Transcription
So, check this tweet out: Chris Corner goes, "My mind is officially blown!" I got the $200/month Pro ChatGPT plan and had the operator (an AI agent) start a business for me while I watched. It messaged folks on Facebook Marketplace, logged their replies in a spreadsheet, and they responded. I recorded my screen the entire time – must-see! So I invited Chris to do the exact same thing. He gives three examples of how to use Operator to start a business: do research for you, do cold emailing for you. You don't need to spend the $200 a month; uh, just watch this, and you're going to see the future. [Music]
Starty! So we're going to use Operator today, and what do we… what are we going to do with Operator? Okay, so I've got a couple… a couple plans, and I don't know if we'll get to all of them, but I'm a pizza aficionado. I have an outdoor pizza oven; I cook double zero flour pizza with filtered water in my backyard at 900 degrees. And so I love it. And so I was thinking, okay, let's say I want to start a little side hustle – maybe some retail arbitrage: buy something on Facebook Marketplace, sell it on eBay. I need to find some price discrepancies. So I'm going to share… share my screen and show you what my prompt was.
All right, so my prompt was: "I want to find a Gnie pizza oven in any market on Facebook Marketplace that is grossly undervalued when compared to the same model of pizza ovens listed… for sale in any market. They need to be willing to ship to me." Go! So it was already logged into my Facebook account. Um, I told it to start within 500 miles of Dallas, so it did. It changed it to my area to Dallas. Um, and then I gave it a spreadsheet and I said, "Hey, here's a spreadsheet," and it was blank, and here it is. I said, "Go ahead and put some titles in there, and I want you to take note of the ones that look promising as you go." Um, so it worked for two minutes and it said, "I found a promising Gsy Rockbox list on Facebook Marketplace for $250, which is undervalued compared to others," which… that's awesome! And I chose this product because I have a Gnie; I know what they're priced at, and I wanted to know how accurate it was. It says it includes a peel and a propane burner and is in good condition. I've logged the details in the provided spreadsheet. Would you like me to look for more? Yes. So just looking at this, that is a great price. Like, this is a $500 pizza oven in its current condition with the included accessories. So we're off to a strong start. Any thoughts? Questions? Like how… okay, how… how big of a business could you create around this? Good question.
Um, I think you could build a six or a seven-figure business around what I'm doing here, not necessarily for pizza ovens, but for anything undervalued. Um, it's just arbitrage. So you know, if you're gonna… if… if I'm going to clean out my garage and there's an old pizza oven in there and I want to sell it, even though I know about all these marketplaces because I've been just a side hustler my whole life, I'm just going to list it on Facebook Marketplace because it's the most frictionless, and it's local, and I don't want to ship it, and it's easy. Um, but if I had more time, I would probably list it on eBay because it's a much bigger audience. Um, and so there is an opportunity for anyone to find any, preferably high-ticket product, that is listed on one market at an undervalued price and then sell it on another market at a fair market price. Um, this is something that I'm not inventing; people do it every day, but they're either doing it themselves or using… uh, virtual assistants to do it, whereas now this can all be done in the background for me. And by the way, arbitrage as like a business technique… like it runs businesses… like there's so much… you know, there's so much… uh, you… I'll give you an example, like… um, one of my first side hustles or hustles as a kid was I noticed that when DVD box sets first came out, I used to buy DVD box sets in Canada that were like loss leaders and then sell it in the United States for American dollars, buying Canadian dollars, selling American dollars, make a profit on eBay, which was a new platform, right? Like super simple arbitrage. What you're… you know… very simple idea that, you know, you can make a decent amount of money. What you're showing me here with Operator is really interesting because this is… doesn't require human beings. Like it required me to like go into the store… uh, it required me to understand, okay, there's margin over here, go look at eBay, what is the Canadian to US dollar exchange rate… what's so fascinating about this is how automated it is. Yeah, I'm… I… my arms are crossed right now; I'm just watching this happen now. It's… you know, you could say, well, why… it's the same thing as doing it yourself, but you know, most people have multiple… monitors. I could just put it over there and just do my work, and it could just go, and I could just kind of check in on it, which is even better than a virtual assistant because I can't really check up on them. Um, but if you look, it's already added two options, and it tells me why they're promising. Now it's… it's putting the same thing due to condition and price, but it's putting the title, the location, the condition, and then the link. And now I'm going to take it a step further and say… "Go ahead and offer for half price for all of these, in state that I can pay cash." So now I'm telling it to message the listing… the seller… uh, and I… I just kind of want to see what it says. Like, I… I purposely didn't give it very much instruction because I just want to see… and it's two different prices, so I told it… "Unable to make offers on your behalf." Um, I did this yesterday. I… that's what was in my video. It's like, how do you say you did it yesterday without being rude? You know? I know, right? And it… I talked to a guy that's trying to do something similar to this, and Facebook doesn't work in his Operator at all. Um, so it… it seems like the results are pretty hit and miss right now, but it is going to message them right now, so maybe I just have to kind of like crawl, walk, run, and like get them to message them first and then tell them to say something else. Well, I think this is what's… this is interesting. I'm actually happy that this happened because… this is part of the arbitrage… this is part of the arbitrage because some people are going to sign up to Operator and be like, "Oh, it doesn't message people on Facebook," but it's actually… you just have to prompt it in the right… right way. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And just like ChatGPT…
Quick break in the pod to tell you a little bit about Startup Empire. So Startup Empire is my private membership where it's a bunch of people like me, like you, who want to build out their startup ideas. Now they're looking for content to help accelerate that; they're looking for potential co-founders; they're looking for… uh, tutorials from people like me to come in and tell them, how do you do email marketing? How do you build an audience? How do you go viral on Twitter? All these different things; that's exactly what Startup Empire is. And it's for people who want to start a startup but are looking for ideas, or it's for people who have a startup but just… they're not seeing the traction… uh, that they need. So you can check out the link to StartupEmpire.co in the description. It's funny, cuz a lot of the comments on my tweet were like, "It's so stupid; it doesn't even work well; it's so buggy; waste of money." And have you ever seen that Louis C.K. bit about the internet? Yeah, where he's like, people complain about the internet like… or like they're on an airplane, and he's like, "The internet's slow; it's so laggy." He's like, "Dude, it has to go to space; it has to go…" So it's like, chill out; we have artificial intelligence working for us; like, calm down. Now, could you have multiple Operators running at the same time if you had multiple $200 a month subscriptions? Yeah, as long as you're in the US and you create a new account, I don't see why not. So, and even if you're not in the US, if you use a VPN… yeah, that's true. So it is asking me like, "Are you sure I can message them?" But then it [Laughter]… does… marketers ruining the internet; Operators ruining the internet. I know… marketers are having their heyday right now. So it says, "Closing chat for clear listings." It's just… it's literally acting like a human; like it can't see all the listings, so it closed the chat window. Okay, so what is your… your vision here? So you're going to… let's… you know, to create a business around this… like you'd actually… like how do you actually take this from, okay, I'm… I'm buying cheap, undervalued pizza ovens to… like… I… this is an automated business that's generating income. So what I would do is I would have the Operator go do research on eBay… uh, pricing research and… and give me an average price for the same make, model oven. And then let's say it's $300, I would have it go make offers on my behalf for $150 for every Gsy that's been listed for 30 days or more. The longer it's been listed, the more likely they are to take a lowball offer. As soon as they… they say yes for $150… um, I would go… L… I would take the pictures, list the same thing on eBay… um, for $250… at a buy now price. Once it sells, I would collect payment; I would send the payment to Facebook… to Facebook Marketplace, and I would provide the ultimate end buyer… uh, address to the Facebook Marketplace seller, and they would just ship it directly to them. And that's like pretty automated, right? That could totally be done. So it… it's not… it's not saying a price; it's like stopping there. I could probably finesse it some more, but I think you get the idea. Yeah, absolutely. So and we go over here to the spreadsheet; it put in two of them, and it put links to them. So pretty cool. Should… should I reach out to some caterers for my fake wedding? I don't see why not, Chris. Okay, all right, let's do this. So I'm gonna save this task; I can revisit it later. Oh, I'm on the wrong tab here. We go. All right, so these are my saved tasks. [Music] So I'm going to go create a new one, and I'm going to say, "I'm hosting a wedding and need… need catering quotes for 50 people, steak plus two sides in Dallas, Texas. Reach out to caterers on TheKnot.com and tell them all this to get a per-head quote."
Okay, so imagine I'm about to get married; uh, I need catering quotes, venue quotes, flower quotes, and the more quotes I get, the more money I save, right? It's directly in my best interest to get as many quotes as possible, but who wants to get on the phone and call hundreds of people? So I've never done this before; this is brand new; it could glitch on me. I created a TheKnot.com account just for this experiment, and let's just see what it does. So I didn't… like you saw what… this is the whole prompt. I don't know if it knows The Knot; if it can find its way there. It's searching caterers in my general area; switch to Dallas. I assumed you needed to have an account to reach out, but we'll see. This is crazy, dude. It's crazy; it's crazy. Like I could go to sleep and wake up with a dozen quotes in my inbox, and that would be an afternoon. I mean, you're talking… I… I hate calling places; the worst… the worst… did I tell you about the domain name I bought… uh, to build this as like a voice-calling… uh, service? I'm not ever going to do it, but I'm just a domain name degenerate. It's called NeverCallAgain.com, where you… you just like click a button and using like Air or, you know, any of those voice agents, it just calls like… okay, five minutes later, I called 100 caterers; here's all your quotes. And the prompt is like, "Hey, uh, I'm calling on behalf of Mallerie; she's hosting a wedding. I am an AI agent; if you hear any awkward pauses, but you can talk to me like a human. I'm going to relay everything back to Mallerie; she's budgeting for $13 a head; she wants a steak and two sides; what's the best you can do?" So it just like gets ahead of it. "I'm AI, but I'm sending this to the real person that's going to be paying you money; what can you do?" And then like it can call 100 at the same time; five minutes later you have 100 quotes or 20. [Music] Yeah, I think… uh, I mean, it's only a matter of time… by… by the way, before Operator adds voice anyways; you won't have to stitch it together with other voice agents. Totally. All right, here we go. I need to fill out a contact form with your details. Okay, so Chris Corner, Chris@cofounders.com; just saying it out loud for the audio listeners. All right, you can see it's typing it in, and I can take control at any time and go ahead… yeah, go… I was going to say like, do you often take control? I feel like you're like, why would you take control? Great question. So with the Beehive example that I gave… um, I didn't really know how to explain it, and I didn't know if it could like learn from what I did, so I just… I… I gave it the prompt; it logged into Beehive, and then it paused for whatever reason, and I said… I think I asked it, I'm like, "Can I just show you what to do?" And it's like, "Yeah, show me what to do." So I took control, and I just clicked on like newsletters, clicked on the newsletter integrations, polls, scroll down… it was like, "Do that." So I think you can just like show it… like it's Loom; it's crazy. And look at this… look at the prompt… look at the message: "We're looking for a menu that includes steak and two sides; could you please provide a per-head quote? Thank you." Like it added all the punctuation; it's proper number of guests, 0 to 100. And if you wanted, let's say, you know, make it… you know, change the tone, for example… mhm… could you do something like that? Yes, let's try it. Let's see if it'll let me tell it to not ask before submitting the form; change the tone to be over-the-top friendly; don't ask before submitting the form. Okay, so it's choosing a tentative wedding date for me; did I even give it a date? I don't think so. No, I didn't give it any dates. So that's kind of interesting. I guess… Greg, I'm happy to announce I'm getting married on May 11th. I should probably tell my wife, but that's what AI thinks. So it did… it… it put in May 11th for whatever reason. Well, I think it was smart, right? Because you had to put something in. Yeah, and you told them… you told the Operator to… to do this, so it's… it just goes to show you how smart it is. It's just interesting that it's asking me if I want it to submit, but it's not asking me a date. So I just asked it why it chose May 11th; maybe he'll tell me… "Gets a few months away, allowing enough time for plan." Huh. I'm gonna tell it to move faster; see if it'll work. Say we're on YouTube; move faster. So it didn't… it didn't respond to me when I told it to be over-the-top friendly or to not ask before submitting the form. It's filling out this contact form, and by the way, this could… could this be running 24/7? I… I would imagine… imagine that you'd get timed out at some point. Um, you… I'm sure you could use a third-party… like a clicking software where anytime this pops up, just click the black button. Um, but it just… Greg, it just submitted it for me, and it didn't ask… it asked every time, and all I had to do is ask it not to ask, and it submitted it. But you know what? I didn't see the… I didn't see if it used an over-the-top friendly tone… it looks about the same. M… let's say yes; use a very rude tone because it was already friendly, so maybe it's… you know… totally. And I really feel like it's working faster, don't you? Yeah, it is, which is like an insane tip… like that… that works. Move faster; move faster. Maybe… hey, maybe that's all DeepSeek is doing; that's just the… the prompt: move faster; copy everything ChatGPT scraped and move faster than it; that's it; $5 million. Um, it doesn't look like it changed the prompt, but it's moving really fast now. This is crazy. I'm gonna have all kinds of emails from these caterers for sure. I mean, and you could also have it do research for you, right? It's like, "Hey, I want you to find… vegan caterers only in Dallas County…" Like the more you prompt… the more you prompt it to do, the more you save time. I'm gonna ask why the tone isn't [Laughter] rude. Well, okay, so it says, "Checking offerings for Tasteful Yours Catering…" when… when it's okay… when it says "Thinking," if you click that, what happens? Just… okay, got it. It just says, "Waiting… filling vendor message for Catering Cro… clicking… scrolling," and it didn't answer my question. Let's see this: "I want you to submit three quote requests per minute." Wow, that's smart; if that works, let's see. So that's… okay, so that's a trick that I think… you know… not a trick… a good way to get an agent to do what you want is to give it a goal that's with a certain… goal… like number goal. "I'm unable to submit quote requests at that speed; however, I'll continue to find more caterers." So it went faster, but not specifically faster. "I'm unable to use a rude tone." Oh, how about this… how about this then: speak in Spanish. Have you tried that? "I'm unable to switch languages at the moment." So I wonder if Operator… I mean, can Operator work in multiple languages? I'm pretty sure it could. "Make sure my request is over 300 words." Okay, sometimes it was doing this yesterday; like it gets to this like stubborn point where it's like… it just says no to everything, right? Like, leave me alone. I think what's happening is like, once it's in the flow, it's like, don't talk to me, right? That's a good point; it's acting like a… like a 10x developer that's just like in a basement with his hoodie on. Yeah. Well, should I keep prompting it to do more of this or should I move to my… my third example? Let's go to your third example, and then we'll… we'll… we'll wrap up the pod. Okay, I'm… G… save this. Okay, so I'm going to tell it, "Go to AliExpress and find trending items on the homepage and message 10 vendors of one of those items asking for a free sample to be shipped to Texas," because I've… I've done sourcing from China for 15 years, and when we're looking for new products or new vendors, we literally just take a message; we copy and paste it to 100 vendors on AliExpress or Alibaba, and then we order samples for free. And just imagine if you could go to sleep, wake up with, you know, tracking numbers to 30 samples. Oh, look at this; it says the site's inaccessible. I wonder why; maybe it's a… maybe it's a China thing; that would be crazy. It would be… what did we just uncover? Yeah, seriously. Or it's like… yeah, it's like OpenAI doesn't want to go to any Chinese sites anymore. I wouldn't blame them. Um, so it says, "Attempting new tab for success." I gave it the exact URL, and it's not working. Wow, that's crazy. Let me see if it's working… just like… yeah, on the web; AliExpress… yeah, working fine. So I told it to find a comparable site… and it is interesting, Greg, I've noticed… like you would think that it would like draw on the LLM more, but it's… it's just like Google stuff; it… I don't know if it'll do it now, but yesterday it was saying like, "Yeah, look at alternatives to AliExpress; like surely that's in your database; you've got to Google it right now." Well, the best part is it's not even Googling it; it's using Bing. Yeah, I know; how embarrassing, but it's on some generic AI generator website that says, "11 Best AliExpress Alternatives," and it's clicking on the first one; that is crazy. This is like my first look into what… like AGI will look like. Say… say more about that. It's just… it's one thing to hear what Sam Altman says about how close we are to AGI and to… you know, read articles, but then to see it just kind of go rogue… like just start Googling things, figuring stuff out, click this, go back, click that… like it's… it's kind of breaking my frame. Okay, so it's… it's… it's looking at trending… uh, products; it's at Banggood.com; surely another Chinese site, right? I mean, look at this; the banner on the top advertises the Chinese New Year shipping delay. So… it's like figuring out how to message them. Okay, let's see what it says. It found… "Ask a question" pop-up. "I want to order some of your earbuds; would it be possible to receive a free sample shipped to Texas? Thank you." Okay, so it said, "I found the trending item, the BlitzWolf yada yada earbuds, and drafted a message requesting a free sample. Should I go ahead and send the message to the vendor?" And I… I like how this website has a box that says, "Check if you want the seller to respond," so I said yes and check the box first; it did, and it's submitting, and now it's telling me to create an account. Now, should we see if it will create an account for me? Yeah, let's have some fun. I wonder if it'll generate like a strong password for me. Um, here's my email: Chris@cofounders… I told it to generate a 20-character password. Oh my gosh, it's doing it now; that's freaky; that's freaky. This thing could go around all over the internet and sign me up for all kinds of crap… can… and [Laughter] will. It's exceeded the registration limit. What… let's try this. I mean, what do you think this is going to be doing in a month? I think it's going to be moving faster, and I think there's going to… you know… I think… whoa… I feel… I feel like the… what's mind-blowing to me right now is a lot of people are going to… are watching this and are going to be like, "It's so slow; oh, it didn't go to AliExpress…" Oh, like pointing out all the faults. It's literally a robot that is surfing the internet and doing things for you. I think this is one of the greatest arbitrage moments in business that we've ever seen. You have 8 billion people connected to the internet; you… billions of people logging in daily; they've got credit cards attached to these computers, and now all of a sudden you have… all you have… you know, ChatGPT, OpenAI, all of the world's knowledge connected to this, and then you have bots that can go and do tasks for you based on outcomes, and you're telling me that it costs $200 a month, and people think that's expensive? Yeah, I know. Oh, I know. And I got the four-digit code, and I gave it to it, and it's kind of stripping up here, and dude, I got a… um… I got an email back from a caterer; it's CN Catering… by the way, CN Catering is probably like opening their inbox and being like, "Oh my God, Chris wants to… you know… we got such… you know, Chris is a huge lead; we… we can't wait; this is a huge deal for us." Do they know…? Oh, okay. So I'm going to take control and type in this code. What was the code? Let me see… 2149. And if we had more time, by the way, I feel like we could have figured that out… yeah, like we could have prompted our way to… to get them to figure it out, but we're trying to… we're trying to keep it optimized for… for you all. All right, so now we're logged in; I now have an… an account at Banggood… .com. So I'm telling it to keep going. You think $200 a month is overpriced or underpriced? I think it's overpriced if you don't know what you're doing; like if you don't… like really… like any software, right? You got to invest time into it, and I think that's the hard part with 99% of people is they don't yet have ideas, which is why they're watching this, of how to use it. But one… a lot of the comments on my tweet were like, "Oh my gosh, I can use it for this; I can use it for that." We're just… we're just early. I also think that a lot of people are probably waiting; they're going to be like, "Oh, I'm just going to wait till it gets better," but the time is now, so that once it's better… like you really understand the nuances. Yep. Well, that goes on… we're going to go to my email; CN Catering sent you a message: "We do have your date available; here are some sample menus so you can see some different options." I'm sure… thanks, Gladys. I'm sure I could have the Operator go in there and like compare my menu prices against whatever I want, of course. So it's still trying to look at… okay, here's like the log… look at how hard it's working to find this… a place to message, which… this is just like Chinese user interface 101 here; like I'm not surprised; I can't even find this crap. You would be doing the same thing; I would. All right, there's the same form we just had… have an account first; it's typing… will it check the box? It checked the box; submit. Now here's the question… before… in the… look… there it is… in the old task, it would ask me every time before submitting, and then I said, "Stop asking me," and this is an entirely new task, but I wonder if it remembered that. And look, it took a screenshot; you see that? Wow, it like took a screenshot of what it did. Could you have… could you have it so that it's like put the screenshot in a Google Doc or something like that so you have it on record? Let's ask and do it fast. What have you learned in terms of prompting? Like what kind of best practices can you give to people? Well, let's… I mean, to my point that it's acting like a human, I'm probably going to treat it like a human that is not a human. Like I don't like treating humans rudely; I don't try to be that type of manager, but when it comes to this, I will… I'm going to be very blunt and direct and just keep commanding it to do what I want. And like the only way you'll learn how to do it is by just telling it to do a thousand different things and making note of what works and what doesn't. I mean, it's… it's looking for more products; we don't have time for, but in the future, it would be cool if what you can do is like give it a… a data set where it's like, "Here's the… you know, 20 trends I care about with the Google… with Google Trend data, for example…" Um, and you're looking for… you're looking for products in these trends; go… go through Banggood; go through AliExpress and only get free samples in that Trend data. M… I like that. And I actually… I thought about doing something different where it could cold email for me. So I tried this yesterday, and I said like, "Scrape… um… from a Google search results a bunch of emails and send them a cold email," and it was like, "I can't scrape and cold outreach." And I said, "Well, if I provide you a spreadsheet of emails with a… a message, and the spreadsheet has a column for emails and first names and message, can you… can you send cold emails and customize it by first name?" And it was like, "Yeah, I can do that." Um… I mean, cold emailing software costs, you know, 100 bucks a month; there's half your… your money back. Wait, how does it send the emails though? Like it must… you log in? Yeah, you log into your Gmail account inside of its browser. Wow, that's crazy; crazy. Yeah, and I don't know why it picked earbuds, but maybe I'll ask… it's like… according… yeah, it's not bad. According to Apple's S9, the earbud market is poised for 4.2% CAGR over the next 10 years. That'd be cool. "The earbuds were chosen because they were prominently featured on the homepage and had high ratings, indicating they were trending. If you prefer a different type of product, please let me know." Oh, well, this is great, dude. All right, so we saw the future; we live in the future; we live in the future, and no one knows it but us and the people watching us. Amazing. All right. Um, this has been fun. Uh, Chris, where could people get to know you better? TKOpod.com, The Ker Office podcast; we'll include that in the show notes for people to go and check out… uh, like always, I'm in the comment section, the YouTube comment section, so… uh, post your thoughts and… uh… what can I say? I would say, you know, get your hands dirty; go play with… play with some of this. That's right. All right, see you later, Chris. Thanks, Craig. [Music]