The Startup CPG Podcast

Yaminah Childress
I hear that a lot that AI is scary, mainly because people think it's going to kind of take over things. But I look at AI as literally a tool, right? Like I don't think of it any different as I think about my computer or my Alexa. And so I wanted to learn how to use AI as soon as I heard about it, which was about two years ago. As soon as I heard about it, I had to learn everything. But I also know that it could be such a helpful tool for us, especially as small business owners.

00:40
Veronica Blue
I'm always chatting with ChatGPT. Probably the most helpful thing that I've been able to do is work with my costing, scaling, recipes, things like that. And then I kind of fold all of that data that it gives me into my two to three year projections.

00:55
Daniel
Welcome to all our loyal listeners and to our AI bot hot overlords. Today we are hoping to level up our AI game. We're going to learn how a few entrepreneurs are using the latest technology for operations and other back office efficiency. I'm chatting first with Caitlin Bricker, our startup CPG editor. She's been leading a lot of the research into how brands from our community are using AI. Then you're going to hear it straight from some of those brands, Phenomenal Foods and Yanni Beauty. You are going to be amazed the stuff that they are figuring out how to do. All right, let's go. It's time for chat cpg. All right, everybody, I'm here with Caitlin Bricker, world's biggest AI fan. Isn't that right, Caitlin?

01:35
Caitlin Bricker
Yes, as of late, yes, I was a hater before, I will say, but I've been turned.

01:40
Daniel
But why were you a hater?

01:42
Caitlin Bricker
I just don't want AI to come from my job. Like, let's be real, so many people are talking about how AI can write copy for you. And yeah, I can make my life easier, but I don't want it to take my job one day.

01:54
Daniel
But is that why you were avoiding learning how to use it?

01:58
Caitlin Bricker
I was avoiding learning how to use it because I like to do the work. I don't, I don't want to take the easy way out. I like doing the work, I like doing the research, I like being creative. And unfortunately, I've learned that AI can help me be creative.

02:14
Daniel
Okay, so first of all, what caused you to change your mind? What were you paying attention to? Who were you listening to?

02:22
Caitlin Bricker
Well, I've seen a lot of stuff on LinkedIn. It's, you know, nothing's ever a black and White issue. A lot of people are really concerned about the sustainability issues and then there's a ton of people who are leveraging it and they love it. And not just because I work here, but I listened to the episode with Lentiful and with Focus Fuel on the startup CPG podcast after I was a changed woman. I was like, okay, if you're using AI as a COO when you're bootstrapping a company, that's insane. I was changed after listening to that.

02:56
Daniel
Yeah, I think for me that's the biggest thing. Because in the current environment there is no funding for brands. Probably most people are doing this as a side hustle right now, trying to keep their regular jobs so they have money to pay for things. Cause you can't go out and just get that juicy 5 mil valuation pre launch anymore. And I just am seeing everybody get very scrappy in how they're building businesses because they are still building them, but they're just building them with fewer resources to conserve the money that they have. And they're using AI, amongst other things to have a really scrappy business model, which I love to see.

03:32
Daniel
And so yeah, that's kind of how I view it is like if you are the sucker who is still spending all the time trying to do everything manually that Chat GPT can do in seconds, that then like, how are you going to compete and how are you going to get everything done and how are you not going to be exhausted?

03:49
Caitlin Bricker
Right. I feel like at that point it kind of comes down to pride. Like, are you okay with swallowing your pride or do you want to light your money on fire? I don't know. Like that's what it comes down to for me.

04:02
Daniel
Honestly. This is not going to make me sound better to anybody out there, but if I could snap my fingers and make Chat GPT disappear, I would probably do it because I don't like it. I feel like I like doing things the way that I know how to do them. I think I, you know, am like fast and good at multitasking and like I know a lot of shortcuts in Excel that most people don't know. And all of that has now been leveled and it doesn't matter anymore. The same way where like I spent all this time learning other languages and now it doesn't matter and you can Google Translate anything and even live and like whatever. Okay, that's just a couple years of my life.

04:38
Caitlin Bricker
So language is good, but Excel, I could do without Excel.

04:43
Daniel
That's like a language too. So that's kind of how I look at it, but I'm just like, that just is what it is. So I gotta learn how to do it. And when I use it is amazing. So a little while ago, you know, we did, yeah, we did the first podcast on AI for cpg and it was mind opening, just who's on board already? And then we wanted to follow up with this second episode, but really I wanted to do kind of more like ops focus. Because I think the thing that you see on LinkedIn a lot is, hey, I generated this image using only AI and I don't have to use an ad agency anymore, like, whatever, but I think people are seeing that.

05:18
Daniel
So I think we're all kind of aware it can do that or it can create a superhero figure of you with all of your brand elements.

05:25
Caitlin Bricker
I may not have done that recently.

05:28
Daniel
Right, okay, so we know about that. But I think the thing that people aren't seeing as much, it's not as visible, is how it actually can really help you, let's say, on the back end of the business, your operations, especially in finance and you know, some of the like legal, regulatory, whatever, all of that stuff that is very time consuming often requires a lot of expertise or just being good at computers to get stuff done. So a little while ago we did a bit of research to see how people in the community are using it. Because for me, that's the best thing. Like you can ask an AI expert, but they aren't really a brand actually using it.

06:03
Daniel
And so I like to go right to the brands from our community and say, hey, what are you guys actually doing right now that's working, that's saving you time so that we can share that with all the other brands. And so, Kaitlyn, you were on the forefront of this. What is some of the stuff that you learned about?

06:18
Caitlin Bricker
Yeah, I learned quite a few things. Again, mind blown. I talked to a brand who hasn't yet launched, that is launching in Target, and they are using AI to aggregate a bunch of retailer data and onboarding documents. So then they can take that data in those documents and they can distill it down and create SOPs for their three PL partners and distribution centers for later on. I was like, whoa, not even launched yet and using AI?

06:48
Daniel
So that stuff is really important because, yeah, I mean, sometimes you would need a sales ops person or an OPS person to just take these documents that I think can come in PDF or Excel and just have all these like quote unquote unique requirements that can be across a bunch of retailers. And I know we heard that from Bumpin Blends, actually when she was on the podcast about how she was using AI for a lot of new item forms. This makes a lot of sense to me because you can ask ChatGPT to simplify things and to extract things. Right. And so, yeah, let me just feed that kind of stuff into the model and have it just dump out the bare bones into a nice Excel. And that would be kind of a more universal.

07:27
Daniel
Like when, you know, when you're applying to colleges and they have the Common app.

07:30
Caitlin Bricker
Oh, please. Now, yes, I do know, but PTSD a little bit right there.

07:36
Daniel
Okay, well, I think this will be the. Gosh, I wonder what's going on with college applications, by the way, in the world of ChatGPT, does anybody write theirs anymore?

07:45
Caitlin Bricker
Hey.

07:45
Daniel
Oh, all right. Anyways though, back to the business at hand. So, okay, that's a really interesting application and just massively time saving. I mean, what it doesn't change is like every business should have some kind of master record of all of their product data and all that stuff. But that probably makes it really easy to just get all the fields you're eventually going to need and just try to keep them in one place and probably use it to fill those things out and to send different kinds of parties, different kind of documents because like, you know, your warehouse, your coman needs some components of it, but not the whole thing. Right, right.

08:19
Caitlin Bricker
And what was really cool about Steve, who I spoke to about this, he had mentioned that because he's putting all this data into the AI, it's now creating a knowledge base for him so he can say like, where did you pull that from? And it will say, I pulled it from XYZ Document from XYZ retailer.

08:37
Daniel
That is cool. It's good. You want to know the source.

08:38
Caitlin Bricker
Cool.

08:39
Daniel
Yeah.

08:39
Caitlin Bricker
Especially as a new brand. If this is the first time you're building a CPG brand or building any kind of business, I just cannot imagine how much data you're being inundated with and information that you're like, whoa, where is this all coming from? How do I keep this straight? And being able to just feed it to somebody who can then spit it back out and bite size bits for you is just. It's a game changer.

09:03
Daniel
All right, so. And in a little bit we're going to hear directly from a couple of brands that are using it in very interesting ways. But can you tell me a couple of other things that you learned how brands are using AI for some of this back office and Ops type stuff.

09:16
Caitlin Bricker
Yeah. Speaking of Excel, I spoke to somebody named Clara and Clara shared with me that she is very handy with Excel, but she was able to remove check digits from a hundred UPCs way faster with ChatGPT than she could do with her Excel skills. So that's just another way, like very simple. Like, even if it's something that you didn't want to, you know, if you knew the Excel tools and you knew how to go in and just remove the numbers quickly, ChatGPT was able to do it faster.

09:47
Daniel
I believe that I do have pretty good Excel chops. I'm a former management consultant, but I still sometimes get tripped up by like, oh, especially if it's like a zero at the beginning and then it chops it off. Yeah, format that baby as text. But sometimes that doesn't happen. Sometimes you multiply the whole column by 0 or 1 to try to strip it. It gets. It's a whole thing. So ChatGPT knows how to do that for sure, better than even I do and people who are even better. So that makes a lot of sense. And ensure it can rip it right from the PDF. You don't need to. All the other workarounds, Clara was also.

10:19
Caitlin Bricker
Telling me that she was using Walmart's Food traceability and comparing the brands that she's working with to Walmart and saying, hey, where does our brand fall in the traceability standards? And being able to use AI to just quickly give her a rundown on what they should improve on or how they are fitting into the traceability standards.

10:42
Daniel
That is awesome. And I also saw Clara had commented in our AI study group channel on the startup CPG Slack, somebody was talking about deductions which are notoriously sent to you in the most ridiculous formats like a PDF and you don't understand any of the stuff that's in there. And the format is horrible. And for sure, I can tell you I've worked at companies where we had people, it was just their job to try to like write down everything that was in those PDFs, which is crazy. And someone was asking about that in the Slack and she was like, chad, GPT can extract all of that for you into a nice little formatted data sheet. And then you'll just have your data table of all of the deductions coming in. So that was a nice comment from Clara Torres.

11:22
Daniel
Okay, do you have another example?

11:24
Caitlin Bricker
Yeah. I might be butchering the name of this tool, but we had somebody named Andreas Michaels who was telling us that he uses a tool named Replit to do inventory management and sales data tracking.

11:37
Daniel
Okay, how does that work?

11:39
Caitlin Bricker
He says that it allows him to store and track batch data and then he can create new deals and all the information that he puts in there, he can just do one Click to print PDFs.

11:50
Daniel
Okay, so Replit builds like apps and tools. And I've heard about this in the context of people being like, you can basically build and replicate any software that's out there now using Replit. So I think, I don't know, I think how it works is you're like, I don't know if you could like, be like, hey, I want to build my own Excel and like, take that to market. But the context that I heard about this then is like, why valuations for tech companies now are going to get tough. Because it's actually so much easier to launch a tech or SaaS product now because you'd be like, oh, I want to do the like, AI for whatever. And then you just go and tell Replit, hey, build the software that does this. Kind of make it like this other, but a little bit different.

12:31
Daniel
Now I can just go out and sell it. And so because that now has meant like the moat or whatever competitive barrier for creating those kind of businesses now is so low, that is really hard to have a good valuation because there are going to be so many companies coming for it and pitching those same VCs. So cool. But it sounds like also some people are really using replit to just build their own software applications that are doing the stuff they need to do. I'm not at that level yet, but, Caitlin, maybe you and I will get there. We're going to start maybe in all my free time. Right? Well, yeah, we'll launch the startup CPG AI for. I don't know what's like the most annoying problem for founders today.

13:12
Daniel
It's probably, let's see, maybe not getting emails back from buyers when they really want to.

13:17
Caitlin Bricker
So, yeah, I was just going to say, like, a common question that I always see is, hey, like, what's the. The email form for this retailer? Like, is it first name, last name or first letter of name and last name? I wonder if there's something you could.

13:31
Daniel
Build, but it'll just be the AI bot that just asks that in our Slack for you, for every retailer. All right, I got it. Okay. So, Caitlin, I think it actually is helpful for everybody to hear about our kind of curmudgeonly journey on AI because, like, we are you listener. We don't really want to be on board with this, but actually it is super helpful. And I'll say my left work good prior to AI. Yeah, I mean, I like, I'm using it as, you know, I wouldn't say I've developed the muscle memory to like start every task with it, but definitely when I get stuck, I go to it and it's always helpful. Helps me think of things that wouldn't occur to me where I'm like, yeah, that's pretty good. So it bruises my ego but lifts me up.

14:13
Daniel
And it's nice to be on this journey with you. We're learning together. We're bringing everybody else along with us and I think everybody's going to really enjoy hearing from a couple brands who are leading the charge. So these next couple segments here, you're going to hear from people who are unafraid. They're out there on the cutting edge of AI as much as, you know, I think any of us CPG people can be. So thank you, Caitlin for helping us with all this research and I'm excited for everybody to listen along. Here we go.

14:39
Caitlin Bricker
My pleasure.

14:40
Daniel
All right. All right, now let's hear from a brand. Veronica, thank you so much for joining us. Today's episode is on AI for OPS and finance. All that stuff. I'm really excited because I, I know you've been doing some interesting stuff with it for your brand. First of all, do you mind introducing yourself, please?

14:55
Veronica Blue
Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me, Daniel. My name is Veronica Blue. I'm the founder and CEO of Phenomenal Foods company. So we make plant based foods for people who follow alternative dietary lifestyles. Our flagship product is creamy Keto hot cereal. So it's a low carb, gluten free alternative to Cream of Wheat. And we started on Amazon in 2021 and last year 2024, we started rolling out into groceries. So that's pretty much where we're focused right now.

15:19
Daniel
All right. And I know that you are a big fan of ChatGPT. Can you tell me about how this relationship developed?

15:26
Veronica Blue
It's a relationship for sure all the time. I'm always chatting with ChatGPT. Probably the most helpful thing that I've been able to do is work with my costing, scaling, recipes, things like that. And then I kind of fold all of that data that it gives me into my two to three year projections and that has been super helpful. As we're talking with potential investors, it's been able to make the numbers a lot more accurate. Before I was just using percentages based on previous years and now I'm actually able to base my numbers on real inputs and actual spending that we've done.

16:03
Daniel
Okay, so tell me a little bit more about how you're actually using it. So how do you get started with it and you know, what are the specific kinds of queries you're putting in there for some of these outputs you're getting?

16:13
Veronica Blue
Yeah, so when I first started, I created a costing spreadsheet and that spreadsheet has all of my ingredients. The price per pound, the volume, how much I'm buying, the freight cost, because I absolutely roll that into my unit economics. And from there I'm able to kind of. I've actually uploaded that spreadsheet and it does get a little bit sticky there because it always wants to. Doesn't matter what your headings say. It always says, well, your headings are a little bit, you know, this. I'm going to simplify it now and then I'll tell you what. So it's interesting, you have to watch it think, but eventually it does get it where you need it to be. And so I just basically ask it, you know, I need to produce, say 10,000 units of our blueberry SKU.

16:58
Veronica Blue
How much of ingredient A, B and C do I need in order to get there? And it just makes it so much easier. The spreadsheet that I created is a great spreadsheet, but if you're accustomed to working with Excel, you know that the formulas can get tricky. And so I just spent a whole lot of time double and triple checking those formulas to make sure that I was actually right. So now I can have ChatGPT do the math and check it and make sure that I'm right and it's a lot faster.

17:27
Daniel
I like that a lot because I am a former management consultant, which means I used to live in spreadsheets, and especially those kind of ones with the formula that are very complex like that. And I, as much as I've done it, I still don't really know exactly how to do those kind of what if scenarios. And so I would absolutely be using Chat GPT as well to just answer some of those simple questions because I just couldn't really figure that part out in Excel. That's really cool. And so when you're talking about, you know, uploading a spreadsheet, really, it's like click the plus sign, upload the spreadsheet, and then just have a little bit of a dialogue with ChatGPT about it. Like your headings of the rows are kind of bad. They're saying this you're like, no, here's what it's saying. Please know this.

18:10
Daniel
It really is whatever the heading says, something like that.

18:13
Veronica Blue
And I actually just allow it to make it whatever it needs to do, because it literally will edit the spreadsheet and then generate a new one and show it to me. So I don't try to correct it. I let it do its little process. And then as long as the outputs are right, I let it think the way that it thinks.

18:29
Daniel
All right, so you work. You work around its flaws or just the way that it sees the world.

18:33
Veronica Blue
Right. And it's not perfect. You know, I think that's one thing that needs to be clear, is that it's not perfect.

18:38
Daniel
So, okay, so. Well, I mean, none of us are, but you would expect it could be maybe someday. So, okay, you're using it. You're entering in basically your recipe, your formula, and it can tell you how much of specific ingredients you need based off a specific kind of forecast. What else are you using it for? Are you using it to actually help you figure out what that forecast volume could look like?

18:59
Veronica Blue
Yeah, I mean, and you can also work backwards. So if you're. If you're working towards a certain number for your revenue goals, or even if you're looking not to spend more than a certain number on your raw materials, you can start with that number and work backwards. You know, I don't want to spend more than $10,000 on raw materials. How much can I produce based on what you know about my formula and my ingredients? And it can figure that out for you. So that's pretty much how I do the projections is if I'm trying to project out two, three years, rather than saying, well, my expenses for raw materials were 30% last year. You know, that's such a broad projections. So I'm able to say, listen, this is my number.

19:40
Veronica Blue
This is the number I'm trying to get to tell me how many units I need to sell in order to get there. And it can spit that out pretty quickly.

19:47
Daniel
So that's an interesting way to think about it. Do you feel like that is more applicable if you're heavier on E Commerce like Amazon, maybe you can control it a little bit more versus, I mean, if you were in thousands of retail doors, you're maybe just, you know, it's a little hard to kind of limit the amount that you actually want to spend on production, right?

20:07
Veronica Blue
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And so for us, since our wholesale business is growing, we produce based on open pos. So when we get A po we produce to spec, essentially. So it is easy for me at this stage. And as we grow, I'm sure that things will need to get a little bit more sophisticated. But it absolutely is helpful at this stage for us.

20:28
Daniel
You must have a pretty nice lead time than where you do your manufacturing if you're able to produce that quickly based off when the POs come in.

20:35
Veronica Blue
Well, anywhere between, because it takes time to get those materials. So anywhere from 30 to 45 days if we need to do the ordering.

20:43
Daniel
That's lightning fast. Where I come from, I feel like maybe 90 to 120 days. I don't know if you're talking to the co man, they also could just bump you if you know, and then. Oh, if just one of the ingredients doesn't come in time, then you've got major problems.

20:57
Veronica Blue
We've been lucky.

20:58
Daniel
Yeah.

20:58
Veronica Blue
Our group really works with us, so it's been good.

21:01
Daniel
Well, that is awesome. Okay, so that makes a lot of sense how you are using it to do costing spreadsheets. You enter in all the info about what percentage of your formula is coming from different products and you enter in the costing info for each of those as well with price info. And then you're also adding in freight and stuff like that.

21:19
Veronica Blue
Yeah, definitely. I attended a conference, CPG sales and finance conference, and that was a real sticking point. You know, make sure that you keep that in your cogs, because it truly is a cost of doing business. It's a cost of your product.

21:32
Daniel
So, all right, so when you ask it to give you analyses, like, hey, if I am going to do 2 million in revenue, you know, what's, how much ingredients do I need or what's my cogs going to look like? What kind of insights have you come up with based off seeing it run those numbers?

21:46
Veronica Blue
It has helped me understand what my expenses actually are. And it was good news, right? It. The percentages that I was using as a general predictor were way off. You know what I mean? Because things change as you produce more. Your costs do go down. You're consolidating all of that output. And so it's been very helpful, you know, giving me a better understanding of my numbers and what to expect as we continue to grow.

22:14
Daniel
All right, so Veronica, what's your team size now?

22:17
Veronica Blue
We. It's. I am. I am a solopreneur. Right. So it's me full time and we have a team of contractors, but it's me on the day to day.

22:25
Daniel
This is what I'm hearing from people who know how to use AI and ChatGPT, they're like, oh, no, I'm just a hustler. I'm keeping my expenses down and I am being efficient with some of these tools. So, Veronica, you are an early adopter of using AI in this area. Me, I'm still kind of afraid of it, you know, like I. Even reluctantly, I'm just trying to fig wrap my head around it and how everyone's using it, but I know it's the future. How did you figure out you were going to do it and, you know, get at the bravado to learn this kind of scary new technology and start making it work for your business?

22:58
Veronica Blue
Well, it might have been a few months after, you know, the big announcement that AI was here. And my background is digital, so I have a master's in digital marketing, so I'm comfortable with technology. That's actually one of the reasons why we started on Amazon, where a lot of people were like, why didn't you start in grocery? And to me, you know, it's just, you go tech first. So when I really started using ChatGPT, I had gotten the idea that I wanted to start coaching. And so I kind of wrote out a course and I was amazed at what it put out. You know, I had to again, there's outputs or, you know, inputs that you have to give it, but it knows the CPG industry. So it wasn't math that I was doing with it. It was.

23:41
Veronica Blue
It was really just instructional informational stuff with my framework. But I was really shocked at how much it was able to output.

23:48
Daniel
I am also really blown away and I think the models are getting better. But just this past weekend, we have a new position that we're going to be hiring for@startUp CPG. And I wrote out kind of a lazy job description. I was like, well, let me just try and see what ChatGPT would do with this thing. And I just explained in about two sentences what we do as a community, which, you know, we think is so special and unique and how could anyone possibly understand it who doesn't know us and our history? And then I said vaguely what the job was. Give me a job description. And it was beautiful. It was so much better than the one that I had written. And the thing that was scary is that it was even more me than me.

24:26
Daniel
Like, the way that I wrote it was kind of like low energy and not that interesting. And it wrote such a better one that had all of the passion and enthusiasm that I just hadn't dialed up on a Sunday night.

24:37
Veronica Blue
That's so interesting, because I've noticed that too. It does kind of learn you and your personality, and then everything it does kind of is kind of like you. So it's interesting.

24:46
Daniel
Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm very happy about that. And even sometimes on the podcast, I'll. I have my script and, you know, questions that I want to ask, and I'll often just say, hey, I'm doing this episode. Here's the kind of person that I'm interviewing. What questions would you ask? And it'll just drop a couple that I'm like, of course I should ask that. I can't believe I didn't think of that.

25:07
Veronica Blue
Right. That part, sometimes it is like, wow, I didn't think about that. But it's interesting. I mean, you. There's really nothing. You cannot run by ChatGPT, to be quite honest. You can ask it anything.

25:18
Daniel
I'm going to ask it later what it thinks of this episode and it can grade both of us on our uses of it.

25:23
Veronica Blue
Yes, absolutely.

25:25
Daniel
All right, Veronica, thank you so much. If people want to follow along with you and Phenomenal Foods, what's the best way for them to do that and support you?

25:32
Veronica Blue
You can find us on Instagram. We're at Phenomenal Foods. Underscore Keto. We are the Same handle on TikTok, Facebook. We are at Phenomenal Foods.

25:43
Daniel
Co. All right, thank you so much for sharing. I really want to just say how impressed I am by anyone who figures out how to just take this new technology head on in the early days, you know, it does seem like these are just the early innings. I think some people will look at it and be like, oh, no. I'm like, too late to do this. Like, no. This is the top of the first inning right now. Everybody can just still get on board. It's scary, but let's step into the abyss together. So thank you so much for sharing some of these early learnings that you have with our community. I know everyone will find it really useful.

26:14
Veronica Blue
Awesome. Thank you, Daniel.

26:17
Daniel
All right, don't go anywhere. We're going to hear from another brand. All right, Yamina, thank you so much for joining us. Do you mind, first of all, just introducing yourself and your brand?

26:26
Yaminah Childress
Yes. Hey, guys, I'm Yamina Childress. I'm the co founder and CEO of Yanni Beauty. We're a luxury, inclusive and sustainable beauty brand and we offer all things makeup, skincare and hair care for eco chic beauty lovers.

26:41
Daniel
All right, awesome. I am very interested to Talk to you about this topic today of AI for ops, business, operations. All that kind of good stuff because you had some comments that were featured in our recent newsletter. So, first of all, do you mind just tell me about your AI journey? How did you decide to just get on the bandwagon and start trying to learn how to use these tools?

27:02
Yaminah Childress
So, first of all, I tell everybody I am a tech junkie. So anything new that comes out, any new technology, I want to try it, I want to use it. Yanni Beauty was like the first beauty brand to have an nft. So it's just like, I love to just play around with technology. So that's really how I jumped in it, because I love it. And then I have a really small team, and so I figured AI could be like other assistants.

27:31
Daniel
So just because, like, that's AI is scary to me. I don't know about it. I don't have the confidence about it. Why do you think you have such great confidence of, like, just tech in general? Like, I'm, yeah, I'm going to master all this stuff and try all the new stuff. That's incredible. I love it.

27:45
Yaminah Childress
And that's. You know what, I hear that a lot that AI is scary mainly because people think it's going to kind of take over things. But I look at AI as literally a tool, right? Like, I don't think of it any different as I think about my computer or my Alexa. And so I just always think about when I'm working, how can I work smarter? How can I make this faster and easier? And so I wanted to learn how to use AI as soon as I heard about it, which was about two years ago. As soon as I heard about it, I had to learn everything. I designed my own AI assistants.

28:21
Yaminah Childress
And so it's really just something really in it, in me, because I love technology, but I also know that it can be such a helpful tool for us, especially as small business owners.

28:29
Daniel
Well, good for you. It might just be like an age that I'm at now where like, okay, I'm in my 40s. I'm like, Nah, I'm grouchy. I don't want to learn new things. I don't feel I'm like, oh, NFTs. Like, that's. I don't know, not fun to talk about is what I think the acronym is for nft. Like, you know, I'm just like a grumpy old guy now. But I think that's really beautiful that you're just so hip to the new stuff and ready to dive in and try new things and like learn about new things. I think that curiosity and energy is what I wish. I wish I had that even in more spades. Like, you have it.

29:00
Yaminah Childress
You know, it's funny because I'm also a grumpy old lady. Most people can't tell, but I am also in my 40s. In my 40s. But.

29:08
Daniel
But you know what?

29:09
Yaminah Childress
That's the thing I think. You know, my dad, he was really old and he would still be into technology. So maybe that was a thing that Even as a 70 year old, he still learned all the things. So I always kept up with it as well.

29:22
Daniel
I thought I was going to find an excuse there for why I wasn't better about it. But you just took. You took it away on a couple fronts. One, because you said you're in her 40s too. Okay, strike that out. And then second, because you said you were inspired maybe by your dad. Like, my mom actually wrote a book on like doing psychoanalysis over zoom. She's like a pioneer on all the tech stuff. And I'm still afraid of all this stuff. So. Darn it. Anyways, let's just talk about you. So. So tell me more about what you've been doing, because two years is a lot of time in market with all the AI tools. So tell me how you're using it to level up your brand.

29:57
Yaminah Childress
Okay, so first I'll say I think people should use AI. The tools are different for different businesses and different people. But I do think there are some tools that I think a lot of us can use across the board. Of course, the first one most people know about is ChatGPT is the first AI tool that I actually use. And I tell people all the time that ChatGPT is my best friend. Right. Like I talked to ChatGPT. I didn't give her a name, but I talked to her all the time about all things.

30:24
Yaminah Childress
And so she has really learned all about me and all about my brand, which is really helpful for businesses because for instance, if I want to write a newsletter to my audience, if I want to record a podcast, if I want to create a bio, if I want to do any of the things, I ask ChatGPT to write it for me. But also by, because I use it so much, it kind of understands how I would talk, the words I would say and wouldn't say. But it does things at such a record speed that now I can knock so many things out the park in minutes versus hours. So that's one tool that I use every Almost every day. I do use ChatGPT almost every day and then I use things like Perplexity AI. I started using that one maybe several months ago.

31:11
Yaminah Childress
And that was because we decided at Yanni Beauty were going to expand into the uk. And Perplexity AI search engine is all about facts and figures. And so it was, it's able to give you market share, what it would look like if your brand went into whatever country, whatever market, if you decided to have another product, how would it compete against other brands in the world? Right. So it gives you all of those really specific market research tools because it's AI power is all about facts and figures. And so I use that when I really want to know the facts of something.

31:47
Caitlin Bricker
Right.

31:48
Yaminah Childress
And then I use Contractor AI, which is a new tool that I use for things like forecasting. I use it for agreements. Like a lot of us brands have content creators or influencers and it can write those agreements for us or just write small business agreements in general. And it's already pre prompted so you don't have to have an attorney to ask you the questions it asks you ahead of time. And so that is something that I use, you know, several times a month when I need a new agreement or I need new forecasting tools. And so all of the things.

32:22
Daniel
So tell me a little bit more about that. You're blowing my mind with all of these use cases. So okay, let's say for Contractor AI that you mentioned, you said it pre prompts you on stuff. Can you take me through that a little bit? What does that mean?

32:33
Yaminah Childress
Yeah, so a lot of people can't use AI properly, especially something like Chat GPT because it doesn't know exactly what to ask it. So Contractor AI has pre written prompts. So if you're looking for like a content creator agreement is already going to ask you what is the name of the person, what's your business name, the business address, et cetera. So then it'll take your inputs and then use that to create the agreement. So now if you didn't know exactly what clause should be within the agreement or what information to put in it's going to ask you those general questions ahead of time so you know that it's complete.

33:09
Daniel
That feels more like what a lawyer would do or like TurboTax approach to it instead of like give me this agreement. But then you don't know if like, because I've done that with Chat GPT like give me X kind of a policy or agreement or something and it Just it doesn't know to ask you the kind of things that a lawyer would, that you actually need to have in there. Like, well, what if this happens? Like, well, it doesn't know that's part of your business. Right. So I like that approach to it. Okay, can you tell me when it gives you that stuff? Do you feel like it's a hundred percent baked? Like, do you need to review it really?

33:39
Daniel
Is it usually like pretty there or do you feel like, no, I mean it's pretty good, but I still have to give it a close read and fine tune some things.

33:47
Yaminah Childress
Yeah. So I am a lawyer who does not practice, so I do have other insights into it. So for me, I would say for general purposes, it gives you a really good agreement. Of course, in my lawyer voice I would always say that if it's something like a super major, you don't understand legalese that you would want to have it looked at. But there is a feature that you can connect with a real attorney if you need it to. But it really is something that I think if you, it puts it out in our plain term layman's terms. Right. And so I think for most people it gives you a good solid agreement and then you can regenerate as you need it.

34:24
Daniel
Well, that is awesome. And you just keep impressing me more and more with these little tidbits like, oh, I happen to also be a lawyer, I love it. Okay, so, and then let's talk about the forecasting piece for a little bit. Can you tell me more what you're doing there? What are you doing? Where are you inputting things? What, what's the output?

34:39
Yaminah Childress
Yeah, so forecasting I use contractor AI or ChatGPT. It's really using like data maybe from whatever platform you use, Shopify or you know, whatever. And so if I'm looking to see how a particular product sells, I'll just put that product name in. I will say things like I wanted to forecast for the next three months. This is what I made over the past three months or whatever period, maybe the last year. And what is, you know, the likelihood, what would I make, you know, over the next three months based off of the past figures? And so you can do things like that just generally on chat GPT or if you want it to be pre prompt, just like the agreements, you can use something like Contractor AI.

35:19
Daniel
Okay, I gotcha. So it's not like bottoms up account level forecast, it's more like kind of higher level monthly. Here's what my run rate or growth order rate looks like. Can you just give me an idea of what this volume is going to look like in the future?

35:33
Veronica Blue
Absolutely.

35:34
Daniel
Okay, cool. All right, and then last question. Just coming back to the Perplexity Tool, which I've heard a bunch about, that is fascinating that you're saying it can basically do market research, like desk research for you on, hey, what's the market size for my particular kind of product in the UK or this category? What's the growth? I know there are a lot of data sources out there. I used to do that kind of research for a living and I was constantly looking at the data sources out there. You have Mintel, you have Statista, is a kind of cool tool that you can use online where, I mean, you can get a lot of stuff for free.

36:10
Daniel
It's, it seemed to me always like they just had a bunch of like older reports that you could get access to for cheaper or free with a subscription. So it might have the stuff that you need and if so it was a good deal if, but they wouldn't have like the latest year reports or something. So what kind of sources do you feel like Perplexity is combing to get the kind of data? Are they just like combing free stuff? Because often if you say, what's the size of this market? Whatever, there's going to be some, you know, global intelligence report or whatever that lists it before the paywall in a Google search. Do you think it's just pulling that stuff or is it going deeper levels and getting, you know, really good stuff? And does it tell you where the data comes from?

36:49
Yaminah Childress
Yeah, so I think it's pulling. It's a search engine technically, and so it's pulling information from all of the resources that it has available. So whether it's pulling from Google or some of these reports, I'm sure it's pulling from that. And it does indeed give you the sources from what it's pulling. But the beautiful thing about AI in general, every tool is trained by a human. And so humans are consistently feeding it current information from sources we may not have access to. And so that is how it just makes it smarter because, yeah, we have to pay for those. I've run those reports too. I have to pay all this money and hope to it has it. But someone is already feeding Perplexity AI the data that we need.

37:30
Yaminah Childress
And so then when you're asking it a question, it's pulling from this search engine that it has, goes in and is giving you all of the information. You can even see the year and the source to see if it's current or not.

37:41
Daniel
I gotcha. It's so interesting and I mean, it just makes me really wonder also, like, did perplexity pay for that information? Do they have to like get a bulk deal with, you know, the people who did that original research and they got it for cheap, just a mass import, all of it to train its model or they just scraping stuff? The researcher in me wants to know that, like, hey, like, I want to get, you know, I did all that work. I want to get paid for it. It's pretty interesting and I'm really glad that you're able to figure out how to use it so effectively because that stuff is important for so many reasons. So I just really want to thank you for coming on the podcast.

38:15
Daniel
I've learned so much from you today and I am really glad that I got to meet you and I'm really glad that everybody listening gets to learn from you as well. So thank you so much. And what's the best way to for people to follow along with you and support you?

38:27
Yaminah Childress
Yep. So everything is yanniebeauty co. So if you follow us on Instagram, TikTok on our LinkedIn, we have a YouTube channel as well and it's all yanniebeauty. Co. All right, thank you.

38:44
Daniel
All right, everybody, thank you so much for listening to our podcast. If you loved it, I would so appreciate it if you could leave us a review. You could do it right now. If you're an Apple podcast, you can scroll to the bottom of our Startup CPG podcast page and click on Write a review. Leave your company name in there. I will try to read it out. If you're in Spotify, you can click on about and then the star rating icon. If you are a service provider that would like to appear on the Startup CPG podcast, you can email us@partnersartupcpg.com lastly, if you found yourself grooving along to the music it is my Band, you can visit our website and listen to more. It is super fantastics.com thank you everybody. See you next time.