Imperfect Marketing
Imperfect Marketing
How AI Automation Saves 25% of Your Time Every Week as a Founder
In this episode of Imperfect Marketing, Kendra chats with Aarti Anand, a software product builder turned AI automation consultant, about how small business owners can leverage AI and systems thinking to reclaim their time, energy, and freedom.
Aarti shares her journey from building award-winning software to starting her own business to create more space for what matters—her kids, her aging parents, and her own time. Now she helps other founders do the same using AI and automation tools.
Key Takeaways for Business Owners and Marketers
🗸 SOPs aren’t just for big companies—they're the backbone of freedom
đź—¸ AI enables better thinking, not just faster doing
đź—¸ Delegation and automation are tools for building a life, not just a business
🗸 You don’t need agents or advanced AI to start—you just need intention and clarity
We dive into:
The Real Barriers to AI Adoption
- Why “AI curious” entrepreneurs don’t know where to begin
- The persistent myths holding people back (Will it replace me? Isn’t it just for big companies?)
- Why not adopting AI actually leaves your team at a disadvantage
Getting Started: Crawl Before You Run
- The “record yourself” strategy for overwhelmed founders
- How documenting simple tasks leads to automation success
- The marathon analogy for building automation systems over time
Where to Start with AI and Automation
- How founders waste time crafting proposals manually
- A simple Typeform-AI automation combo that can save 25% of your week
- When to automate, when to delegate, and how to decide
- Designing Your Ideal Day—Then Reverse Engineering It
Aarti’s mindset shift: “Everything else either needs to be delegated or automated”
Aarti’s Biggest Marketing Lesson Learned
👉 Stop leading with your product. No one cares how amazing your thing is until they believe it solves their problem. Lead with empathy and relevance—your customer is the hero, not you.
This episode is for you if...
You're wearing too many hats, feeling burnt out, or just wondering where to begin with AI and automation. Whether you're a founder, solopreneur, or marketer, you'll walk away with actionable steps to start reclaiming your time and scaling with intention.
🎧 Ready to build a business that supports your life—not the other way around? Tune in now.
Connect with Aarti:
Website: https://www.kodenyxai.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aartianand82/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/amunjal1
Looking to leverage AI? Want better results? Want to think about what you want to leverage?
Check and see how I am using it for FREE on YouTube.
From "Holy cow, it can do that?" to "Wait, how does this work again?" – I've got all your AI curiosities covered. It's the perfect after-podcast snack for your tech-hungry brain.
Watch here
Hi, I'm Kendra Korman. If you're a coach, consultant or marketer, you know marketing is far from a perfect science, and that's why this show is called Imperfect Marketing. Join me and my guests as we explore how to grow your business with marketing tips and, of course, lessons learned along the way. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Imperfect Marketing. Today we're talking about one of my most favorite topics and that is AI, and I'm so excited to be joined today by Arti. Thank you so much for joining me. I'm super excited to be talking with you about AI. Why don't you take a minute and tell us? How did you get into this?
Speaker 2:AI stuff. And what do you do? Absolutely. Thank you for having me, kendra, I'm very excited. Yeah, so my name is Arti Anand. I've been building software products for more than 15 years now.
Speaker 2:Almost two years ago, I didn't want to work for anybody else. I had this epiphany my teams were already building awesome products and they were winning awards, and I was also told to hop on sales calls to help them sell. And at that point I had this realization Well, we're good at building, now I'm also helping them sell. I should just go do that over myself, and I think the pain point it was solving, particularly for me in my life was I'm a mom of three kids and we have dogs. I also have aging parents.
Speaker 2:I like to be in full control of my time and my schedule, and a business, if I did that well, would be my route to that freedom of time, money and location. That's why I got into running a business, and then when I started, I had no idea what I wanted to sell. I just knew that I had the skill set or I could upskill myself to go whatever I wanted to. So when I started talking to business owners and see what pinpoints they were struggling with, I saw everybody was wearing so many hats in their business and they were doing it as a badge of honor and I just I didn't like that and I didn't want to build a business following those lines. So that's why I got into AI.
Speaker 2:I learned more about it. I automated some of the workflows that I had in my business as I was starting out and as I started seeing success, I started selling those solutions to other people too, and I took their feedback and saw what they like, what they didn't like, what was the ROI on the things we were automating for ourselves and for other businesses. That was our starting point, and lead gen seemed to be one of the problems that founders were spending most of their time in, and then they didn't have any plan or process in place to nurturing those leads on autopilot who weren't ready to buy from them today. So that became my mission is, as I was helping my own business to get to the freedom of time, location and money, I started other business owners with the same issues and now I help them go to build a business that helps them achieve that freedom of time, location and money in their life too, and help them build their business around the life that they want to live, not the other way around.
Speaker 1:I love that. I picked up on a lot of things. First off, you don't get the freedom of time, location and money before you build your business, so there is a lot of upfront work and I think I heard that in there, right and then but you're building it so that you can have that. And I definitely get the aging parents thing. My year of 2025 was totally derailed by aging parents things and it can be a lot of work. I have a really good friend who is almost like semi-retired right now because she has to take care of her parents, and so I yeah, I mean a lot of things come out of necessity, right, and so having that control is just amazing, and AI is such a great tool for that. So what is the number one concern that you're seeing that people have when they're implementing AI?
Speaker 2:Most of the business owners I'm talking to. They are AI curious, but they have no idea where to start. So that was the first thing I have. The second thing I am seeing why they are not adopting it today is because they have lots of myths. Again, they are self-implicated. There's no truth to it.
Speaker 2:I think there's this knowledge gap. When change comes around, people are averse to it, not because they don't want to live a better life, it's just because it's hard, because they're used to doing things a certain way and they don't know what the outcome could be if they go and follow that path of change. And I think there's a lot of hype around AI, but the spin is it's for big tech companies. We don't have the budget for that. What will happen to my team if I adopt AI? Will I start firing people and lots of those concerns and what I'm trying to do. As I talk to them, I take them on discovery calls.
Speaker 2:I have lots of tools available to help those people who are AI curious but they have no idea where to start. But I think where they need to go is they need to fill that knowledge gap and see what ROI other business owners are getting in their business. Where are they starting from? What is the path they're following? What are the things they are automating the top three automations they're installing on their business, and then, from there, what is the ROI that they're getting? What does their life look like now? How much time have they saved? How much dollar amount have they saved? What does their productivity life look like now? How much time have they saved? How much dollar amount have they saved? What does their productivity curve look like now? Are they happy? And then go, follow that path and get to that point and, from there, be the leader that your team needs to be and start leading the way by adopting AI, not shying away from it, because if you're not adopting AI, you're not doing a service to your team. They're going to be behind a year from now.
Speaker 1:It'll be too hard for everybody in your business to catch up, actually you needed to start like a year ago, but you definitely have to start now, right? And so one of the things so I know this is going to be shocking because I thought we actually like got rid of this misinformation like a couple years ago now and it feels like it's still there and that is, I actually had someone walk up to me and tell me that they weren't using AI because they thought it was going to replace them. They were wearing they worked in a nonprofit, they were wearing seven hats, they had all these things to to do and they didn't want AI to replace them. And I'm like AI is not replacing you, you're just gonna get more done. And like those seven hats are gonna feel like three. She's like, well, I didn't think about it that way, but that makes more sense. And so it's very interesting to see, because I do see some shying away because they're concerned it's gonna replace them.
Speaker 1:I actually I'll ask you this question. So somebody I was working on some automations with a group and we started trying to identify some of their opportunities and one of the managers said to me well, like it's really hard for me to map out a process and to tell people what I do, she goes process and to tell people what I do, she goes because I just do it, I just don't, I don't think literally, I just go, like I can't tell you what I do to get there, which I thought was really interesting. How are you working with people that are that are just like you know what, I can just get it done and I'm doing it, and like they have a mental block with slowing down to map out the process so that they can automate it right and then they don't have to do it again?
Speaker 2:Yes, kendra, that's a beautiful question, by the way, because it's going to help so many of your listeners. The way I put that in front of them is every time you feel like you need to sit down and do something that's costing your family maybe a couple dream vacations a year. You're not building the business around your life. You're basically putting on fires every day, and when you're in those shoes, you don't have the business that you were dreaming of before you signed for that LLC or whatever. So here is how I want you to think about it If you are doing anything on daily, weekly, monthly basis, you need to start documenting the process. It could even don't go fancy start with a Google Doc or, even better, put a camera in front of you, record the whole thing and then have someone edit parts of it, which would not take very long time. So, in addition to the document, now you have a video. That's your first V1, start there. Someone else can take it, replicate it. You may have someone on your team who's more creative than you. Give them a chance and have them re-record it. Redo the thing that you just did, re-record it. Maybe they'll do a better job than you do, and that's fine, and then that becomes your V2. You start from there.
Speaker 2:Everybody thinks they need to wake up tomorrow and go run a marathon. It doesn't work out that way. You start with putting your shoes on, go run a mile, or maybe jog, and then next day show up again, go run two miles. That's how it works. That's the same mentality I want you to adopt in your business. You don't need to streamline everything tomorrow when people think about AI and they see other people on LinkedIn brag about how many automations they have in their business, but they don't see. It took them six to 12 months of work to get there. That's the perspective I want you to take Start and improve your business with AI and automations 1% every day and guess how improved and streamlined it would be and how much more enjoyable it would be for you to come into work every day.
Speaker 1:There was a study that was printed in the Atlantic that I quote all the time, and that is, 60% of our days, are spent on work, about work. That's the piece that we need to get rid of, right. That's not the delivering work, that's not the innovation and the inspiration. Over half of our day is spent on work about work, which is just insane, right, and if we can lighten that load, wouldn't that be amazing? I love what you said about recording, because actually that is the suggestion that I gave her, and I suggest to people to subscribe to Loom and to upgrade to their AI feature. They'll build a standard operating procedure right from your video, no editing needed, and it gives you all the links and it gives you the document It'll like give you the whole thing, which is super cool, right, and then you could have someone else redo it or try and follow along with it. It's amazing how much time it saves you when you start implementing even things that you're not going to automate, just standard operating procedures in your business.
Speaker 1:Again, I'm not a super processed person, because that's just not. I'm more of a creative, I guess, and I get things done person, like this other lady, which is why I told her to videotape herself doing it so someone else can write it down. Because, yeah, some of us just struggle with that and that's okay, right, because we're the idea people in our businesses and I really think taking your time and recording the process provides so much insight. And then just have someone else help you document it or subscribe to a system right, that's gonna help document it and then have someone check it. So you talked a little bit about lead gen and how having AI help can do that better, because founders are wasting their time there. Are there other areas that founders are wasting their time, that AI can do things better?
Speaker 2:It could be as simple as in their daily ops. How are they running it on a day-to-day basis? When you get off a sales call? Let's say you're the founder and you do sales call which I do in my business today, by the way but I don't plan on doing that six months from now. When you get off that sales call and they tell you they're interested in your proposal, how long does it take you for you to send that proposal? If it's anywhere above a few minutes, then that's what you need to go streamline first.
Speaker 2:I know personally when I talk to them they spend maybe one, maybe two or maybe more hours personalizing and tailoring and customizing every proposal. Why don't you have a streamlined process? If it's the offer that you've been selling already, why haven't you automated already? And if you're taking five sales calls every week and hopefully your sales process is good and your scripting is good, so they ask for the proposal right after you're done with the sales call then if you're sending five of them, you're easily wasting 10 hours every week, which is 25% of your time. And if you put a dollar amount on that hour, that's how much money you're wasting every week. And then multiply by four, that's every month and then multiply by 12, that's every year. That's where I need you to start Save your energy. Only do things that light you up, and I don't think writing proposals from scratch every time lights anybody up. I don't want to do that.
Speaker 1:I don't think so. I don't know anybody that loves writing proposals, but yeah no, that's a really good way to think about it, and AI loves templates, right? So if you have a format that you've been using and want to personalize, it'll personalize it, it'll follow your template, it'll fill in the blanks with the information you give it and spit it back out to you.
Speaker 2:Right, and this is what we have done for other clients too, and we do it in our business too. You have a type form. It should not require more than 10 pieces of input from you as you're on the sales call. You fill out those as you're on the go, or you could also take maybe five minutes or maybe less than three minutes after the sales call is done. Put those fields in.
Speaker 2:If you have been recurring selling that offer over and over again, you should know what those repeated fields are. And then you go fill that in and the automation kicks in, and then it generates the proposal and AI personalizes it based on the information you put in what is the company, who's the owner, who did you talk to, who's the stakeholder and what is the price point, what is the timeline? Just put those fields in, have it personalized, and then you could also put a timer, send this after 30 minutes or, if you don't mind that they see the proposal hit their inbox two minutes after. You could also do that. I typically put a 30 minutes timer before it gets sent into their inbox. So that's just that, and it'll save you 25% of your time every week.
Speaker 1:I like the idea of identifying things that are taking you hours a day, a week, a month, and you usually tell people when they're starting out look at something that takes you about four hours a week or four hours a month. That's the process to start with, right, that's the one that makes sense. If you're doing something for 15 minutes a week or 15 minutes a month, maybe don't start with that one right. Let's figure out where the time investment in the automation can really make a difference. Right, I mean I saved 30 to 40 hours a week on average since I started leveraging AI. It's unbelievable. I mean even just with the podcast, the amount it's allowed me to do is just is unbelievable. I think each episode I was saving over three hours of time one episode.
Speaker 2:Right, and the way I typically advise people is you talked about standard operating procedures, right. Again, look it through the lens of if I'm gone tomorrow or I get sick, is everything going to fall apart? Start there. So that's your first mindset shift where you need to be comfortable with delegating. Okay, if you're on board with, delegation is a beautiful thing. I don't need to keep everything here. Start with that mindset.
Speaker 2:If you're ready to delegate, you either go find a person who could do that for you with a lower dollar amount not as the same as the founder's dollar amount. So if something, if your hourly rate is $500, someone else could do that task for $25 an hour. Now you're saving $4.75 and that's you're putting back in your business. You're actually doing the service back and you're making more money. So start there. And then, when you're that assistant that you hired at $25 an hour, there may be things that don't light them up. Then take those processes, have them, use AI or create an SOP for that particular work and then go automate that and now they're going to save their time and they'll be ready to upskill themselves. Then they'll be ready to be more useful in other parts of your business and then everybody's growing and everybody is doing things that they're happy to do, and that's how you grow, and that's how you scale.
Speaker 1:Yes, I love looking at it like that. I did. I read the book Buy Back your Time. I don't know if you've ever read it by Dan Martell, but it's a fan.
Speaker 2:Dan Martell is my coach, by the way.
Speaker 1:Oh, very cool. Yes, like I love the whole concept of buying back your time, because even if you're buying it back, you know, not to necessarily put back in your business, but to put back in your life. That makes you a better person, right? And if you're going from 80 hours down to 50, which is more sustainable and doesn't get you burnt out and stuff like that, you know it's amazing. I love how he talks about how he like hired, you know, a like life person to manage their household calendars and things like that. Like just taking that off the plate and how much money made. That would make that make sense and it's just like. It's just so many different ways that we need to think about it. It's not all about the money going out, right? So it's about the opportunity cost of spending your money there and that's why delegation is a beautiful mindset shift.
Speaker 2:Once you start to see that in one area of your life you cannot help but just go and have the ripple effects in other parts of your life. It just simply gives you time to live as a human.
Speaker 1:Yes, Right and you need that. You need that because you can get just burnt out and even bitter towards some of your clients and customers if you're not charging what you're supposed to, if you're over delivering what they're paying for, things like that. I mean, I've had it happen to me numerous times in my business where I've done that, and it's not a good place to be right To feel like you're over delivering and getting underpaid and not appreciated, and they very well might appreciate it. But again, you set this up for yourself and you can learn and change and adjust as you go. But AI has made it just so much, so amazing when it comes to freeing up time and actually creating a better work product in a lot of instances. So I love that of you.
Speaker 1:So if someone's starting out and they want to start getting used to using automation, it doesn't even need to be AI automation right, it can just be automation, because I think there are different kinds, right? Sometimes it's hard to separate it nowadays with AI, but let's talk a little bit about that. Where do you recommend they start? Is it with the standard operating procedures and those videos you're talking about? Or is it just even identifying those processes and where they're spending time. What are those first couple of steps someone should take?
Speaker 2:I like how you put it, because everybody's talking about AI agents on YouTube today and then every person who's just starting out and their best use case is writing emails with chat GPT. They think they need AI agent in their business, but they don't. So where I want you to start as a business owner is, again. It starts from protecting your energy, your time On an ideal day when you have everything under control. What does that ideal day look like? Just sit and think about that. What are the things that you think on that sunny day scenario you would love to do? Would that be go run five miles? Would that be take your kids to swim class? Would that be walking your dog? Would that be taking three sales calls? What does it look like? Write that down. Those are the things you need to protect your energy for.
Speaker 2:Everything else either needs to be delegated to a person, like an EA or a sales rep or someone, or it needs to be automated.
Speaker 2:But before it can be automated or it can be delegated to a person, they need a step-by-step plan. If they go from step A to Z, you know what that predictable outcome would look like, because if you delegate it to someone too soon and they get X results and you're not happy about it, it's your fault, it's not theirs, and that's why the SOP needs to be there, and SOP does not have to be 100% ideally done. Start with the V1, give it to someone else, let them follow the plan, let them also give you feedback, and then get to V2 and then get to V3. And in a month you'll have a streamlined process that anybody, even a new hire, could come in and replicate, and you could be at the beach having a drink at that time while they're replicating it. So that's where I want you to go, and it starts with thinking big and valuing your time more than anything else, and then reversing from there.
Speaker 1:I love that starting point right. Start with what your ideal day would look like. If it's sunny and the weather's nice outside, what would you want to be doing? And I like how you added in things like sales calls right, because it doesn't have to be running five miles or getting the laundry done or walking the dog or taking the kids to the pool right, it can be work stuff if that's what lights you up. But you've got to be looking at what lights you up. What is it that you would want to be doing and figure out how to protect that, because I think that that is just so, so important.
Speaker 1:A couple years ago, I started protecting my time on my calendar and I created an ideal week. I follow the full focus planner and I always say like hashtag, not sponsored, but I love my full focus planner planner. And I always say like hashtag, not sponsored, but I love my full focus planner. And I really struggled with that ideal week for a long time as to like, how am I going to set this up? Well, everything's everywhere. And then I was watching a podcast one day, or I was listening to a podcast one day and they said my ideal week isn't carved in stone, like things change. This is just the ideal week. And she said I don't think I've actually ever hit my ideal week 100% and that's okay. Right, but she protects it so that she can get close to it. So I threw out all of my meetings on my calendar, hired somebody to redo all of my recurring meetings on my calendar, moved everything around, because I had like meetings at eight and nine and then at like a two, and that is like every day of the week. Right, there was no days I could take off because during the pandemic, my calendar blew up, and I think taking that time identifying what those themes are and what that day would look like, is just. I think that's very, very powerful and I really want everybody that's listening and watching to take note of that, because I think we should all have what that looks like.
Speaker 1:Right, what would your ideal day be like? It doesn't matter if it's not possible right now. Right, because it probably isn't possible today, and that's okay. Right, because that's where we're working to get to, and I love starting there and then moving forward. Right, because now you've got a goal. Now you've got a visual goal. Right, especially if, like, you write it down on a piece of paper, which is what I would recommend right, or draw it out in PowerPoint or Excel. You've got something to go for, and I think that motivation is so amazing. So I love that insight, I love that direction. This is this is fantastic. Thank you so much, artie, for joining me today and sharing so much great information. Before I let you go, I do have to ask you the question I ask all my guests, and that is this show is called Imperfect Marketing, because marketing is anything but a perfect science. What's been your biggest marketing lesson learned? I learned this.
Speaker 2:The hard way we all did Right.
Speaker 2:So think about me being, you know, a software products builder for many, many years. Every product I built or contributed to, at some point it became my baby, and then I took so much pride in it when I started talking. At any phase in those years I never started with the customer what their pain points were. I started with you need to check out this thing that we built, and it's so cool. Nobody cared. Nobody cares if you are an Olympic gold medalist, unless they have a problem that you're set to solve. You've solved for someone in the past. So to anybody who's listening I'm sure you know that already I just want to double click on it. It has to start with the audience. It has to start with who's reading it. If someone comes to your landing page, they don't need to know anything about you, but the pains and the problem that they're experiencing and if there is a solution that exists that you can contribute to, that's all that matters. You're not the hero in your story. They are.
Speaker 1:I love that. So, so, so important and so overlooked, because, yes, we hear it all the time. I've probably said it on 150 different episodes of this podcast, because we're over 300 now. So I say it at least every other time, I think. But you got to think about your audience. It's what's in it for me and we forget sometimes because we're moving so fast.
Speaker 1:And that's again where I love the power of AI coming in there, because you can slow down right when AI is picking up that slack, that 60% of work about work. Then you're able to slide in there and think and be inspiring and come up with innovations that AI can't come up with, innovations that AI can't come up with. That's where we're adding value, that's where we're making a difference, and I love that. Thank you so much, first off, for again sharing your wisdom and your insights. I hope a lot of people got some insight on how to start moving forward with automation and looking at their business, hopefully differently, or if they're looking to start to start with the intention of that ideal day which I just think is so powerful. We will have again all the normal things on how to connect with Artie and her company if you're looking to get some help in that AI automation space. So definitely check that out and connect with her there. Thank you all again for tuning in. Have a great rest of your day.
