How Go Brewing Built Their Entire Business Operating System With Claude Code | Joe Chura | EP 14
How do you build a business operating system with Claude Code?
You build it one component at a time and connect them, rather than building isolated dashboards. Start with the smallest painful process you already pay software for, rebuild it so it writes to your own database, then make the next tool read from that same data. Joe Chura rebuilt his brewery's sensory testing app in a single evening in Claude Code, tied it to batch numbers, then layered on customer support, wholesale onboarding, creative production and retail campaigns until every system in the company shared one set of records. The test for each piece is whether it increases revenue or reduces cost, not whether it is impressive.
In this episode, Andrew Foxwell and Will Sartorius talk to Joe Chura about how to build a business operating system with Claude Code instead of buying and stitching together software. Joe rebuilt his brewery's production, support, wholesale, creative and retail systems himself in about 90 days, and explains how the pieces connect, which builds paid off fastest, and why isolated dashboards are the mistake most operators are making right now.
Joe founded a digital marketing agency in 2011, grew a software company from $0 to $40 million in revenue in five years, sold it to Cars.com, and ran a 1,000-person organization with 100 developers. He now runs Go Brewing, a non-alcoholic brewery he says was the fastest growing in the country last year, with three salespeople.
We discuss:
- Why Joe rebuilt a cheap sensory testing app instead of renewing it, and what that unlocked
- How to connect internal tools so batch data, customer complaints and cost anomalies all read from one source
- Turning customers into a sales force with an ambassador app that pays out on validated leads
- Why the rate-of-sale math on non-alcoholic beer makes traditional field reps uneconomical
- A full screen-share walkthrough of Brewery OS, from nightly bug sweeps to a tank planner that saves a week of work
- The three highest-ROI things to build with Claude Code, starting with your Shopify theme
- How connecting GitHub to a Shopify theme took Go Brewing's conversion rate from under 5% to 10% in a weekend
- Using Claude Design to build a design system, then handing it to Claude Code as a prompt
- Why reading Microsoft Clarity every day is the cheapest optimization loop in ecommerce
- The mindset shift that is harder than the technology: getting a team to stop asking for reports
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To connect with Joe Chura, Founder and CEO, Go Brewing Go Brewing: https://gobrewing.com/
Joe on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joechura/
To connect with Andrew Foxwell reach him here Andrew@FoxwellDigital.com
To connect with Will Sartorious 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: www.foxwellfounders.com
Learn more about Foxwell Digital and join our newsletter: https://www.foxwelldigital.com/email
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 stratigest to hook insporations and creative briefs, runneth can do it all. See the case studies and try runneth yourself https://runneth.com/
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/
Chapters
04:19 What was the bottleneck before Claude Code?
06:55 Rebuilding the first internal app in Claude Code in one evening
09:50 Turning customers into an extension of the sales force
14:39 Sponsor: Runneth from Motion
15:50 How to decide what to build next, and in what order
19:02 Why team mindset is the real bottleneck, not the technology
24:21 Screen share: a full tour of Brewery OS
35:53 Live demo: building a retail campaign end to end
39:40 The three highest-ROI things to build with Claude Code
Transcript
(00:04) If you work in DDC and you use AI and you're wondering what the F is going on every week, this is your podcast. The AI to see F 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. Welcome to another episode of AI, DDC.
(00:25) Super stoked on this episode. Got to be honest with you. Have a real operator who will himself said makes him nervous. So you know how good that this guy is. Joe is an incredible operator and Will's going to go ahead and intro Joe, but glad you guys are all here. Yeah, if you sort of think about the guys that are in the big leagues that are sort of the 1% of the 1%, I think of two people.
(00:47) I think of Thomas, who is our third co-host, and I think of Joe. And generally I have a pretty big ego when it comes to Claude. But like, I always feel a little humbled when I talk to Joe about cloud Code. You know, Joe has built an agency very successfully in Soul Bat for, I think, 50 million. And now he runs a very successful nonalcoholic beer company.
(01:06) But, Joe, I don't want to sell your thunder. Maybe you can give a quick intro about yourself and, like, how did you even get interested in cloud code in the first place? Yeah, well, thanks for having me on, guys. It's. I feel like I want to say that I'm so lucky. And I think a lot of us are lucky to live in this time where you can have an idea and be able to create it.
(01:25) Often we're limited by everyone you meet as an idea for something, right? But now you can actually go create it without a lot of friction. We'll mention I built an agency in 2011 focused on digital marketing. So I was literally at SM advanced. When Matt cuts, if anyone remembers him announced schema. And so he was the Google SEO guy.
(01:47) I know I'm dating myself. And then and then schema got announced. I was like a part of that whole thing when SEO started to become not black Hat, and you had to, like, put out meaningful content and just watch that grow. But that was what my agency did. And then we quickly went on to building websites and bunch of stuff, mainly in automotive industry, which gave me the idea to create a software company to for a few reasons.
(02:08) One is the designs out there. Kind of sucked. Secondly, there was no attribution. So I created a patent called Roxanne that tied in attribution to these that car dealers would get, which no one was doing the space. So think like triple wheel today for car dealers in 2013. So have a have a patent on that and then built a software company to create car dealer websites and then create a live chat and automation through AdWords.
(02:33) And, and when I say I my team did and we ended up being one of the fastest growing companies in America. Five years went from $0 to 40 million revenue and sold the businesses to Cars.com. And it was an amazing ride. I had at one point as I stayed on as the CEO after I sold the businesses, I had 1000 employees. I'm literally at 100 developers, and I could tell you definitively, and these were like really good developers.
(02:57) I would say most of them, that I could do much of what they're doing in a weekend that I couldn't get done successfully in six months or the way I wanted to. And it wasn't it wasn't because of their talent at all. It's just because when you start to understand how to leverage the tools in front of you and you know the goals that you want to accomplish, and when you can connect the dots in a way that can be meaningful, you just have such an advantage.
(03:20) And that was my limiting factor, is I was always the guy that had the innovation that can see, like how to put things together, but like couldn't really want to articulate the way I wanted to always. And secondly like get the outcome that I expected either. So then once once you do that and we've had scrum teams, we have we followed every best practice you can.
(03:39) I had all the things, you know, we were injury and we did everything by the book. But still it just took a long time. And the bigger your company gets the harder it harder it is. So now found myself like in my running and creating as of last, last year, the fastest growing brewery in the country. And I've done this with three salespeople because I've been leveraging tax and state one not nearly at the velocity that we are today, but by thinking differently about the space that we're in.
(04:10) And that's where I think people can really kind of take a step back and say, like, what do I want to accomplish? Like, what's the goal here? Like, how am I thinking differently about this industry and then develop a tool set to help you do that effectively? Yeah, that makes sense. So let's sort of go to the impetus of like Claude code, like what was sort of like the status quo of what your business was doing and like what were the bottlenecks and like, what were some of the initial things that, you know, Claude code
(04:38) or just like AI helped enable for you all? There's there's a few things I'll touch on I two tangible examples. One is we had this really basic sensory app that we would pay a nominal amount for. Wasn't anything that was like breaking our bank to have this app, but it was to me, on the surface, just a very easy to to replicate or rebuild and do it in a way where it ties to our systems.
(05:04) But I wasn't even thinking about the time tour systems until until I built it. And what this was is when you produce your product. So. So I want to say that especially for my business, because we do all our own manufacturing, there's a ton of data that comes in and out, goods that are material goods, raw supplies, and there's finished goods.
(05:24) And then there's complexities with like because we also want a contract manufacturer like who owns what. And it just gets crazy really quickly. But along the way, when you're making a product, you do what's called sensory testing. So you basically taste it. You make sure it is inspect, you do tests on it, you document those tests and you make sure that everything is looking good.
(05:45) So by the end of it, you don't get a surprise and you're like, oh, that's, you know, 1% alcohol. Because for us it can't go above 0.5%. So we have to strenuously test this stuff all the time. But then then after we make it, we do what's called a sensory panel. And we have our team come in and we taste the product.
(06:00) Everyone gives it a thumbs up. And that's what releases a batch of beer for us. So there's about ten different steps. So the end of it, there's this app that we use and the team would come in and they will log into this app. And they would basically put in there'd be various tests, but let's say one would be like, okay, does this taste like the beer that we've had before? Right.
(06:20) Where where it has to have all these notes, it has to look a certain way. And if and they could go in there and basically pass or fail a bunch of questions. So it's like we could totally like rebuild this thing. And that was my first time that I started to get more into the coding, like I was saving the backend side of things here versus just editing like Shopify and TML emails and things like that.
(06:40) So then I was like, okay, well, let me, let me test it out. So I went on lovable and I started to play around and I was like, wow, this is like super easy. So I built this whole experience unlovable. And then I realized, like, level was not really a at least for me, it didn't seem like a future scalable thing. So I was like, oh, I heard about cloud code.
(07:00) I'm a mess around with it. And that evening I was able to go in there. I installed terminal, so I use terminal for everything and just started to rebuild this app. And and I did it from basic, basic principles of what's the lowest common denominator of things that I needed in their first and then build up from there.
(07:19) And I could explain that later too. But that's that's kind of what started kind of the first thing. And then once I built it, I'm like, wait, we also get customer, I'm going to call them concerns, but let's say a customer hits us up three months from now and they're like, hey, I had this beer was on the shelf.
(07:35) It doesn't taste right. I was like, well, what if we could tie that back to that sensory test and make sure, tie those batches together and then make and then say, oh, you know, there was nothing different we did with this batch because once you have the batch number, you can look at historical like, hey, did we change ingredients of here or anything? Then all of a sudden things started to connect, like, how do you take these different experiences in your business and time together to even get good intelligent data?
(08:00) So, so that was like the basics of it. And the from there it was just like, oh, well, once we have that, then what if what if we can collect from the customer pictures of their can and then use OCR to read the batch codes so the team doesn't have to do it? So then we created a little experience for that. And then it's just like keep that building on to building on and building on to what we have today, just what I call brewery OS.
(08:23) So that's like one tangible example. The second one was I was actually, as I mentioned, like we started off really tech forward in this business, and I had this idea to disrupt the go to market strategy of what beverage brands typically do, especially beverage brands like, like ours. And the typical thing what companies do is they will hire feed on the street reps, which are really important to have.
(08:49) I'm not saying they're not to then going to bars and restaurants and, and solicit them to get the product to get your product in there. The problem is with Na, our rate of sale at a traditional account is fractional compared to an alcoholic beverage, meaning if will the store buy you selling? Let's say ten cases of set alcoholic beer a month or on draft we might sell a 2 to 3, so that doesn't mean the rep can handle more accounts that that just means that, like, we're not getting enough revenue from that account.
(09:20) And if you start adding up the economics like don't scale, but it's still hugely important. If you if I had billion dollars in funding, I would have reps all day long. But I thought about like what? What's different about our business that I can leverage compared to the competitors? And the difference with our business is day one.
(09:38) We had a Shopify store first times in history. There's brands now that are selling online beer online because you can't sell beer online, but you can sell any beer online. So we have a customer database of customers have purchased from us a number of times. So then I thought about what if we leverage our customers to be an extension of our sales force? Is are the best salespeople anyway, if you walk in as a customer to a restaurant and you're like, hey, do you carry go brewing? The probability for them to pay attention is a lot more than sales rep,
(10:03) and you'll see 50 of them in a week. So I was just like, what if we do that? So in order to do that, we needed to build an app to make it as frictionless as possible for the for the customer. And then we needed to build an interface like conduit to a system and into our distribution partners. So so the way it works is the apps there will and you guys have access to the app.
(10:25) You're out and about at dinner with your family. You notice like there's no nonalcoholic beer on the menu. You go to, you go to our app. You then can talk to a manager, be like, hey, would you be interested in casing go brewing? It's awesome. I come here all the time. I would love it. And they say, and if they said yes, then you would just literally like do a lookup in there.
(10:44) Finds their businesses information and you and you get the person's info. You hit submit lead, we validate it, you get paid and we send it to our distribution partner. Well, the back end of this whole experience was this constant iteration needed, right. But I was solely reliant on my former CTO, who came on as an advisor to this, who single handedly built the app.
(11:06) I'm mocked up to everything, built, built the app, launched the app, and then built this back end interface. And I was as I was like looking at it, I was like, man, I want to do these things, but there's no way that we're going to be able to iterate as fast as you want. So I rebuilt the whole backend engine of it, and now it's part of our like, holistic customer experience, ties to payouts and a ton of automation.
(11:28) And and not only do we have that, but then we have a separate system. I'm like going into that here that identify accounts that might be like let's call them dormant or their velocity in those accounts that are slowing down. And now we could also send what I call like missions or assists out to those same ambassadors and say, hey, can you go check on the shelf at Wegmans at this particular location to see if our products there? Because my data is telling me it might not be.
(11:53) And there's a bunch of variables that happen when you're in this space, because from a buyer's perspective, at a retailer, once you get in and they're like, yeah, we're going to stock your brands, it's up to you to get them in there. Well, you normally use distributors to make that happen. Well, if a distributor messes up or you mess up or or the store doesn't order and all these things happen, you might not be on the shelf.
(12:18) Well, guess what? At the end of the year, when the buyer goes to look at his numbers, none of that matters. What matters is like how much? I mean, units you sold. So your distributor might not have delivered there for six months. This would happen to like Loverboy and Kyle talks about this is that he had a problem with his distribution, that people weren't restocking it.
(12:35) So the distributors or the retailers, a lot of them dropped them and then the distribution dropped them, because if you can't stop shelves, you done. It's hard and it's hard enough in business. So anyway, we built this system that ties it all together. But then velocity it, which needed to iterate was such that I needed to kind of take it over because there's no one that could have built it faster and knew what we wanted to other than myself because of my vision.
(12:57) Right? So if you have a vision for something, you don't have to be relying on someone else. Yeah, that makes complete sense. I mean, the thing. Yeah. Go ahead. Well, no, go for it. I mean, the thing that's interesting, just hearing you talk about this is something I think so many business owners are in this place of right now, which is that I'm enabled with AI.
(13:13) I'm going through this. I'm thinking about it. Right? Or I feel like I'm enabled with the AI and it starts you start with one idea and then that idea, like blossoms into another idea, and then it kind of continues to expand. It's like, I wonder if I can x, y, z. How do you Joe? Because you have a bigger organization you are dealing with obviously production like you talked about.
(13:34) I mean, there's I do want to get back to talking about the OS, but how do you start to build an understanding of the systems of which you're switching over to eyes, like, is there somebody that's a project manager that's with you, or is this in your head, or do you have a way that you're tracking these, even with something you built with AI that's like, okay, look like these I know are inefficiencies or the customer could do this.
(13:57) What if we enabled this? Right. Because I like when what I've seen with a lot of organizations is they start with one thing and then it goes and then like a month later, they have like AI is doing like 12 things. And I'm always like, how are you keeping track of this? And there's certainly software that's out there that seems to be trying to solve the interconnectedness of staff, which is one problem, but another one is is like, how are you going to establish like, this is what we're doing, this is why.
(14:25) And this is what we believe will be the outcome. How are you establishing that and keeping that going? Because that's where I think a lot of people get caught up. This episode of Aid to See is brought to you by runneth from motion. And, you know, there's so many interesting things about runneth that I absolutely love.
(14:46) The best marketers I know right now are not sitting there going, how do I get an answer my questions? They're thinking in systems. It's I have taste, I have judgment, I know my customer better than anyone, and they're putting that into runoff and having it work on it in a really sophisticated way. It's putting it in there and runneth is amplifying what they can do with that particular data.
(15:07) It's not a chatbot, right? It's not just Claude, it's not just ChatGPT. That's the thing I love about runneth is that it pushes it further, and it has your ad data, your competitor data, your creative strategy, it has your product data, and it helps you understand all of these things together so that you can genuinely train it on how you think.
(15:26) And it becomes useful from an operational level, saving you time, giving you context, and giving you important information so that you can make the most absolute best decisions as a marketer today, to help make your business run more efficiently. Motion can do so much. Runneth can do so much on top of it, so I encourage you to give it a shot.
(15:48) If you haven't, run a calm and go and see what you can build. My answer might not be helpful to a lot of folks because it might be on Orthodox. I literally do it at all. Like, I know the business so well that I see the pain points because I'm with the team and I say with with a caveat, I do 98% of it. There's the amount of stuff that I built in 90 days.
(16:10) It would be embarrassing to even show you because it's so much. But I also one I, I find this like super fun. This is what I do for fun. So so I'm so it's hard not to do it. And I put a lens on of like, how is this actually going to drive business outcomes and not just create yet yet another tool. And I happen to be in a position where my background of knowing technology and how things connect.
(16:36) And now knowing this space and being a part of like our ERP from day one of like, how does NetSuite work and how can I connect to it? And how do I want to show what's meaningful to being a speaker at Google and, and meta like a decade ago? I mean, like, like, like evolving with that and being able to see the big picture to tie things together.
(16:58) So I tackle it by which now especially of like what's going to deliver the biggest outcomes. But as I alluded to earlier, I kind of tease this a little bit. You have to look at things like you're on an assembly line and I might want full automation, right? But until I built a creative studio, I'm an online studio, meaning like a thing.
(17:22) I could put a couple of prompts there, creates a ton of images and pictures and ads. And until I tied in tools to help me create those, like inspiration tools. Like, for example, I have an API through a tool that allows me to look at meta ads that are doing really well that that then I could look at it and say, okay, I want to create 20 eyes just like that.
(17:44) I want to create ten ads just like that. And that's all. Like, that's all built now. Right? Then I had to build a copywriter. Copywriters look at all my ingestion of all my reviews of of Reddit, of anything. Comments. Now Facebook comments. Because that's where a lot of stuff lives to. And then building objections to those for copy.
(18:03) So now I have the creative side of the copywriter, and now the rest of it becomes a little bit easier because now now you're building, you have these components that you build right now you can start to think about the size. So what I'm saying is, like I looked at every part of the business like that. I broke it down by the smallest parts and in building it up, and now it's coming to a place where this stuff is starting to talk to one another, and I can show you something that's like, pretty insane that that launching a still
(18:30) haven't fully tested yet that looks at like if I wanted to do a campaign at a certain retailer because this meta is like one use case that's not overly hard, that's not overly difficult. Meaning like what's difficult is retail. How are you going to move the needle in retail retailers where all these brands like their valuations come from? Most brands aren't getting valuations from their direct to consumer business alone.
(18:55) So you gotta have this initial experience. So that's what I'm really focused on because I've built all these parts. Now I'm building this experience that was amount of accounts we had. There's no way we could do this. And this is a long answer your question, but the team, the hardest part is having their mindset shift around this stuff because they're so used to doing reports or like, I want to click this and see this and, and and then the kind of that's it.
(19:22) Then they have the report, they're like, let's go do this thing. I'm like, no, let's there's no way we could keep up. There's no way that we would be faster than an agent that is doing it. Well. We sleep. So that's the that's the biggest challenge for me. But again, I don't know how full that is to other people because I'm like obsessed.
(19:39) And this is what I do for fun. Yeah, I don't know. I mean I think you to do it well, you have to be close to it, you know, and I think to your point, like, I think the founders that I know do. Well, I just, I think that maybe what you're doing and maybe what we're talking about here is, is the is the 2.0, right.
(19:53) Like and and what I really think is it started in like I don't know you will you feel about this and I'm sure you have another question but like it goes you know, V1 is like, all right, like an e-commerce business. Like I'm going to go and I'm going to update, you know, update my landing pages. It's like, see what I can do on that.
(20:09) And then it's like I'm going to do around with some of my creatives. Right. And like, you sort of start doing these v1, v2 type activities. And now what you're talking about is like you're talking about operating systems. And so now we're on to a whole different category. And I think now, you know, the V5 678 of this stuff is here's the team that's a building this and here's the hypothesis and here's the outcome we hope to get from it.
(20:36) Because I there's there's not many organizations that I know of at this moment that are doing that. I see a lot of things in terms of like, you know, you look at you look at other industries like, you know, suffer from injuries and Horowitz that they, you know, they're talking about how to make sure it's talking to you properly, your AI.
(20:55) But there's a lot of the only systems based stuff that I've seen have been from, like the large consulting groups that are going in and trying to do $100,000 a month engagements with the fortune 100 companies. And, and that's, that's the framework they're trying to set up. Here's the test, here's the why. And it's just like, you know, it's it it can do almost anything.
(21:16) So but without a system it's not going to be there. So it's interesting to hear your take on it. And I think you have to be obsessed with as a founder. Otherwise it's not going to go anywhere. And you have to see the magic yourself. You know, I don't I don't think if I'm a CEO and I hire a consulting firm to come in to do all this AI work, I don't think I will ever get it the way that someone like you will.
(21:35) Right? That's that's like a moat that you're building for the business, which is crazy. It arguably it makes your business infinitely more attractive to, to like any buyer or whatever in the marketplace because nobody else has any idea what the fuck they're doing. Yeah, I think I think a large part of that is your point is like going to be going to be shown in the outcome of it, right? I could do all this stuff, but if I'm not selling more, it doesn't matter.
(21:58) Now if you start to see the velocity go out of what we're doing, and being the number one fastest growing was definitely a cool thing to to talk about. And we will be the fastest on Amazon. I mean, we will be number one in our category in Amazon in 60 days. So like those things aren't by accident there because we've been building the some of these things.
(22:18) And the thing that I can't wait for is to where it is truly a genetic, and no one is going to be able to catch up to it. It'll be impossible to catch up to it like, because now, now you've built it in a way where these systems are talking to one another and getting better and smarter, and and that is where what I'm trying to get to is like, as possible, but in a way where it's scalable.
(22:38) So it's not just a bunch of shit too, because it could go it could go south. You have to think about all those guardrails in place. But but to your point, Andrew, like all of this starts in V1, right? So you have like you have that sensory thing like that's very basic V1 and then you're like, okay, well what's the other thing on this side of the business.
(22:56) What customers send emails to us. Right. So that led me to then rebuild. Gorgeous. Like I rebuilt my own support ticketing system now because I'm like, why wouldn't I do that? Because I have all the information I'm going to feed gorgeous my information to for the AI to like make any sense. So like so so now I have three things right and now and and you can see where it goes from there.
(23:17) So that's the thinking that I think people can can it I find it hard for people to think like that. But like once they do then you're like, oh shit. Like this is crazy. Like I didn't know I could do this stuff. So that's that's what I would say. Yeah, I definitely tend to agree in the sense that, like so many folks I talked to, it feels like everyone in their companies almost that's using Claude code is like building independently.
(23:40) Right? They're building like these dashboards or, you know, these tools that, like, aren't speaking to one another. And like that, I think is a massive mistake. And like, to your point, like creating an operational system that it can be fully everything needs to be in full communication with one another. And obviously, like with the conveyor belt, I think it's a great analogy.
(23:58) It's like you have a conveyor belt that is still like pushing everything forward, but ultimately it's all moving towards the same end goal. So I would love if you're if you're open to it, you know, maybe you can sort of like walk through, you know, Berrios that you've built and like how everything speaks to each other and like what this sort of looks like, you know, on a day to day basis.
(24:19) Yeah, sure. Let me I'll just share my screen on a time here. Right here. This will take me back to this pulse. This right here gives me an AI system on any page. This is the other thing that's pretty cool. Like, people are like, well, how do you keep up with this now that your whole team is in there? And basically you the team has the ability to send a bug report enhancement, a feature request.
(24:42) And then in the back end, any bugs that come in. I have something called sentry plugged in there, identifies the bugs, and does a bug sweep every night. So if it's something that I don't need to manually look at, like a feature request, it'll go manually clean that up for me automatically. If there's something urgent like they usually like, we'll do that.
(25:00) But then triage via slack to and then feature requests on the back end. I basically have the ability to look at any of this information here, and I could say like, okay, yeah, these are good ideas. I look at them and I could click combine and preview and it basically combine a prompt to do all these things. But in each one of these things, there's a lot more detail.
(25:23) So I can look at the detail of this coming in screenshots. I could copy this one and I could get working on it. And then when it's done, it automatically closes it out and it slacks the person and lets them know. So that's just one example of like scaling this. And then here's the back end where I put like all the APIs in all that stuff.
(25:44) So and then given user access to modules and that's just kind of like building things with the right architecture, having built systems before and websites like I just had that and then we'll get into everything in here because you can see there's there's a lot, but everything from production to what I was saying, the sensory tests to logs to results.
(26:04) If we do trials, let's say that we want to reduce costs on a year. We can do that here and we could do a trial on it. We can look at the results. And this is why, like if we get a complaint later, we could tie it back to all of that. And then as far as like costs here, I can go back and say, okay, here's my liquid costs that pull in from NetSuite.
(26:23) I could look at anomalies. So this beer here's the average barrel cost of this beer. I could look at all batches by beer trying to analysis. And you can see here that it's it's going down. So then because I want to manage what I measure and measure what I manage. Right. So it's like really important. If I want my product clogs to go down I'm going to start to track them.
(26:47) And I have a CEO, son of great job at CEO at our contract manufacturing facility. And that's his focus. So that's just an example. And then I could click through here and see things over time and so forth. So just imagine like I have that for like every part of our business, our daily planner, this was like the 2% thing that I would say I'm not doing.
(27:08) So my this is like our tank planner and my head of operations taught him a little bit how to do this, and he's really kind of just owning this part. So this basically saves him a week of planning at a time. So these are all the tanks we have. This is everything we have planned for one facility. And and we're able to then forecast that out and can imagine from there it does a lot of cool things.
(27:33) Our online wholesale key context. So our online wholesale when someone buys for an online wholesale account we built a version. We just basically did a headless Shopify store. They log in there when they submit an application. It scores their application to see like is this person legit? For example, if they're like if they're buying our assembly electrolyte water, it'll look and do a lookup and lookup.
(27:55) So I basically looks at their email history and we'll then grade them. And if it's above eight or above it automatically approved. And get a wholesale account team doesn't have to talk to them at all. If they're lower than that then we manually look at it. Social media from anything from organic that we have going on some mentions.
(28:13) And so these are things where people tag us. I pull in something called mentioned Litex, which is basically like advanced school news. If if I see something here, I could see push to press and then I see it here, and then I basically can add it to my website by clicking the button here says anybody with Shopify.
(28:32) So if you go to our website and you go to the bottom page and says press, it can show like here's the latest articles so I can create those that come over from here. So this is the not that other stuff wasn't fun, but this is like the creative studio. So I could go to quick create and basically create a photo video.
(28:48) And these would be like example of of shots that we would do. Or let me do this one on products here. So this would be like images we'd use on like emails and things like that. So our products swapped with models with problems that are just built in. You don't have to really do anything with them. And then we have very different brands here with different brand guidelines.
(29:14) So I'd be able to to manage it, manage it that way. And then. And then well if you, if you guys want to I'm just I'm just going to keep going. I don't know how exciting this is. If you want me to keep going here or what, but like I have I built a form generator so got rid of type, form, email and SMS. So this will this is actually pretty cool.
(29:39) So it integrates with Clio and and I can build an email campaign here build a segment within here. So we're we're going to like the Diplo Run Club or a new sponsor of it for example. So within I don't know maybe like two minutes I was able to create this email. And because there's a form here, I have the form.
(30:00) But not only that, I when I go to create the email, I can build a segment. So I could build a Denver segment right here that's integrated. You click one button, email goes out to the Denver segment. That's it. So so effectively you're never really leaving this. Like you can run the entire business through this tool.
(30:19) Yeah. Yeah. So then so then once I built like all these things out and I could even investors for my, my data room that I'm creating to deck some presentations to reports and products. You built this all on. This is all built on cloud code. Yeah, yeah. Pretty much I mean, few other things here and there, but. Yeah.
(30:41) And have you thought about independently selling this tool to other breweries eventually? You know, I do that every time I. Yeah. You know, I mean it's this is, this is like can work for any, any CPG company really I think that because you're kind of everything together. Right. But I mean, it's it's possible. So like here's the hero image generator, like I was saying.
(31:08) So like I could go in here and then create like a schedule of like, okay, I want the website to change here. And I wanted to do X, Y and Z or Beer Club. So right now I could change inventory to say like, okay, here's how many we have or how many pending subscriptions we have. If this when this goes below a 100, I'm sorry.
(31:30) This this is not not a good example here. When this when something like this gets below 100 like it automatically creates a lockout. So basically will make them not available on the store front and then say, okay, you only can get this if you're in the beer club. So that's the kind of logic you could do. I mean, to me.
(31:49) So there's a couple of things that are I mean interesting about this. Like one is obviously for it's crazy to see this. And if you're listening to the audio version of this, I think it's worth going check out the YouTube version to see this. I mean, one is, is that I think this is definitely where so many more brands can go in terms of building a full dashboard of the business, which is is something that I think you start to see, and I'm starting to see and hear more people doing where it's bringing all of the disparate things
(32:20) that you're doing in the business in one place. And I think this is a great usage for AI generally. The second thing that makes me think of is, you know, I have maintained that outside of a few other industries in, in direct to consumer e-commerce like we are, I think, on the leading edge of trying to figure these things out.
(32:40) And in terms of of testing and stress testing and trying and I think a lot of other industries are too. Don't get me wrong. But it seems to me that from what I've seen, like we're really pushing limits on, hey, have you seen this? Do you know this, etc. and there's so many. You talked about car dealerships before, Joe.
(32:57) You're talking about breweries like I used to work with multiple breweries as well. And, you know, just such an old school of business like. And so, I mean, in, in the distributor partnership, you know, I mean, just what you talked about, like, it's so common, you know, getting it and like, what is it like on the shelves and to some degree CPG generally is still behind in that way.
(33:19) And there are a few firms that I know of that are pushing limits on that. So I think it's really interesting to say, like if you're listening to this. You're listening to this. One of the absolute green pastures is trying to find a niche that doesn't have this kind of thing, and this can be something that you're creating with it or for them that you can create dashboards that are going to bring the whole business together.
(33:41) And like you will change the business fundamentally as long as you keep, as you said, Joe, like have the North star of like, is this banking us more money? Right. And is this making, is this cutting costs or is this bringing us more revenue or more customers or all of those things? Hopefully it's doing all those things.
(33:58) And if it is, then absolutely. Let's go. So it's just an exciting time to think about because it's it opens up just infinite possibilities. Yeah, that was it. You're right. In that lens I think is so important because all of this feeds into the greater good of like, is this helping your business? Am I going to reducing my labor costs over time? Or I might not have to hire some people.
(34:25) And and it's not like I don't want to, but we're, you know, when you're especially when you're in CPG, chances are you're like me and you're not profitable. So every dollar that I could put into building the brand is going to give us a better fighting chance at competing with the biggest companies out there. So our right to win is is this, you know, like that's what you have to think about as a business.
(34:46) Like how do you how do I compete as Bud and Miller Lite? You know like like it's really challenging. Like they're huge right? They've been around forever. They're great companies like. But I got to figure it out. So this is the hour right here is me. And like what's some unique things that we know how to do that others don't.
(35:05) At least it this moment in time. So it's it's it's hugely important. And then be able to do things like this which this is like I built this office yesterday or the last two days. But the ability now to create because I have all these building blocks is, is ridiculously easier now. Meaning like I could keep layering on because I've already made the cake, you know, I don't know if that's a great analogy, but like, I just keep layering on it because I really have the base down.
(35:40) I have all the connections, I have all the things. So like when I want to do something like this, I can do it. So I can, I can do something like, and this is like what will be will be automated. But let's just say I want to do like sprouts Bogo. And so sprouts is a is a chain. I'm just using them as example. So sprouts are here this this isn't I think.
(36:06) So then it'll pull up all the sprouts that we have. We don't have all of them. I'll pull up some other chains that we have and they just build build a strategy. So it's basically looking at all the things that it could do to help move the needle. And what I was talking about is once we start to do this more and more, not only is it doing this, but is creating a program that I can measure and I can then go look at.
(36:30) So it's basically creating this, this annotation to then say, what? What did you do to move the needle and then do more of that and less of the stuff that doesn't. So what I just did here is it basically is like, okay, you want to do this by one, get one free offer at sprouts, get it. But be careful because your distributors, you have eight of them that need to.
(36:58) You have eight locations within here that haven't had stock in a while. So you don't want to send people to a store that doesn't. So I could literally this happened yesterday on accident is sent to email to the distributors like it was. I was testing it and I got an email back and it's like, just check they're all stocked up, you know, because they could be stocked up.
(37:19) There could be other variables there. You know what the reality is like? That's the reality, right? So then this other idea I had is this, there's there's an ability to like, do a rebate so I can generate that. So basically generates in my programs I build place rebate generator that someone could go in there by the buy a product, upload the receipt.
(37:42) I use OCR to make sure that it's legit. Team does another once over check on it and then we we do a payout right there for for the rebate. So instead of you sending something in and it takes 30 days to get its immediate. And then this is this is kind of cool. So again this is tying things in together. So I'll I'll jump to this tab here.
(38:06) So so if you go to our website now this is the dynamic heroes that I was talking about. And if you go to where to find us, if I put in my zip code here, you'll see what happens. This sponsored like listing so to speak pops up. So then get the offer to then get the rebate. And the reason why it pops up is because we we wanted to target this store with an offer for a very similar reasons.
(38:42) So, so so then then it goes into okay, great. You have that. But that's only the targeting the people that are actively looking on your website to buy your product. Right. Okay, cool. Well I'm going to build a clever email to target the people near the sprouts and do a five mile radius around them to send a postcard out to them.
(39:04) This I'm still working on. I'm going to create meta ads based on the products that I automatically know that these they sell. And then we create a Google Ads campaign with very specific search. And then I'm going to hit launch. And then when I launch, you know happens it all launches. It's yeah, it's truly crazy what you've built here.
(39:27) And I guess I guess just like to sort of tie this all up, you know, maybe for the folks that are watching this and just like, you know, sort of awestruck or just like, you know, I could never fucking do this, like, what would you say maybe are like sort of the three most like accretive or like ROI positive things that like a business could do with cloud code that were just like massive unlocks for you.
(39:50) So I'll say the one that I kick myself on that I did not learn earlier, and I'm going to create a YouTube video on this to really describe it. This website here I, we had a website for since we opened and it looked pretty similar. And there's things I wanted to change on, and I was dependent on a developer to change those that I trusted and had a good look, look and feel.
(40:12) And I could change certain things for sure. But there's there's so many things connected. Even before with the website, I figured out that you could install GitHub to Shopify and natively, and you basically can download a theme file, upload your theme file to GitHub. You have to I would upload it c create a GitHub project, upload it to GitHub, connected to a theme, and then literally cloud code to that repo.
(40:48) And I'm telling you like my conversion rate. No joke. Will can attest this because he looks at it went from less than 5% to 10%. I'm getting a 10% conversion rate and I did it in a weekend. The the other thing that I would do that was on lock is I went to. This podcast was a ton of value for people. I went to Quad Design and this is like unbelievable.
(41:27) But you basically go create a design system and then you just tell Claude Design that you want to create a website. So I have like a giant system here and this design system, it basically you just just follow the prompts like there's nothing crazy about it. Like and then it will not only did it take like our current colors, but it added like cool stuff.
(41:49) And we never had like we never had green in our brains. But it works. And we never had this like these, like some of these fonts, but they work. And then from here I designed the entire website first, the look of it, and then I literally went to share and it creates a clock quote prompt. I pasted that in the internal to hit the repo.
(42:14) It took our current theme. I didn't have to. Do you want anything with the theme and basically recreated the entire website of what you see today? Ish. I mean, obviously there's there's there's tweaking and then what I did is okay, so that's hopefully very actionable for people. Then on top of that, I installed clarity, which you and I talked about this.
(42:39) Well then every day clarity will tell me how many people have dropped off the website. There's a dead click if there's an error. And then I'm going into like change those elements. I didn't automate that part, but but I go to change those elements. And I looked at it very like very methodically to say like, how do I just make it really simple? I also looked at best practices of like, like Ridge Wallet.
(43:07) You'll see similarities here. I looked at like I was overcomplicating the whole Shopify experience and I just simplified it. So then did that been made in a way where it really feels like our brand and, and focus on the things that I know matters to the business. And, and I did that all. And now every day I'll make a little tweak here and there to it.
(43:29) But that's, that's a really actually I mean, it's, it's I think it's. Have you always been a curious person, Joe? Like, have you always been like like a person that. Well, somebody will say something and you're like, I'm going to learn about that. Has that always been part of your DNA? If if it's something that like this, that I truly like, love.
(43:47) Absolutely. Like, yeah, I'm extremely curious. Like, I like I mean everything. Yeah. Yeah. Because I think, I think what's interesting about it to me, in going through this and hearing you talk about it and seeing you describe it, it's clear to me that one, you love this and you're meant to do this at this point in time, which is awesome.
(44:07) And I think that the second thing that's crazy is you, you. It seems to me what's happening is every day you are going through and looking at the business as a whole and saying, what could I do to make that better? Inefficient? How can I understand that more completely? And then you're talking to Claude, you're using, you know, you're using Whisper Flow or whatever you're using to get the information in.
(44:32) And now that you have the framework that you said, the foundation side of it, now, it's now it's a totally open season on anything, basically. And so to me, the people that are hold the most curiosity are often the smartest people in the room. Right. And this is a testament to that. And, you know, I just want to commend you because I just think it's really fucking unbelievable, to be honest with you, in terms of how you've gone through this, the way that you've thought about it in every part of the business and the way that you really built
(45:01) the OS, you know, that's going to that's going to accelerate and continue to accelerate you. I mean, honestly, just based off of this, you might be the guy that gets me to drink beer again. I haven't had a beer in a long time because I just don't drink anymore, basically. But look, I mean, this is pretty sweet, so I'm going to check it out.
(45:21) Thank you. And just to show you, like, one more thing, because I built this this morning, it I was like, one of the issues we had is we have meetings and we have meetings about these projects, and these meetings are now isolated. And yeah, I could take notions API and feed it in there, and that'd be that'd be a good thing for people to do.
(45:41) But I'm like, how hard is it to build like just a to do app? And we already had one in here. Like we already had one that was kind of okay. And then I was just like, but it just wasn't like it didn't have everything I wanted. So I was like, what if I just had the ability to, like, take notes during the meeting? And if I click new notes, then I could record the note using chat, chat, GPT.
(46:04) And then once I do that, you know, it's a speech to to text and analyze it. But then what's awesome about is it ties you to a project. So like we have a new launch coming up as an example. So then I could tie it to this and then I can summarize it. And now the team has contacts. And then later they could go create a new agenda for a future meeting.
(46:26) And it'll be created from these projects we've already done. So that's context. So that's the power of it. It's like and now from these meeting agendas, we'll have so much more intelligence in our system to know how to operate more efficiently. But that's just an example of like once you have the foundation like this would seem crazy, like it's combining notion, Todoist, you know, like all these things, but like really it's not.
(46:52) And then because I, Google's API already hooked up like I was able to pull on everyone's calendar, so they're able to go in there and this is their actual Google calendar. And then they could join a meeting like a note to a meeting. So it looks like crazy. But it's it's really not super. Appreciate your time walking through this I think incredibly valuable episode and and and interesting and a lot of deep diving.
(47:14) So a lot of gems here and appreciate your time. And yeah, thanks for walking us through it. Yeah. Thanks so much. You're welcome.
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