The Good, Better, Best AI Workflow for Smarter Cold Outreach

Ever deleted a cold email before you even finished reading the first sentence? Yeah…so has everyone else. That's exactly the problem Joe Downs and Peter Swain tear apart in this episode.

Cold email open rates have collapsed below 20%, replies are under 3%, and AI-generated spray-and-pray outreach has officially killed the inbox. 

But here's the twist: the same AI flooding everyone's trash folder is also the weapon that lets a solo operator outmaneuver a full sales team. 

Joe and Peter break down the good-better-best framework for using AI workflows to research prospects, personalize outreach, and build automated systems that do the legwork while you sleep. 

From LinkedIn screenshots to conference selfies analyzed by Gemini, this one's for every entrepreneur who needs to grow their business but doesn't have time for 80 cold calls that go nowhere.

Listen For

:30 Why have cold email reply rates fallen below 3% — and what does that mean for your business right now?

4:59 What's the difference between "good, better, and best" when using AI tools to research a prospect before you reach out?

16:10 What's the one simple prompt any solopreneur can use to prepare for a sales meeting without spending hours on research?

24:14 How can you use Gemini and a conference selfie to walk into day two knowing everything about the people you just met?

30:55 How do you turn an AI side hustle solution you built for yourself into a digital product you sell for $49 a month to thousands of people?

Links Mentioned

Peter's Free AI Business Audit | Claude | Manus  

Email the “Idiots” Joe and Peter

idiots@successfulidiots.com 

Joe Downs

Website | LinkedIn | YouTube | Email Joe:joe@belroseam.com 

Peter Swain

Website | Email | LinkedIn | X

Transcript

Peter Swain (00:00):

If you were a caveman that figured out how to survive the ice age, you become king of the world.

Joe Downs (00:06):

Then you can become king of your little empire, your little

Peter Swain (00:09):

Industry. This is what's on offer to people right now. There are two options available to everybody that listens to us, and the options are thrive or die. There is no survival option in this mix.

Joe Downs (00:30):

There's a number floating around sales circles right now that should make every small business owner either very nervous or very excited. Depending on how fast you move. The average cold email open rate has dropped below 20%. Reply rates are now under 3%. AI generated outreach is already indistinguishable from a human written outreach, which means every inbox on the planet is now drowning in messages that all sound the same. All claim to understand the recipient's business and all go straight to the trash. Here's what that actually means for you. The era of spray and pray is over. Not dying, it's over. And the small business owner willing to do outreach the right way, researched, personalized, timed correctly, just inherited a playing field that used to belong exclusively to the companies with full sales teams. I'm Joe Downs. With me is Peter Swain. We're just a couple of successful idiots using AI to simplify our lives and optimize our businesses.

(01:41):

Peter? True or false? British outreach is the original spray and prey. You sent ships to six continents with the same pitch and hoped for the best.

Peter Swain (01:54):

We did a right at it, but still true. Actually, I would wonder if the Spanish conquistadors are the original.

Joe Downs (02:02):

Did they conquer more of the world before the Brits?

Peter Swain (02:06):

No. No, I think if it was like all that time, like the English, the Dutch-

Joe Downs (02:10):

You had the Navy first, the formidable Navy. Yeah,

Peter Swain (02:15):

But we didn't really have a message. Well, we did. It was, "We now own you and we'll make you really wealthy as a result." Whereas the Spanish, this message was, "God loves you if you bend the knee and take the cross." God, that sounds very anti-religious. It wasn't. It was anti-Spanish. Oh, that's even worse. No comment. Let's just stop there.

Joe Downs (02:34):

Oh, I'm going to try to save you here. Today is why everything that used to work in outreach, cold outreach, is now working against you. And then I'm going to tease out of Peter, the AI moves that led a solopreneur or solo operator now outmaneuver a sales team with thousands of contacts. So Peter, you're on the hot seat here, as always. Here's the inspiration from this. And actually, I was very proudly did this myself the other night before I even read this LinkedIn post from Charles to no, and I guarantee you I pronounce that properly, it sounds French. He posted something this week that I think is both reassuring and a little bit of a wake up call depending on where you are with your outreach right now. And if you're listening, "Well, I don't send spam emails and I don't say..." Okay, but we all need to.

(03:23):

We all need to do business development. So if the words cold email outreach turn you off because we're all on the other end of them, okay, fine. Just replace that with your business development. All right. But here's what he said. He said, "AI is going to kill the spray and pray outbound for good." And if you don't know what spray and pray is, it's exactly what it sounds like. You build a list, you blast the same email to 500 people, you hope one or two reply. It worked when the bar was low, but now AI generates those generic emails in about four seconds, which means everyone's inbox is full of them and everyone deletes them. So the bar got moved and it moved fast. And his point is the future isn't sending more messages. It's sending fewer but better ones to people you've actually researched before you hit send.

(04:11):

And here's the part that matters for every solo operator or solopreneur listening or entrepreneur. AI can do most of that research for you, which means the small business owner willing to do this right now can compete with companies that used to have wholesales teams doing it. Peter, I like this post because I think this builds on the LinkedIn cold outreach strategy, which eventually makes for a warmer outreach strategy we cover just a few episodes ago. And I like it a lot for the solopreneur because he's not just talking about linking in with them and then sending him an email. He's talking about getting to know them so you can send a clearly personalized email, but at more scale than you and I can humanly do in a day, week or whatever interval we're talking about. So it's really sneaky good. Where does somebody start?

Peter Swain (04:59):

Okay. So before we do that, on the basis that I sell a lot of AI automation services, I just like to caveat. The right advice at the wrong time is still the wrong advice. So I don't completely agree with him that the spray and pay prey era is done. I think an AI enthused version of that can be incredibly successful and incredibly powerful. Where I do completely agree with him is the people that listen to this podcast are smaller in revenue ranges and the active campaign just chucking out a thousand emails every day, that kind of thing I completely agree with is dead in the water. So in the context of people listening to our show, small business owners, entrepreneurs, side hustle, people starting to make a go of it, I think he's completely correct. So just to put that caveat in the world. Now, where you start with this is really quite simple.

(05:58):

The first thing you have to do is work on kind of a psychology side of things because we're taught from six years old plus that we get rewarded for hard work and often entrepreneurs wear it as a badge of honor. Like I worked 80 hours, I worked 20 hours, I work 16 hours and we don't mean to, but that's kind of embedded in us. But if we don't want to work 16 hours and 18 hours, what we're going into here is really quite accurate because I think most people would agree, at least logically, that you'd much rather speak to four or five people and get four sales than try and reach out to a thousand people and get one. In fact, I think you'd rather have four or five and get four than reach out to a thousand and get 10 because the thousand still requires 80 sales calls, 40 presentations, 30 proposals in order to get the 10, whereas the four and five will only require eight or 10 proposals and presentations to get the four.

(06:55):

Yeah.

Joe Downs (06:56):

There's

Peter Swain (06:56):

Time for

Joe Downs (06:57):

Sure.

Peter Swain (06:58):

It's a hundred percent time. And it's one of the worst roles in the world. No shows for sales calls are just, oh, they're a permanent pain in everyone's life because it takes your energy away stepping back up. So how could you do this? It's a really simple prompt. So you say something like, "I'm about to reach out to Jim and this is the easiest way to get this done. This is what he does. This is who he is. This is what we're talking about. This is the goal I have from the call. That's hyper important that you put the intent that you have for the call. Here's a screenshot of his LinkedIn. Here's two or three posts he just did on Facebook. Go and tell me what you think that his main concerns would be, where you think the conversation's going to go, what I should lead with, what I shouldn't talk about, and give me a priming, like a dossier, research dossier on who this person is, how they think, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Joe Downs (07:53):

Can I push back on that a little bit? Of

Peter Swain (07:55):

Course.

Joe Downs (07:56):

And maybe this will make you proud of me. That sounded like work. What you just said. Here's some posts. That means I had to go do that research. I don't want to do that. I don't have time for that. I didn't think I was going to bring this up in this episode, but now this is the point to bring it up. What I want, and I want ... And maybe this is the answer, but I think you probably have a better way to articulate it or some different ways to do it. But in the green room before we started recording, I told you that I did something similar to this the other night for my daughter. She got a letter of recommendation from the dance studio owner. And my wife is encouraging her to send that to the dance coach at James Madison University where she's headed this weekend.

(08:44):

Tonight, she's headed tonight. For the Saturday tryout, yes. Fingers crossed, knock on wood. The tryout, the official tryout, it was the last of all the tryouts is Saturday. She finds out Saturday. My daughter doesn't want to send this recommendation. It looks weird. She's not going to be that girl, whatever. And I'm listening to this fight back and forth. And I said, send me the recommendation. I want to read it. And so I read it and I threw it into Manis and I said to Manis, this is my prompt with something like, "This is the recommendation for my daughter's dance studio teacher. I think this could be beneficial for the coach to read what she's written about her because it's not just about dance. It's about how she's a leader. It's about a number of different things." And I said, "Research the James Madison University Dance Coach.

(09:32):

Her name is TK." I forget her last name. Her name is TK, whatever. Sorry if you're listening. Actually, by the time this airs, she'll either have made it or not made it. So I can't worry. I don't have to worry about it. So

Peter Swain (09:43):

Either thank you or- Thank you or

Joe Downs (09:45):

Cares what your last name is. But bottom line is I said, research this dance teacher, find out what her philosophies are. While you're at it, what are the philosophies of James Madison? What can you extract from this letter of recommendation? Now this is a little different because this is more forward searching than researching, right? But it came back ... Oh, and by the way, I said, "I want you to extract from it what aligns what she could write in an email to highlight and then write it in a style that's coming from my daughter who's 17 years old who's a dancer, not from a parent." And it came back with total research, like a mind map of everything in the letter that mapped over to exactly this coach, the university, and then gave three options in emails about how for my daughter to send an email without sounding cheesy, corny or too into it over the top or whatever.

(10:44):

But Peter, that was a prompt. What I heard you tell me was go research this guy, see what he's posting, do this, do that, then feed it in. So is there a better way that morphs those two together? What I did

Peter Swain (11:01):

Is

Joe Downs (11:01):

What you just said that- Because think about the solopreneur.

Peter Swain (11:05):

I have to

Joe Downs (11:05):

Do business development, but I don't have time.

Peter Swain (11:08):

Okay. How can

Joe Downs (11:09):

You short circuit that for me?

Peter Swain (11:11):

So you said this is a bit different because it's forward facing. So first of all, I am proud of you. Good job. I'll take a few minutes. Second of all, it is different, but that isn't the reason it's different. The difference between your example and the example that we were drawing on for a small business owner is where does the data exist? So James Madison University is going to have 300 webpages that are publicly facing. The dance coach is going to have an about page on the faculty page. She's probably got previous press releases around events and wins from previous engagements because if she's the person making the decision, she's at least 45. So she's had at least a 25 year career in those similar kind of environments. So all of that information is public facing. Yep. The average person we're talking about, the information is inside walled gardens.

(12:11):

It's in places like Facebook, LinkedIn. LinkedIn is near on impossible to get data out of via research this person. LinkedIn blocks that kind of access in any easy way that we would be recommending to people. So if you're working on walled, garden, data, Facebook, Meta, TikTok, yada, yada, yada, you're going to have to go for a screenshot. In the easy way to do things, in the kind of how we can talk here. If I was talking to people in my mastermind or abundance groups where I've got longer where I can spend with them, then Claude cowork on your desktop plus MCP connectors could make it so you could just say, research this person and you'd be done. It could go and grab that data and pull that data and bring it back. But if you're in something like chatgpt.com or claude.ai, the web front end versions, you don't have those capabilities available to you.

(13:11):

So you're going to have to default back to the screenshot. I tried to give the real simple answer, but you extracted at me so I have to give kind of a more nuanced answer. But

Joe Downs (13:19):

This is the nuanced answer I want because I'm trying to provide for people, I'm trying to give them what I know. And I'm not sure, are you sure Manis? Now Manus is on my desktop, so the same thing, but can't Manus do that as well? You can take over my browser and go into LinkedIn and look some ... Yeah.

Peter Swain (13:37):

So any of the desktop versions of the software that support MCP connectors can do what I just said. It's the web version. So ManisIMclaude.ai, chatgpt.com cannot do what I just

Joe Downs (13:49):

Said.This is what they need to hear. I think the solopreneur has to graduate from the. Ai version. If you're really

Peter Swain (13:58):

Going to- Well, it depends where they are, right? So if we're assuming that people are still like, "Oh, this AI thing's kind of cool. I've heard great things about it, " then I would much rather they just get their feet wet inclaude.ai and upload some screenshots. But when you'll reach a ceiling on that pretty quickly where you're like, "Okay, more, feed me. How do we get this doing automatically?" So interestingly, in my upper tiers, I would be teaching people how to do this with an agent that they could literally just text the name of the person or it would scan their calendar the day before, or it would automatically watch certain social media accounts and it would just ping it all back to you on day zero without you doing any work. So you can go all the way from uploading the screenshots to you just get an email in the morning that says, "Hi, you're speaking to Jim at three o'clock.

(14:56):

Here's his last three LinkedIn posts. Here's this. I would pay attention to this. I would ignore this. "

Joe Downs (15:02):

So this is great. So I love this. This is perfect. So we're giving people the good, better, best, right?

Peter Swain (15:08):

Yeah.

Joe Downs (15:08):

If you're not ready for Claude or Manis or your desktop because you're still just getting your feet wet and you got a meeting coming up or you haven't had time to really lean into the learning curve and it's not much of a learning curve, but I'll give you some grace. You haven't had time. Peter just handed you the better way. The good way is you do it yourself and you spend an hour or two and you prepare for that meeting, for instance. And this is a meeting we're talking about in this example, not going to find you leads. That's the good way. Better way, take the screenshots of their LinkedIn profile, anything you can find on Facebook, Substack, YouTube, Twitter, whatever, whatever the social media platforms there are, I'm hearing you say the better way is to take those screenshots, dump them into, I guess, any AI, whatever you're using, and what's a simple prompt?

(16:07):

Just seed people with a prompt so they can, they don't have to-

Peter Swain (16:10):

I'm about to meet this person or I'm about to outreach to this person. My intention is to secure business for insert blank here, tell me everything I need to know.

Joe Downs (16:22):

And how to pitch them even, for instance.

Peter Swain (16:24):

Yeah. And I'd say and fan out and look on the web for any additional research. So this is an interesting thing that we weren't necessarily planning to talk on. There are two ways that you use AI and at a very, very high level. Way number one is an area that you don't know what you're doing. Way number two is an area that you do know what you're doing. And it's really a very, very different approach. So if you do know what you're doing, you're already going to say, "I want your expectation of their Clifton strengths. I want their disk analysis. I want to see the frequency of their posting of this company. I want to look at stock price variations for the company that ... " Because if you already do this, you know exactly what you want and how you want it. So you're just using the AI as an efficiency tool and an efficiency play, a hyper efficiency tool.

(17:15):

I

Joe Downs (17:16):

Just wouldn't dumb it down like that. It's an incredibly enhanced.

Peter Swain (17:19):

Unbelievable. But the thing I'm leaning into is the prompting is very specific because you're just saying, "You're going to do this job for me and here's how I want this job done." Now on the flip side, if you're asking it to do something that you're not an expert at, I tend to prompt as loosely as possible. So I would just say something like, "About to talk to this person, 50K package this, tell me everything I need to know. " It would be a very, very loose prompt because actually I want it to use its understanding of what that job means and how that job should be done because it knows that job better than I do. So if you imagine in storage, if you were looking for a due diligence analysis of a deal, you would be telling it exactly what you want it to look for because you know that industry.

(18:11):

I have, well, secondhand knowledge now from you, but very little understanding of that industry. So my prompt would look something like, "Here's a bunch of data on a storage facility I'm considering buying. Are there any red flags?"That would be my entire prompt because if I try and learn it- You

Joe Downs (18:31):

Don't

Peter Swain (18:31):

Know what you don't

Joe Downs (18:32):

Know. Yeah.

Peter Swain (18:32):

I don't know what I don't know. And if I tell it to do it, it's going to do it and it probably is not going to do the full thing. So I'm not just trusting it.

Joe Downs (18:41):

I'm glad you used storage. I could speak authoritatively on this. Yeah. If you ask it something specific and you don't know what you're talking about, it'll give you this specific answer, I would think. Maybe you would even throw a few more facts at you, but if you don't know how those facts impact the specific answer that I gave you, then was the point. So I completely understand what you're saying now. Well, you're right. If I want to know something specific, I'm going to ask it in storage because I understand how to process the rest of the information or

Peter Swain (19:11):

I

Joe Downs (19:11):

Already have it. You don't know what you don't know, so keep it open, keep it loose. You said something earlier, and I'm going to give you an opportunity to plug your business because we've talked about good and better, but the best way is what I know how to do, which is use the agents. So if someone is listening, who's using the. Ai, we'll separate the. Ais from the desktop version people and they're interested in taking that next step, how can you help them? How could you help them? Could you implement something for them like, "Hey, Peter, I love what I heard you say. I want to wake up every morning with 10 leads that are fully researched or I want to wake up every morning with, I've got three meetings on my calendar today and I want a sales plan for each one. So when I get on that call or Zoom, I know everything about this guy.

(20:10):

I know that his daughter's trying out for dance team at JMU and I know he's interested in this, he's not interested in that. And tell me how to pitch him because his birthday's in September, so he's a Libra and he's hardheaded. I don't know, whatever. But if they're looking for that level of stepping up their game and they should be, how do they even approach that? How can you help them?

Peter Swain (20:37):

No, thank you. Yeah. So if you go to www.peterswain.com, there's a work with us page and all of our programs on there. We've got programs at 200 bucks a month for people that are just starting out on their journey all the way through to $250,000 for larger enterprises that are looking to do more serious stuff. So wherever somebody is on the journey, if they hit one core qualifying criteria, which is they're an entrepreneur, I don't play so well with enterprise because I tend to curse a little bit more than I probably should. And I love entrepreneurs. To me, it's one of the truest callings to try and bring your value to the world. So if you're entrepreneur, we've got a program there and there somewhere. You can just apply on the website.

Joe Downs (21:21):

You should have an idiot audit.

Peter Swain (21:24):

An idiot audit. Yeah. Are you an idiot?

Joe Downs (21:27):

Here's

Peter Swain (21:28):

Who we are.

Joe Downs (21:29):

This is how to make you a successful idiot.

Peter Swain (21:31):

We should do that

Joe Downs (21:33):

Idea.

Peter Swain (21:34):

I think it's a good idea. Well, AI should do that for me, but

Joe Downs (21:36):

Yeah. Exactly. Well, you should create an agent that does it for us. All right. So this leads to ... My head went immediately here when I started thinking about all of the things you could do. Especially when you pass the idiot audit, you're through the idiot audit and you've got your agents set up and you're in business, you're humming. From a timing perspective, this is where my head ...

Peter Swain (22:05):

I

Joe Downs (22:05):

Have more on that later. People already know I'm messed up. From a timing perspective, and this is where my head went with this, is there a risk that you come across as creepy if you're too on top of what someone

Peter Swain (22:20):

Just

Joe Downs (22:20):

Posted?

Peter Swain (22:22):

So in my previous life, I built out a booking system for hotels and what we did is it was quite clever. You know when it says, Call this number at the top of the website? That number was uniquely generated for you. Really? We had a pool of 500 phone numbers and when you hit the website, we'd use cookies to paint your browser and we'd then replace the number at the top. So when it said, "Call this number," we knew who you were, what previous bookings you'd done, what pages you'd looked at on the website, where you'd come from, how often you'd come back, and all these wonderful things. It was phenomenal. Technically, it was phenomenal.

Joe Downs (23:01):

It's not creepy at all. Keep going.

Peter Swain (23:03):

You'd call up the hotel and they go, "Hey, Joe, how was your last day in Calgary?" And yes, it was creepy. No one liked it. It didn't work. So what we taught the agents to do with that, this call center agent, so I think the same logic applies here, is instead of saying, "Hey, Joe, how was your stay in Calgary?" They would say, "Hey, thank you for calling. Do you mind if I take your name?" They already knew your name, but do you mind if I take your name? Cool. "And do you mind if I ask if you've stayed with us before?" And they'd go, "Yeah, no. Yeah, I stayed with you recently in Calgary." Now they already know whether you had a good stay or a bad stay, so now they know whether to ask the next question or not, which is, "And how was your stay?" So what we did was change the assumptive of stating the fact into the question that would get the customer to say the thing we wanted them to say.

(23:55):

So we still had a layer of intelligence, but that layer of intelligence led us to be able to ask the right question. Now, there's another fun thing to do if you want to extend this research model out a little bit, and that is to do it with people at a conference.

Joe Downs (24:13):

Talk to me.

Peter Swain (24:14):

So if I go to a two, three day event, I will say, "Hey, do you mind if we grab a selfie?" People go, "No, sure." I'd take the picture and then I chuck all the photos into Gemini at the end of the night and say, "Find me one talking point about everyone that I've just given you a picture of. "

Joe Downs (24:35):

From a photo.

Peter Swain (24:35):

Because it's got their company on their name badge.

Joe Downs (24:41):

Okay. So as long as you can read the name of the company and the name badge.

Peter Swain (24:47):

So when I walk in the next day, I know where they've worked, who they worked, what. So I remember one, it was like the VP of Visa and it told me the last five events they'd been to and the keynote that they gave at each of those events. So I'm not saying I pretended I was at one of those events, but if I'd chosen to pretend I was at one of those events, which obviously is actually what I did.

Joe Downs (25:13):

I'm thinking about all of the sequences from there that could follow if you set up a system, like an email system.

Peter Swain (25:22):

You could have an agent that as soon as you send it the photos, it does that look up, sends you the information back. And in the first batch of photos, it asks you when is the event running from and two, or it looks on your Google calendar to find out. And then at the last day it says, these were the 22 people, which one do you want to follow up with? Which ones just need a thanks, it was great to meet you, versus which ones need the, let's see if we can grab some time.

Joe Downs (25:50):

And then couldn't you have a link in, try to link in with them and then start a sequence of them?

Peter Swain (25:55):

If you're on a desktop mode, yes.

Joe Downs (25:59):

Just think about that. So take that back to the couple episodes ago where if we link in where four or five, I forget the number, four X or five X times more likely to have success with that person. If we're LinkedIn and then we send an email, here it's, "Hey, it was great to see you at this conference. By the way, couldn't you send a picture of the two of you together since you have it? " Link in with them, connect on Facebook or follow them on Instagram and Twitter to the extent you can find that information if they make it public. I mean, look at all those touch points.

Peter Swain (26:34):

Somebody gave me that.

Joe Downs (26:36):

Hold on one second. You're only doing that to your point a second ago if that was someone that warranted it because some of those people are going to flag as, "Yeah, there's no business. You're actually competitors. There's nothing you guys can do today." Okay, great to meet you. See you later or just connect on LinkedIn because why not connect? But think about that, the power of that sequence. And I think that's what he was talking about in his post is he didn't even have this in mind, what you just said. You're right, that was a dark secret. But in a way he did because his point was find other avenues, finding other ways to connect with people. It doesn't have to

Peter Swain (27:20):

Be

Joe Downs (27:20):

Just LinkedIn.

Peter Swain (27:21):

The only limit, and I think we've said this a few times, but it's always worth re saying, the only limit on what AI can do in the knowledge world, so in digital, the only limit is your imagination, and your imagination is so pre-trained on what is possible. If I ask you to tell me a story, it's going to be quite preset. Whereas if I ask my eight-year-old to tell me a story, it's going to involve mountains and automatic trucks that become the thing and new planets and weather that never existed because the younger we are, the more active our imagination is and the more new stuff we can come up with and we get trained and framed into what is doable and what is not doable. The right way for anyone to think this through is, well, what would it look like in a perfect world?

Joe Downs (28:15):

I couldn't agree more. And this is why I go all the way back to the beginning when I was talking about people of mental blocks. And you might've just said it differently, but what I was trying to say this whole time is we are programmed to accept that this is the way this is done or this is what can be done and this can't be done. I've been saying to people for months now who are still opening the wrapper of their first AI platform, whatever, whether it's desktop or. Ai, and I don't know how to use it. And what I keep saying to them is, just imagine this, the old saying, "If you can dream it, you can do it. " It's now true. So what I just heard you say, me versus Sam and that example, and you're 100% correct, he's still dreaming. I'm doing less dreaming because we're so programmed and we need to-

Peter Swain (29:15):

A hundred percent.

Joe Downs (29:16):

We need to start dreaming again. We need to start wondering and asking, "God, what if I could do that? Wouldn't it be nice if when I went to a conference, everyone I met, I meet 50 people, 60, 100 people at a conference. I can't possibly remember their names. I don't know who I want to do business with or not or who I should even be asking about. " You get one 10th of what a conference is worth the way do it.

Peter Swain (29:43):

Take it to the next step. You want to amp it up a bit? You had a program that was washing the hashtags and watching the ads on social, so anyone you didn't connect with, you still connected with. What if you had applaud running with you all day So that you could take a transcript at the end and do the authoritative carousel posts so that the event retweeted, re-shared your event. What if, once you've done that, you turned it into a SaaS solution and sold it for $49 a month to 300, 400, 500,000 people. Because the future is here, but it's not evenly distributed. And it's such an important phrase right now to understand how small a fraction of people have got this and how quickly it's accelerating means that we use this phrase internally called pop-up capitalism of we need to treat our business like a pop-up retail store of the opportunity is here and it's now and it may not exist in a week or it may not exist in a month.

(30:55):

Because if somebody turned around to me and said, "I have designed the perfect system to follow up with people from conferences where you can choose the outcome and how aggressive it is and what it does. You tick the boxes, these people go into this, these people go into this, and you just say what the event is and when it's running and it does everything I've just said, I'd happily pay 50 bucks a month, 100 bucks a month. Happily, tomorrow would pay that money. And I think that there'll be hundreds of thousands of people that would agree with me. So when you look at AI and you solve ... Necessity is the mother of all invention, you solve the issue, you scratch your own itch and then monetize it, sell it to other people.

Joe Downs (31:35):

I couldn't agree with you more. The power of AI is ... First of all, it's hard for even me to ... I just learned a ton on this podcast.

Peter Swain (31:46):

It's hard for me. I do it every day because it sounds hyperbolic. It sounds ridiculous.

Joe Downs (31:53):

But more interesting is something you just said, I think. And the pop-up store analogy I'm going to use in two ways. It's so true. You know what happens when a store pops up somewhere? Only the people around it know about it. There are so few AI podcasts, this being one, and I'm sure more are popping up every day, but the volume of numbers of people listening to them is non-existent almost compared to the population of people that should be listening to them.

Peter Swain (32:25):

100%.

Joe Downs (32:26):

So you're right. Only the ones who are in the know are going to win. Define win however you want, but only the ones who are in the know. Only the ones who are taking the time to learn it now because it's happening and it's happening fast and it can be an absolute game changer. I mean, what you just heard in this podcast alone, this episode.

Peter Swain (32:51):

I used this analogy a few weeks ago and I was talking to someone that wasn't adopting quick enough. I was like, "Okay, imagine that we're cavemen and you can see the asteroid coming down and you know that the ice age follows it. " They're like, "Yeah." I'm like, "Because you agree with me as to what this AI thing is going to be. " And they're like, "Yeah." I'm like, "Okay. So we know that this asteroid is coming down and we know the ice age is coming. What would your first priority be? " And they said something, I went, "That's not correct. Your first priority would still be to eat today because if you don't eat, you're going to die whether the asteroid comes or not. " So you've got these things that you have to do to survive as a business and you've got these things that you have to do to survive as a human, but what comes next after that?

(33:36):

Surely it's figuring out how to survive the ice age. Surely that's the next thing you're like, "Okay, well, it's coming. I need to survive the ice age, but then the next thing that comes if you're smart is, well, I've just figured out how to survive the ice age, so maybe I should sell that knowledge to other people. " And I want to just cap off this analogy. If you were a caveman that figured out how to survive the ice age, you become king of the world.

Joe Downs (34:05):

Yeah. And you can become king of your little empire, your little-

Peter Swain (34:09):

This is what's on offer to people right now.

Joe Downs (34:11):

Yeah.

Peter Swain (34:12):

This is why we say unfortunately, and I'm not saying I like this, again, we spoke about this earlier, I'm a pragmatist. There are two options available to everybody that listens to us, and the options are thrive or die. There is no survival option in this mix because AI is going to thousand X the efficiency of you and your business, or it's going to thousand X the efficiency of your competitor's business. So given those two choices of thrive or die, I choose thrive. There's no option. I'm not going to be the person that just gets run out of town because I'm operating at human level efficiency when my competitors are operating AI level efficiency. So I find it exciting because you fix the problem for yourself like LeadStrike, you're like, "This is the problem I need to solve." And suddenly you've got a monetizable product that you can go, "Wow, okay.

(35:11):

I think people probably want to buy this because they probably don't want to go through the thought exercise of working out how to fix this for themselves." It's not that they couldn't do it, it's they probably don't want to go through the exercise to do it.

Joe Downs (35:22):

And I find it even more exciting for a different reason. I love doing what I do best. I love being in my unique ability as much as possible. And if you don't know what I mean and you're listening, you do know what I mean. Just think about when you're at your best during your day. You're in the zone, you're on a roll, it's doing what you do best, whatever that is. You're an attorney, it's lawyering. If you're an accountant, it's counting numbers. Whatever you're doing, it's probably not business development, unless that's your role, in which case this enhances that too. But what I love about this is it reduces the amount you need to do business development, not just in a linear fashion, in an exponential way, because not only am I getting the people that I want to be in front of so I can be in my unique ability, I'm doing it with less effort, which just gives me more energy in general, but I've now got a filtration system that's making sure I've got the absolute best people in front of me so I can be my absolute best while I'm in front of them.

(36:33):

And it's telling me how to, I'll say pitch them, but you know what I mean? How to sell them, how to pitch them, how to present my best unique ability to them. It's not even a choice. This is a no-brainer. In any business, you have to be doing this. If you're not, you're looking at the asteroid and you're saying, "Hey, it's been fun. It's been a nice ride. Let's eat until we can't eat

Peter Swain (37:01):

Anymore." The nature of AI means that you have AI working on itself. So the curve is getting quicker, not slower. This is not going to slow down. It's going to get quicker. And that's the bit that I think people miss. One of my favorite examples is I said three years ago, accounting firms are in a lot of trouble because very few people like paying their CPA. They're like, "Yay, no." And my prediction was that we'd see an accounting firm come out that said that they will file your tax return and they will indemnify you for anything that comes back from the IRS to double the value because it'll be a VC backed play and it would cost you a hundred bucks a month for the guarantee the best tax return you can ever have, and if they miss anything, they will pay the damages times two.

(37:53):

That company went into beta three months ago. There are 460,000 CPAs in North America. When that takes hold, and it won't be for another year until it's ready and up and running, when that takes hold, how quickly does that spread through the workplace? Because I'm going to turn around to you in a room and go, "You'll never guess what? I just did this thing. It's amazing.You're straight on it, and then the next person is straight on in the next person straight." It doesn't take long for something like that to go from 0% market penetration to 100% market penetration.

Joe Downs (38:26):

And it's going to do your bookkeeping too, I'm sure. And it's going to tell you in real time whether you should sell this or not and take the gain today because of this is happening. Yeah, it's going to be incredible. It's going to be absolutely-

Peter Swain (38:36):

So the CPA that just listened to this and went, "Well, what do I do with that? " Connection, community and trust because I'm still flabbergasted that the CPA firms that I work with don't try and optimize my cashflow. What I mean is turning around to me and saying, "Hey," because our business is 100% online, "Hey, you're paying 3.5% to Stripe. We've got this partner company that would charge you 2.5%. Just so you know, we do get financially incentivized to make the introduction, but I think it's going to save you 1% literally of top line revenue, which is going to earn you this much money. Would you like us to make you the introduction?" We're like, "Yes, of course I want you to make that introduction." Connection, community, and trust. CPAs have a very unique position to leverage that and literally make you more money, which means that if they were to ever do that, stop seeing themselves as bookkeepers and accountants, but instead see themselves as financial optimization partners, you would never walk away.

(39:38):

We'd be like, "Yeah, I'll pay you 2K a month, a year, whatever you want. If you're going to carry on making me more money by finding me better options of how to spend my money, sign me up." But that shift has to happen now because if it can be done with the keyboard and done with a mouse, AI is going to do it

(39:55):

And bookkeeping accounting is the ultimate example of that.

Joe Downs (39:59):

Couldn't agree more. Want to just add this in at the end here because we talked about how great it is for us on outbound, but I want to add this something here because I felt I've been on both sides of this. I've been on the receiving end of spraying pray. We all have. The generic, I came across, this is in storage, I came across your facility and thought would be a great fit. That type of email, that tells me the person never looked at a single thing about my business, right? That's an immediate delete. And I've also done the work the other way. When we're expanding into new markets, I preach building relationships with local operators. So I spend the time understanding who they were before I ever reached out. And the difference in how those conversations went is night and day, right? The research isn't just a tactic, it's a signal.

(40:50):

It tells the other person, I actually took the time in a world where I think, again, we've all been on the receiving end of it.

Peter Swain (41:01):

Oh, Drew, it's my first question in an interview. So what do you know about me? What do you discover? And if their answer is, I haven't looked you up, I'm like, I've literally now do this. I'm like, okay, we can end this here.

Joe Downs (41:12):

Wow. Well, it makes sense because in a world where nobody takes the time anymore to write their emails and, "Hey, I was writing it for you. " We're smart human beings. We can read through the BS, right? And that's the whole premise behind what we're talking about here is it's still AI, but you can still personalize it. We spend a lot of time talking about how to improve our businesses and that's extremely important, but think about the other side of it too. And I think that indirectly makes for a better conversation when you have it because cold outreach still works. It's getting slimmer and slower and slimmer, but your first conversation from a successful cold outreach, cold outreach is still very cold. And if you start with something different like, "Hey, I saw you won the award at that conference where we're at. Congratulations. I missed your speech

(42:06):

Or whatever. I missed your presentation, but I saw you won an award on it. I was bummed to miss it. Hey, congrats. You want to get together for coffee or whatever?"That goes a long way versus congrats on the award, let's get together for coffee. It's not personalized. Anyway, Peter, I didn't see us going in all the directions we went today, but boy, that was exciting. Folks, if you want to go deeper on my business, storagemoguls.ai for real estate and for self-storage entrepreneurs, give us a look. And of course, peterswain.com, peterswain.com, pretty soon he's going to have the idiot audit up and you'll be able to run your business through his audit and figure out how you can improve it. And you'll help them with that, Peter, right?

Peter Swain (42:57):

100%. Yeah. We want people to be on the thrive side of that equation, really that simple.

Joe Downs (43:03):

How much time does it take for me to go from, "I am not doing any cold outreach because that's not what I do, " to all of a sudden I've got an AI system built doing cold outreach for me.

Peter Swain (43:13):

Approximately how long? As you walk through this, the good, better, best, you're talking about 15 minutes, an hour, four hours type thing.

Joe Downs (43:20):

Four hours, and I'm humming.

Peter Swain (43:22):

Four hours to have it so it's humming and it's pulling stuff and writing stuff and pushing stuff to you wherever it is you live. Yeah, four hours.

Joe Downs (43:29):

Folks, four hours. You can't not afford to take four hours. Keep the emails coming. Dear idiots at idiots@successfulidiots.com. Thanks for listening. For Peter Swain, I'm Joe Downs. We are your successful idiots. See you next week.