Episode Transcript
Kyle James (00:00.961)
Hey, welcome to the ad chronicles podcast. I'm your host, Kyle James. And today we'll be talking about how a company called in-boxing engine is using AI inside of their own business. And we'll share the exact steps that you can take in order to implement AI for yourself. Now, before I dive into that, listen closely. Are you looking to implement AI inside of your own company or maybe just struggling to get your AI to stop hallucinating? Speak to GPT trainer.
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scheduled consultation today. Once again, that's gpt-trainer.com. Say hi with me on the show, Cole Vandy, who is the founder of Inboxin Engine. Cole has been a sales and marketing expert for more than a decade, generating over $250 million for his clients. He's the host of the Suck Less podcast, and now he's on the path to replacing his entire company with one push button AI system.
Hey Cole, welcome to the show. How you doing today, my friend?
Cole Vandee (01:30.126)
I'm doing well, man. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited for this one.
Kyle James (01:34.071)
Yeah, for sure brother. tell us a little bit how did in-boxing engine like give us some origin story about how you found the company and like what exactly is it y'all do right now?
Cole Vandee (01:41.942)
Yeah, I'll leave out the boring stuff. But I'll fast forward into getting into business. I failed a bunch in the beginning when I was a teenager, had 12 businesses that made absolutely no money. So I don't know if they're considered businesses or not, but I tried eventually figured out that my thing was copywriting. So writing advertising for different businesses started with a fitness trainer in Texas and he made 50 grand in a week from this letter I wrote.
I was like, I'm pretty good at this. So I went down the marketing path. I think like a lot of people in our internet marketing industry and eventually had a copywriting agency, had 20 something writers across the world, had 20 something salespeople. Zero idea what I was doing or how to manage that. This was seven or eight years ago now.
And so that business ran away from me. ended up shutting it down, refunding hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of contracts and working for free for a year. and then as I was rebuilding my life and figuring out what I wanted to do, I was in sales and, and it was just doing a sales job, making multiple six figures, doing great. And I got a call when I was golfing one day and that call was, Hey man, can you come do my email for me? It's the last piece of the puzzle for me to leave my business.
and really be the CEO. And I was like, sure. So I started doing email thinking, this is a little extra side money. There's no way email is going to take that much time. And then when I got into it, I realized how much data I had available to me and it became a game. And for the next 18 months, I probably spent 10, 12 hours a day every day reading everything I possibly could on the Internet about how to be better at email.
reading all the terms and conditions you can find from Gmail and Outlook and all the boring stuff. Like, how can I get this email into the inbox and how can I get them more money for each email that we send? And we went on to scale that email list from making about $200,000 a month into a little over $1.2 million per month over that next 18 months. And that was when I was like, maybe this is business. And so we started taking on more clients.
Kyle James (03:51.647)
Yeah, yeah, that's
Cole Vandee (03:54.351)
So it's kind of the long story short of how we got to where we're at today.
Kyle James (04:00.887)
Yeah. So you said something like it, like, I mean, the, call, you know, out on the golf course, like, what was it specifically about? you, said the data game there and like, like, there's, I'm sure there's a lot of things coming to your desk at the time, but for some reason, like the, email him or making that request was, okay, I am going to dive deep. that like, what caused you to dive deep into that specifically versus maybe some other things that were on your desk?
Cole Vandee (04:27.566)
Yeah, I mean, I I'd gotten calls, you know, over the years to write this webinar, do this funnel. And those were fine, like one off projects. And there wasn't really any data like until after it was done. Right. So like I build a webinar out for somebody and write the script and I write all the copy and all the stuff. And then it would be like six months until I know whether or not that was worthwhile. So I had no idea. Right. And then there's so many other variables like where the ads good where.
you know, do people actually trust this guy? Did he deliver it really well on the webinar? And there's just so much more outside of my control. And then I got the call about email. It was a good friend of mine. I taught inside of his company for years at this point. So we had a really good connection. I knew his business pretty well. And I a lot about who he was. And I was really kind of excited to take that on. And just for him, really. And
So I dove into email and I thought, you know, the goal for him was really like, Hey man, can you just like not mess this up? Like just keep doing what I'm already doing. Like ads are killing it. We're scaling ads. Just don't mess up my email stuff. Just do what I've been doing. And when I looked at it, I was like, you do so much better. Like I just, just the, maybe the arrogance or maybe my experience, I'm not sure, but I was like, there's no way like a 20 % open rate is like good. Like there, like I had no experience. I had no idea, but I was like,
there's got to be a way to get this higher. And so it just became a game and I'm incredibly competitive. And so I was just like, I'm to get more opens and then I'm going to get more clicks and then I'm going to make more money. And then it was just like this never ending cycle of like, I'm going to make this better and this better and this better and this better. I just kept doing that over and over and over again.
Kyle James (06:13.943)
Yeah. I'm going to probe a little bit here. Like, cause I mean, at this point, the person you're working with, your friend, like he's just thinking, Hey, just try, I just need you to maintain it. Like, I don't need you to go all star here and hit home runs, but like you decided to go to that next step. Like as you started figuring things out, like what was it that really changed from the tuner K per month to over 1 million per month and reoccurring? Like, what, what was that? mean, I know it's multiple things, but like, what was kind of like going through like, wow, this is eyeopening that I think.
A lot of people don't realize on the email space.
Cole Vandee (06:47.086)
The, I think the big thing here, and this is the model that we have inside of the company, anyone that comes into work with us or contracts with us or helps fulfill on anything or whatever it may be. And it's the same thing we share with our clients is we just don't believe in industry average. Like we just don't believe in it. Industry average for an open rate across the board is between 16 and 25%. Um, that's crazy to me because if you're sending out great content, uh, to people that want to hear from you.
More than 16 % of them should be wanting to hear from you, right? Like, especially if you're paying for advertising. And so for me, it was like, well, how do I get this to a hundred percent, which is an outrageous goal. It's, it's absolutely outrageous and it's not going to happen overnight. But for us, it's just like, how can we do a little bit every single day to get this number higher? And it doesn't transform overnight. Uh, for example, I just took on a client we started a couple of months ago and they're getting 16 to 17 % open rates.
And today, you know, just sent them out the weekly report yesterday. They're getting 28 % open rates now. It's like, that's a, that's a pretty big swing. It's a 33 % increase in overall opens, which is great. Is it life changing? No. Are they making hundreds of thousands of dollars and more dollars and more money? No, but it's the little bit that compounds month after month.
And then quarter after quarter year after year in that long-term game turns into millions if not tens of millions of extra dollars Making ad costs cheaper and overall the customer experience better, too
Kyle James (08:21.131)
Yeah, 100%. Cause I suppose like over the email that comes through, it's like, it's the first like tip of the spear in a sense, right? Like it's going through, like if they don't open it, there's no, like there's nothing, nothing happens. But like the moment they open it, that is the exposure. So if it doubles, I mean, everything else kind of is in a way, right? Kind of doubles as well, right? All the way down to the funnel.
Cole Vandee (08:40.268)
That's, that's the overall thought process. Like if twice as many people read an email twice as many people have the opportunity to buy. That doesn't necessarily, it doesn't always directly correlate like that, but the math kind of maths in that direction, like more people open more people buy it's in, in simple terms, that's kind of how it works. And so I want to give my clients the best opportunity to reach the people that want the help from them as possible with their solution to whatever problem they're experiencing and.
Kyle James (08:55.894)
Mm-hmm.
Cole Vandee (09:08.078)
the best way to start with that is to get more people to see it.
Kyle James (09:10.869)
Yeah, I love that. And so now you're using AI over at inboxing engine. Like it's really cool what you guys are doing. Like, tell me like what, why did you decide to start using AI in the first place? And specifically like what types of challenges are you trying to solve with the AI within, within your business?
Cole Vandee (09:26.786)
Yeah. I mean, full transparency at first, you know, a couple of years ago, was like, AI is just not going to be better than what we do. and, and, realistically it wasn't. I have a lot of friends in the industry that own very large AI companies. have some that have multi-billion dollar AI companies and they're very successful with AI and that's great. And I even had them come in. like, make this better than what we do it. And they'd spend months on it they come back and be like, it's not there yet. It's not there yet. It's not there yet.
today, you know, 2025. Absolutely. It's getting there. Does it write better than us? No. Will it write better than humans at some point, depending on what LLMs you're using and how you're prompting them and how you're training them and the data sets you use and everything else, maybe one day we're pretty close to that. But what we're realizing, what I realized last year is about it actually roughly 12, 14 months ago, depending on when this comes out. Right.
But sometime in 2024, had, I saw it was like, I'm making decisions every single day about strategy and it's all based off of data. If I can train some sort of AI infrastructure or tool or combination or agent or whatever, how to think like I do as far as how I interpret the data, how I tie that into the emails themselves and it can start making decisions. Well, then I no longer have to be the bottleneck of that.
process like I can now I can give this to more people because we're really expensive. We charge 10, 20, $30,000 a month. We've had clients pay us as much as two or $300,000 for a month worth of work and obviously directly proportionate how much money we're making them. And, but the small business owner can't, can't afford that the million dollar brick and mortar business can't afford that. The startup can't afford that. And so they're, they're paying freelancers. It's like, well,
If it's just a, like this, this number is here and then this decision needs to be made as a result of that number being in this range. That's something AI can definitely do. So I went down this rabbit hole of like, how can I get AI to on like, just do everything for us? And so that's kind of where we've been on the path of transitioning all of the logic, all of the decision-making process and all the data that we have and every tying it to everything and just really training LLM models and building out an AI brain infrastructure.
Cole Vandee (11:51.256)
has been incredibly helpful and not being LLM specific, meaning it's, it's very agnostic as far as does it live on chat GPT? Does it live on Claude? Does it live on this? Does it live on that? we're, making it agnostic cause some of these tools go down. Some of these tools, get upgraded in different ways. Some of them become obsolete. Some of them become dominant. And so finding, kind of theories and ways to kind of tape everything together, if you will, to have something that's
very consistent has been kind of our goal and our path. And we're not quite there yet. There's still because there's I'm still training as much of these AI models as I can. But the goal is to get it to a push button system where you connect, you know, your email platform with our AI infrastructure. And at the push of a button, it will tell you exactly what went wrong, how to fix it or what went right and how to do more of it. And even getting it to the point where it's going to
Kyle James (12:26.135)
Hmm.
Cole Vandee (12:50.094)
actually write the emails and send it for you as well with any platform that you use just using APIs and other connectivity.
Kyle James (12:56.575)
Yeah, for sure. Well said. like, cause I, I think like how much you've seen in the email space too. And you know, like, okay, I know what works. I know what doesn't work. Like the one thing that's actually having the, the bigger, I guess, influence for you is like, what does the data say behind it? So in this case, like the AI is like, is being that kind of like that data analytics email data analytics, you know, expert and then rendering out like, Hey, this is what it suggests on making those changes. And like, what have you been seeing?
And know this is probably pretty granular, like what, since like adding AI compared to what you're currently doing into what you are now, like how has, how have the results been, both maybe just from when you're making the changes internally and then maybe even like relating it back to some of your clients who might see some of those impacts from the AI generated email content.
Cole Vandee (13:45.922)
Yeah, I mean, the results are similar. They're not always the same and they're not, but then they're not always worse. They're very rarely better. And, and I'll, and I'll also preface this by saying we've sent a half a million emails out to people now with a 70 % open rate that humans wrote. Right. So like to say that we're more experienced in sending email than any LLM out there is pretty easy for us to say. Right. And so for us to expect a
a software tool or an AI to do better than what we've been able to do based off of all of our SOPs and everything else that we've been writing over the last five years. It's not going to happen overnight. But the goal is if we can produce the same results with less brain power and less human involvement, that's our real goal here. Can I produce a similar result to what we're producing without a human being actually having to be involved in that process and just a button being pushed to us? That's a massive win.
From there, once we get that baseline dialed in, then it can start improving on itself and start finding nuances that we didn't see or we haven't been able to see and creating kind of its own algorithm inside of our kind of human manual algorithm that we've built. That's the path forward for us. I'm really excited.
Kyle James (15:01.685)
Yeah, that's really cool. I love that. It's almost like I pictured kind of like a, it's not hitting the same results as like the humans do. It's like, I'm still taming this like as an animal here. Like it's not like I'm going to make sure I'm putting it in control and just keep training it up. But ideally it's like, if you can get it to that point where it is doing, even if it's just five or 10 % better, that's when it's like, okay, now I can slowly kind of release a little bit on this and allow the AI to do more of the work. But until then, like, and thankfully, right, that's why you have a business model. Cause
You are better than the AI, right? But at the same time though, you are the experts. Like that's why there's so much training that's going into the AI, the prompting, the LLMs and all the data behind it. Like that's what makes the AI more powerful. Not just like, you're good at AI or, there's a cool large language model out there that's new and hip. Like if everyone can do it, then it's not special. But the fact that like you're bringing your expertise, that's what I think really makes it magnify even further to where you, instead of like a hundred X, you can go 200, 300 X.
with the power of AI at your hip, which is this route. So fascinating concept to look at that. And as we start like transitioning here, like what, and I know there's gonna be a lot of changes in these next couple of years, Cole, but like, where do you see AI playing maybe some of the biggest role in, in boxing engines, AI initiatives, and especially in like your operations next.
Cole Vandee (16:21.614)
Yeah, I mean, I, the real reason I made this pivot is to be super transparent. anyone that has a service based business right now, if you don't have a push button AI solution in the next six to 12 months, you're going to be out of business or you're going to be hurting to scale. The reason I pivot is because I was like, there's, there's zero reason for a human being to be writing emails and sending them from a marketing perspective. There's no reason for a human to do that at this point. The LLMs write better than most human beings do.
They understand how to articulate data better than most human beings do and it can do it faster. And so there's no need for me to do what I do anymore. And so the goal is like, okay, I either need to get to this finish line faster than anyone else or I need to find something else to do. so, you know, as far as where AI is and everything else, I think AI gives people like me, for example, an agency owner that services businesses, I think it gives me the opportunity to...
like unlock myself from the business and look at business as a business. Like what's next for Inboxing Engine? It's like, okay, well, if we can get this push button AI solution done and it connects with all of the email platforms that are out there and businesses start using it, it's great. What's next? And it's that, that's
That's where I'd rather be playing in business anyways, because that's where the guys that go on to file, you know, find these billion dollar companies and grow these startups into massive international brands. Um, that's the world that they're playing in. They're playing in the world of what's next. What else? What's five years from now? What does that look like? And when you're so stuck, like for me, if I'm so stuck on just like, the open rates were 29 % yesterday and they were 30 % the day before and I need to make this decision. I'm so stuck in this day to day as a business owner.
Kyle James (18:04.183)
Mm.
Cole Vandee (18:07.02)
It's going to be incredibly hard to compete. incredibly hard. It's going to get even harder because all of those mundane, repetitive decisions that don't need to be made by human beings. the more I'm making those, the further behind I'm going to get. Cause the people that are allowing AI to step in and replace themselves with it, those people are going to be stepping outside of their business, looking into the future and going, what's the next problem I can solve for whoever businesses, governments, countries, whatever it may be.
Kyle James (18:29.653)
Yeah.
Cole Vandee (18:34.867)
And that's where I think real impact and real change lives. And so that's kind of the world I'm hoping to be in here in the next six to 12 months.
Kyle James (18:38.015)
Yeah, that's cool. I love a picture just like a kind of like a gold mine or oil right underground or however you want to like mine is just like there. There is that cheese or there's that gold down there and you can definitely it'll still be there for a little bit, but it's not going to be there forever. And it's like, if AI is here to help, like you can help replace you not because you're trying to like not work. I mean, you'll always be working, but how do I automate that? And then now I take my human power.
human powers, know, superhero human power and go, okay, what do I want to target next and find that next gold mine and that next bit of, you know, oil to dig up and, and, and bring some fruit to the business. Cause like you said, like you cannot, it cannot be just a, like, how do I just, I don't want to zoom in too far in the business. have to act in certain times, like zoom out and go, okay, what's the big picture here? What's the next step after this next step? And then I think that's where you see a lot of longevity, longevity of lot of companies.
when they build it to an empires because they're not just looking at one thing. They look at multiple different solutions, different avenues to figure out, how can we keep bringing in the gold year after year when the mine on this, when the gold mine runs out, we have other ones we're going to, we have other investments that we're putting into. And I think that's like the picture here that you're painting.
Cole Vandee (19:52.652)
Yeah, absolutely. And beyond even finding the next gold mine, it's like, where's the location of that? And can I sell the shovels? Can I own the land? Instead of digging for that gold again, because what I found in the evolution of entrepreneurs and business owners, they're usually really good at solving the problem. And so they go in and they solve the problem. They do it very, very, very well. And then if they're smart and they have a lot of charisma and they can make it happen, they build the team to help solve the problem.
Kyle James (20:17.911)
Mm.
Cole Vandee (20:18.328)
And then eventually they build the team to then find new problems to solve the next problem, right? And it's just the evolution of it. I've kind of gotten to the point where I've outgrown writing emails and analyzing data about emails. You can say hi to my cat here if anyone's watching on video. Yeah, a little guest appearance.
Kyle James (20:36.567)
We have a second guest on the show here. Welcome in.
Cole Vandee (20:44.694)
And so, so yeah, so that's, that's really what I'm looking at. It's like, what's, what's the bigger game I can play here instead of trying to run a multimillion dollar company? What does it look like? What kind of impact do I need to have in the world in order to run a hundred million dollar a year company, billion dollar a year company, a portfolio of companies that do multiple billions of dollars. And what are those people that are already doing that thing? How did they transition from where they're at to where they are and, and playing that game? And some of them are just incredibly passionate about what
what problems they currently solve. And that's amazing. Elon Musk would be a great example of that. He has a passion for saving humanity for some reason. And I applaud him for that. But then there's other guys that are just like, I just love the game of business. I love the game of building teams. I love giving other entrepreneurs an opportunity to come in and run something. And I just give them some money and let them do it. Just depending on kind of what game you want to play and how you want to grow. And I think AI is going to...
substantially accelerate that process for a lot of people that want to play at that big level. And it's going to really create some space between the big guys and the people that are just trying to survive every day and just hustling and trying to make the next dollar. There's going to be a huge separation between those two groups of people. And we're going to see probably a massive change over the next six months.
Kyle James (21:57.783)
Yeah, I love that man. appreciate you being on the show today. It's been solid conversation. I knew at this moment we hit record here. I'm like, this is going to be a good one. just, can feel it. Um, as people who are listening in, where can they go to learn a little bit more about you Cole? And then maybe a little bit more about Inbox Engine that you'd recommend them check out.
Cole Vandee (22:16.076)
Yeah, if you are a company doing at least 10 million a year or more and you're curious about what we can do for you from an email perspective, Inboxingengine.com is a great place to learn. We break down the entire process, what we do, how we do it. There's some testimonials from clients so they can even tell you what we do. So feel free to check us out there. We don't take on a ton of clients at a time, but we do have a space for maybe one more client.
in the fourth quarter of 2025. And if you listen to this in the future, just give it a wing, see if we're there, if we got a push button solution. And for anybody that wants to follow me, you can follow me on social media, Cole Vandy, V-A-N-D-E-E. And I'm on all the platforms there. If you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, that would be cool too. I'm learning that that's a pretty cool place to hang out and be. So I'm getting a lot more active and posting a little bit more content there too.
Kyle James (23:10.807)
Cool. Awesome. Thanks so much, Cole. It's great having a show. Definitely keep in touch, brother. We'll hopefully see you on the next one in the future. Awesome. And again, remember for those who are looking into implementing AI, please don't try and do it yourself. The time is just the AI could cause. It may not be worth it. Schedule a call with GPT trainer and let them build out manager AI for you. Once again, that's gpt-trainer.com. Signing off for now. Have a great rest of the day, everybody. Thank you so much for listening and looking forward to seeing everyone on the next episode.
Cole Vandee (23:17.26)
Awesome, thanks Kyle, appreciate it.
Kyle James (23:40.339)
of AI Chronicles.
