The Startup Ideas Podcast

Hire a team of AI Agents

41 min
May 8, 202622 days ago
Listen to Episode
Summary

This episode explores how to build an AI chief of staff using Nebula, an agent creation platform. The hosts demonstrate practical use cases including blocked team member detection, project status tracking, vision alignment monitoring, daily agenda management, and lead prospecting—showing how AI agents can automate executive assistant tasks and free up time for strategic decision-making.

Insights
  • AI agents are most valuable for automating repetitive, low-cognitive-load tasks (calendar management, email filtering, status updates) rather than strategic thinking, allowing executives to focus on decision-making
  • The paradigm of assigning agents specific goals, tools, and integrations mirrors human organizational structure, making agent design intuitive for teams already accustomed to role-based work
  • Personal software—customized tools built for individual workflows—is becoming accessible and practical, challenging the moat of enterprise SaaS by enabling rapid, low-cost automation
  • Continuous optimization of personal workflows through agent-building is becoming a core professional skill; it's not a one-time setup but an ongoing practice of identifying automation opportunities
  • Agent platforms with low technical barriers (no terminal, no manual configuration) significantly accelerate adoption among busy executives who lack engineering resources
Trends
Shift from hiring human executive assistants to deploying AI agent teams for administrative and operational tasksAgent platforms abstracting away technical complexity to enable non-technical users to build and deploy multi-tool automationsPersonal software and micro-apps replacing off-the-shelf enterprise tools for niche, individual use casesIntegration-first architecture (OAuth, Composio) becoming table stakes for agent platforms to compete with open-source alternativesAI-powered lead generation and ICP sourcing becoming accessible to small teams and solo founders without sales infrastructureMulti-agent architectures solving memory and context problems that plagued earlier single-agent systemsAsynchronous agent execution enabling parallel task processing without blocking user workflowsShareable agent templates and open-source agent sharing creating a new distribution model for automationModel selection optimization (cheaper models for routine tasks, premium models for complex reasoning) becoming standard practiceCross-functional alignment and vision tracking emerging as high-ROI use cases for AI agents in organizations
Companies
Nebula
Primary agent platform demonstrated throughout episode for building AI chief of staff with integrations, custom agent...
OpenAI
Referenced for Opus model as premium LLM option; compared to cheaper alternatives for routine task automation
Anthropic
Mentioned for Claude Sonnet model as alternative to Opus for cost-conscious agent deployments
Hermes
Open-source agent framework compared to Nebula; requires more technical setup but offers cost savings and self-learni...
Composio
Integration platform used by Nebula to manage OAuth connections to Gmail, Slack, Google Calendar, and other tools
Zapier
Historical automation tool referenced as predecessor to AI agents for workflow automation
Make
Automation platform mentioned alongside Zapier as pre-AI workflow automation solution
Linear
Project management tool demonstrated as alternative to Jira for agent integration in project status tracking
Jira
Project tracking tool used in example agent setup for cross-functional alignment and project status briefings
Confluence
Documentation platform integrated into project status agent for comprehensive project visibility
Granola
Meeting notes tool used to store offsite documentation for vision tracker agent to monitor team progress
Notion
Knowledge base and second brain tool integrated into agenda agent for proactive meeting suggestions
Obsidian
Personal knowledge management tool mentioned as alternative to Notion for storing relationship and task information
SendBlue
iMessage automation platform used for customer outreach and lead qualification through AI agents
GitHub
Referenced for trending repos mini-app that surfaces daily trending projects to users
LinkedIn
Social platform used for ICP sourcing, lead research, and relationship mapping in prospecting agents
Salesforce
Named as example client of Late Checkout agency; represents target ICP for AI transformation services
Nike
Named as example client of Late Checkout agency; represents target ICP for AI transformation services
Dropbox
Named as example client of Late Checkout agency; represents target ICP for AI transformation services
Duolingo
Referenced in discussion about software moat erosion and personal software replacing enterprise solutions
People
Imran
Guest demonstrating Nebula platform capabilities and teaching practical AI agent use cases for executive automation
Greg
Podcast host exploring AI agent applications and discussing implementation challenges with Imran
Quotes
"Everything that a chief of staff would do, things like manage your calendar, help you figure out the most important things to work on that day, filter out annoying messages, and basically just manage all the projects or things that you're working on. We're going to build agents that will help you do all of that so that you can do more with less time."
ImranEarly in episode
"For all the boring stuff that a normal chief of staff wouldn't actually want to do or that you wouldn't want to do, we can build a really, really good solution. There is no reason why a human should be looking at your calendar, your email, your LinkedIn messages."
ImranEarly in episode
"I think what you need in both those cases founder or if you want to build a one person billion dollar company is you need to, as you said in the beginning, be making decisions. You can't be spending time in the back of your mind stressing about who am I meeting today?"
ImranMid-episode
"I think all careers are going to become like that where you need to allocate a percentage of your time to work on your job, to actually take a step back and supervise yourself and be like, okay, what did I spend time on today? And then how do I automate parts of that using agents?"
ImranClosing segment
"It's just going to be something that you're constantly it's a muscle that you're constantly going to be flexing, flexing, flexing, getting bigger, bigger, bigger"
GregClosing segment
Full Transcript
Can you create a chief of staff with AI, one that handles your priorities, that's doing research for you, that's doing a lot of the legwork that a traditional chief of staff assistant could do? Well, in this episode, I brought on Imran and he teaches us a bunch of different use cases for how you can create your own chief of staff with an agent platform he uses called Nebula. Now, I'm not saying you should use Nebula, use whatever platform you want. But what I am saying is by the end of this episode, I think you're going to look at this and you're going to be like, how don't I have an AI chief of staff? I mean, in this day and age, in 2026, it makes total sense to have AI automating a lot of these tasks to save you time and make you more money. By the end of this episode, I had my creative juices flowing around how I can be automating more using some skills and some agents. I learned a lot and I want to thank Imran for coming on and showing us the whole, whole thing. Thank you, and I'll see you in there. Grateful to have Imran back on the pod. Imran, by the end of this podcast, what are people going to learn? By the end of this podcast, you're going to learn how to build your own AI chief of staff. And if you're too lazy to do it, you can just copy our setups. And when you say AI chief of staff, what do you mean by that? Yeah, so the whole idea is that everything that a chief of staff would do, things like manage your calendar, help you figure out the most important things to work on that day, filter out annoying messages, and basically just manage all the projects or things that you're working on. We're going to build agents that will help you do all of that so that you can do more with less time. And when you say agents, we've been around the block. We've seen people pitch AI chief of staff. Is this a real AI chief of staff? Be real with us, Imran. For all the boring stuff that a normal chief of staff wouldn't actually want to do or that you wouldn't want to do, we can build a really, really good solution. There is no reason why a human should be looking at your calendar, your email, your LinkedIn messages. We can build agents to do most of that. All right, let's see. Let's do it. All right. I know in the last video we were covering Hermes agent. It was extremely technical. There was a lot of setup, and it required that you have a little bit of technical knowledge. So for today's video, I wanted to show you guys how to do it using a tool called Nebula. So Nebula is essentially an agent creation, deployment, and interaction platform. So you have channels where you can talk to agents, you can create custom agents, and now there's a new feature where you can actually share agents. so at the end of this video we'll essentially have agents in the description that you can copy and bring into your nebula account in case you don't want to build them yourself so the way i like to do this in the beginning is i always like to first do some research so in the beginning we'll say things like tell me what are three to five things and a chief of staff does the Nebula agent itself is kind of like the master agent so this agent is the one that can actually create other agents inside of Nebula it's really easy to think of a custom agent or like an agent inside of Nebula as just a specific kind of AI tool that has a set of instructions so basically we call that a system prompt it has goals, you can define what the goals are and it has integrations. So if it needs to use Gmail, Calendar, Jira, whatever it is, you can specify and you can organize each agent based on the tools that it needs to use and it's basically the goal for what you want it to do. I find this really important because for a lot of us, we work in environments where we have like, we work with teams where everyone has a specific role and they have tools that they use. So when trying to automate a lot of the boring stuff, the easiest paradigm is to use the one that we're already using which is like there are certain people who have certain goals inside of a company and in order to achieve those goals they use a certain set of tools. So just like that when we think about agents the easiest way to kind of start using these is to think about them the same way that you would think about a human with just maybe like smaller tasks. And how should people think about why would I do this on Nebula versus setting up an OpenClaw or stuff like that? Is it just more technical on those platforms and this is just less technical? Yeah, that's a really good question. So the last time I was on the podcast, we talked about Hermes. We talked about OpenClaw a little bit. Actually, we called it Hermes. We called it Hermes. I called it Hermes. I'm sorry. I got a lot of flack on Twitter for that as well. But it is pronounced Hermes. We talked about it last time. You still need to have some technical know-how in the sense that you have to open up a terminal. You still have to manually update it. you have to go ahead and configure the models. And if you're someone that's generally interested in tinkering with these tools, it can be a really fun experience. You can actually save a lot of money too. But I think Nebula has abstracted away a lot of that complexity. If you're someone who's extremely busy, you already have a business, or you already have a really busy job, and you just want to get things automated, if you just want AI working for you, this is the fastest way to get started. And so that's why I elected to use it for this one. Because typically speaking, if you want a chief of staff, you're probably a busy person. And if you're a busy person, you probably don't want to spend time setting up your little private AI server. There are, of course, companies where the actual organization will require that you run AI locally. But this is kind of built around that. And I know that the Nebula team has some stuff coming for that as well. And it's also a very familiar interface. It looks like a chat. It looks like Slack. you have different channels. And then instead of teammates, you have different agents, right? So it's very familiar and it just kind of works. All right. So Nebula here tells us a chief of staff is a force multiplier for an executive. They focus on strategic planning and execution, agenda and focus management, cross-functional alignment, communication and stakeholder management and special projects. So the first one that kind of like jumps out to me here is the strategic planning and execution. So you can imagine if you're an executive or even if you're just like running a business, you get a lot of messages every single day. And there is a certain level of like you needing to execute, but you also needing to unblock the people that are like the people that are actually executing on your behalf, right? And just getting work done. So the first type of agent that I want to create with Nebula is one that shows me based on my Slack and my email if anyone on my team is blocked. So let's say, let's go ahead and make an agent that shows me who on my team is blocked. By the way, I'll just say it because you're going to get flamed in the comment section. Why are you not using a whisper flow or something like that and typing with your God-given hands? I do have Super Whisper installed. Let's do it with Super Whisper actually. Good catch by the way. Let's make an agent that goes through my emails in Slack and lets me know exactly who on my team is blocked and waiting on me for something. And this is for the people, first of all, I'm just trying to protect you, you're my homie. No, I appreciate that. Also, to the people in the comment section, And the people listening, I read every single comment. And I respond to most of them, or a lot of them. And so some of them hit me hard, you know? Some of them hit me hard. It's true, though, right? Because with Super Whisper or Whisper Flow, you can speak at 150 words per minute. Yeah. I don't know anyone that can type at 150 words per minute. So if you want to talk about real productivity, I think that's probably the biggest lift. Yeah, that's true. Okay, so Nebula, you can see Nebula here. It's doing a bunch of stuff in the background. It's really just searching through tools and toolkits. It sees that I already have Gmail, Slack, and agent management available. If that wasn't set up, I would just jump into the settings and I would go over to integrations. And then here I can scroll down to where the tools are and I would search for the tools I need. So maybe I wanted Calendar. I could connect Calendar. If I wanted Jira, I could connect Jira. and things like that. So pretty straightforward. And you can see here on the left side, Nebula has already created a blockage radar agent. That's cool. Yeah, and it's going through. By the way, I'm one of those guys who, I want a chief of staff and like, I don't have one. I think you need one too. You know, when I was reading the description of chief of staff, because when I hear chief of staff, I'm kind of like, what does that even mean? But then when I saw the description, I'm like, oh, I want that. Yeah, yeah. Basically someone that, you know, the job of an executive is to make decisions. So everything around that is like what a chief of staff's job is, right? It's like optimizing the executive to make decisions. Cool, okay, so I see we have a blockage radar set up now and it's on the left side as an agent. We're going to click on that. This is a separate agent here. And I think it's still running right now. You can see here also on this panel, so if I click on this, you can see the agent details. So here I have the name of the agent, I can specify which model it's using. So let's say I want to use the Nebula model, I can use that one because it's cheaper. And then there's a description and then there's goals. So this is like a lot of what we talked about in the last video that we did together was about how tools like OpenClaw struggle with memory By segmenting out all of your tasks that you need to do into sub you can actually fix a lot of the memory problem here as well. Hermes solved the memory problem by having a self-learning loop. If you just use sub-agents or agents inside of Nebula, you can solve the memory problem by specifying the goals, and that just gets tagged into the system prompt every time. you can see exactly which tools are here that are set up already you can see which accounts it needs and then the coolest thing that they just launched was that you can actually change this to public so I can make this public it'll anonymize all the connections so you won't be connected to my Gmail and I can just click this button right here share this tab instead and now you can see that I have a blockage radar agent and there's a URL right here so maybe we can throw that URL in the description. And you can just take this and clone this agent. So if you like how my blocker agent works, you can literally just bring it right into your Nebula setup and try it out for free. That's really cool. Yeah, I think that was one of the things I was missing. People were sharing skill files, people were sharing their tools, people were sharing CLIs. But I want to be able to share something that I've built for me. And then you can come in and tweak it. So maybe you use Gmail, Slack, and Telegram. So you can come in and add Telegram and tweak it and then remix it and share it yourself. So I think that's super powerful. So let's see, the next run will be in six hours. I'm not going to run this because it's connected to my work Slack, so I don't want to show you guys this stuff. But let's see, let's see a sample. Let's see a sample, no real data. And while that's being pulled up, I noticed that the model you're using is Quen 3.6+. What's the thinking there? One is the price. It's just much cheaper than Opus. But also if I need something that's going to go through my email and Slack and tell me what needs my attention, I don't think that we need a state-of-the-art model for that. I feel like using Opus for that or Sonnet is probably a waste of money and resources because this is a very basic task. if I was doing coding or if I was doing some really I don't know, some tasks that required deep thinking yeah, I would probably use the latest models but I would rate these tasks as pretty straightforward I think even an older LLM could tell you what's waiting on you and then I had it spit out a sample briefing so we've got emails waiting on me Slack messages waiting on me and then a summary pretty straightforward, right? But having this sent to you every morning like two years ago was like a job that you would hire someone to do. Right, like part of it. So cool, let's jump back into Nebula, let's find the next one. There's the cross-functional alignment. This is a good one. So I'm thinking, let's make an agent that takes a look at Jira, Confluence, my email, and Slack, and lets me know about the status of every project that I'm working on. It should show me what work was completed yesterday, what's on the docket to be completed today, and let me know if any projects are at risk of falling behind schedule. That sounds like the job description of a project manager. And we're able to make an agent to do it. So let's see. Let's say I use linear instead of JIRA. Is that possible to connect into that? Yeah, totally. So you can specify that you want it to use linear, and then again you can go into settings, integrations, and you can search for, or we can click add tool, and then we search linear. And then you can go ahead and connect it this way. And there's even two ways to connect it. You can do OAuth or you can do it with the API key. OAuth uses this thing called Composio, and I've noticed that Nebula is really good at working with things like Gmail, Slack, and Google Calendar because they use Composio to manage the connections. Whereas tools like Hermes and OpenClaw, although you can use Composio, it's a little bit more difficult to set up because it's a little bit more of an enterprise product. So that's one of the benefits of using a tool like Nebula. You have basically the best-in-class bridges to connect to all the software that you use. I know this is a side tangent, but one of the tools is WAP. How would someone use Nebula with WAP? Yeah, so we run a line of our business on WAP. So I'm using it to keep track of revenue. I'm using it to basically just give me more information about our customers. We have a SendBlue messaging agent, so we talk to a lot of our customers or prospective customers via SendBlue. And I have the SendBlue agent actually, it has a goal, right? So if someone comes in and wants to learn more about our offer, it'll send them an FAQ video, it'll redirect them to book a call with me and automate that whole process. The one thing I will say is if you do set up a SendBlue messaging agent, make sure you follow their rules so your number doesn't get burned. With a lot of these automated outbound stuff, there's some nuance. where like if you if you like you know you don't want to get like you don't want to get your number marked as spam or you don't want to get read limited so just make sure you read the docs that's the number I mean can you mask your number like aren't there tools to mask your number you can but SendBlue comes in as an iMessage oh okay yeah yeah so I think it's a little tricky because I believe it's like peer to peer yeah so you know they have like their own internal limits on on like how many messages you can send a day. Okay, cool. Oh, this is a cool thing too, right? We're jumping back into the Nebula agent. So you can see if it has a doubt about anything about building your agent, it'll just ask you a question. We can say we'll use GitHub issues or maybe we connect JIRA only. Let's say you want it to use linear. We can say, oh, actually we'll use linear. What time should the briefing arrive? Let's say 8 a.m. Pacific. How should I deliver? Let's say both. Let's say Slack DM. That's a nice touch. Yeah. It'll come in and actually ask you exactly how you want it. This is, I think, super powerful. I think in the last video we covered a lot about Hermes being a really good personal agent. I think we went over, I was even using it for some very elementary version of therapy. Where it's helping me figure out what I should work on, helping me get unblocked mentally. But if you actually just want to lock in and get work done, this is the way to do it. Cool, and now we have our project status agent. So it's going to chug along and do its thing. Let's see, scan linear, Gmail, and Slack, and build a daily briefing. So Greg, I have a question for you. Now that you're seeing this, what would be the first agent that you would go back and create after this? If you go back to the definition of a chief of staff, as a founder, I'm kind of thinking about what are the highest value activities that I could be doing. so when I see the strategic planning and executive so translating the CEO's vision into actionable parts tracks key initiatives, make sure priorities actually move forward so we have offsites and in our offsites we have these big goals and these big visions and we leave these offsites feeling really good and then what happens is we lose some of those docs and we lose track a little bit because things get busy so in an ideal world I have an agent that has all that information from those off-sites and that keeps people accountable and that reminds them to do things and stuff like that How often are these off-sites? Once a quarter? Once every six months They're kind of like big vision off-sites Let's make it Let's do it this way let's make another agent called vision tracker it should take notes from granola where we record our notes for our off sites and every week for each person who was inside of our or who was at our off site it should report on their status towards the goal or the vision that we discussed in the offsite. We do our offsites twice a year and the notes are stored in Granola. Progress on their work towards what we discuss in the offsite will either be stored in Gmail, Slack, or on Linear. Can I add one more small thing to that? Let's do it. So I think it would be really helpful to include in this DM or however we get it one quote that is from a famous person, call it, that just is related somehow to motivating people to actually complete the goal. Awesome. And we'll be able to share this too. We're open sourcing you, Greg. There we go. Very interesting. So what do you think that would unlock for your team? Do you think that they would just get more work done towards the ultimate vision? I think that it's always, I don't blame the team at all. And sometimes I'm this way too. You lose track of the big vision as you start working in the business not on the business That makes a lot of sense All right, we have our project status agent. We're going to see if we can get it to show us an anonymized sample so that we can see how this comes out. And then again, same thing. I'm going to jump in the right side. I'm going to click this side panel here. I'm going to change the model to the Nebula model. because I am price sensitive, and I'm going to go public on this. Again, I don't think you need Opus 4.6 to be able to give me a briefing on the status of a project. And then you can see, if you go to this link, and we can put it in the description as well, you can see now that we have the project status agent, it's got linear, Gmail, Slack bot, and then you can just literally come in and clone it. All right, let's see what the sample looks like. So you can see here it would have what shipped yesterday, the top three cards, or whatever shipped yesterday, what's due today, and then things that are at risk. Very straightforward. I think this is pretty useful. Totally. You know what it gets me thinking of? How many companies don't have agents, are not running with agents to 99.9%? Yeah. Yeah. Another thing I wanted to show you too is like, there's also this notion of mini apps. So we can say like, can you create a mini app for this where every day it has the number of tickets that were completed the previous day at the top, how many tickets are due today, and then the at-risk items and be able to deep link into each linear card. Obviously we haven't connected linear yet, so you can just use samples there. So there's actually basically a replet inside of Nebula where you can spin up and host these mini apps that connect to your agents. This isn't something I've really seen anywhere where it's kind of like a new paradigm. Essentially you can make a web app that when you click a button can actually make a call back to an agent and then the agent could update the web app in real time. I haven't seen this yet. This is something kind of new. But I think this is going to be pretty sick. So I'll let this run in the background. and let's see where our vision tracker is out. Okay, looks good. We just have to connect Granola. And let's do the same thing. Give me an anonymized sample of what the weekly vision tracker would look like just so that we can see the format. Let's see if it'll insert the quotes in here too. If it doesn't, it's fired. You don't need HR. for agents. Number one value add. I'm trying to think of a more fun, there's got to be a more fun one we can do. Something a little maybe off the cuff. Maybe we did communication. We did cross-functional alignment. You know, that's kind of the project management stuff. Agenda and focus management. That could be good. Yeah. Let's do something around agenda and focus management. So one thing I have set up and I think I showed you in the last video is that I have like my own kind of daily briefing, but it's more personal. So what if we can actually make daily briefings for everyone on the team? And then show the top three priorities for the whole team. That would be cool. Let's make sure this one's done. Oh, one really interesting thing about using Nebula is that when you actually fire off, when you tell the main Nebula agent to create another agent, it doesn't clog this main thread. So you can see the vision tracker is still working, the project status agent is still working but I can still jump into the main Nebula agent and talk to it that was one thing that I felt like was a drawback of Hermes is that I would go spin up my own web UI my own web page to manage it or I would have different Telegram channels but I felt like multitasking in the same kind of workspace was kind of tedious I'd have to keep waiting for a query to be done so that's another thing that I like about tools like Nebula and whatever else is going to come out I think this is going to become, like if we look at the industry in general, I think this type of tool is going to become the standard. Where you're talking to agents like it's a friend, like it's a co-worker, like it's Slack. But then it actually goes out and does real work for you. Let's do the agenda one, okay? Let's make an agenda agent that every morning at 6 a.m. goes through my calendar and lets me know who I'm meeting with. It gives me two lines about each person I'm meeting with. it tells me my top three priorities for the day and it has any relevant reminders from my email that maybe haven't been put in my calendar for that day what else would you add Greg? maybe like so that's by looking at the calendar but like what are things that like that's by looking at book stuff but like what are meetings that I should be booking that I'm not booking And you can say maybe you guys have a knowledge base, right? So I would say like check my notion, check my email, of course, check Slack and also cross-reference it with the vision docs that we created earlier in the year. Yeah, and I think the use case I was just thinking about is maybe in my notion I have a little note that says, Imran, six months ago, let's just say for my agency or something, Imran told me six months ago that in six months he wanted to build an app and needed design help and engineering help. Most of the time you forget about that stuff, right? if it actually went into my second brain and was like, oh, by the way, I noticed that you haven't met with Imran. And six months ago, he said that you guys should meet. I should know about that. I should be reminded of that. We're human beings after all. So do you have a second brain setup right now in Notion? Is that what you're doing? Yeah, I use a mix of Notion and Google right now. I'm also using a little bit Obsidian. I haven't made the full move over to Obsidian yet, TBD. But yeah, right now it's between Notion and Google. Cool. If there's someone I should catch up with and that information is stored in Notion, please resurface it. Essentially, I want you to be proactive about following up with people and letting me know what calls I should be having that aren't already on my calendar. you can kind of just word vomit these things and it just works as you can tell that is the one downfall of using super whisper that it just kind of gets you to just keep talking but you know it'll clean it up it'll clean it up alright let's see this project status dashboard okay so this is just a quick little dashboard that Nebula made for me so in case I didn't want to see this text in case the text gets boring it actually spun up an entire web app for me which is publicly accessible as well. And so let me share this tab. So this is now a full dashboard that I have. Again, this is sample data, but essentially I could plug in my real data that the agent will resurface every morning. And then maybe I don't want to see everything as a daily digest inside of Slack. Maybe I want to see it visually. This is a way you could do it. And I have a few mini apps as well. I have one for trending GitHub repos. This is one I made where every morning it'll show me, it'll update it with the most trending GitHub repos and I can kind of click into them, get more information and go see what's up. This is one I have running for myself. So yeah, that's mini apps. Yeah, mini apps to me feel like what they call personal software. Exactly. Yeah, which is this idea that it used to be in the future, but now it's the present. In the present, you will, instead of going to find off-the-shelf software for certain use cases, you'll just spin up software specific and personalized to you based on your use case. Exactly. I'm really confused about this when I think about the industry because on one hand people are saying now that you can make software, companies like Duolingo and Salesforce have no moat because anyone can go make a CRM, anyone can go make a language learning app. At the same time, if you look at the fundamentals of those businesses, they're highly defensible because they have so much distribution. and even though for the last 36 months people have been able to create their own personal software I haven't felt like it's replaced things at the enterprise level and I think there is more that goes into enterprise level software whether that's compliance, uptime and things like that but I think personal software is like you said it's like a new category it's something we've never really had that's accessible so it's really cool that we can just do it inside of a tool like this for a couple bucks. All right. Deally Agenda Agent is going through. Again, I didn't have to configure any of these tools. I didn't have to tell it which skills to do. And if I click in, it already knows the goals and it already builds out a system prompt and then tells me exactly what it needs to connect to. And if I don't have it connected, it prompts me to connect it right here, which is pretty cool. So how many hours a week do you think this would save? me yeah for you personally you know the truth is it wasn't the hours that was that's intriguing to me it's like the the anxiety and the stress that you get right like there's so much if you're a founder you are just dealing with a million fires at any given time and there just so much going on and especially if you want to build like the one person one billion billion dollar startup the negative side of that is you the one dependency for everything which no one really talks about but the positive side is you're a one person billion dollar company so champagne problems but I think what you need in both those cases founder or if you want to build a one person billion dollar company is you need to, as you said in the beginning, be making decisions. You can't be spending time in the back of your mind stressing about who am I meeting today? Or let me go and check their LinkedIn recently. Or I know I should be reaching out to so-and-so, but I'm not sure. Why I love tinkering with tools like this is because I'm a hobbyist, frankly. I'm a tinkerer, and I'm always looking for ways to feel superhuman. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's also like a little, at the same time, it's anxiety-inducing for me in the sense that I know I can be doing so much more with agents that I'm not doing already. That's, I think, the biggest thing that I've been wrestling with mentally. I can do everything now, but I have to really zone in on the few things that will actually move the needle for me. I think that's going to become the new skill set. It's actually being able to have judgment and pick what to work on. And frankly, that's why I wanted to have you on the show, which is giving people and myself ideas around what are the different types of agents, sub-agents that you should be building if you're building a business or you're working at a company and you're trying to save time and make more money. We'll do one that's not related to the chief of staff one. I know we talked a little bit about the SendBlue agents. SendBlue is what we use for, if you're in sales and you want to set meetings or you just want to talk to your customers, you can do it via iMessage. Since our last podcast, I've gotten a lot of inbound of people who have been asking me questions about agents. Mainly the people who have been really interested are people working in e-commerce who are doing automated dashboards. They're enriching their customers with data from other sources. Maybe they'll go search someone up on LinkedIn or maybe they'll set up a flag for a famous person so they can send them more stuff. That was one use case I saw. Or with people on the sales teams, one thing that they're always looking for is just more leads. How do I actually figure out, okay, I know my ideal customer, how do I go search that? LinkedIn has a little bit of a monopoly on that, but I've had some people DM me and say that they actually set up agents that will go out and scrape and find their ICP that is within two degrees of separation away from them. So that type of stuff is pretty cool too. We could do one of those or any other ideas you have? Yeah, let's do that. Yeah, okay, cool, cool. So let's do it for late checkout. What's your ICP? Well, for our agency, so we work with the biggest companies in the world, like Salesforce, Nike, Dropbox, all these big companies. And so our ICP is actually the chief product officer or the CEO of those companies that are looking for how can I do AI transformation and also a new product suite that's AI first. So it's very specific. There's only a few thousand people on the planet that meets this. Cool. Okay. But let's see if we can actually search potential ICPs. I know obviously most of your business is word of mouth anyway. The top of funnel is this podcast. That's part of it. But let's try it. Let's try it. let's build an agent that sources 10 people who are my potential icp for a company called late checkout every day it should search the web or linkedin and just find me 10 of these people that fit the icp bonus points if i'm connected with them on linkedin or i'm a second degree connect with them on LinkedIn. You know what's another little hack there before you hit it? I find that if people come from the same city, went to the same schools, if there's some amount of commonality, I find that there's a greater chance of it working out. It happens to me all the time even. And people will reach out to me and like, oh, I went to McGill, which is the school I went to. And I'm more likely to be like, oh, yeah, let's meet for coffee type thing. Or something like that. That's actually a good one. I didn't know we had a sales demon on the podcast right now. I mean, I'm a people demon. Meaning I love people and I try to understand people as much as I can. and that's where that's coming from. Yeah, that's good. I mean, this stuff is really important because I know everyone wants to know, of course, if you're operating at the executive level, there is a notion of your job is to make decisions every day, but there's also just a subset of people that just want to make money. They just really directly are like, what's the fastest way to get this thing to make money? Well, if you're starting a business, you obviously always start with an ICP. you talk to your ICP you figure out what their problem is and then you try to package a solution for them whether it's a startup or agency info product whatever it is right so this is like a really easy way for people to find leads right like I work at a fund every single day founders are coming up to us and saying like yo we need more leads it's like well this is a good way to do it so let's see it's building it right now late checkout prospector so it's using a search yeah it's using search not LinkedIn it's interesting yeah think this one we won't make public this one you gotta build yourself we can make it public I got nothing you know I got nothing out of here cool oh yeah another thing about Nebula you can just select different models too just like you were able to with what's the Nebula model I don't know how much I'm allowed to talk about it but I do know the specifics and I know it's really good. I don't even need to know the specifics. I just need to know when are we using Nebula? Are you using the Nebula model? Generally speaking, the Nebula model is probably one of the best bang for buck models. I don't know how much I'm allowed to speak about it publicly, but it's two very good models. It is a base model and a supervisor model. The supervisor comes from a very expensive model and the base model is a you know another really good model so basically it's a Lexus you know it's a Lexus bank for buck we don't need a Ferrari all the time you know sometimes you just want to go you know and we'll make this one public too ta-da and this will be our last one and at the end you can leave us with one thing that we should be thinking about I see some people already we're cooking Dell, Expedia oh wow this one actually just went ahead and just found the leads it didn't even need my LinkedIn connection this is interesting some of these people on this list some of these companies on this list are in fact clients of ours already there you go man you know your ICP well yeah alright so if there is one thing I will leave you guys with after this video I think no matter what role you're in whether you're a founder whether you're a PM whether you sell solar panels I think you have to figure out a new split of your time which is like in business you have this idea that you would work in the business and then work on the business I think all careers are going to become like that where you need to allocate a percentage of your time to work on your job, to actually take a step back and supervise yourself and be like, okay, what did I spend time on today? And then how do I automate parts of that using agents? A lot of people were already doing this before AI with tools like Zapier and NAN. They've been around for a long time. But now that we have the ability to actually reason on the data, all these automations are much more powerful. So I challenge everyone to almost watch themselves work over the next week and try to pick three to five things that they can automate out or build a tool for. Challenge accepted. I have done some of this, but I'm not fully there yet. And frankly, it's never ending. That's how I feel about it, right? Once you integrate this, then you're like, oh, you know what, I should do this. Or it'd be cool if it adds this. And it's always getting better and getting better. so it isn't just for people listening it's not going to be something that you can do in a week and it's probably not something that you can do a year it's just going to be something that you're constantly it's a muscle that you're constantly going to be flexing, flexing, flexing, getting bigger, bigger, bigger and thank you for Imran coming on, showing us this showing us some use cases and I'll include links on where to follow Imran and connect with him in the show notes, in the description. And I want to thank you again for coming on. And I always enjoy chatting with you. Yeah, you as well, man. And we'll include links to play with some of these agents. Yeah. All right, take care. Later.