. But well what's really crazy is just how quickly it's changing. And I think it's coming to it's coming to coding first. And so all the software developers are seeing this before like other kinds of knowledge workers. But like this is where it's going for for everything. And like what so what we're doing in Lash Loop right now is figuring out like well, what can we do with these more general agents so that way it can apply to any kind of knowledge work. but but yeah, the the the usage just keeps increasing and like

Adrian (33:04.838)

Love it. That's so cool, man. That's so cool.

Bryan McAnulty (33:10.736)

Where where I see how crazy this is, I think in like the last like 10 years, I wrote like a million lines of production code or something like this. This year I'm going to write more than that of like what gets pushed into production this year alone. Like without a doubt, it might be over two million. And to me, that's just crazy. Like it's a it's a more than 10x increase in output of of what's possible now. So

Adrian (33:32.292)

Unbelievable. Unbelievable. And and and how many engineers did you hire for that?

Bryan McAnulty (33:38.514)

It's it's me with my my a my AI engineer, so yeah.

Adrian (33:42.492)

Got Brian, I'm joking with you, but listeners, this is why we all gotta pick our game up. Like meaning like and by the way, I keep saying this, Brian, tell me if you feel different. I know and we'll jump into the third pillar of process as we kind of as I ask this, but like

Like for me, man, like Brian, I'm a non-technical founder. I was very, very fortunate early in my career where I got to work with analysts and builders. And then I was the I was I always jokingly say the Nancy Bear. I go talk to every single customer and I would learn what the customers wanted, and I would, you know, and then I would go and talk to employees, and then I would essentially normalize what we're hearing from user and then di the builder. And that's kind of what I did for 17 years, brother. But like now, even me, I've got I I I'm building with Gemini, I'm building with Replit.

I'm build I'm starting to test with Cloud just because I'm hearing yammering. So then I'm also trying to be aware of like, well, even me now, now that I've gotten comfortable sorry, R Riverside and Opus brother, I've been using these now for two plus years. So even though even their infant some of the some of the the early solutions that they were giving people like me and you as creators,

And guys, I am by no means like you ask Maria from our team. The poor lady has to deal with all sorts of stupid questions from me every day about technical stuff. And I'm a technical consultant. But the reality is like it's we're we're living in a world right now. Just pick your one or your two tools, man. Pick your one or two tools. It could be Gemini, it could be Cloud, it could be Replit, it could be whatever your subject matter if there's something that's already been built in your subject matter expert space. because confidence

Bryan McAnulty (35:02.3)

Well, here, I got I got two ideas for you actually. So the way I see things is that there's this new category of like everything apps. And and Latch Loop is kind of like one of those because it it's this agent that can do all these different things. But I don't think that's all that people are going to use. so like codex from OpenAI, Claude Co-work is kind of like the more like knowledge worker focused version from Anthropic. and then yeah, something like Latchloop, there's Hermes agent has been in like incredibly popular recently.

Adrian (35:13.339)

Okay.

Adrian (35:25.328)

Yep.

Adrian (35:30.588)

Hermes. Yep.

Bryan McAnulty (35:32.384)

these are all like the kind of like everything agent software that just is a new category that didn't exist before. And then you have the the general like SaaS software where you have like more like the vertical agents. So like in Heights platform, you have Heights AI, it has this very specialized use of the thing that it does and it's optimized for that. And I think people are gonna use both of these things. They'll have like the the average person will have their own like general agents that

That they've customized that works well for them, that knows about them and their business and the way that they work. And then they have the specialized tools that they use in combination with that, maybe through these these agents. That's what everybody still has to figure out. It's like, is my is my general agent gonna talk to my specialized tools or am I gonna still what where where do I get involved? but then what I would say to that is that the way to think about this is if we fast forward

Adrian (36:14.04)

Yeah, yeah.

Bryan McAnulty (36:25.081)

a year or two from now and everyone has these magic AI agents that do all the work for you, then what makes your business any different from anybody else? And my argument would be it all comes down to just how you do things. And so that's the important part that you want to preserve. And that's the part that you want to get your team on board with in like how that they're going to leverage AI in the right way. Because if anybody can press a button and say, make me the software or anybody can press a button and say, solve all my customer problems or whatever like that, everybody's just the same then.

And so like your business isn't going to stand out or isn't going to win because you can press the same button everybody else can. so being able to press that button two months earlier, you're you have an advantage for a couple months, but it's not gonna last, right? So what you have to think about is is how do you do things and how is that different? And the analogy I would give is like the the Mac versus PC ads that we used to have of how Apple always communicated that like the the way that they design their products and their software, the the how they do things is what made them different.

Adrian (37:12.966)

Yeah, those the best.

Adrian (37:22.158)

I I love that. I mean it's it's it's extremely well said and then it goes back to what we were saying earlier where there's still gonna be this huge human touch and this personalized especially for the last mile, man. I know everything was gonna go fist, but that last mile of selling, last p mile of remediation or support, last mile of of of onboarding and implementation and getting a client to actually an engaged or an adopt state, man, that's still humans for the now. Brad, I'd love to we we chatted through a bunch of different things. This is fantastic. We hit on a on a few different before we leave some

the ideas from our process. What about content? Do you have like in 60 seconds, what any any ideas immediately flash your head for how people like you and myself who've got you've got a hundred, you've got almost 200 episodes, I've got almost 300 episodes. How do people like us leverage some of the things that you're talking about right now with all the the the the amount of content that we've built?

Bryan McAnulty (38:12.741)

Yeah. I I think like where I'm putting my time the most is things like podcasts like this, my own podcast appearing on other podcasts, doing YouTube, things like that I think are are important because like you're you're getting your unique message out there and then you have leverage with that. but but yeah, it's really interesting to see like where where are things gonna go with like creating like written content and like

And how how does that even work nowadays? And I think I don't know if I have the best answer for that. in in some ways we're we're kind of frustrated with how Google seems to be handling things with the the AI overviews and all that. Cause it kind of feels like an adversarial relationship nowadays. Hmm.

Adrian (38:55.524)

And LinkedIn and LinkedIn by the way. LinkedIn is getting ridiculous. So apparently LinkedIn doesn't care about people who have talked to three hundred CEOs that have done the thing. They'd rather listen to a CSM who's got three years of experience who's got fifty seven thousand followers. Like so you got Google doing that, you got LinkedIn doing this. I know exactly what you're talking about. Yep.

Bryan McAnulty (39:08.635)

Mm.

Bryan McAnulty (39:13.797)

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, it's difficult. And then because yeah, you've got all this all these people posting this this AI slap that people aren't gonna read anyway. but it's crowding things up. But it's you you could argue, okay, well, that's not gonna impact you. But the problem is if Google wants to show everybody the AI overviews and they want to get your content to index it, to use it, to be able to show the AI overviews, but they're not gonna take people to the page, then like the model changes for us a little bit from like before we hope to write a knowledgeable article, people see

a little lead magnet or something they can get. And now they're in our in our ecosystem. Now like the way that that happens has to be a little bit different. so yeah, the way I'm approaching it, we are a small team. And so this like kind of founder led marketing and like appearing on podcasts and and doing video content and like the things that don't scale as easy, but give people to the opportunity to spend more time with me. I feel like that's what that's what converts because I've seen in the content space, like we talk with creators and everything all the time.

Adrian (40:04.186)

A hundred percent.

Bryan McAnulty (40:11.531)

And everybody has said that the short form content, like you can get views on that, but the views don't translate to revenue in in the case of especially for businesses, where the the views translate to revenue for businesses is because the amount of time that the user spends with you. And so like you want to focus on the the ways where people can really get to know you versus like the short form thing they've seen your face, but they can't even remember who you are or what you care about.

Adrian (40:28.677)

So

Adrian (40:38.066)

Dude, I I love that and it's a great answer for me, but I'm sorry I put you the spot, but I I mean there's only a handful of us that even can give intelligent answers on the side. Like

What I've been seeing, for example, with our content and Spotify, for example, the amount of color and the amount of detail that I'm getting on who's who's now engaging, and then you're spot on where then their level of focus on engaged forward is incredible. Meaning they're not just showing you some bullshit top impressions, guys. Come on. I my some of my friends that love to talk about how they have 47,000 impressions on X. Get out of here. That's the one thing that Elon did that's probably not the best thing. But whereas people like us, like you see, wait a minute,

Bryan McAnulty (41:10.737)

So

Adrian (41:16.372)

this was I like for example when I started this show, I knew it's never gonna be Joe Rogan. I knew it was never gonna be Mark Marin. That's not why I started the show. But on certain weeks, when you see holy shit, there's 697 people that number one finished the show, they listened to it, they listened to the whole damn thing, or engagement hours on YouTube. I can see shit even in a small audience. Wow, there's 17 people engaged X number of hours, so that means not just the pieces that we posted that month.

Some of them went down a CX rabbit hole and they were just, you know, try or then or they walked away from their computer and they they they kept but like but I I love what you're saying where it's like having these different levels of visibility and then understanding truly engaged versus marketable and just like a market contact. huge man. but okay, Brian, I know we're coming up on time, I don't want to be respectful of your time. last question for you, fourth and final pillar of feedback. Give one one example of over your journey.

of the best things that you've ever seen, learned, or applied to everything that you do with customer feedback? And then I'd love to mirror that answer, give one example about the ways that you've thought about employee feedback over over the years.

Bryan McAnulty (42:24.548)

Yeah. I think for us, it it I guess it's like it's kind of a holistic approach in in trying to to always be collecting that. so like collecting that as I mentioned before, like the the AI answers and seeing what people like and what people don't, feedback on regular like support tickets. but then it's also I think why we're successful at having good good customer service and good customer experience is because we're proactive about it. And so like taking opportunities.

To like even when you feel like okay, we're we're doing some kind of promotion and things are busy. How like don't think about okay, how can we make it through this? Think about okay, well, how can we do even more? How could this be better? And so, how could we reach out to every customer and just check in with them and see how can we serve them better or do they have any feedback? and like really asking them for that feedback and and being willing to to talk with the customers and and interact with them. and I I can share, I definitely believe that the the human

approach and human touch is still important. And I think there's a lot of ways it becomes more important. for some businesses, there's talk of this idea that maybe agents are going to buy from you or something. But I think for a lot of us, it's going to come down to still like humans are our customers and we're we are people, right? So like even in in Heist platform, we're we're really leaning into this idea that I didn't invent, but I see people talking about that software as a service is becoming service as a software.

Adrian (43:37.862)

Yeah. Yep. Yep.

Adrian (43:49.243)

Absolutely.

Bryan McAnulty (43:49.527)

And I I think not only software, but also even like agencies, I think are becoming services of software as well, where you have AI helping to deliver these outcomes for people. And so like the the software is helping you to now deliver a direct outcome. And so for us in Heights platform, we have this service that we're now offering to be able to like build out a funnel and email sequences and everything for a customer at a price that's really affordable and something that we couldn't have done at scale before.

Adrian (43:54.959)

Absolutely, a hundred percent.

Bryan McAnulty (44:19.45)

But now we can do that easier. So we can provide a more personalized, more direct service that involves actual people in our team, just because AI is able to help do some of like the grunt work and the legwork with that kind of thing. so yeah, I know I'm getting off the topic of of the feedback. but yeah, definitely I think it's really important to to be like constantly seeking out that feedback and like being proactive about it.

Adrian (44:33.818)

No, no, no. No, it's great.

Adrian (44:42.512)

I love it man. I love it.

Brian, this has been absolutely fantastic. Before I let you go, and and not only that, I hope we have many more of these conversations, man. You're giving me a lot of ideas today. There's a lot of things that I'm gonna follow up with you on just and then for our listeners, we'll put everything in our show notes as well as normal for for where you can learn more about Brian and where can learn more about Heights. But is there anything else you want to shout out? Any any number one, if there's someone easiest place that people can get in touch with you or your team, and then anything that you want to shout out so that people can easily find some of the awesome things that you guys are building.

Bryan McAnulty (45:14.352)

Sure. yeah, I I think probably most relevant to everybody here is if you guys want assistance in like implementing AI in your organization and using tools and agents like something like Latchloop or Codex, Cloud Cowork, all that, you can reach me at build at latchloop.com. Build at latchloop.com is the is the email address and be happy to to talk with you and see if we could help you with that.

Adrian (45:38.008)

Awesome. Brian, it's been an absolute pleasure, brother. best of luck in the future and I look forward to our next conversation.

Bryan McAnulty (45:43.313)

Thanks, Adrian.