TEA 244: How We Automated 40 Hours/Week With Claude AI (Without Hiring Anyone)

In the last month, we automated 40 hours of work per week using AI — without hiring a single new employee. That's an entire salary we don't have to pay.

In this episode, Josh and Dylan walk through the exact step-by-step process they used to integrate AI into a small team and offload hundreds of hours of monotonous work so the team can live in their "green zone" and focus on the work that actually grows the business.

This isn't theory. It's the prompt, the tool, and the workflow we're using right now.

Inside this episode:

• The single Claude prompt every founder should run to identify the first task to automate (you can literally just talk it out with no typing required)
• Why Claude is the AI built for business (and how to start on a $20/month plan)
• How Josh built a content capture skill that turns voice memos into fully tagged, scripted Notion entries
• How Jake (our sales lead) got 30-40 minutes back per day with a non-technical automation he built himself
• The "AI Fridays" ritual that saved our company 329 hours per year in a single day of building
• The mindset shift: AI isn't replacing your team, it's replacing the worst parts of their job so they get to do more of what they love
• The one prompt trick to always add to the end of your AI requests (it'll change your outputs immediately)
• Why you should start by automating what you already do  not by adding new things to your plate

If you've felt overwhelmed by where to start with AI, this is the episode that makes it dumb-simple.

🎁 Loved this episode? Leave us a review on Apple or Spotify, then email team@ecommercealley.com with a screenshot and we'll send you a $10 Amazon gift card as a thank-you. We're on a mission to become the #1 ecommerce podcast on the planet.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

We were essentially able to hire a new employee in the last month, leveraging AI, without actually even hiring the employee. And so we want to talk about this episode. We're going to walk through something that you can do to automate 10 hours of work off of your plate in the next couple of weeks, just following a few things. Now, this is not like you need to spend two full-time weeks doing this, but we're going to show you a process to begin integrating AI into your life, into your team. And then that way you can create more efficiency. And many people don't know where to start. So we're going to show you here's where we started and here's how we're doing this company wide. And the amount of time that we've offloaded, 40 hours approximately per week right now in AI in one month of doing this is huge for us because that's a whole salary we don't have to pay. Yeah. And there's a process to this that we're going to walk through. And it's really, really easy.

SPEAKER_00 0:50

And we're a small, we're a small team too. So it adding essentially another person allows the small team to do even more that we just were not able to do because everyone's plate was already full. So we freed up a ton of time from everyone's plate for everyone to go do more things that is going to push the business further.

SPEAKER_01 1:09

You feel how fast we're moving now, though. Yeah. Do you feel you sense the energy? Like I feel it. I feel it. Yeah. And so like we're moving so fast. And here's what I would say is I believe AI, one of the greatest leverages of AI right now, is in your team and in your company from a time-saving standpoint that you're now going to be able to do two, three, four times the revenue per head because AI is going to be able to replace a lot of the monotonous things that aren't really the zone of genius for your team and people don't like doing. It just has to get done. And now Yeah, that we did because we had to do it. But now it's going to, it's opening this new world of what if the entire team only got to do what they were best at and that they loved. How much more momentum? How much more fulfillment would we feel if we were all living in that green zone of work? Now there's a level of things you will not be able to automate. So I don't think AI is going to take over everything. But the reason we're so like so focused on AI right now is because we have seen more growth in it in the last three months than ever before. And we believe it's it is the greatest opportunity in many, many years. Yeah. This is a revolutionary thing that's happening. And so we're pushing all of our clients to do it, not to replace humans, but rather to supercharge the humans that you work with. Now, I believe that our our our cost of head, our head count and overhead cost of team is going to go down and the output is going to go up. So you know what? You're going to get to pay them more. They're going to get to do more things they love. So there's a lot of benefits to it. Let's go ahead. I want to walk through how we recommend starting. And this is going to be really, really simple. And then we're going to give some examples of things that we've automated that you can maybe get your gears turning and then you could run with.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

Yeah, because I think a lot of people ask the question like, how do you know what to do with AI? Because it it feels like just an endless opportunity where it's like there's too many options that I don't even know what to do. So I'm excited for you to share this because it's it's really, really it's almost like dumb how easy it is to figure out what to do.

SPEAKER_01 3:07

Here's what you do. Go choose your first choose your tool. We recommend Claude. If you're on business, you if you're a business, you need to run Claude. Claude is like the business AI. So anything I'm gonna give you is through the lens of Claude. Claude is the best. And on a $20 plan, you can do everything that we're about to say. Yeah. We have a company-wide plan. If you have a company with team members, I highly recommend you start with a company level plan because you cannot transfer your stuff from the personal to the company. And that was a problem. I had it personally and I had to like restart all this stuff going to company. So if you have a company in a team, just commit and do this. I promise it is worth it. So here's what you're gonna do. I did this a month and a half ago, two months ago with the whole team. I we we got Claude for the entire company, and then they all ran this single prompt to get the ball rolling. Go into Claude and say, here is a list of every single task. And by the way, you could talk this to Claude. Just talk it. Don't even type it. That'll take you too long. Just talk this to Claude and say, here's a list of everything that I do. Just word vomit. Take some time to plan it in advance and word vomit or paste it if you have it. Like if you are, if you're one of our clients, we we do quarterly energy audits. We recommend every single founder, every quarter, they should analyze all of the tasks that they do and rate them on. We have some ratings like, is it green, like zone of genius, brings me joy, high impact on the business, or is it yellow? I'm kind of okay, it's okay to me, I'm kind of good at it. And then red is like, I'm bad and I hate it. And so we're trying to rank these. And then we're trying to offload the reds and the yellows and live in the zone of green. And if you do an energy audit, we have spreadsheets and we do this every single quarter. We push all our clients to do this. That is the tool you should take because that's all of your tasks, right? And so what you'll do is hop into Claude and then say, you can either if you have one of those, great, do it. If you don't, it's easy. Just go in and say, here's a list of 10 things that I do redundantly every single week, right? I do, I do our books, I reply to emails, I create emails for our marketing, I schedule things inside of Clavio, I schedule SMS, I create social media content, I analyze our ads, I just literally give it as many individual tasks. Don't and here's the thing stay high level or low level, not high level. I was gonna say that's low level. And what I mean is granularity is key here. Yeah, because to say I want to automate my email marketing, yeah, that's a big, big thing. Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 5:35

Or like social media, if you want to say, I want it to look at my past posts. I want it to look at the what posts did well, then I want it to look at that post, then I want it to make another post like it, and then I want it to post that post, and it it will get lost.

SPEAKER_01 5:48

Yeah, so I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna recommend that you you pick a couple of topical areas in the business that you do, like high-level tasks, and then I want you to list out the smallest subcategories of tasks. I'm gonna give one. I create a lot of content. I'm creating emails, I'm creating podcasts, we're doing YouTube videos, we're doing internal client content, we're creating tons of shorts for all platforms, TikTok, whatever. Like I'm creating content all the time. My job primarily is content within our company. And so, because of that, let's walk through the process of what Josh has to do. Number one, I have to capture the idea of the content. And I don't know about, well, I was gonna say, I don't know about you, but you don't really create a ton of content. So this is I don't know about you listening, but if you create content in your business, by the way, I believe there are three greatest leverages in business thinking, content, and leadership. You have to create, and content is something you have to do if you're a founder. You can't get around it. And now how it's done changes over time, but you have to create content. So the first thing is you need to know how to capture that. And I don't know about you listening, but I have ideas in the car. I have ideas in the gym. I have ideas because I scrolled by something. And what happens? Either you're like, hmm, that's a great idea, and you don't do anything. Or the second thing you do is you're like, that's a great idea. Let me open up some place in Notion or or in my to-dos or my notes, my notes app, and I'm just gonna throw this in there, right? And then it gets lost. And it and you're typing it, and it takes like you just type a headline or a simple idea, and it's not very flat hashed out. And so, number one, you either don't do the thing or you do the thing, and it's like very poor. And so when you come back to it later, you're like, what does this mean? What is this actual, what was I gonna do for this email, for this what you know what I mean? You you don't know. And so that's the first thing. You capture an idea, and then you need to know where to put that idea. And if you can't, you're you're gonna be really poor at content. It's gonna be you're gonna struggle bust your way through it. But you're gonna create, if not, if we get it right, you're gonna capture the idea, then you're going to curate the idea, then you're gonna you're gonna write it out and decide what you're gonna do, and then you're gonna film the idea, and then you're gonna send the idea off to editing, and then you're gonna do the the scheduling of it all, right? Like the let's just talk the whole funnel of content, right? The first thing you need to do is you need to capture an idea. So here's what I basically went through and I said, I capture my ideas, I then write them, I determine what platform it's gonna go on. Is this gonna be an email? Is it gonna be a podcast? It's gonna be a short form, is this gonna be a YouTube video? Is this gonna be intern? Like, what is this gonna be? And it depends on the piece of content, how big it is, like whatever. And so I went and I explained, I said, here's everything that I do for content. This is the next part. Once you say everything you do, say now, based on all of these, what do you believe would be the easiest thing for me to build or to automate using skills and capabilities within Claude?

SPEAKER_00 8:30

And by the way, I would also recommend potentially, depending on what you're looking at automating, list out the softwares that you use too. Because that's a big piece of like, hey, you it might be super easy to automate one thing with software A, but it's really hard to automate with software B. If if Claude doesn't know what software you're currently using for it, it will change the output. So for us, if we're like, hey, this is our CRM, this is our email tool, this is our where our website is, this is where we store our ideas, we use Notion, we use ClickUp, so it knows all of that too, because then it'll look and say, well, Notion's easy to integrate with, ClickUps easy to integrate with, but go high level is really hard to integrate with. So it'll deprioritize go high level tasks and prioritize Notion or like clickup tasks.

SPEAKER_01 9:17

Yeah. So you're gonna go in and you're going to say, This is everything that I do currently inside my business. I recommend, by the way, starting with as many admin tasks as possible, but this is any, I'm just giving the example of social. So I went and I said, here's everything that I do on a weekly basis with social, and here is my writing. I write on Wednesdays, I film on Thursdays, and so I like gave it all that information. Here are the tools that we use. We use Metrical for scheduling, we use Notion for doing a lot of the scripting stuff, we use Google Drive for uploading things. Like I gave it all of the granular details of what we needed to do. Once I gave it all of that, I said, based on everything that I do, what do you believe would be the easiest thing as a first project to automate off my plate that we could do within Claude? Now, Claude knows its own capabilities and it's able to know how it integrates with a lot of those different things, and it can then plan what the first thing is to do for you. Now, here's the thing, you're gonna go into this thinking, like, I don't even know what's gonna happen. If you've never done this, you're gonna be like, what's it gonna, what's it gonna tell me? I don't have any idea. Josh, how would you automate literally any of that stuff? Good thing is Claude's gonna show you. And we didn't know either. And then once you once you go through, once you say all that, the final thing I would say before you press go on the prompt is you say, and what with all this in mind, ask me any questions you need to clarify to for any ask me any clarifying questions to then be able to complete this.

SPEAKER_00 10:41

You should probably put that on any prompt. Oh, yeah, usually. So almost any time that I'm putting anything into an AI, I go, I put as much context as I can, I try to give it as much information as I can. And then at the end, I always tack it with, and ask me any other any other questions that you think you might need, because it almost always does, and it almost always asks me a question that I'm like, shoot, I really should have put that in there, and I'm glad it just asked me and it didn't waste all this computing time trying to answer it without this very critical thing that I forgot to put in it.

SPEAKER_01 11:21

You want a suggestion? What? Go into your personal account and then go to customizations and then say always ask me this. Yeah. And then it'll always do it. Always like 90%. Say if you believe you don't have enough information to create the best possible output, ask clarifying questions. That's smart. I don't do it in everything because I don't we create a lot of things that I don't want to ask questions, like just go. Yeah. So, like, so in this example, you give it all this stuff and you say, ask me a question. So it'll ask you some questions about things, and then it will present one thing that it believes you should automate. And here's what it did for me. It said, you probably capture you right now, it said, How are you currently capturing ideas for content? And I said, I'm on the go, and I'll if I remember, I'll take it and I'll log into Notion and I'll go to some, I'll add it in a daily tracker in Notion, and I'll just I'll move it around if I feel like I have a spot to put it. And it said, we should tackle that first. All right, cool. So it said, here's what I propose. We create an idea capture skill inside of Claude. Now, if you don't know what skills are, skills can like, it'll automatically run if it detects that it's needed. And it said, we need to create an idea capture skill that will capture, you could talk to Claude, you could just talk to me and vomit all of your ideas. And I will take that idea, I will go into Notion into a database in Notion that we will build out together called the con the content bank. And it I will insert that idea into the content bank. I will then recommend what form of content I believe. Should this be a short form video, an email, and I will I will tag it with the types that I think that it should be. I will then give you a recommended hook. I will include the raw transcript for future recommend future reference if you ever need to recall it and use this for writing something further. I will then uh I and then I will then suggest a script for writing this. Like if you're gonna if I recommend a short form video. And I'm like, that sounds good to me. And then it said, Do you want me to build the database in Notion? I was like, yeah, sure. And it went into Notion and built this whole database with all the tags and everything. I didn't do anything. And then it said, great, let's test it. Go ahead and give me an idea for a piece of content. I'm like, okay, cool. And here's an idea. And I just like sat there for two minutes and I said, okay, so I'm thinking we could talk about boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Actually, this right here, this topic is an example of that. I was like, and so now all I have to do is I can go into Claude and I could just say, Hey, go ahead and add to my idea bank. Uh, I want to talk about how to get started with automating things off of your play with AI. And really the first thing you need to do is you need to say, this is everything that I do. What do you believe that I should automate? And ask me any clarifying questions and come up with a and I really like this idea that I could do maybe a podcast on sometimes I'll tell it to say, I think this could be a really good podcast, but also really good email. I could probably include this in the newsletter. Yeah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Right. And it says, Great, it'll ask any clarifying questions, and then it'll say, Do you want me to push this to Notion? And then I say, Yes, and it's like added to your idea bank.

SPEAKER_00 14:07

Doesn't it doesn't it tag it to?

SPEAKER_01 14:09

It says like this is an email, this is a Yep, it goes into Notion, it creates the the content idea. It yeah, it does all that. It tags the proper thing, it titles the content idea based on it. It gives you a recommended hook for any type of content that you're creating, it puts a raw transcript, and then it like literally spits out a recommended script if you're gonna do short form content.

SPEAKER_00 14:27

Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. And that's not even really automated. Like it's it's automated, but you're still like manually doing it. It just ultimately simplified something you were already doing.

SPEAKER_01 14:38

Yeah, but it saves time. The amount of time because I would spend a couple minutes going in and adding the thing. Yeah. And so like I do that 20 times.

SPEAKER_00 14:44

And then it gives you eight times a week.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

But then here's where it here's where it sped it up. So that was the first thing. And then I said, after this, we should actually create uh two additional databases that are all linked together. And I want you to create, and it said we could create a content theme and content units database. So everything goes into idea bank. And then when you want to put actually, so it just my idea bank has like 50 things in it. And it's like, and whenever you want to actually move something into like a hashed out piece of content, it will move it into a theme, and then the units are all the individual pieces of content that you should take or you should create, all links to the major theme. So this one that we're doing right now, this has multiple different pieces of content to it. It has a short form video unit, it has a podcast unit, and it has an email unit. And so they're all in this other database. So it's like, well, when we need to create content, we just go in there. And then what happens is I could say, I want to, I say push it to a content theme in units, and it breaks it all down for me. I said, great, now I need to go ahead and I need to hash these out further. And so, like, that's just a simple, simple example of one thing that it did. It captures all of my ideas just like that. Our team has automated so much stuff. We have like, like even like recaps, emails, and stuff like that. When we're done with like Zoom sessions for our coaching clients, it literally pulls the Zoom transcript, it analyzes the transcript for all the clients that got coached, it creates summaries for them, their action items, it logs into their client profile, it adds the notes, it adds your action items so we have access to that, and it adds how long the minutes that they were in the session so we know people's attendance and everything. It then goes to our client success manager. The amount of things you can automate, guys, yeah, is bizarre.

SPEAKER_00 16:19

Yeah. And and the deeper you end up going with this, the more you start to unlock that you maybe don't completely fully understand, but it's okay because you can you can work with Claude to understand it. So I actually used Claude Code for the first time last week. And it was something that I I wanted to automate, but I wasn't sure if it would be possible. And I wanted it to run consistently, and it was a really big project that I wanted to automate. And it was like, well, let's do it in Claude Code. And I was like, I don't know anything about code. And it was like writing Python scripts for me, and it was using APIs and stuff and connecting things, and it works flawlessly. But you have to have the right idea, you have to know how you want to execute it, and then Claude will help you execute it, whether it's super, super technical, like using Claude code to write Python scripts, or whether it's just a skill like Josh talked about, that you talk to it and it goes and does things for you.

SPEAKER_01 17:13

Yeah, and they're they're different, like my recommendation is that you get in and you say, in a chat window, you say, I wanna, I wanna create some way to for you to automatically do this process for me. And then you refine it over time. Then what happens is Claude has this skills area that it could it'll build a skill for you and you could share with your organization, and essentially it will always remember that. And I'll give you another example, like to streamline the stuff that you're doing. Like everybody needs to write emails, right? We all have to write emails. That's just everyone sends emails all the time. And so, what you could do is you can take this content bank idea that I have. You could put wherever you want, you can put your ideas in a spreadsheet of Google Sheets, it'll put it in a Google Sheet. It really doesn't matter because what happens is when you write an email, if you have all these ideas in there, what you do is you say, you could set up an automation on cowork and say, like, hey, every single Monday, I need you to go into my ide my content ideas bank and find one thing that is an email. And I want you to pool that and I want you to hash out and write an entire email using our brand voice and following our email rules. And then once I give you a thumbs up, I want you to schedule that out for us. I mean, Claude integrates with Clavio, guys. I mean, it integrates with so many tools and so many MCPs, and we're not gonna get into that.

SPEAKER_00 18:25

And that's probably something people don't even know. Yeah. That you can directly integrate Claude with Clavio. And that's why it's really important when you're saying, hey, here are the things that I'm doing and here are the tools that I'm using. It will say, Oh, we can integrate directly with Clavio, and this is super easy to do. And you'd be like, I didn't even know it could do this. So, like, and also keep this in mind when you're picking new tools. This is something that we've started talking about. When you're looking at new software, keep in mind does it integrate with AI? Because odds are you're going to want it to integrate with AI at some point. So start building your foundation on tools that already integrate with AI because they will probably move faster with AI integration.

SPEAKER_01 19:00

Yeah. I yeah. So I start with all of the stuff that you're doing. Don't add new things you're not doing. This is a really big thing. So a really fast thing I would say is work to replace the thing, the time of the things that you're already doing through that automation to save yourself time and then replace that time with other tasks that you then replace or fill that time with other tasks that you then replace again. So you're gonna replace tasks that you're doing now, so it frees up time. You will fill that time with more things, and then you will replace that time. And that's how you're gonna create more leverage. This is really compounded leverage. Last week during, we do AI Fridays as a company. So like we spend the whole day on Friday. This is the fourth week in a row where we spend the whole day uh just building, just working on AI and doing things that will like compound. And last week I was like, I want to build an AI scoreboard for the entire team to be able to track AI projects and estimated minutes or hours saved per week on it, or every time it runs, we'll save two minutes or three minutes or whatever it is. And so we ran the automations and last week we saved 329 hours per week based on or per month or per year, per year.

SPEAKER_00 20:03

I was gonna say that's a lot.

SPEAKER_01 20:04

6.3 hours per week was saved. Last AI Friday, the whole company did it, and we saved 6.3 hours per week in automations from the things. Like we have creative things of like doing creative briefs. We have we have so many other things that are that are being implemented from like accounting and finance to copy and and and to website stuff as well to sales. Like Jake on Jake, who who does all of our sales, like he has calls every day with tons of uh potential customers that want to like work with us and stuff. And before he usually would go and research their stuff, understand their business more beforehand, and he spent about 30 minutes a day on people he's meeting with. If not more. If not more, if not more. And so now you know what happens? Jake walks into the office and there's literally an entire thing spit out with every call, with the type of the call, the agenda, a drop-down thing. It's like interactive. And it literally tells him in Claude, it says, like, hey, here's their business, here's kind of where here's all the information we have on them, here are potential areas that they can improve based on what you guys do, and like has a whole breakdown. So Jacob now has 30 to 40 minutes back per day, yeah, just by spending an hour or less setting up that thing. And he ROI'd that in two days.

SPEAKER_00 21:15

And there's two things there. One, it's not replacing what Jake was are or it's replacing what Jake was already doing, but it's not replacing Jake. Yes. Because he's able to take that and say, oh, here's how I can connect this with this person, or here's how I can deeper connect with this person. It's not replacing his ability to connect with someone. Uh, that's number one. Number two is he's not a technical person. He's not, I mean, I even says that. Yeah, sometimes I'm surprised he knows how to use his computer. I love you, Jake, but it really is true. And he was able to figure this out. So don't ever think that your technical ability or your potential limitations with tech makes you make it not possible for you to do this. Because we have people on our team that would not consider themselves incredibly technical people that are figuring this out for themselves. And saving themselves time without the technical people on the team having to step in to help them.

SPEAKER_01 22:06

Yeah, good stuff. Good stuff. So I hope this inspires you. You must lead the way if your team is not leading the way. Yeah. Your team will not lead the way. You, as the founder, need to start integrating and doing this now. If you don't have a team, great. You're the you have a perfect clean slate. Do this yourself. And you know what? It's going to stop you from needing to hire people sooner. So you're going to have more profit built into the business. And honestly, AI is the cheapest employees you will ever hire. That's going to give you so much leverage. And so I hope you found this valuable. If you did, please go ahead and give a thumbs up, subscribe. If you're listening on Spotify or Apple, it would mean the world to us. If you just gave us a rating, we're trying to be the number one e-commerce podcast on the planet. And so we would love it, it would help us tremendously. And if you do leave a review on Spotify or on Apple, please email team at e commercealle.com and we will send you a $10 Amazon gift card, is our thank you for helping us on that mission.

SPEAKER_00 22:58

By the way, sorry, if you're listening on like Amazon or like some other weird platform, we will take a review there, but you're probably weird for listening to the podcast on like anything other than Apple or Spotify.

SPEAKER_01 23:07

Hey, there are listeners. I don't want to call them weird, man.

SPEAKER_00 23:09

Well, it's it's just a strange podcast listening platform. That's all.

SPEAKER_01 23:12

Hey, it's abstract. We like it. We like it. However, you're listening. We appreciate you guys. We'll see you in the next episode.