Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:50:07 · Claire Vo
[00:50:07] S1: I'll talk about my favorite use cases, and we can talk about them from a work perspective and then into a personal perspective. This is my telegram. And, again, you can see along here all my agents, and then also the BotFather here, always using the BotFather, and they all have their own emojis. Sam is my salesperson, and so he's got the dollar sign eyes here. And what Sam does for me... I'm a solopreneur, so I run ChatPRD mostly by myself. And a lot of our business comes from enterprise, so larger organizations. We get a lot of enterprise inbound and then we get a lot of product-led growth that turns into enterprise opportunities for us. And it's really tedious for me to go through our CRM and look for those opportunities. Even with filtering, even with enrichment, I have to sit down. I used to have a calendar invite on my calendar that just says sit down, and it had sales in all caps, so I would just sit down and do sales. And now, Sam, every morning he wakes up, my lovely SDR, and he goes and he does the PLG sweep, we call it, and he sweeps our CRM for all the signups in the last 24 hours, identifies ones that have domains that are company domains, uses Exa people search, we can search biographies and professional information, sees if any of them are decision makers, and then sends them nice emails that say, "Hey, I'm Sam. I'm an accountant manager at ChatPRD. Love to see you sign up. Here's a couple of things you might find useful. Let us know if you have any questions." So really soft, helpful message to these people. And then he carves off ones that are from companies that are like 100,000 employees or more, and double checks with me and says, "Do you want to send this email as the founder or do you want me to go ahead and send it?" And so this is an example we'll blur the specifics, but we found five good prospects here, we held one, he gave me some details on the one and I said, "It's international, I want you to handle those as much as possible because, again, I'm a mom. It's hard for me to do the international ones. Handle those as much as possible and only bring me in when you need me." And he just does that all the time. And then at the end of the week, he does a CRM cleanup, keeps the pipeline clean, reminds me of any deals that are stale, drafts emails for me to send to our customers, and he runs QBRs.
00:52:44 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[00:52:44] S0: This is incredible. This is actually useful too because you see all these tweets about people using all these tools, but this is something you're actually using that is helping you grow your business. [00:52:52] S1: Yeah, it is saving me... Actually, last year before the beginning of the year, I was paying somebody 10 hours a week to do this, just a friend that was between jobs and he was like, "Oh, I'll do it for you." So this has real economic value to me and is real time carved back. And what I think is underappreciated is it's so tunable, we had this process where I said, "You just look at PLG, pick the big company ones. And now I'm telling Sam, "Actually you handle international end to end, don't bring me into those," or, " If it's a San Francisco-based high growth tech startup, I always want to take those." And I would have to go into our CRM and filter and create lists and automations and no code this, and now Sam just knows, sends me a note, and it's easy to work with. [00:53:46] S0: Two very cool parts of this also. One is to do this all you do is you talk to it, "Hey, here's what I want you to do. Here's what you could do better. Here's what you want to change." So just organic conversation like a human. And then the other is there's all these AI tools that are trying to do sales for people and what you're... ... That are trying to do sales for people. And what you're showing us is just open claw on a little Mac Mini can do this. You don't need to explore all these other products. I'm sure they're better in various ways and if you-
00:53:46 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[00:53:46] S0: Two very cool parts of this also. One is to do this all you do is you talk to it, "Hey, here's what I want you to do. Here's what you could do better. Here's what you want to change." So just organic conversation like a human. And then the other is there's all these AI tools that are trying to do sales for people and what you're... ... That are trying to do sales for people. And what you're showing us is just open claw on a little Mac Mini can do this. You don't need to explore all these other products. I'm sure they're better in various ways and if you- [00:54:00] S1: Sure. [00:54:14] S0: Maybe you need that, but this is amazing and free.
00:54:14 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[00:54:14] S0: Maybe you need that, but this is amazing and free. [00:54:15] S1: Well, and I saw somebody say something the other day, which was like the best way of success in B2B SaaS is getting somebody promoted and making them look good. And I think about Howie, the How I AI bot and Howie just makes me look good. Every morning when I have a podcast episode to record, he sends me a reminder. It's like the most friendly reminder. It's like, "Hey, Claire, remember your meeting with Al. And just in case you forgot, here's who Al is, here's all the stuff that he's going to show. Don't forget this. LinkedIn linked ready to go." And then it's just so sweet. Good luck. Sounds like a meaty one. Hypes me up for the day. And so what I feel with the way I have set up my OpenClaws is it's not just a tool doing work for me. It is a team helping me look better to customers, helping me honestly show up better to my family. And that feels like a very positive experience. So for anybody out there building agents for business users or even consumers, I think thinking about how do I make the end user feel like a winner is a really powerful model to build a useful agent. That's exactly right. [00:57:08] S0: Show us a couple other examples. I know you have a family planning one.
00:57:08 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[00:57:08] S0: Show us a couple other examples. I know you have a family planning one. [00:57:11] S1: Yeah, so those are my work ones. Fin is my favorite. So again, my personal life might be busier than my work life in that I've got these three boys and a husband and we're all over the city. We're city living. And so we had one car and we're finally at the tipping point where we have two cars. That's how complicated our life is. And there's so many things that come in ad hoc throughout the day that you just have to remember an action. And so a good example is, I don't know why we did this, but my oldest is on a basketball team. And the basketball team will not tell you when the game is until Thursday before the weekend. So it's like a mystery until Thursday. And then Thursday, you may have between zero and three basketball games somewhere in the Bay Area. So we are living very free right now. And what would happen in past life is we get an email from the basketball team and they'd say, "Here's the link to the tournament we're playing this week." That's where the schedule is. And the schedule is this long and it has 50 teams in it and I don't know which team my kid is in and I don't know where the gyms are and all that stuff. And so I'm in a group chat with my husband, that email hit my husband and he just texted Fin. He said, "Here's the page, put it on the calendar so we know where to go." And it had a little hard time browsing web. I know you've had some hard time- [00:58:40] S0: Yeah, let's talk about that.
00:58:40 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[00:58:40] S0: Yeah, let's talk about that. [00:58:40] S1: Browsing web. But instead he just select all, pasted the page and pasted it in and then Fin dropped it on the calendar and then said, "Hey, oldest kid has a conflict with middle kids soccer game. How are you guys going to split up duties here?" And so it's not just doing that functional, like put it on my calendar, it's going that next step because we've put it in its instructions to help us solve logistics challenges. And again, force the humans in the loop, my husband and I, to come together and confirm to it that we solved this problem. And so my favorite use case of Fin is every Thursday, or sorry, every afternoon at about three o'clock, it pings in this group chat and it says, "Which of you are picking up which kids?" It sounds so simple, but it's a conversation that my husband and I should be having live every day, but sometimes we forget and then we get to 4:45 and we say, "Well, are you getting him? Am I getting him? Can we get them together? Do they have soccer?" And so again, it's just this really useful, makes me feel like a winner mom use case. [00:59:48] S0: Something that it does for me is when I have a meeting somewhere, I don't know how it knows this, but it's like, "You should leave now." Or "Have you left yet for this meeting because it's like traffic is a little higher right now." [00:59:57] S1: Yeah. [00:59:58] S0: And that's the heartbeat in action, right? It's just like every half hour it's just like, hmm, let's see what's going on. And then fires off some messages and then goes back to sleep.