Happy Monday folks, it’s been a fun week in the business world with a lot going on. Sales, new AI tools, an online community and maybe a fundraise too.
Who said summer is quiet?
Let’s jump in:
Update from last week
We’ve had a really great few weeks of sales at my immigration tech company, Visto. So much so that we’re thinking of how to keep scaling, adding more clients, adding more features, all that fun kind of stuff.
I think it’s been a good culmination of our product coming a long way (mostly from just listening to our first few clients and building in new features based on what they ask for), and also fine-tuning our sales process.
Not going to go into details on sales in these update as I’ve talked about sales a LOT over the last few months, but really spending time to fine-tune everything – cold calling script, target market, messaging, demo call script, pricing and more – has started to really pay off. If you want more sales-focused content from me, definitely check out the last 5-10 posts on my blog here.
Another fun thing we’ve added, more on the marketing side, is started a Discord community for our users and target market. Since our platform uses AI in the immigration space, and lots of immigration professionals don’t have much experience with AI, I started hosting a weekly call for Canadian immigration practitioners so we can share tools, tips, etc., about how we can leverage AI to grow in this industry.
The first call was last Tuesday and it went really well – I’m excited to keep running it. And it all started because a few potential clients said they wish there was a place they could do just that… talk about AI with other professionals! Always be listening to your audience…
On the topic of AI, I’ve been keeping an eye out for good tools and software that use AI to help save time growing a business. I may actually need to create a new section for AI tool of the week…
For this week, I found an awesome tool that helps create short video snippets for Tiktok, Youtube Shorts, etc.
As most of you know, I host the Grind Mastermind podcast and also go live on LinkedIn every 2 weeks. And I love to splice those videos up into short clips to share on social media to spread the word. But of course, editing those short clips takes time (and/or money).
I found this pretty cool tool at https://www.opus.pro/ that will auto-generate short clips for you, including captions and a title, in minutes, using AI (I’m not affiliated although I wish I was). I’ve used it for about a week, both for Visto (repurposing my LinkedIn Lives) and SG (repurposing the Grind Mastermind podcast).
And while it isn’t amazing, it’s still impressively good considering it does everything for you. If you’re posting longer form video on youtube (right now you can only upload youtube links), I suggest giving it a try.
Key takeaway
The big lesson of the week is to listen. They say we have 2 ears and 1 mouth for a reason, so respect that ratio!
A lot of what we’ve done at Visto over the last few months is to just listen to users/clients and keep building and testing based on what they say/ask for. It’s one of the reasons why I never suggest spending months/years planning your business before you launch it.
The best thing you can do, for any business or industry, is launch something super quick and then adapt and evolve based on feedback.
Books
I started a doozie this week, a book that’s considered “one of the greats” that I probably should’ve read a long time ago.
And that book is The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. I’m about 1/5 of the way through – it’s a pretty big book (physically and by page number), but keeping me very interested so far.
In short, it goes chapter-by-chapter explaining a different law of power – and yes it’s as creepy and as cool as it sounds. Forexample, Law 2: Never put too much trust in friends, learn how to use enemies.
One of the main reasons I’m liking it so much is because it’s going to help me takeover the world he uses stories from history to explain each law, and sometimes more than 1 story per law. And what I’ve learned now that I’ve read something like 500+ books, is that even for nonfiction, I much prefer reading stories to textbooks.
So far so good, more on the book next week…
Recent Content
I may actually replace this section with my New (AI) Tool of the week. But for now:
- you can catch episode 10 of the Grind Mastermind podcast here
- make sure to follow SG on Youtube and Tiktok to catch the highlights of those episodes too, some of the newer ones will be the ones I generated using Opus Pro (mentioned above!)
That’s it for me – have a great week, make sure to sign up to get my weekly update right to your inbox, and keep grinding,
– Josh
