Episode Transcript
Kyle James (00:00.78)
Hey, welcome to the A.I. Chronicles podcast. I'm your host, Kyle James. Today we're going be diving in headfirst into how a marketing company called Funnel Gorgeous 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 just struggling to get your AI to stop hallucinating? Speak to GPT Trainer. GPT Trainer literally builds out and manages your AI agent for you.
eliminating hallucinations for good. Go to gpt-trainer.com. I promise you, it'll be the biggest time saving decision that you've made all year. Trying to set up AI on your own is like trying to build a house from scratch. Sure, you could do it, but the time and frustration is going to take you to get it finished. Just isn't worth it. It's a thousand times faster and safer to hire professionals. Schedule consultation today. Once again, that's gpt-trainer.com.
Say hi with me, Julie Chanel, who is a digital marketing expert coach who built a multimillion dollar business in under three years by combining growth strategies with a bold, no fluff approach to online visibility. Julie now leads Digital Insiders, a high level mastermind for scaling entrepreneurs. And she co-founded Funnel Gorgeous, a company teaching powerful marketing.
and design strategies through education and software. And not to mention host of Million Dollar Grit podcast. Hey, welcome to the show, Julie. How are you doing today?
Julie Chenell (01:37.898)
Hi, Kyle. Thanks so much for having me. I'm very happy to be here.
Kyle James (01:41.322)
Awesome. Glad to have you. So give us some context, Julie. How did you found Funnel Gorgeous and like give us some background with that.
Julie Chenell (01:48.19)
Yeah, so my background is in copywriting and tech and I was a funnel builder for a long time. And one of my clients, her name was Cathy and she was a designer and we worked really, really well together. And after about four months of working together, she positioned or she, you know, she pitched me on the idea of a joint venture course. And that course was called Funnel Gorgeous and we were going to teach conversion marketing and formal design. And so we launched that course. It was a huge hit. And from there, the course turned into a multimillion
million company that it is today. have over 25,000 customers. We run software and education. It just started with that one little client relationship.
Kyle James (02:27.758)
Yeah. So when you say three years or in three years, a million dollars, that's a big growth. How did you get there so fast?
Julie Chenell (02:37.494)
Yeah, well, so I had an audience prior to launching this business. So when we launched final gorgeous in 2018, I was already making more than a million dollars a year in my private business. So I had a big audience. when I
showed my audience what I was going to do with Cathy. It just took off. And so that business made a million dollars in just a little over a year. And then when we added software onto our marketing education, everything doubled. And so we have been sort of running at about $4 million a year ever since 2021.
Kyle James (03:10.582)
Yeah. I'm curious here. If you, if you didn't have that, that, that, following initially, do you think you could have gotten to that million dollar that quick? Or do think it would take in a little bit, maybe a little bit longer?
Julie Chenell (03:22.051)
So I think it probably would have taken a little bit longer, but I will say that back in my personal business as a funnel builder, I was averaging about $20,000 months. And once I built a really strategic webinar funnel, which is something I teach today, I went from 20K months to $96,000 months within 90 days using ads. So it is possible that you can scale quickly if that offer and that funnel is really dialed in.
Kyle James (03:48.654)
Yeah, that's amazing. So I know over at Fun and Gorgeous, you're using, you know, you're using some AI and I love what you're doing. Before we dive deeper though, like tell me, why did you decide to start using AI in the first place? And what types of challenges were you trying to solve with it?
Julie Chenell (04:04.2)
Yeah, so I was one of the very first users of ChatGPT. So I love Twitter, which is now X. And so there's a lot of it's a lot of tech, right? So you're up on the up and up. I remember
you know, downloading it or going to that website and being like, Oh my gosh, like this is insane, you know, and, it had a million users in five days or something crazy like that. So I was right there at the beginning, but it took me a long time to really make it a daily habit. And so I think, I can't remember. It was actually my personal business. So I'm a coach and I have over 75 private one-on-one clients and the mental bandwidth that it takes to
keep track of all of that was a lot. And I think one day I was like, I wonder what would happen if I started to set up my chat chat GPT with a project folder and my clients and I started adding all of their messages into chat because chat
can remember everything I can't write. So, you know, a six month long Voxer chat. I don't remember what she said in March. The chat could. And that was the moment where I was like, my goodness. This is like a second brain. And that was a big paradigm shift. went on to teach it. And then over at funnel gorgeous.
I said to our organization, we have about 15 employees or eight employees and seven contractors. I said, listen, I want everyone to work themselves out of a job, except we won't actually fire you or terminate you. We will just give you more high value work to do. So that was sort of the big, you know, declarative statement we made over at Funnel Gorge just about a year.
Kyle James (05:27.502)
Yeah, I like that concept. That's cool.
Kyle James (05:41.196)
Yeah. So talking on the coaching side, I think that's really interesting. you obviously got the first glimpse into chat, GBT and AI and you saw the value from it. And then you started to take it and implement it into your coaching business. Like when you made that switch over, not fully, I'm not saying this is fully switch over, but when you started applying the AI into the coaching side, like what, what types of results were you seeing from that? And like both on your side, then maybe even like.
What were some of your, kind of your clients saying when they were chatting with AI?
Julie Chenell (06:13.46)
Yeah, so the big paradigm shift is if you start to see chat GBT and I'm using chat GBT specifically because of its organizational features as a second brain, it's different than using it as an assistant. And that was mostly what I was seeing people saying, you don't know how to answer this question. You don't know how to write this email, you know, ask chat GBT.
But what I started to do is I thought if I can get all 75 clients in here and I can document every single message they send to me in one chat thread per client, I'm now going to have like a psychological treasure trove of information from chat. And so not only did it make me faster, not only did I, was I able to answer questions more quickly and like shrink the amount of time that I was actually like listening to audio messages, but now my clients will say things.
like, can you ask chat your chat about what I said? Because it knows that it is not, you know how chat will sometimes pander to the user. Well, it's not going to pander to it. It'll pander to me, but it won't pander to me about you. Right. And so, it'll say, you know, can you run this through this, your chat and see what, see what it says. And so now they're asking for my feedback and my chats feedback because of how robust, not only that, but
Kyle James (07:15.182)
Mm-hmm.
Julie Chenell (07:32.988)
every week now that chat has that extended memory. Every week I will go into chat and I will say, based on all the conversations I had this week with 70 clients, what are the recurring themes? And so in the newsletter with my clients, I'll say, here's what chat had to say about you all. And it will, you know, and now this is their favorite part.
Kyle James (07:44.238)
Hmm.
Julie Chenell (07:52.052)
of this newsletter is like, is chat going to say about us? What analysis is it going to come up with based on just the extreme amounts of data that I'm giving it? The only downside is my chat is running real slow because it's got so much information in it. I have to use the app. I can't use the web version just because how full it is.
Kyle James (08:05.763)
Hmm.
Kyle James (08:12.302)
Yeah, absolutely. So that's incredible. Just the, like to see some of your, I don't know you call it clients or coach coaching mentees, I don't know you phrase it, but, um, for them to see the value to the point of where like, where they're asking you to use your own, like, can you ask it this specific question is like, it's kind of, it shows the interest level of, of how much they want to learn about AI, how much they want to gain more value and probably a little bit of the data and even some of the perspective.
So like talking a little bit about, go ahead, yeah please.
Julie Chenell (08:42.464)
But it also shows the value of what you can do to customize your chat. If you start to see it as a second brain versus seeing it as like a spray and pray assistant where you just throw stuff at it and you keep it super disorganized, right? That's the paradigm shift. It doesn't seem big, but once you start doing it, then you like realize what power is in your hands.
Kyle James (08:48.334)
Mmm.
Kyle James (09:04.71)
Yeah. I like, I like how you talk about the second brain, like, and, and, and because a lot people, think they use it as the assistant, but what, can you, can you clarify a little bit more? Like maybe, maybe realistically, like when you say second brain, like, how do you go from like the assistant mindset to, I'm going to have AI being a second brain instead. Like, how do you make that transition?
Julie Chenell (09:25.206)
Yeah, it's, it's going to be super underwhelming and you're going to hear it and you're gonna be like, Oh, yeah, that's not a big deal. But then I want you to do it. And then you're going to send one of those emails to me. That's like, you just changed my whole life that I get every single day. So step number one is everything you do in work. You start in chat.
your emails, your daily plans, your conversations, your everything. And people will say, well, how is that going to help me? I said, just do it. Just open chat. Because people said, how many hours a day are you in chat? And I was like, the whole day? And they're like, what do you mean? I'm like,
Kyle James (09:57.91)
All day, every day.
Julie Chenell (10:00.776)
Everything I said because I'm thinking of it as a second brain. So I am putting everything that I'm about to do here I'm giving it to chat first. So it has it on hand. Second thing is organized chat. So
Keep threads organized, create a naming structure. I use emojis to like create naming structures and folders and all that kind of stuff so that you can go back to chats. I have chats that I've been running for seven months and I keep going back to that chat and it will remind me and it will get more, you know, cause it has to like review the whole chat before it gives you an answer. And then the third habit. So the first habit is start in chat. The second habit is organized chat as a second brain.
If you haven't seen the movie Inside Out, go watch it. Watch how they organize memories. That's what you have to do. Yeah, both. And then the third thing you need to do is clean up your chat every single day, right? Just like they were, they were storing, we go to sleep, our brain has to catalog memories. We have to do that too. Delete things, archive things, rename things, add them to projects and every single project folder.
Kyle James (10:44.578)
first one or second one? Yeah, they both get really good.
Julie Chenell (11:06.01)
is like a custom GPT because it has those instructions. So every folder has a different purpose and a different way that chat interacts with me.
Kyle James (11:15.884)
Yeah. I love that you could tell you have a, coaching mindset is so great. wish everyone had the coaching mindset like you do Julie, because you give like the tangible steps. think that's what people need. who were trying to take those, like, do I get that? I understand the mind and the process, but like, or the, idea of like, give me the process. Like, what do need to do today? I can totally see that within like your coaching mindset. So looking into the next like year or two, I who knows where AI is going to be, but like for funnel gorgeous.
Julie Chenell (11:19.99)
Thank
Kyle James (11:44.578)
Where do you see some of the maybe upcoming AI initiatives? And then where do you see AI playing maybe the biggest role in your operations next?
Julie Chenell (11:54.782)
Yeah, so we did a big migration about a year ago. We started redoing all of our docs, help docs specifically for AI. So the initiative is you need to prepare content for AI more than humans, right? And humans love videos, but right now AI still doesn't watch videos, but AI reads text.
And so where everybody was doing loom videos for tech and SaaS, we were sitting here typing hundreds and hundreds of articles. But now our AI support agent inside of our customer help desk far outperforms anybody else's because it has all that written data. so we're doing it. So right now our live chat support.
is 12 hours a day and then the night shift is all driven by our AI. So that's a big area where it's going to continue to grow. think in my personal, in my personal philosophy, I think a lot of SaaS is going to go kaput. I think that personal SaaS will be just like personal websites will be able to create super custom SaaS. You know, I think it's a little clunky. I know all the software developers are like, this is amazing, but they're
have a background of code so they can use like lovable and replit and all that kind of stuff. I think it's going to take a little while, but I think that's coming as well. And then people are going to make a lot of money with AI wrappers where, you know, specific use cases, they're building on top of chat. You know, the danger with that, of course, is that OpenAI could just steal your idea and work it right in. We just saw that with the release of recording. But
for some people if they have good UI, the wrapper creates the stickiness and they can make good money. So those are some of my predictions if you will.
Kyle James (13:48.876)
Yeah, absolutely. No, I've heard it once. we had a, had a conversation with some previous guests on our show and one said that they build a, an AI, like a support or like an Excel or something specific. And they're like, I wonder who's going to use this the most. And she'll say, like, it was a tutor assistant for a teacher. And a lot of teachers might be like, I don't want to replace my tutoring, you know, but they found out that like the people who are using the AI tutor are the tutors. Like.
Julie Chenell (14:17.512)
Yeah.
Kyle James (14:18.722)
What, would have thought like, or like the marketing, like who's using the marketing AI. It's the marketing people. so it's almost like you're going back to the second brain is like getting using AI to work with you, not just like take us. And I love your approach to like, Hey, I want you to work yourself out of a job. And it's, a different mindset there because you're like, well, why would I do that? It's like, well, I'm not going to fire you, but I want you to think that way of like, how do I automate this as much as I possibly can? And then once you free that up, then you can put your time elsewhere, which I think makes the biggest difference.
So, and as we start wrapping up here, Julie, appreciate your time today, but like for people listening in and they're really curious to learn a little bit more about you, even about Funnel Gorgeous, where would you advise them to go to for next steps?
Julie Chenell (15:01.234)
Yeah. So if you are interested in the second brain paradigm shift and sort of my teaching on that, if you go to secondbrainworkshop.com, you can actually pick up the workshop. think it's like $27 or something like that. So you can go there if that's interesting to you. Otherwise you can just go to funnelgorgeous.com and you'll see we teach everything about starting up a coaching business, course creation business or service based business. And then we also have software.
Kyle James (15:28.234)
Awesome. Thank you, Joey. It's great having you on today. I know it's short and sweet, but you have some really good perspective and I wish we could see, hopefully maybe in the future, we'll have you back on the show. Who knows, right? Awesome. Thank you so much, everybody. Thanks for listening in. And if, again, if you're listening and you're looking at implementing AI into your business today, don't try and do it yourself. The time is just the AI could cause just isn't worth it. Schedule a call with GPT trainer and let them build out and manage your AI for you. Once again, that's GPT-trainer.
Julie Chenell (15:36.766)
Yeah, sounds great. Sounds great.
Kyle James (15:56.6)
to schedule your consultation. Signing off for now, have a wonderful rest of your day and looking forward to seeing you on the next episode of AI Chronicles.
