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Question: How do you build your own software with Claude when you have never written code?
Direct answer: Act as the product manager and let Claude Code be the developer. Colby Flood, who has never written a line of code, built Brighter Click's whole UGC operations platform by starting with the single most urgent problem, describing the outcome the user needs with zero room for interpretation, and asking Claude for an easy, non-developer, step-by-step process whenever setup gets technical. Once the team depends on the tool, add a test environment, push every change to test before production, and have Claude run a full end-to-end test.
In this episode, Will Sartorius talks with Colby Flood, founder of Brighter Click, about how to build your own software with Claude when you have never written a line of code. Colby walks through the UGC operations platform he built for his agency, from a 15-step creator application and a database of more than 600 creators to AI quality checks on every video, and explains how he decides what to build, how he tests it, and when he pushes back on Claude.
Colby started Brighter Click in 2019. The agency began in media buying and now leads with UGC and influencer sourcing, creative strategy and post-production.
We discuss:
- Why Google Sheets, Canva decks and Drive comments broke the UGC process
- How a non-developer gets started in Claude Code by acting as the product manager
- Why the build started with the most urgent problem, not the first step
- The 15-step creator form behind a database of 600+ creators
- Using ClickUp time tracking and Claude to find the admin work worth automating
- Automating shortlists, client approvals, contracts, briefs and upload portals
- AI checks for aspect ratio and subtitles, plus a 20-point QC checklist
- Turning client feedback into a running checklist every creator sees
- How to set up a test environment and push to test before production
- How to challenge Claude when it suggests a different build
Show site: https://www.ai-dtc-wtf.com/
Connect the Foxwell MCP to Claude or ChatGPT: https://www.foxwelldigital.com/mcp
Guest: Colby Flood, Founder, Brighter Click
Brighter Click: https://www.brighterclick.com/
Colby on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colby-flood/
This Episode is sponsored by Motion's very own Runneth. Runneth is the AI Tool that is quickly becoming the go to decision maker brands turn to when it comes to creative decisions within their ad accounts. From Creative strategist to hook inspirations and creative briefs, runneth can do it all. See the case studies and try runneth yourself https://runneth.com/
This episode is also sponsored by Alia, the AI-powered popup platform that turns more of your site visitors into email and SMS subscribers. Our listeners get an extended 45-day free trial: [ALIA LINK]
AI DTC WTF is the show for brand owners, in-house advertisers and agency operators who use AI every day and want tactical workflows they can implement now. Published by Foxwell Digital: https://www.foxwelldigital.com/
To connect with Andrew Foxwell reach him here Andrew@FoxwellDigital.com
To connect with Will Sartorius DM him here https://x.com/will_sartorius
To connect with Thomas Moen DM him here https://x.com/thomasmoen
To learn more about Foxwell Founders and conversations like this one, go here: https://www.foxwellfounders.com
Learn more about Foxwell Digital and join our newsletter: https://www.foxwelldigital.com/email
Chapters
00:00 How to build your own software with zero code
02:04 Why Google Sheets broke the UGC process
05:32 How to start in Claude Code with no technical background
08:17 Which problem should you build for first?
09:40 The 15-step form behind a 600-creator database
14:42 How to find the admin work worth automating
16:19 Automating shortlists, contracts, briefs and uploads
26:57 Demo: AI quality checks on creator videos
35:40 How to set up a test environment with Claude
42:37 How to push back when Claude suggests a different build
Transcript
Build Your Own Software With Zero Code - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShTXfcpyB3M
Transcript:
(00:03) If you work in DTOC and you use AI and you're wondering what the f is going on every week, this is your podcast. The AI TTOC WTF podcast, your home for tactical tips, strategies, and ideas that you can implement right now in your AI workflows to make your brand or agency more money. All right, welcome to another episode of AI DTOC WT book. Uh, today we have a special guest.
(00:28) I think every guest is special. You know, today is particularly special because a good friend of mine, uh, Colby Flood, who runs Brighter Click. Uh, thanks for coming on. Yeah, excited to be here. So, Colby, I think as a starting point, why don't you just give us some background on yourself, uh, you know, your agency, sort of what you do, uh, and then we can sort of get in the weeds a little bit on what you've been building. Yeah. So, I started Brighter Click in 2019.
(00:54) I had been freelancing for some time before that and then just made that transition where I needed to have more team because client base started building up. Um, you know, fast forward from 2019 to 2026. Here we are now. We were primarily media buying as a service because creative didn't really matter as much back then. Over the last three to four years, we've delved really deep into creative strategy and post-production, but more specifically UGC and influencer sourcing.
(01:21) Right now, UGC is the primary source of our pipeline for new client opportunities. And so, there's been a lot of chance, a lot of need for us to build out tech, to build out tools that can help get our team out of Google Sheets, get our team, you know, centralized, but also make sure that the creator and the client experience is good without having to pay, you know, multiple thousands of dollars per month for some tech that we don't even own. So that's been my goal over the past uh year, couple of months is just building out better tech for that.
(01:54) That makes sense. So two questions piggybacking off that you know the first what did your process sort of look like beforehand? Um and then second like do you have a technical background at all? Like what introduced you to Claude and like how did you get started? Two good questions. Yeah. So, you know, our process beforehand was very much fragmented in the sense that um we would reach out to a creator.
(02:23) You we'd post on Twitter or something like that, post on Reddit, find some creators. Um we would pull all of their videos that we could from their portfolio and then put them manually into a Canva deck. We would send that over to the client. The client would review those, approve them, etc. And then we would go into contracting. We would go into product shipping, all that. All of this was being managed in Google Sheets.
(02:45) Every client had a separate Google sheet that we had to keep up with. We had to keep up with email communications through um you know the creators and the client. And then at the same time when we did QC, which is the longest potential time drag of the entire UGC process, um we were doing that in Google Drive. So a creator would upload their content. We would then leave comments on that file in Google Drive.
(03:12) The client would do the same and then we would send it back as either that or a document to the creator. Everything was just so scattered that there was no way. And it would kind of make more sense as I explain the tool we built. There's no way to keep up with like what creator is good at turnaround time and consistency of quality and what clients expect and all of that type of stuff. And then technical background.
(03:33) Um, no, never written a line of code. I did um you know I started to build out a software three years ago and hired a team of developers for that. So I had a CTO from my hometown he's in his early 60s I believe. Um he worked at Wells Fargo for like 20 plus years lead that project. And so I had a lot of opportunity over the past three years to lead software development and learn a lot in terms of like how important it is to be very very crystal clear on your communication and leave zero room for interpretation so you don't build in the wrong direction for two weeks. Um and just how that entire development process goes. But no, I don't know Python. I don't know
(04:15) umnet or you know anything of the sort that way. This episode of AID TOC WTF is brought to you by Runith from Motion. And you know, there's so many interesting things about Runith that I absolutely love. The best marketers I know right now are not sitting there going, "How do I get AI to answer my questions?" They're thinking in systems. It's I have taste. I have judgment. Um, I know my customer better than anyone.
(04:42) And they're putting that into Runith and having it work on it in a really sophisticated way. It's putting it in there and Runith is amplifying what they can do with that particular data. It's not a chatbot, right? It's not just clawed. It's not just chat GBT. That's the thing I love about Runith is that it pushes it further and it has your ad data, your competitor data, your creative strategy.
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(05:32) com and go and see what you can build. Got it. Makes complete sense. Um, do you feel like having built out that sort of software beforehand sort of gave you the knowledge base or the tools to sort of get started and, you know, start building on your own? Or, like, what sort of gave you the confidence to, like, get into cloud code and, like, what were the some of the first things that you did? I think it did.
(05:59) I think it um, you know, it helped me navigate the room better, right? When you're trying a new, um, let's say you're doing media buying on a new channel or you're starting to try to do cloud code whatever, you're in a dark room. Like, you need to figure out how to turn the light on and navigate around it.
(06:17) And then, once you've done that for a while, it's a lot easier to move between, you know, uh, AWS Secrets Manager and versel environment variables and all these different things, right? So, um, I had a little bit of familiarity with AWS backend through the project, and really it was just taking everything that I had done communicationwise with the actual human developers and then translating that to cloud code. And at the same time, um, just really understanding like what my role was, because my role was never with the software that I was building with the team to understand, um, like what the developers were supposed to do tactically. My job was to make sure they understood what the user wanted to achieve and that the overall flow made sense for the user that way. And that's all my job is now is to make sure
(06:58) that I understand the project management workflow, how we can improve what we need to do for our team and that whatever cloud code outputs achieves that. Got it. I think it's a really good frame of reference. So effectively like you are the product manager, right? at the end of the day like you are orchestrating Claude. You have a hypothesis. You have a thesis.
(07:28) You have a bedrock of knowledge that you're sort of building on and effectively using Claude as your executor, but like at the end of the day, you're sort of the marionette, right? You know, pulling the strings. Um, and so let's sort of dive in to, you know, what you've built and like how you sort of got there. So, like it seems like the problem was there's these really slow, clunky systems with UGC.
(07:47) You know, right now everyone's sort of like talking about Tribe, which is this sort of pay-to-play creator partner network where, you know, I think creators make 1.5% of ad spend and nothing more than that. Um, so if their ads take off, great. If not, then you don't have to pay for anything.
(08:07) Um, and so like candidly on a lot of sales calls, you know, we don't do creator sourcing, but one of the first questions I always get is like we have this sort of dashboard that we've built like couldn't you just like find creators with this? And I was like, "Yep, maybe." But like it seems like it's a pretty daunting task. So like can you maybe walk me through like sort of soup to nuts like how did you start this? Yeah. So the you know the tool the build actually did not start at the beginning of our process.
(08:28) Um so it's okay with you. I'll kind of start like where the build started and then go like linearly through the process from start to finish. But um the tool actually started with like what's the most urgent problem that we need to solve, right? And at that time it was um two main things. One a frustration that when creators would upload content into Google Drive they would not notify us about it.
(08:57) So our team was always on standby to try and figure out when the content had come in from the creators and at the same time keeping up with client feedback so we could minimize the opportunities for a client to have to repeat the same thing multiple times for multiple creators. So the tool actually started out dead in the center of the overall UGC process which was the QC phase. Now, taking a step back and then we'll get to like what that dead in the center looks like.
(09:24) What we've built out now has been slowly added on to week over week for the past couple of months. And uh our team will test out a new feature, send me some feedback in Slack. I'll screenshot that, give it to say fix this. But we we try to own the entire start to finish. What I mean by that is we've built out a form that is a 15step form.
(09:49) When we see a creator that we think might be a good fit because we follow the mindset of ABR, always be recruiting, right? We do that for our talent for our agency, but also for our creators, we will send that creator the 15step form. It asks them, of course, like name, age, gender, location, but a lot of other filterables because all of this then once they get approved goes into a database.
(10:11) So, do you have a pet you shoot content with? If yes, what type of animal? If dog, what breed and what age? Do you have kids you shoot content with? If yes, list them out. Girl, 11 to 13 years old, boy, 1 to three years old. Do you have visible tattoos? Are you licensed or state board certified in any of these things? We ask all of these questions.
(10:37) And then we also get them to tell us the industries they work in. And for each industry, they're given the option to upload up to three video examples. We do all of that for these reasons. Uh we have a database at this point of over 600 UGC creators. We have a client come on board. How can we go through 600 people very quickly and find who might have a Labrador Retriever or who might have a four fouryear-old son if we're looking at Canva decks? It's impossible.
(11:07) So you have a I I just want to zoom out real quick just because I think this is a really important detail. So you have 600 creators in your network. That's insane. So like how are you getting people to even complete this form? Like is there like an incentive? Like you know what is that process? No, it's just, you know, people we've worked with over time and also just, you know, the opportunity to um have projects.
(11:30) And at the same time the, the negative feedback that we did get from some is that they don't want another platform to keep up with, but that's not what this is. This is not like a platform for public facing. This is just a database of creators. So, you know, very well some don't fill it out. Some, you know, have rejected it. But more often than not, we find creators are open to that. Got it. Okay.
(11:51) And so is the system automatically reaching out to creators or like how are you curating that list? Good question. So um when a client fills out their onboarding form which is type form, we ask them some initial filterable questions, age, locations, so like cities, country, um languages, gender, all these different things. and we have that directly routed to our platform to do a pre-initial filter.
(12:22) The other thing that we have is we built out a feature called opportunities, right? And imagine it's just like it sounds. Uh our UTC manager will go in there, she will assign the name and then put all the filterables that we need for that specific opportunity. And then once she has uh completed that opportunity, it will go into our database and autoshort list people that it thinks might be a good fit based off that.
(12:50) And then she can go through and either keep the check box for them or uncheck them and then click a button that says send invite. So we technically have three ways that we invite people to our datab or to a project. One is they're already in our database and we just send them an invite. we already have their videos, their card. They just confirm through a button through email that they're interested.
(13:12) The other is we have their email and we don't work with them. They're not in our database. We will put a string of emails separated by commas into this field. And then we will hit invite and that'll give them a front-facing form where they have to upload a headsh shot, videos, and then all that. The third is that exact same form that's frontf facing but just a public link.
(13:36) So when we're posting on Reddit, on Twitter, in Hive House, which is Foxwell's community, which is great for you to see creators, we can have people just apply through that that way as well. All to try and minimize email back and forth to make our teams a lot easier. Got it. Okay. So there is a human in the loop that's effectively helping vet this initial process. Of course. Yeah, of course.
(13:56) There, you know, there are some things when we get to the QC phase like there is some things that AI can do. It can check noise levels. It can check um lighting quality in a video because those are like those are um scales if you will, but AI can't tell you if a video just is good or not. So they're definitely still has to be a human to assume this. So the goal is that this tech alleviates a lot of their their burden.
(14:19) Got it. So you you effectively just outsource like a lot of that pain in the ass admin work to the goal with everything we build this tool, everything else is get all the admin work out. So our team can use their brains for what their special is at. Got it. And I do want to double click or take a brighter click on what you're building.
(14:39) But you know, you know, I I think you raised a good point on like the admin thing like how do you even figure out like what are the biggest admin headaches? Like how do you figure out what are the problems that you need to solve in this process? Yeah. Um two ways. one is just asking the team and just kind of getting their feedback because normally you know you can open the floor and and they'll share you like what is the biggest pain point for them.
(15:03) Um we have like a you know town hall if you will but just asking everybody to list out like what are the things that are taking most of your time. The other is time tracking. We use Claude or Claude, we use ClickUp for time tracking, connect Claude to that and then have Claude do a time analysis of everybody by client and by task type so we can understand what is taking the most time for people. Got it.
(15:28) And then you feed that into Claude and Claude helps you say like, okay, these are the admin tasks that we can alleviate the most pressure from. Yeah. Like for example, we just like a senior media buyer, we just found that like 30 35% of their time was going to ad campaign setups. just not nothing t like nothing strategic. This is just turning off optimizations and meta and all that type of stuff for their side campaigns. If anybody listening has a tool that actually sets up um campaigns that is not just duplicating an ad set would love to see that.
(15:55) But because of that we just brought in like someone outsourced that is just specialist at setting up campaigns. So that's all they're doing. Right. So that's how we use time tracking. Got it. Okay. That makes sense. Let's go back to the process. So, we have a network of creators that are built in uh in this database. A client fills out a sheet.
(16:15) You're using Clawude to do like sort of a best match in terms of like these are the creators that would work. Um what's next? Yeah. So, once the invite gets sent, then the uh creators will apply. We set a deadline for like the availability for that opportunity. Once there's the submissions, our team goes through and reviews and then they will create a short list.
(16:38) There's another button in that little opportunity screen that says uh generate short list. And what that short list does is it creates a public facing URL. So the client can then go in and see uh four cards um horizontally or four cards beside each other and then you know limitless vertically. Each card is a creator. They click into that card, a modal pops up or a screen pops up.
(17:05) It plays the creator's videos and then it has an approve or reject button. If they approve that creator, we originally built this with it being front like a wrapper on top of ClickUp because we were using project management and ClickUp. We've transitioned away from that. When it was in ClickUp, approve would move that creator to a status called client approved and rejected. client rejected. Similar in our tool now.
(17:34) Um, and then once they've reviewed everyone, it notifies our team in Slack so they can go into the portal, see who's approved and denied, and then from there, they will click another button that automatically sends the rejected creators a notification that we're not going with them. The client went another direction.
(17:56) And then for the ones that were approved, they click another button that automatically connects to Panda doc, which I think we're going to switch away from because their API is extensive, and automatically sends that creator a contract to start their engagement. Got it. Okay, that makes you go ahead. Yeah. Okay. So, that makes sense. So, yeah, at the end of the day, like it sounds like a lot of APIs are sort of hooked up in here.
(18:20) So like when let's say you know probably doesn't make sense to sort of distill down every API that's being utilized but I think one thing that uh a lot of folks struggle with is just like the the Instagram sort of API sort of sucks right like it you can't really you know do DMs very well from it. So like you know are your creators constantly checking that dashboard to see if they got approved for something or not or like how are they getting notified? Are you shooting them a DM via Instagram? like you know how is that what does that look like? Yeah, they don't have to check the platform. They it's all through email. So every action that happens is sending out an email either to the client or to the creator.
(18:55) Got it. Okay. And then so you're just you just have like the Gmail uh API hooked up effectively. Yeah. Mhm. Got it. Yeah. We're using we're using we're using resend. Resend. Perfect. Okay. Got it. So the creator would get an email. They can hit like accept decline.
(19:16) that feeds back into the platform and then what happens like products get sent out like briefs like what is the whole process? Sure. Yeah. So, um just imagine like there's a little you know card or a little um section if you will that is that creator, right? We've sent them the contract, they've signed it, I signed it. That API feeds back into our tool to notify our team that the contract has been signed by both parties. And then that's when we go into brief writing as separate. But once the brief is ready, that creator has a card.
(19:43) Think about ClickUp and you see ClickUp has like the custom fields in a task. So you know like let's say one custom field might be um brief link and then the next custom field would be number of briefs. The next one would be number of hooks per brief and then um the next one would be deliverables. We have all of those originally in ClickUp now in our front-end tool. And so they'll go through and they'll outline scope for that creator.
(20:06) So let's say two briefs, three hooks per brief, um provide both of the brief links from Google Drive and then they will put the deliverables 9 by6, 4x5 and RAWs. When they do all that, they click send um send brief or send scope and it will automatically generate them a Google Drive folder. It will automatically move those um we use Google Sheets for our briefs.
(20:34) move those Google Sheets into their new Google Google Drive folder. It will automatically create them an upload portal that has drag and drop areas to upload creatives for every brief that they have. And then it will send them an email outlining next steps and what they need to do to get started. They click through that email and there's a screen that says start my brief or accept my brief.
(20:57) As soon as they do that, their clock starts and we start counting down to the 3 to five day turnaround time we offer for them to produce their content. Got it. Okay. And just to take a few steps back, the brief generation process, like what does that look like? Is AI generating the brief like based on context like you know what? Yeah.
(21:21) What's that process? We've done a lot to um to automate or use AI for like the research side of things. Uh, so like, voice of customer, competitor research, and all that, we are still very humanled when it comes to the brief writing. I'm sure our, you know, copywriting team jump starts with claw and stuff like that, but you know, there's a lot of, um, there's a lot of opportunities still, I personally believe, for AI to improve on copyrightiting, so a lot of that is still human le. Okay, cool, that makes sense. And so, like, what about, like, getting the product to the creator? Is that automated? Like, how does that work?
(21:53) We, uh, we could probably improve this. I'd love to know if you know anybody listening or if you have any thing that you do. But what we will do is the client does receive that creator's card and it shows their address and then we have a field uh in that card that says insert tracking link because another pain point that we've had is either clients not sharing tracking links or just not knowing where the product was.
(22:21) And then once they insert that tracking link and hit submit, it will go back to us so that we can keep up with that. I'm actually I was trying to work this week on building out a crime job so that it could scrape the tracking page to monitor when it got delivered, but it seems like it's consistent with USPS, but not with FedEx and and uh UPS. So, that's one thing we're trying to figure out right now.
(22:41) Yeah. Yeah. No, I've definitely experienced that. Uh it says it's delivered and then you get it like two days later or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, okay, cool. That makes sense. So, uh, the creator gets a product, they shoot the footage on their own, all manual, no real AI built into that, and then what? They just upload it back into your platform.
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(23:52) So go to Alia popups and book a demo. Our listeners get an extended free 45day trial. So make sure you tell them that Andrew Fox will set you. They edit. So we have creators edit, which I know a lot of agencies don't, but we have creators edit. And then they go into their portal. I can actually um I can show you this one piece really quick. Let me just try and pull up screen really fast.
(24:15) Um and I'm also curious after we sort of walk through that like have you considered or explored you know using Claude as a sourcer uh in terms of finding new creators? We have not yet. That is one area of opportunity that I think we would have. Um we have not done that much. We did just actually bring on somebody um like outsourced so that they could handle just focusing on review of things or finding creators. Um but no, we haven't. Have you ever tried that like with influencer or UGC in general? Not myself, but I have a client that's built out a whole system that will like
(24:54) you know reach out to creators and like that I'm something exploring as well, right? Because like we have for all of our clients, we know like the personas, angles, formats that are working. We know the net new personas that we want to test. And so it feels like marrying that to finding creators is like a logical next step.
(25:14) But this, the question is just like, do you just like have Claude go out uh, you know uh, maybe you use like Sonnet uh, find creators, and then you use like Gemini Flash to like analyze their videos and like try to match up, like, you know, if you're selling a pet product, like, "Here are like 100,000 pet product creators," or something like that? Like, I think it's doable.
(25:35) I just like don't know how reliable We, so we have not done on the UGC side of things, and I've learned from many sales calls good to define actually: UGC is content creator, no social following, not posting organically, they're just shipping you back ad content; influencer being like, uh, someone that has a following and then goes that direction. Those two get like combined a lot.
(25:56) On the influencer side of things, we did just launch last week, um, a tool where, so, human will find potential profiles on this is specifically for a YouTube influencer client or a client that wants YouTube influencers and then our UGC manager will verify that they're a good fit. We'll put them in a Google sheet and then we'll click a button.
(26:22) It will go through with Amplify, scrape all their profiles, scrape um the most recent 10 to 15 video titles, descriptions, and transcripts. And then it will feed all that to Claude and Claude will consume those transcripts and so and titles and then generate a three-step sequence cold email based on the transcript. So it looks like a human who watched their content is reaching out to them to increase our response rate.
(26:44) So too early to give you data data on that because we just started running it last week, but that's the only thing we've really done for sourcing so far. Got it. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. It's uh it's an area of massive opportunity, but anyway. Yeah, let's see. Let's see this. So, this is we have a test environment for our tool.
(27:04) Anybody listening, highly recommend once you actually have a tool that your agency is using day-to-day and relies on it, don't just ship it to that. Don't ship updates to that. Like, ship it to test first. So, we have a test environment. This is when I said earlier that when we send a brief to a creator, it creates their Google Drive and also their upload portal. This is what the upload portal would look like.
(27:24) Um, and so just imagine, you know, this is a brief where or a project where each brief just has one hook, but this would be multiplied. So, you know, they uploaded the the 9 by6 content. When they upload the content, we do have AI check to make sure that the aspect ratio matches what the aspect ratio is supposed to be for that asset. We have it check the first 5 seconds uh in increments to make sure that there is subtitles and if it fails there it checks the next 5 seconds and if it fails there it checks next and if they don't have subtitles and they're supposed to it autorejects their video and makes them re-upload it. And then um we also check caption placement. This
(28:01) is something that we need to perfect a bit. Right now, we're mainly just tracking to make sure it's within safe zones, but we need to add it to make sure it's not over face as well. Once they upload the content, it then goes to our QC section of our tool that uh looks something like this right here.
(28:21) And our team gets notified. Once again, this all started because our team had a painoint of not knowing when creators uploaded content. So, in our creator portal, which is one of the tabs, they'll go in, they will start. Let's see if I have an example here. Uh, no. They'll click the button that says start QC, and then they watch every video.
(28:43) We have a 20 a 20 point QC checklist. It says 21, but the actual one is that some of these are automated. So, no important content, bottom 20% of screen, um, you know, sound levels, echo, reverb, those types of things. Some of those get pre-checked by AI, some don't. They go through this checklist and then they also leave timestamp comments on the video as well.
(29:08) From here, once they have done this for every video, they hit send a client for review. The client gets an email with their portal. They go in, they get a very similar screen. They see our comments, they can leave their comments, they can approve a video or [ __ ] back with revisions every time that we leave content.
(29:33) And to me, this is why it's so important to own the database of creators. Every time that we leave comments on a creator's content or a client leaves comments on a creator's comment, two main things happen. First, when the client leaves comments, all that gets fed through Claude so that it creates a client learning QC list.
(29:56) Because everybody listening who sells a creative service has definitely experienced where you ask, "What are the brand guidelines and brand specifics?" and then first brief or second brief in, there's new things that you never heard before, right? Yeah, totally. We always wanted to solve that problem of how can we keep track of that. So, this is how we do that. The second one is we want to make sure that we are keeping quality creators in our database.
(30:19) Our first you know yes or no on them joining our database is what their content they show us looks like right. So if if Jordan who this demo fake name is submits content and our team and the client says poor lighting poor sound and then on the next project we and that client say poor lighting poor sound. All of that gets aggregated into their database card so it can flag that multiple projects they've had that issue and it'll move them into a um like safety security flag area so we can potentially move them out of our database. So we keep we try to keep track of all of these types of things and
(30:56) we also at the end of a project have multi-star turnaround time video quality communication rating systems one through five so we can give them star ratings as well. Got it. So, that's really, really interesting. And I think, to your earlier point, like we've all been in a position where, you know, there's been a 180 on brand guidelines or maybe they're like, "Hey, like, you know, we need 16 pixels between each of these things," right? So, like, it's helpful to sort of have that in the database. Like, is your QC checklist also being updated, you know when, with that database
(31:28) information? that's why I said it's a 20point checklist that says 21 at the very bottom there's a list of all the client feedback that gets aggregated every time new stuff comes out. That's awesome. That's really cool. I am definitely stealing that. All of that also go All of that also goes the creator portal that I mentioned um or showed you earlier.
(31:49) There was a little yellow box at the top. That stuff goes to the creators as well. And not just one creator, but all creators. So, if it's not something that is that creator specific, it gets sent to all creators. Got it. Interesting. Okay, cool. Um, and then you know, let's talk performance, right? Like, okay, so you know, a client approves a piece of UGC content after a revision or two, like how is the performance of that ad affecting future content that you're generating? That's a good question. So, that goes completely outside of this tool and more so into the
(32:24) tool that we spent three years building, which I wish we would have waited two two and a half years to build the code versus you are in great company for what it's worth. Minus. Yeah, could have saved six figures on software that I never did anything well, we used it at the agency but, um, we built out like a full... what started as a creative analytics software.
(32:46) So, think like Motion ,for play, Atria; um, and we tagged things across nine key categories: UGC, creator, messaging angle uh, creative format, product or feature, all these different things, right? And then... through naming conventions our software auto tags each of those with the specific thing. So it might be uh John versus Rachel and two different ads and then all of that gets moved into our central creative database or central creative dashboard where we have a tab for every category.
(33:17) So UGC creator product or feature and every row is the summed and averaged data for all ads that match those tags. So that's how we start, like especially with UGC creator. And you know, we don't do it currently, but once again, this is a... the UGC tool is something we've been building over time. Um, we plan to integrate the two so that we can loop back, uh, KPIs into the creators database cards per industry as well. Cool. Okay, that makes a ton of sense.
(33:52) And do your clients also have access to that tool that you've spent three years building? Yeah. Yeah, they do. Yeah, we uh we're trying to build that one out quite a bit more. So, it started as a creative analytics platform. We just added like a full Shopify connection and a full P&L customized builder so that we could like have a lot more um buyin from clients, but also financial transparency for our media buying team.
(34:15) Um so, yeah, they do get access to that. Got it. Okay, cool. Helpful. Um, from a UGC perspective, coming from a guy that is not a UGC guy or influencer guy or whatever the [ __ ] it's called these days, uh, you know, like how much of a value ad has this tool been for your company? I think it's been huge. I think, uh, value ad for the company and then for the team and for the client, value ad for the company.
(34:45) I think it's it's great to be able to show clients no matter what service that you sell in the sales process that you have some sort of tech built out to make your process replicable. So you're not so human dependent. I don't mean that in any negative way, shape, or form, but there's a lot more confidence in, like, okay, you're good enough at this to where you've been able to build out a program for it and, like, I can tangibly tangibly see it and know what my experience is going to be like, right? So I do a full I do a full demo from start to finish in most of my sales calls. Um just kind of walking them through the process and that tool
(35:16) and then team I mean it's just made our team a lot more efficient but at the same time just made their life easier. And I think there's a there's a fun part of it where the team can send me a Slack message, I can screenshot that, give it to Claude, and within 15 minutes their bud fix is done and they can just keep using it, right? Or the new feature that they want gets built out. Yeah, that makes sense.
(35:44) I think uh there's something that you mentioned that is probably slept on honestly by myself as well. Uh testing environment. So like let's talk about sort of testing versus shipping live. like what how are those set up? Are they they GitHub? Like you know, how are these sort of set up? And then like how are you the one that's going and doing all of this? Do you have a team member doing all of this? Like how are you deciding like what gets shipped and what doesn't? Um yes, right now it is just me.
(36:10) I lean on to claude quite a bit for full end toend testing. What we generally do, so if I'm building something brand new, I'm not going to like day one build a test in a prod environment. I'm going to build it to the MVP point to where it's actually going to go into actual use or what we call actual production, right? To where our team if something breaks, it's going to impact how good our team can do their job. At that point, I will build out the test environment.
(36:35) So, what I will do is honestly just tell Claude, um, you know, we need to take this current product that we have and duplicate it into a test environment. Give me a clear step-by-step process of everything you need me to do and at the same time you do it. I have claw directly connected to superbase AWS um uh versel everything I can and give it all the permissions that I can.
(36:59) So it can essentially do all of that and very quickly for reference for anybody listening MCP or API just real quick whatever the direct connectors are in cloud so I guess it's MCP yeah but for reference like the software that I built out uh with human developers it took us probably like a week and a half to two weeks to build out our test environment.
(37:22) Um it takes Claude maybe like an hour to two hours. Like it doesn't take a ton of time. And so what would I tell Claude? Like if I have and I'm doing this right now, but like if I have a database for my team and I want to just like, you know, potentially test net new ideas in a in a in a testing environment, what do I tell Cloud? Do I just say like, "Hey, can you like clone this?" Like, how do you link the two? How do you link the testing environment? How do you link the live one? And like, yeah, what does that even look like? So, are let's just assume you're using like Superbase or something in this example, right? Or AWS, right? Um, Superbase is a lot easier. It will start by duplicating everything structural wise.
(38:01) So, it'll duplicate your database. It'll duplicate your front end. It's a completely different URL, completely different um um like Versel is the same thing, but completely different environment variables because you can choose deployment, production, test, all of that. Um, and then from there, everything is still linked in the same git if that's what you're pushing to.
(38:22) It's just when you're doing when you're doing builds going forward, I always tell it um push to test before we push to prod and it'll push to test. And then I will tell um Claude run a full E2 or end toend test and make sure that you test all potential fail points and then outline what needs to be fixed. So I'll let it do that.
(38:50) What I've learned Claude is very bad at, unless you know I could just be missing something, is the uh this makes sense for how we want it set up versus not, but it's good at checking all the APIs, the documentation, all that stuff on test. Yeah. Yeah. It's also really good at leaking your APIs if needed. Uh but no, but I think you you raised a really good point.
(39:18) Um and I guess just like for like our power users that are listening, like what cloud models are you using? Is it like Opus, Fable? like do you have an orchestrator? Like are you just using this in Cloud Desktop? Like what does your process look like? Pretty simple guy probably. I uh I use Cloud Desktop. Um I'm of the type where like if it's a simple fix, I'll just use like Opus 5. Um but if you know, especially like on a Thursday when I need to max my credits out, I'm Fable 5, Fable 5.
(39:41) 1, like whatever I can do to try and get things built as as efficiently as possible. Got it. Nice. Yeah, I'm I'm sort of the same way. Uh max out Fable ASAP. Like if I buy, you know, and the weekend Fable is not maxed out, I'm doing something wrong. Like I I'm going to go ask it like what what should I buy for groceries this week? Yeah.
(40:02) I like to just make sure that like, you know, I I I fully understand there's still a lot of value in in expert human developers because I have no idea what under the hood looks like with my codebase for projects like this. Um, but I like to try to use the best model possible to minimize that as much as possible. Got it. Uh, we did an emergency pod this morning about Fable 5.1. I'm curious, uh, you know, as we sort of wrap up here. Fable 5, Fable 5.
(40:31) 1, like have you tested it? You know, what differences have you seen? Like, where is it better? Where is it worse? I have not been able to uh I think it moves a little bit faster but I have not been able to really give like a clean end to end. What do you feel like is better in in those two? Yeah. Um twofold. One uh it's really good at QCing your past skills and markdown files. Like I think one thing that was happening and this is going to be redundant for the other pod but that's fine.
(41:01) Like one thing I was finding is that like Claude like was taking so long to like QC static images that it was generating for like proposals and I was it would take like 6 hours and then I'd like go look at the statics ads and I'd be like this is fine. This is ready to ship. And it's because like I had like two lines in the markdown file that was just like putting it on this like loop. And so what I had Fable do Fable 5.
(41:21) 1 do is like I need you to go QC all of the skills I use more than twice a week and I need you to clean them up. And it literally did that and like it made a massive difference. The other thing I will say Yeah. Go ahead. Have you uh I told you we have um AI check the UGC for subtitles. Claude told me that flash will be better than claw for that. Have you tried flash for that? No. But 5.1 is it it's really good at subtitles.
(41:46) It can also do translation very well. If you want to like go to a different language, you can upload a video. It will translate the entire video and like also adjust the subtitles. It's actually a pretty good editor. Uh okay. Yeah. Okay. I'll try it out.
(42:00) And then you know my newsletter tomorrow is on this but like it's also a much better copywriter. Like it doesn't have like those sort of like bolds and like you know paragraph or like if it's not this it's this. It feels a lot more organic. Obviously huge asterisk here. Like if you are going to be you know posting slop on any you know newsletter or LinkedIn 5.1 will have the watermark. So people will be able to tell that you're using 5.1 copy.
(42:27) So like pick that you know and you know think about it carefully before you do anything. Um but you know to that end it is a much stronger copywriter I found uh as well. Awesome. Yeah I'll have to I'll have to take a look at that. Cool. Um any sort of final thoughts you know for our listeners like if you were to do one thing today and you're starting from zero uh what would you recommend? I'm trying to make this as as short- winded but it might be longwinded.
(42:56) um take the pressure off yourself of feeling like you need to know anything about code development. And if if you are trying to build something, all you need to understand is what's your goal outcome? What's the problem you're trying to solve? And how can you tr communicate that to Claude well enough for it to build something? If at any point Claude asks you to go into AWS and set something up, go into Versell, literally say, "Give me an easy non-developer step-by-step process to follow for this with links. Make it easy.
(43:25) " And if it doesn't say, "Make it easier." Make it easy for yourself. Claude is there to, you know, really navigate the whole journey so that you can just focus on being the architect of the overall build. I think that's so well said. And like I have one followup on that. I feel like a lot of folks get swayed when Claude tells them to do something a certain way.
(43:56) And I think you know to your point like being the architect is very very important, right? So like if Claude makes a suggestion to you like we should try this like and it differs from your initial thesis like how do you sort of think about that? Like if it differs from your initial build and it says like we should try doing this instead like how do you approach something like that? Challenge it just like I would a person else.
(44:14) And you know, it falls back to, you know, I'm not going to challenge it on like what language to write in or what this or that because I don't know anything about that, right? But, um, man, I'm trying to think of a recent example. I had one yesterday, um, if it will... Oh, so we just actually, uh, yesterday just did the update, because normally hooks always have, uh, subtitles in the first 5 seconds of UGC video, but one video did not have subtitles in the first 5 seconds because there's no speaking, and it was causing problems with being able to upload because he kept taking back. Claude gave me a recommendation on how we could fix it. And I said, "Actually, shouldn't you just measure the next 5 seconds first and then do this?" And it said,
(44:51) "Yes, that's a great idea, but Flash is already pull flash is already pulling all of these screenshots because we're doing another process over here. So, we already have what we need. What you want to do with duplicate work." Okay, cool. Let's do that then. So, I mean, just, you know, challenge it and see what it says.
(45:08) Yeah, I think that's a really really important point that folks miss is like you can push back on these models, right? Like you are pulling the strings like don't fall into the trap of just like saying what would Claude do, right? I think that's really really important. Um and yeah, it's just so easy to just be like, oh, you know, Claude told me to do this, so I'm just going to do that.
(45:30) Claude has zero context of um how your agency operates and what you're trying to achieve. It has a lot of context on API documentation, all that, you know, fun development stuff, but it's it's our job to make sure that we are directing cloud to reach our goal outcome. Its job is to do it with the best code build possible. Yeah, totally agree.
(45:55) And then like I guess one more question then we can wrap is like how do you ensure that you aren't falling in your that vortex like that that the claude is sinking for you rather than you being the orchestrator. That's tough man. I, you know, I've uh, I'm on the, like, I'm in such a on the fence spot about this cuz, like, at at one point I'm like, man, you know, you think of, and not relating myself to this at all, but like you think of, like, a high up Fortune 500 CEO, like they have a intern and they have a receptionist that does a lot of the stuff, like responding to emails and stuff like that. I'm like, okay, that's like what claude is for the common personnel. But then there's also times where like no,
(46:29) I need to like use my brain and just respond to this email instead of copying and pasting it. I'm on the fence. It's tough. It It is tough. Yeah, I completely agree. Uh, I completely agree, and like, I was definitely AI redpilled for a while, and I've sort of come out of that the other side. Like, I write my own emails now; like, I write my own newsletter entirely. Like, and it just, like, it makes sure I I'm sure, ensuring like my brain is, you know, being utilized properly.
(46:56) So it's easy to fall into that trap. Yeah. it becomes, you know, I think it's very easy for anybody to be to come over reliant on it and it's like what is the what is the balance? You know what I mean? Like what I guess Yeah. It's probably different for everybody, but it's it's a tough one. Yeah. It's like if you want to revert to the mean, just do whatever the quad says. Anyway, all right.
(47:17) Well, thank you, thanks so much for joining us. Uh stoked to uh get this live and uh yeah, that's it for today. Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me. We have an awesome tool that's a little bit of a secret and I'd like to tell you about it. It's called the Foxwell MCP. The Foxwell MCP connects into Claude, connects into your ChatgPT Pro and it gives you direct access to every single thing we've ever said in the Foxwell Founders community. Check it out at foxworlddigital.com/mcp.
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