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Brady Hugins: Alright, make sure I'm showing up here… There we are.

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Brady Hugins: Hey everyone, this is Brady Hugans, with Day 6 for the Mirror Mirror webinar series.

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Brady Hugins: Appreciate you all being here, whether you're live or joining us, via recording.

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Brady Hugins: So…

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Brady Hugins: This is a 30-45 minute presentation, usually. We do sometimes go over if needed, but it should be pretty quick.

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Brady Hugins: And go over some of the core…

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Brady Hugins: systems that we have. So, integration. Integration is…

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Brady Hugins: an important part of the ecosystem style that we develop, it's because

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Brady Hugins: It's about bringing everything together. It's the reason why we have core project work, we have core unified data, profile. We do have a central

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Brady Hugins: Tech stack that can work across many brands.

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Brady Hugins: But all of that is needed through integration and integration steps. So it's what holds the whole stack together, and what gives you the leverage in order to go across multiple brands.

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Brady Hugins: And you're doing this all on the back end, in the sense that, you have your own database, you have your own workflows, your own automation, some… often your own LLM tools. Sometimes they can be…

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Brady Hugins: AI LLMs that are remote, that you're working with, or some of the frontier models that are being released with Anthropic and whatnot?

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Brady Hugins: Or are they chemical models?

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Brady Hugins: Maybe simpler, depending on what kind of hardware you're running.

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Brady Hugins: So, appreciate you being here.

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Brady Hugins: So this is day 6 of a 7…

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Brady Hugins: day series now. I think people can probably get the nuts and bolts of everything in…

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Brady Hugins: two to three days, but, for general work cycle, you know, having it broken up into 7 different chapters is an easy way for integrating everything together. We've covered along the contact profile, so this… think of it as assembled, like.

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Brady Hugins: In phases, or different… Different segments.

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Brady Hugins: the plan, like, what do you plan for your own technology model? Like, what are you renting? What are you owning? What does it make sense for you? How do you build?

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Brady Hugins: Also, rhythms. So, what are common rhythms and checks that you have, either on a daily, weekly, monthly basis? What does that cycling look like?

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Brady Hugins: It could be checking in on air checking, it could be financial reporting, it could be… Database cleanups.

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Brady Hugins: Chapter 4 is engines and Automations. These are the… what I would consider the locomotives of the modern age.

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Brady Hugins: They can be incredibly complex, simple, work very quickly, or they can be very expensive, but there's what's driving the engines. There's what's moving things forward. Setting up these automations in… so that more intelligent work or more manual work is being done in these ways is what's…

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Brady Hugins: causing this AI evolution. Now, we're in the midst of it. I think we're at the beginning parts of the cycle, but we'll continue to develop, and things will get faster and more thorough and contextual over time.

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Brady Hugins: Chapter 5 is about delivering, and making sure that we're delivering on a… Performative basis to our…

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Brady Hugins: customers so that the last mile is covered. So, today we're working on integration.

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Brady Hugins: So… It becomes one system in this way.

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Brady Hugins: As we integrate the different tools together.

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Brady Hugins: So… When you have one system.

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Brady Hugins: you connect in various different parts of your brands. You may have different rules and brand structures that is different for each of your brands, or products, or different processes. And then you have core systems. So, these are designed much like enterprise-level

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Brady Hugins: Bureaucracies and functionalities are designed, but just for a small set, so that that functionality can be distributed through the scripting and coding that you have set up.

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Brady Hugins: It's a discipline, so it can read the same sources each time, it can be hard-coded or dynamically coded based on utility.

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Brady Hugins: But one of the things that you can rely upon is that the system is, in fact, working.

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Brady Hugins: the same way. Computers are reliable in the sense that they are very smart, they can… they can do a lot of amazing things, but they're very stupid in the sense that they do the same things over and over again, unless they have guidance and controls.

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Brady Hugins: So, one of the terminologies that's often used is drift. So, when two systems are holding in communion and union, where there's data flowing.

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Brady Hugins: And common data and intelligence, That's when there… there's no drift.

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Brady Hugins: But when they do inevitably work

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Brady Hugins: Over time, there's almost always some sort of drift, and you can measure that. And measuring drift in the systems is part of the integration component and meta-analysis that you're looking at.

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Brady Hugins: So that when you solve an email issue, maybe in one brand, it may come up and then be solved automatically in another brand, because that rule set fits for both.

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Brady Hugins: And when you do that, Dozens, or hundreds, thousands, millions of times, theoretically.

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Brady Hugins: You have a very involved system that can be very complex or simple based on what is preferred or needed.

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Brady Hugins: So, one of the key points, in fact.

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Brady Hugins: excuse me, is having a single source of truth. Single source of truth is our core database, or…

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Brady Hugins: Databases, where we shape the data, keep the data, contacts, orders, events, and having canonical versions of things.

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Brady Hugins: So…

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Brady Hugins: When we look at things, we can view into the data and know that that data is accurate, or that we have one central place that we say that this is the source of truth and work with that data.

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Brady Hugins: And compare it to other sources.

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Brady Hugins: So you have… the owner, and then the projection. So, the owner is the canonical source.

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Brady Hugins: It's the factual source.

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Brady Hugins: When I was working in enterprise-level software, this was a very important component to look at for databases, for sources of truth.

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Brady Hugins: To make sure that we were looking at the accurate information.

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Brady Hugins: And then projections from that information. In these cases, it could be dashboards, pages.

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Brady Hugins: Email merges… So… They're, a reflection of the data and the activity, so that there's… there's…

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Brady Hugins: system, or there's coding and process in the source of truth, and then that's being projected out, so it… it's created with, like, builders, web builders.

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Brady Hugins: You can build with… You can have web pages that build hundreds of pages very quickly.

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Brady Hugins: If you do it in the right methodology, with the right data in the right spots.

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Brady Hugins: So, this one has a note about bugs. The moment systems both think they own a field, you have a bug that's been shipping for weeks before anyone notices, and this is true.

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Brady Hugins: In workflows that are silent errors.

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Brady Hugins: Which means that there's a success that's being flagged, but it's a non-success from the actual effect. So there's some sort of coding error in there. So it's testing…

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Brady Hugins: It's called smoke testing. Whenever you go through a form.

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Brady Hugins: And you put in your testing information, it's called a smoke test.

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Brady Hugins: So…

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Brady Hugins: When you're able to do this, you're able to see React change things very quickly, update things very quickly. As an example, I've been able to, like, build out and…

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Brady Hugins: put a playlist for an event, or event series that I run. It's complicated.

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Brady Hugins: But it's an interesting use of the data. I have inputs where people

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Brady Hugins: give me suggestions for music feedback for an event, and then I curate them and put them in a playlist, depending on grouping and types.

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Brady Hugins: So…

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Brady Hugins: This is talking about observability in regards to failures. The quiet ones are the most dangerous ones, because you don't… if you don't know something's failing.

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Brady Hugins: Then it's… can be… A false sense of reality, or a false sense of what is actually going on.

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Brady Hugins: So… Part of the smoke detection

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Brady Hugins: Is part of verifying that process.

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Brady Hugins: So…

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Brady Hugins: This is a true story. We have a social publisher that I've been working on for a while. There's a couple different workflows.

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Brady Hugins: And it said it was successfully publishing for 37 days, every 4 hours.

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Brady Hugins: And it was a filter, silently, skipping…

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Brady Hugins: The approved post, so… there wasn't any, like, erring or anything.

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Brady Hugins: So, what happens is, if you don't… if you say that there's a workflow, but you're… that's working successfully, but if you're not measuring the success and verifying.

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Brady Hugins: Then you can have a false… Success for that workflow.

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Brady Hugins: So, it's about…

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Brady Hugins: checking and double-checking. An email is called SendLogs. I have daily digests that are emailed to me every day with any error checks.

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Brady Hugins: We can have self-healing.

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Brady Hugins: Workflows, which is a very interesting concept, where it checks for the error and then fixes it itself.

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Brady Hugins: Auditing. Auditing becomes a very important, regular process with an ecosystem, and seeing the outputs of those audits.

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Brady Hugins: So, webhooks. So, webhooks are a way of…

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Brady Hugins: Pinging different systems so that they're…

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Brady Hugins: interacting with each other, so it could be, like, a Stripe webhook where you have a payment come in.

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Brady Hugins: It could be a form webhook, where you have a form information come in.

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Brady Hugins: So, it's an event.

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Brady Hugins: And usually, these are the most important

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Brady Hugins: Parts of the website, because they measure some of the highest impact activities.

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Brady Hugins: So, it could be a tap on an AMC card.

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Brady Hugins: There could be… in the… in these issues.

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Brady Hugins: There can be errors that come up.

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Brady Hugins: The reception is down, the payload isn't formatted the right way, so that means the data is informed, or it's not staged in the right way at the right time.

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Brady Hugins: So there's a couple terms to go into with… Verification and resiliency.

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Brady Hugins: Indemp potency?

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Brady Hugins: It's basically making sure the… There's results happening the same way each time.

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Brady Hugins: So, there's a standardization of process, and that's occurring at the same time.

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Brady Hugins: retry failure, so…

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Brady Hugins: Failures happen. Like, it's part of the process that either there's internet goes down, lightning strikes a tree and collapses a…

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Brady Hugins: electrical pole, and all of a sudden, there's people without power. So a retry is needed.

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Brady Hugins: In order for it to be a part of the process when things fail, so it can't be assumed that it's working all the time.

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Brady Hugins: Dead letter cues.

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Brady Hugins: So this is… Checking… it's…

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Brady Hugins: the ones that fail still land in the dead letter Q, and then that way you get a record of what's happening when there's a

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Brady Hugins: A false or… or… not a false, a failure to connect.

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Brady Hugins: And then you could check on those the next day, or, do error checks with those.

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Brady Hugins: And then replay. Sometimes you can replay the issue.

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Brady Hugins: And… fix the issue, and then replay afterwards, and make sure that all goes through.

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Brady Hugins: Again, the end steps of a smoke test.

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Brady Hugins: And payments is a really common one, that you want to have this sort of style and system set up.

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Brady Hugins: And you can have this style and system set for each product in the ecosystem as well.

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Brady Hugins: Alright, so… This is a snapshot of my ecosystem. This is in Nation.

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Brady Hugins: Which, I have…

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Brady Hugins: several hundred workflows in there. I'm just gonna go through a standard form handler. So I have one contact spine, so that means if someone's marked for different brands or different products, there's just one contact spine.

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Brady Hugins: And then, we're gonna go over the standard form handler. So this is… Now you can have…

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Brady Hugins: Oh, let's zoom out just a little bit.

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Brady Hugins: So, oftentimes, you have a form, or many forms, on your website, Or wherever you're collecting information.

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Brady Hugins: And… That needs to be validated.

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Brady Hugins: And then it needs to be looped into the preferred, or the right existing contact, and then the

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Brady Hugins: Information needs to be merged.

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Brady Hugins: And then upload it into the unified contact profile.

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Brady Hugins: Here, this one has a… Confirmation email being sent as well, and the process being sent as well.

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Brady Hugins: Very simple, in some ways, very complex in others.

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Brady Hugins: Some of the data can be very complicated in some of these forms, with many different… Steps, or…

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Brady Hugins: Customization, so the merging process may be a little complex.

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Brady Hugins: We have the upsert into the unified contact and coordination with the latest information.

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Brady Hugins: So even though it's a simple process of handling a form, it may have some complexity behind it. Or it could be a very simple form, like an email form. Someone signs up and says, hey, I want to join your email letter list because I'd really love to go to your events.

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Brady Hugins: They sign up their name, their email.

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Brady Hugins: That's validated as useful and practical inputs. Looked up if there's a contact, or if it's a new contact. Merging the information into the unified contact profile.

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Brady Hugins: Sending confirmation email.

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Brady Hugins: So, this is a good example of what is standard. Now, you can copy this and then paste into different forms as well, different products.

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Brady Hugins: Or you can have a code builder go and build them, because Nation has MCP access, so a lot of these code builders can come in there and build these out for you.

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Brady Hugins: So, yeah, that's an example.

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Brady Hugins: So, even though this is just one form.

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Brady Hugins: You can have it be a form across multiple brands, multiple websites, Even…

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Brady Hugins: Agentically, as an agency, you can offer sign-up forms for people.

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Brady Hugins: That's one of the best things to do, is actually collect sales and marketing information for

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Brady Hugins: clients and customers. Almost everyone wants a new, happy customer that wants to meet with them and talk with them about their products.

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Brady Hugins: So,

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Brady Hugins: Yeah, so everything downstream reads the spine, so you can imagine the ingestion process going to your central database, and then a…

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Brady Hugins: a process where it reads and then puts out to different pages. So, you can have confidential information, private information, different categories of where to keep things.

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Brady Hugins: And yet the flow can be very quick still, even though it's… might be…

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Brady Hugins: in private and appropriate areas, with the proper key setup. Almost all of these have keys…

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Brady Hugins: That are maybe 50, 60 plus characters, some of them 125 characters, depending on the setup you have.

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Brady Hugins: Okay.

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Brady Hugins: Integration drift, so… There are certain rules or preferences that you want to keep in mind as you build.

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Brady Hugins: And… For me, it's having discipline around databasing.

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Brady Hugins: Keeping information in the proper databasing, keeping things, information,

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Brady Hugins: I'm aware, very aware of the database, I'm very aware of, like, where the data is, how much I have of whatnot. So it helps me…

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Brady Hugins: Understand the… Home of the data.

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Brady Hugins: The technical term is a canonical home. When we say source of truth, it's canon.

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Brady Hugins: You know, when they say, this is canon, Star Wars canon, Star Trek canon.

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Brady Hugins: You know, what is the appropriate source of truth? That's what they mean. So it's the canonical home?

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Brady Hugins: Audits. As I said before, audits are an important part of the process that often can occur on a daily basis or an ongoing basis when you check on things before you make any changes.

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Brady Hugins: deprecation, so these are things that you might have changed, in the past, or deprecated, which means that you're taking the technology off and not using it anymore, and having a registry for when that happens. So, you see how the discipline works?

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Brady Hugins: Throughout the ecosystem, and how… There's very little.

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Brady Hugins: Left chance.

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Brady Hugins: when you're working with some of these information systems, that even if AI drifts over in some ways, or assumes some ways, the audits take them back to…

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Brady Hugins: A standardized process.

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Brady Hugins: And AI does it very, very quickly.

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Brady Hugins: So, we have Franklin here, and he can… he's welcome to answer, or we can…

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Brady Hugins: You know, think this and speak this out to the end of the universe.

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Brady Hugins: So, oftentimes, when we look at our business, we might have multiple places where our information lives.

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Brady Hugins: And there may be…

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Brady Hugins: more accurate sources of that information other than others. You can think of, like, a will. Like, when you update a will or a trust, you have, like.

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Brady Hugins: the standard set that's submitted with the court, that's the canonical version, standardized version, and then everyone else's versioning after that. But because of the way the court process works, it keeps standard documentation of time, of information, of who…

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Brady Hugins: It affects.

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Brady Hugins: So, what happens when they disagree? So there's some sort of ruling. So, in that case, it would be the latest is the truest.

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Brady Hugins: Sometimes you can get new information that may not be the most true, or it's…

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Brady Hugins: mysterious. You know, you can… you can think that there's… might be…

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Brady Hugins: A pr- a user that might be a certain person, but it's not.

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Brady Hugins: So, they're… There may be some…

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Brady Hugins: need for connection between different systems in order for information to be more clear.

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Brady Hugins: If a job ran successfully but did nothing for a month, what'd you know? How?

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Brady Hugins: That's an important part, question for every business owner, right? A lot of people run their business based on cash flow.

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Brady Hugins: And they say, oh, if the cash is coming in.

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Brady Hugins: Everything's going alright, and to a certain degree, that's true, but to a certain degree, that's not. There's a lot more to success than just cash and income and financial statements.

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Brady Hugins: Yeah, impacted a business in the long way, those very things.

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Brady Hugins: So, if something was failing, and you didn't know about it and didn't get a report on it, it's important for us to check in and perhaps write a workflow for those, or make sure that we're interacting with

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Brady Hugins: Our systems, so that we're…

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Brady Hugins: Successfully understanding the… what's going on in the workflow, in our processes and business.

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Brady Hugins: Payments is a good example of, like, if you had a product that was selling and you didn't have any information about payments.

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Brady Hugins: For customer information, like, Delivery information.

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Franklin Sheffield: Do you… do you think that often…

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Franklin Sheffield: When a model is running quote-unquote successfully, but a company is not getting their desired end results?

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Franklin Sheffield: Do you think that…

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Franklin Sheffield: Like, what they probably should look at first, or should be high on the priority list, would be something along the lines of, like, broadening the goal, or adjusting the goal to be more inclusive of

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Franklin Sheffield: other ideas?

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Brady Hugins: It's… that's a good question. I think that…

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Brady Hugins: When standard businesses often rely on, like, looking at past information.

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Brady Hugins: But often, when a business has an issue or a problem.

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Brady Hugins: They'd need to look at old information in new ways, so they'd need to consider new factors.

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Brady Hugins: So what you're saying is true, and implies that it's true, is that…

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Brady Hugins: You know, how do you,

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Brady Hugins: if a business is functioning successfully, you know, how do you help change it? And oftentimes, it's through the motivation of either the owners or the values of the owners.

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Brady Hugins: That's almost easiest to align with.

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Brady Hugins: and the issues. And now…

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Brady Hugins: There's almost always… there's certainly a lot of issues going on with business, with change, with…

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Brady Hugins: the impact AI, how expensive some…

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Brady Hugins: tools are… I mean, I've looked at some of these

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Brady Hugins: Builder tools, and they're very expensive, so they're…

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Brady Hugins: These businesses need to adapt, and they need to change, and…

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Brady Hugins: adapt their companies accordingly. Do you have any specific examples of this kind of successful, company that you have in mind that is having a hard time adapting?

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Franklin Sheffield: Yeah, and I think I can do you one even better by offering, like, another kind of situational, maybe, challenge.

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Franklin Sheffield: So, like, imagine you have a company that's doing a Shopify online.

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Franklin Sheffield: like, dropshipping business. Everything's automated, marketing's automated, right, and they're making sales.

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Franklin Sheffield: But their sales are dropping over time.

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Franklin Sheffield: But the system is outputting success, because…

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Franklin Sheffield: You know, they… they're making money, and it, you know, like, it's all being automated, and it's generating its reports, and there haven't been any errors.

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Franklin Sheffield: And so now the client is thinking, well, okay, I want to reimagine the gold to be like, I want to make my customers happy, because maybe they've read some comments and they're identifying that people aren't necessarily happy with the product or something.

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Franklin Sheffield: So, like, how do they integrate that into a data system? That, like, vague idea of, like, I want to make people happier?

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Brady Hugins: That's… I would consider a somewhat common problem how you do that.

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Brady Hugins: With Shopify specifically, Shopify has a… and I'm saying this from a developer perspective, because this is a developer course, has an API,

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Brady Hugins: And where you can start interacting it with its database of information. Now, with Shopify, that's probably web analytics.

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Brady Hugins: Payment analytics, and various sorts of emails and whatnot going through the delivery of those products.

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Brady Hugins: So, you can start taking in that information into a central source of truth, and doing analysis on it independently with your own tools, or with whatever tools you'd like to work with, using Shopify as, like, an arm or leg of the business, rather than thinking of it as, like, the whole body of it.

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Brady Hugins: And that would create…

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Brady Hugins: Well, you would then be able to glean some of the information more independently from Shopify, because Shopify is a closed box where you can only do so much.

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Brady Hugins: I've worked with Shopify a little bit, and I've leaned away from it because of some back-end architecture issues, and because I split some of the payment issues out with the web, but…

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Brady Hugins: some people love the UI, and they want to interact with Shopify, so I'm like, do what you love, and do what's easiest for you, as long as it works for the general business, so…

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Brady Hugins: I'm really pretty neutral about it.

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Franklin Sheffield: Honestly, I don't love Shopify, but as a digital marketing professional, sometimes I have clients that want to be hands-on, and so I'm like, okay, now I need a CMS system that has, like, user-friendly qualities, but also gives me a bit of depth.

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Franklin Sheffield: So Shopify hits that sweet spot for me, where it's like, they can get in there and manually make a something.

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Franklin Sheffield: And not break everything, but I can also be in the code in the backend.

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Brady Hugins: Right.

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Brady Hugins: So… with Shopify.

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Brady Hugins: setting up an API, and you can do this with almost all modern tools that have these databases.

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Brady Hugins: you can have a dynamic API. Sometimes it's read-only, where you can only read what's going on in the Shopify area, and then you can do your own analysis on top of that.

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Brady Hugins: But, some of them, you can have interactions where you can have dynamically updated content. So, for instance, like we were talking about canonical source of truth.

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Brady Hugins: An idea of that would be, like.

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Brady Hugins: product pictures, right? Let's say you take some pictures of a product, and, like, a whole series of, like, 10 products, and you keep them on your central database. Now, you can have it fed out to Shopify automatically through the workflow and API,

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Brady Hugins: But you can also say, hey, Kay, we did a great job on Shopify, why don't we go and take that central database that we have, and let's open up an additional Amazon Marketplace shop.

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Brady Hugins: Let's say we get 10-15% more sales from this additional shop over here, but it's all being served from the same central canonical source of truth with database.

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Franklin Sheffield: That, that's essentially what I do for my clients. I call that the franchise era, but…

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Franklin Sheffield: I am the database right now. Like, I'm the guy who, like, keeps everything tiled, and, like, I've got terabytes of stuff at this point.

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Brady Hugins: So, you would benefit from setting up your own infrastructure and ecosystem like this as you're going and collecting on new

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Brady Hugins: Customers and… and, work as an agency, because there's two… there's two types of clients you're gonna run into.

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Brady Hugins: One, they're gonna want you to do it because they don't know how to do it, and they don't want to do it. So they're gonna need you to build your own tools so that they can hop on your back and have the result that you can create.

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Brady Hugins: And then, you're going to have the clients that want to build their own system, so they want to do what you're doing as far as having a centralized database, and they want to build it up for the long run.

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Brady Hugins: This series is built around the second person that's willing to build it up for a long run, but at the same time.

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Brady Hugins: It… this… we're… we're looking… at most people, they don't want to do the development work. They want someone else to do it. That's the reality of the situation.

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Brady Hugins: It's probably only 10-20%, maybe up to 30, 40 in select cases that are willing to do this kind of development work, I've found.

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Brady Hugins: It may be smaller, I don't know, but, we have to assume that the customers are going to ask you, Franklin, and say, hey, how do we do this, and what do we do about it?

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Brady Hugins: Any more questions?

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Franklin Sheffield: I did have one, about data redundancy, so this is more from the world of IT.

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Franklin Sheffield: So, like, from my understanding, like, there's a lot of commonalities between, like, a server environment and an AI agent database environment.

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Franklin Sheffield: One of the problems that you have in a server environment is, like, when the power goes out, you could lose everything.

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Franklin Sheffield: And so, they use a lot of strategies, but one of the strategies they use, and specifically, I could see being a nightmare for an AI situation. So, like, if an AI agent replaces the function of a hub or a server, and their job now becomes keep one-third of this

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Franklin Sheffield: data and send two-thirds of it to… or, like, keep half of this, make a copy, and send it

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Franklin Sheffield: So you create this, like, intricate redundancy system to protect the integrity of your data. Like, I feel like that could…

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Franklin Sheffield: probably be very complex, if not almost impossible to get right and do well in an environment where all of your servers are also trying to use that fragmented data to create, A, what's the most common and relevant and current data, but B, like, products with it.

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Brady Hugins: Yeah, that's a great call-out from understanding how AI is working on a systemic way, and how it looks like a server environment.

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Brady Hugins: What I found to help out with that is moving into a direction that doesn't seem like it's a pro… doesn't seem like it makes sense, but it does when you look at it, is actually cut the workflows down and simplify them more.

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Brady Hugins: Make them more modular-based.

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Brady Hugins: And more useful across multiple tools.

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Brady Hugins: Like, for instance, like, I have a PDF creator.

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Brady Hugins: That is a program

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Brady Hugins: That goes and scans across the branding database, or the branding information that it has, so it outputs the PDF in the appropriate format along the rules.

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Brady Hugins: Instead of saying, hey, I'm gonna make a builder for this one, a builder for that one, a builder for this one, I just say, I'm gonna make one builder, and it's gonna use that one for that brand, that one for that brand, that one for that brand.

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Brady Hugins: So, like you're saying, like, it's overly complex, I'm like, well…

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Brady Hugins: It is one, like, kind of like to set it up initially.

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Brady Hugins: Because of, like, the rules, but once those are set up, you don't really have to do…

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Brady Hugins: the work anymore. It always functions that way, and you can adapt and edit based on those. And you can go right into the markdowns and change individual things. Because it's a natural language model.

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Brady Hugins: You're working with things that are more directive.

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Brady Hugins: And you could say, like, go look over here and do this, because that's what the coding says, where you can go in there, change the coding that the AI is looking at, or whatever tool is looking at it.

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Brady Hugins: So, it's… Pretty fluid, what you can do.

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Brady Hugins: But modularization, I think, is the most effective because, as an example, I have these…

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Brady Hugins: Venus love letters that are… kind of from the outside, looks pretty simple. They're like a 5-page PDF output. It's personalized for astrology, but it's only one planet, but I have to do the entire astrology chart.

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Brady Hugins: look up their geocoding, with the active API database, and then output it towards a branded PDF within, like, 5 minutes, 3 minutes or less, because people expect PDFs to… to, like, arrive in their mailbox within a minute or less.

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Brady Hugins: So, that's a little challenging, to have something, like, hit off, like, every, like, minute, so you have to have a trigger that hits.

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Brady Hugins: And…

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Brady Hugins: So, what happened is that the whole workflow was pretty complex, and so I had to break it down into certain components.

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Brady Hugins: And then those components made my whole PDF generator process with just the Venus Love Letters as a component of it.

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Brady Hugins: So, it's like systemizing and modularizing it, but what I found also is that

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Brady Hugins: doing the work and trying it is actually the most helpful thing you can do to figure it out, is actually just to attempt to do it. Because you don't always know, kind of, what you're gonna run into, or what,

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Brady Hugins: bottlenecks. I've noticed that automation is all about For bottlenecking.

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Brady Hugins: And then smoothing out bottlenecking is a lot of that.

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Brady Hugins: Okay.

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Brady Hugins: Good question. Thank you, Franklin.

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Brady Hugins: So, next Friday, we are going to have a Chapter 7.

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Brady Hugins: Owning the system forever, so what that looks like, from a rental to an ownership model.

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Brady Hugins: This is part of a 7-day series course.

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Brady Hugins: $297, and it gets you the… it provides the ability to build solo in a self-paced way.

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Brady Hugins: We'll be updating this yearly, but also having some of these classes regularly as we adapt and evolve with some of the systems.

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Brady Hugins: We do have a live cohort that's available as well. This will be on a monthly basis, and then we'll have a guided series, in the future. Those will be on Fridays as well, real-life accountability.

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Brady Hugins: And then a live office hours, once a month, in accompaniment with some of our data sovereignty membership. Our data sovereignty membership is an alternative to the course, the sense that you'll receive the entire course, but just for $33 a month.

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Brady Hugins: So, we appreciate you being here.

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Brady Hugins: That concludes for today, so… happy Friday, everyone. Thank you.

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Franklin Sheffield: fake view.

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Brady Hugins: Alright.

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Brady Hugins: Gonna stop recording…

