#110 - How AI And Amazon Fees Reshape E‑Commerce Strategy | Amy Wees

If AI sent you twice the traffic tomorrow, would sales rise or stall? We dig into that uncomfortable question with Amy Wess, a veteran Amazon seller, product developer, and conversion-focused strategist who believes the fastest path to growth is simple: fix what convinces a human before you feed what recommends by algorithm.

We start with the reality check every seller feels right now—rising Amazon fees, stricter reimbursement rules, and fewer safety nets. Amy lays out the math behind SKU economics and shows why monthly contribution margins beat annual P&Ls for real decisions. From there, we map a pragmatic omnichannel plan: launch where the shoppers are, but build presence on TikTok Shop, Walmart, and a lean Shopify site, using small test lots, third-party warehousing, and creator seeding to spark demand without overextending.

Then we go deep on AI-era discovery. Tools like Amazon’s Rufus and Cosmo expose what buyers actually ask before they add to cart. Amy shares two sharp case studies: a phone case brand missing obvious buyer priorities like grip texture, pocket fit, and lifetime warranty, and a foot roller marketed to athletes even though nurses and retail workers drive demand and want medical credibility. The fix is a benefits-first rebuild—lead images that telegraph the core promise, bullets that answer objections in plain language, and A+ content that mirrors the real use case. Only after conversion elements are dialed in should you layer AI-friendly structure and conversational copy.

Speed becomes your advantage. Amy breaks down “vibe coding” with tools like Buildy and Replit to ship apps, funnels, and landing pages in hours. By crafting meta-prompts in ChatGPT to minimize token costs, you can iterate UI, embed tools on your site, and validate offers with creators fast. It’s a scrappy loop: research with AI, build quickly, test on the right channel, measure weekly, and compound the wins.

The final takeaway is bigger than tactics. Brands that think like asset builders, not listing operators, will ride the next wave. Know your numbers, follow the customer, diversify your channels, and let AI compress the time between idea and live test. If this conversation sparked a plan, share it with a friend who needs the nudge, hit follow, and leave a review with the one metric you’ll track weekly.

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Transcript

Set The Stage: From Traffic To Profit

SPEAKER_02 0:00

We should be thinking from the very start of our business how we build out multiple channels and how we have a budget to do that. I found this product here and I sold it for this much on Amazon. It's like this is not what it is anymore. AI is recommending you. You're getting more traffic and it's still not converting. Now we have the data. We can get inside the customer's mind. You're totally missing the point. You're just getting more traffic and less convergence. Don't do that. Stop. Before you optimize for AI, optimize for convergence. The human does not have to be in the loop anymore. Right.

Meet Amy Weiss And Her Background

SPEAKER_00 0:45

There's a lot that Amazon feels like again, they're passing the buck kind of back to us as sellers, and they're not making it easy or they're not especially with the first thing that I I thought of to talk about today. Again, for anyone who doesn't know Amy, amazing, amazing mind, uh helps a lot of new sellers out. And Amy, actually, maybe I'll let you just introduce yourself to those that somehow don't know you. Um, but I want to cover a lot today of how to help new sellers and why Amazon is doing the things that they're doing and speculating on that end. But love if you can give a good brief 30-second elevator pitch about yourself and your company.

SPEAKER_02 1:24

Yeah, so uhybody. I'm Amy Weiss, and um I've been selling on Amazon since 2007. So uh I've been doing this for a little bit of time. I have a military background and um I'd lived all over the world. And um I in 2017 I came up with an idea for a product, and I knew I could launch it on Amazon, but I didn't know how to take my product that was a prototype and actually put it on the market. And a lot of people were teaching um how to find a product on Alibaba, slap your label on it, put it on Amazon, but no one was teaching how to take a prototype and patent it and go through product development and actually launch a successful business in the marketplace of a new and never seen before product. I thought that my only path was Shark Tank. In fact, I tried out for Shark Tank in season 18. Um, thank goodness I didn't make it on the show because I exited that business at the end of 2024, owning 100% of my company. Um yeah, so during that time of developing my product, I um I really wanted to help others because I realized that I was very alone in kind of figuring this out. And in the military, I was a teacher, I was an instructor. So I knew how to take really tough concepts and break them down to a third grade level. And um, anyway, so that's what became my passion. And um I also have a tech background. I was in cybersecurity before I left my six-figure job to do what we're doing now full-time. And um and so I've learned a lot about the algorithms. I'm a total tech nerd, I'm an AI nerd. I get into everything with the best of them. Um, there's not a lot of topics that I can't speak on with authority. And um, that's enough bragging on myself. But not only do I help beginners, somebody who just has an idea, but I also help seven and eight-figure brands scale to the next level. So I'm excited to be here and just give as much as I can to the audience.

SPEAKER_00 3:34

Yeah, and we've had you on before. So anyone that's a a religious watcher of the podcast knows that your episodes are always great. So um, if you won't do the bragging, I will do the bragging for you. Again, thank you for coming back on. It's been gonna be another, it's gonna be another good episode. I know it.

Amazon’s Shifting Costs And Seller Burdens

SPEAKER_00 3:48

So um, but yeah, there's been a lot of stuff happening right away, you know, in in 2026, whether it be some slight fee increases, um, whether it be the ending of the FBA prep and labeling services. I mean, there's a bunch of stuff that they're again, it feels like they're putting on us more and more and more.

Coaching New Sellers On Omnichannel Strategy

SPEAKER_00 4:07

How do you coach or how would you advise new sellers with this seemingly increasing uh barrier to entry always growing? How are you advising new sellers on how to navigate the e-commerce world?

SPEAKER_02 4:21

Well, I really think new sellers need to be thinking about Omni channel. Amazon is wonderful because it's going to give you traffic. I was on a coaching call last night with somebody who works in finance and wants to start this business and had a few product ideas. So we were on the coaching call just validating the product ideas. And she said, Where should I should I launch this? And we found one product idea that was really good. And uh she said, Where should I launch it? And um, and I said, Well, Amazon is great because there's a lot of traffic, but there's also a lot of competition there and Amazon is very expensive. So, yes, of course, in the very beginning, when you launch, if you don't have a huge budget for TikTok to give out samples, to drive your own traffic to your website, you want to go where the traffic is. So, of course, you want to launch on Amazon, but you don't want your entire presence, your entire sales, everything to be dependent on Amazon. So we launch there, we get started, we expect that we're gonna be spending some money on ads. We we make sure that our foundation is good, that we have um profit, that you know, everything looks good. But at the end of the day, we should be thinking from the very start of our business how we build out multiple channels and how we have a budget to do that. I'm a very scrappy business owner, so I help people start very uh in a very scrappy way and grow very quickly. But yeah, I don't think it's smart to go full speed ahead on all of the channels, but I do think it's smart to have a presence on Amazon no matter what.

Where To Launch First And Why

SPEAKER_02 6:05

And then maybe depending on your product, you're best to start on TikTok shop and get those, you know, if it's in a very demonstrable product, getting some influencers and giving away some samples and getting the word out, then you can grow and then have the trickle over effect on Amazon. But you don't want to only choose one channel. You really want to be on the channel from the very start now. And I would say traffic to Shopify is probably your last resort, right? In the beginning, get some sales going on Amazon, get some sales going on TikTok shop, and have your website from the very beginning, have your Shopify or your WooCommerce from the very beginning. But don't necessarily start running ads yet because your product hasn't been proven in it, really depends on the product. If it's a very competitive product, people aren't necessarily going to buy first from your Shopify store. So that's it's important to have an omni-channel mindset, but then have a strategy depending on the product and the customer to launch and realize that in the beginning it can be expensive.

SPEAKER_00 7:11

No, it absolutely makes sense, especially with the rise of, you know, you see Walmart's doing really good this year. Um, you know, Target's sort of on its way up. That's a little bit more exclusive for people that are just starting out. But yeah, there's a lot of options. You don't have to put all your um products in one shopping cart to try and use an e-commerce analogy. Um, yeah, no, it it's it's just again, it seems like Amazon, especially, like you said, it's very expensive. There is a lot of traffic there,

Diversifying Beyond Amazon

SPEAKER_00 7:37

there's a lot of that's where the people are, but it it seems really difficult for newer sellers to get in on there. So on the channel makes a lot of sense in that regard. Um, but yeah, especially if you have a new innovative product that's not on the market or that's not uh as popular as, oh, I'm gonna sell garlic presses or I'm gonna sell something, you know. So it makes sense. It makes sense on the Amazon side, even though that they're still, again, they're they're they're doing these things, they're making it eat a lot of these costs. And for what purpose? For what purpose are the are the is Amazon not able to say, yeah, we can we're gonna put these fees on you, the seller, um, to make the customers' lives easier, maybe. I guess you get in 30 minutes now, they're trying to say that. But it seems really weird, right? That Amazon is is sort of dumping a lot of these fees on the sellers. Am I crazy? Am I making that up?

SPEAKER_02 8:30

No, I mean, they're doing it because they can.

unknown 8:33

Right.

SPEAKER_02 8:33

Um, and because I think what happened, if we think of it from kind of a corporate perspective, an Amazon corporate perspective, if we look at what led up to this, Amazon was trying to be everything to everyone. They have their own transportation network. They were doing Amazon warehouses and Amazon warehouse distribution. They even started their own supplier network

Why Amazon Is Passing Fees To Sellers

SPEAKER_02 8:55

where you know you could source from Amazon-related suppliers. They were trying to be everything to everyone. And what they were finding out was that there was a ton of waste and overage at Amazon. So, as far as like the warehouses, stuff like this, everybody was sending stuff in and not everything was selling. So then Amazon had this huge economical problem where, you know, they're getting in trouble with um, you know, the environmental protection, you know, agencies and um, and they had to really kind of go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We need to place some restrictions on this. And we went too big with this. You know, Amazon doesn't do anything. If you've read the book by Basinomics, Amazon doesn't do anything without a five-year plan. So of course, they don't even, their people are not even allowed to pitch something unless it's has a five-year, like, what are we doing with this in five years? Um, so I think what happened is they grew all of these things really, really fast. And then they were like, whoa, okay, hold on. We can't be everything to everyone. We need to lock it down. Where is our revenue coming from? How do we grow from here now? And um, and so yes, a lot of fees got passed back to the seller. Um, you know, reimbursements are a problem now. They really crack down on reimbursements. Um, there's more storage fees. There's just, it's it's

Know Your Numbers And SKU Economics

SPEAKER_02 10:19

really tough. And what that means for the seller is you really need to know your numbers. The number one thing that I see when clients come to me is they do not know their numbers. And not just know their numbers, because they're like, oh, my accountant does that. Your accountant gives you your PL at the end of the year and maybe a quarterly statement. There, you need to know what your SKU economics are. What are you selling month over month? Because if you don't understand what your actual profitability is and you don't have goals related to that, you are blind. You're flying blind in your business. So that's the really important thing that if Amazon's sending us all these fees and everything, but we don't actually know how much money we're making, then we can't make decisions of, oh, let me work out a deal with my supplier where I can send smaller amounts of this. Let me think about uh alternative warehousing solutions. Let me think about now uh TikTok is cracking down on fulfilling through Amazon. So let me think about sending my stuff to fulfill some of it to fulfill by TikTok, some of it to a warehouse, some of it to Amazon. How do I now manage my stuff to make sure that I'm profitable and not just blindly? And that's what people were doing before. They're just blindly, you know, because that's what all the courses taught. That was what we were doing, right? Right. Just send an FBA and forget about it. On some ads and pray for pray for the best.

SPEAKER_00 11:50

Right. Right. It's an interesting, it's an interesting revelation, you know, to think about how many, and again, I was not around for this in the Amazon world at least, but um, how many people just started a random side hustle in 2016 and said, Oh, I'll just sell whatever, you know, like you mentioned in the beginning, people were just saying just go buy something on Alibaba, flip it, drop ship. It's not like that anymore. You can't be hands-off uh as much as I think I wasn't around, but from what I hear from um yeah, the more experienced.

SPEAKER_02 12:22

It was definitely like an overnight millionaire kind of situation.

SPEAKER_01 12:26

Right.

SPEAKER_02 12:26

You could just

The End Of “Slap A Label On It”

SPEAKER_02 12:27

pick any of the and when I invented my product, that's what was being taught like 2017, between 2015 to 2018, those are like the golden years on Amazon, where you could pick a product, slap a label on it, and get into Amazon, and that sucker was gonna sell, and you made more money than you knew what to do with so fast. And now it's like, okay, what happened was people started teaching that method, and then sellers flooded Amazon, and Amazon go over got overwhelmed and said, Oh, we have all this inventory that's not selling through, we need to start assessing more fees to these people, and then they saw an opportunity in warehousing, right? So, like this whole ecosystem was kind of formed. But the, as we all know, when we when we look at the YouTube videos of who, you know, I found this product here and I sold it for this much on Amazon, it's like this is not what it is anymore. Now you really do need to know how to run a business.

AI, Search Behavior, And Real Buyer Intent

SPEAKER_02 13:23

You need to understand your customer, you need to understand not only your customer, but AI and the new, the new way people search for products, people make buying decisions. You need to understand all of that and you need to know your economics. And you need to have an omnichannel strategy because Amazon is not it anymore. The businesses that I see thriving at seven, eight, and nine figure uh ranges have an omnichannel strategy and they are they're not just one skew. They're, you know, they're growing in the right direction. They're really paying attention to their analytics. And, you know, they have goals for each channel. So it's it's really, really important. And so many of the big Amazon sellers that I know, they're no longer relying solely on Amazon. Like they're making more money on Shopify now or on TikTok than they are on Amazon.

SPEAKER_00 14:16

I was just saying, it's not, it's not just um, it's not just a one-stop shop anymore. It's not the only pillar holding up your business. You know, I can't remember last time we had a uh a client or anyone else come in here and say, I just want to sell on Amazon. Just get me on Amazon. People will always say, Oh, I want to be on Shopify, I want my own Shopify site, I want to be on Walmart, but um, now it's really pr relevant and really prevalent that you cannot just be on Amazon. You have to move past that. Um that kind of ties back a little bit to the basin uh basinomics. What was the name of the book?

SPEAKER_02 14:48

Um Yeah, basiconomics.

SPEAKER_00 14:49

Basonomics, right, yeah. Um of what's the five-year plan? You know, you can't just go on Amazon saying, Oh, I hope I make you know 10 grand this year. It's no, what are you what's your five year stage for this business? Um, so I think that's a very interesting uh uh callback, but it makes a lot of sense, you know, from what we see on our end and what happens in the other side of the seller side as well. So yeah, no, it's it's something that will just continue to keep evolving. Um we touched a little bit already on AI. I know that was that what you recently just spoke about at the um I know the BDS?

SPEAKER_02 15:24

Lately I've

Case Study: Phone Case Listing Misfires

SPEAKER_02 15:25

been speaking a lot on um AI optimization because um the the big thing AI listing optimization, especially, um the big thing that people are missing. So there's all these companies that are offering AI optimization. And that's great, but the thing that they're missing is AI is just going to amplify whatever you optimize for it, right? So if you have an existing Amazon listing, Shopify page, TikTok shop product page listing, right? Whatever we're calling it. And you optimize that for AI. You're like, okay, I'm gonna take these, this information, these features, these benefits, and I'm just gonna make them more conversational. I'm gonna add this schema to my website to make sure it's AI optimized. But your listing is not what customers are actually looking for. You're not calling out the features and benefits that customers, that your customer avatar actually cares about, then you're amplifying the wrong thing. So AI is recommending you you're getting more traffic and it's still not converting. Right. It's not, it doesn't help to optimize for AI if you're not optimizing for conversions first. So that's what I've been teaching. And the beautiful thing about um what's happening now with AI is you can more easily get the data that you need to optimize for conversions. And the the stuff that we've been doing, we've I've been, I've been copywriting on Amazon. That's one of the services I offer, besides consulting, right, and product development help. But um the latest listings that I've been doing are seeing incredible results because the data that we're getting. So I have a huge process, like it, it gets about 132 pages of just core data of like, what does a customer think about when they're buying a phone case? I just did a phone case listing, and you know how competitive that one is. And at the end of that process, I ran the whole process, asked probably about 50 questions to Amazon's Rufus tool. And and remember, Amazon's Rufus is connected to Cosmo, which is Amazon's back end AI, and Cosmo is connected to the rest of the internet, all of the ads data it knows. So it doesn't only know what people care about for your product, it knows what they care about in that entire industry and how they make buying decisions. And so I just did a phone case listing, and what I found out was that this brand was selling completely the wrong features. They knew their keywords, right? Like keywords of this type of phone, whatever, right? Right, but not calling out what customers care about and why customers actually bought this particular case. This particular case is slim and it's like a slim profile, but it's also textured. So you it's it's kind of sticky and grippy, so you don't drop your phone, right? And the way that it's built, it actually provides some shock proof, some drop protection.

SPEAKER_03 18:44

Right.

SPEAKER_02 18:44

And then it's a low price and it has a lifetime warranty. So it's like that perfect sweet spot. You don't want to buy an otter box because that's like

Case Study: Foot Roller Targeting Error

SPEAKER_02 18:55

super expensive and it's like bulky as shit. It doesn't fit in your pocket, right? But this is, you know, it has protection for your phone, it's grippy, so you can handle it one hand and it actually fits in your pocket. And it has a lifetime warranty, and it's US based customer support. None of that was being called out in the listing.

SPEAKER_00 19:16

What were they calling out? What were they positive in calling out?

SPEAKER_02 19:22

And we have a dual layer protection, and a lot of brands do this, right? Like it's like, okay, well, we're we're um we are we have this kind of fancy thing. Well, most Americans don't read at more than a sixth grade level. So when we use fancy terms, and I do free listing reviews all the time, you guys can go to amazing at home.com and submit your listing, and I'll send you a free listing review of me sharing my screen and going through your listing. But it's not just the phone case world. Like the good thing about these this phone case company is they hired me to look at this, right? So the and and that's that's the great thing is like they're looking at it. It's not, it's not that they had bad listings, and it's not that they had bad sales, but every single business that I've worked with that's hired me to do a listing, they're seeing the same trends. They were making their sales are going up, up, up. And now lately, the last few years, slowly creeping down. And they're like, Where, how are we losing this traction? What is going on? And you know, I am picking on my phone case guy, but I've done so many of these listing optimizations now, and every single one is calling out the wrong things. There is not one that I've run this process on that I haven't been like, oh my gosh, wow, customers don't care about, you know, I had another one that was a foot roller. And if we went into Zongguru, which is one of my favorite listing optimization tools, and we checked its listing optimization score against its competitors, everything was right, had all the right keywords, everything. And the listing looked good. Like this guy had used my photographer years ago, you know, and the really great photos, but his background was um, he's an athlete, he's a coach. So he created a different type of foot roller, and he had all these kind of famous athletes endorsing. And then his pictures showed like an athlete in the gym, like rolling their, you know what I mean? Like he was like, This is a better version, you know. But then when we ran this process, we learned it's not athletes buying this, it's nurses, it's people who work in retail. It's and they don't care about an athlete. In fact, it's actually driving them away from your listing. Yeah, they care about does the doctor recommend this? Is this what the is this the thing that the podiatrist was talking about? I don't know, right? So we were using the wrong recommendations from the wrong Avatar, we were targeting the wrong avatar in our pictures. And

New Data Sources: Rufus, Cosmo, And Questions

SPEAKER_02 22:05

you know, these are this is the beauty of AI. Now we can actually find out this information. But if we just blindly go, well, you know, Helium 10 or Zongguru or whatever says that everything's good. And then we pay an AI optimization service to optimize what's good, you're totally missing the point. You're just getting more traffic and less conversions. And every single time we've run this process, and I think that's why I keep winning. I've won the last two hack competitions and I did third place at Kevin King's recent event. Um, I think that's why, because people get it. They're like, oh, yes. And then when they try this process, you wouldn't believe people are reaching out to me and they're like, Amy, oh my gosh, the data that I got. I I can't believe it's like you have this aha moment where you've been missing out on all these sales.

SPEAKER_00 22:58

It's such a weird thing. I feel like sellers the phone case one, I hate to rag on him as well with you, but you would think that that would be the very first thing. The reason he created this phone case for either for himself or just for other people was to solve all of those problems. So is it it's it's funny to hear that he didn't push that right away.

SPEAKER_02 23:16

It's not obvious though. It's you you don't think about why you make a buying decision or what questions you ask when you're making a buying decision, because most of the time those are in your head. The difference is now people are asking AI those questions. What kind of phone case should I buy? Well, I like it like this. Oh blah, blah. So it's not his listings, we're not bad before. Right. They were good. He was making sales, but the problem was he didn't have these insights. Now we have incredible insights that we never had before. Because before people were going, for example, and I used to teach, you know, put your ads on Google because that's where the customer journey starts. If I'm looking for something, I'm just gonna Google what's the best speaker, what's the best for this, you know?

SPEAKER_03 24:05

Right.

SPEAKER_02 24:06

And so that's what we had before, but there was no way other than to run Google ads and get in front of that person. There was no way to know what they were exactly searching for. Yes, we could look at search volume of certain keywords and we could assume, because we're getting clicks for those keywords, that those keywords are good for our listing. That's what we've been doing. And it's

Stop: Optimize Conversions Before AI

SPEAKER_02 24:27

wrong now because now we have the data. We can get inside the customer's mind. We can actually find out when they type in that keyword. What are they thinking about? How do they make their buying decisions? What questions do they ask? We never had that capability until this moment. And so we don't want to just skip, we don't want to just listen to everybody selling AI services and I'm one of them. We don't, but we don't want to skip that. Before I AI optimize your listing, I'm gonna optimize it for conversions because now I have data I never had before. It is incredible. So it's not, you know, it's good you rag it on him, right? But it's he never had this data before. All he knew is like, wow, the best-selling listings are calling out the following things. And I changed one image and it made a little bump in my sales, so my conversion is going up a little bit. Now I can find out exactly what photos I should use in exactly the order. I can find out exactly what customers care about, what their thought process is when they're thinking about it, why they buy my phone and why they don't, why they buy a competitor and why they don't. All of that, and it doesn't just come from review data anymore. It comes from the questions people are asking. Remember, when you're talking with AI, it's learning. Right. And it's talking to everybody else, right? Like it's so it's incredible the data that we have now. And like I think it's like 30% during Q4, I think it was something like 30% of um purchases were made through Rufus. 30% of all purchases. Wow.

Voice Shopping And Human In The Loop

SPEAKER_02 26:06

So this is like it's just a lot more natural. It's growing, people are using that. So it's really big. And now people are shopping with ChatGPT, they're shopping with their AIs, and it's changing everything. So of course, everybody's preaching, oh, be optimized for AI. Don't do that. Stop before you optimize for AI, optimize for conversions.

SPEAKER_00 26:27

Right. It's it's so fun. I was gonna bring that up too. Um, my mom is amazing. Shout out to my mom, love her. She has gone from look it up, you know, like not to make fun of her age, but she's gone from look it up at the library to Google it, to now she'll say, I don't know what this thing is, so I chat GPT'd it. And it's like, whoa, this is a really a crazy cycle here. We used to talk about all the time last year. I'm sure we discussed in our last episode about being um about doing not just SEO but GEO and making sure that you're optimized for all this stuff. But you're right, it's a little bit deeper than that. It's a little bit deeper than just make sure AI says that your product's the best and make sure you have a Reddit post about how cool your product is because that's where ChatGPT is pulling a lot of stuff from.

SPEAKER_02 27:10

So it's like, well, guess who's making that ultimate buying decision, right? You can get all this extra traffic to your listing, but then it's still a person behind that going, uh, that's not the exact phone case I'm looking for. No, that's I don't oh, oh is this foot roller for athletes? I know I'm I'm a nurse, I just need something that's gonna work for me. Right. That's the thing. AI is not making your buying decision for you yet. And by the way, AI is making some people's buying decisions for them. There is a way to add things to your cart and have AI add them to your cart. But if you're the nurse, so here's the other thing. If you don't take the time to talk with AI and find out like your avatar is actually nurses, right? And or retail workers, and you never update your photos, AI reads everything in the listing and it connects the dots. So I optimize my athlete athletic foot roller for AI.

SPEAKER_01 28:07

Right.

SPEAKER_02 28:07

Right. And then I, the customer who's the nurse who needs the foot roller, asks AI. It goes, okay, she says, I I really, oh my gosh, I'm on my feet all day. It's killing me. What can I do? And AI says, Well, here's a foot roller, it's really good. You can, you know,

Vibe Coding: Building Apps In An Hour

SPEAKER_02 28:24

when you get home, you can do this. Okay, well, what's the best one for me? AI is personalized to you. Do you think an AI is going to recommend this particular foot roller listing if none of the photos are represented, if it looks like it's meant for an athletic avatar? It's an approach. Definitely not. Yeah. So that's the thing. That's what we're missing out on. We're recommending, we're amplifying the wrong thing.

SPEAKER_00 28:48

It's fascinating. It's fascinating stuff. Um, I know we talked about this on our last episode. I'm still an AI doomer. I'm still a very much, it's gonna take over the world. My thing, my um, whatever they had, uh, the Amazon uh echo. No, I probably just activated my Amazon Echo just updated to Alexa Plus. And it's got this weird new voice, and it listens. It just, I don't know if you heard that. I don't know if the mic picked that up, but um, it just said something because I said the activation or whatever.

SPEAKER_02 29:15

Mine is as well. I have them right here, and she also is on um the plus version. I'm not gonna say her name in the back of it. Let me should mute her for a second. There we go. Now I can say it. Alexa Plus version, yes.

SPEAKER_00 29:29

Yes, it's it's very uh I don't know. It's it seems very interesting because I know that's the one specifically, it's the first thing I th I thought of when you said you can add things to cart. Because I can say name, search for something on Amazon and add it to my cart, or add my most recent order, or something like that. And they she will, she'll order it and it'll come to my house without me ever to ever having to open the Amazon app. So I'm I'm worried that's a little bit where we're going. I do think I it I if I'm making this up again, I feel like I read a headline a while ago that was something along the lines of AI getting more integrated into that buying process of their like you're able to buy things. I remember when they added purchasing Amazon products on Facebook, and that was a huge, huge deal. And I'm wondering if that's gonna be, hey, um uh, and again, you're still right, it's the person making the buying process, it's the person finishing the buying process, it's the person completing it. Um, but I think it'll be very it'll be like uh leading a horse to water and then also making a drink, with was where we're going with the the AI stuff, maybe.

SPEAKER_02 30:35

I have like here's I think that yeah, I I think that yes, purchase decisions can already be made, and you can ask your AI now, like, what do you recommend for me? Right. And people are adding to cart now. Chat GPT has built-in add to cart, so you can now make a purchase there from multiple different sources, so they will help you make that purchase. Um, and I don't think that I think I do agree with you that it's we're we're getting to the point now where we're removing the human from the loop. So, you know, my argument still stands that if you don't optimize for conversions, you're you're not gonna get recommended by the right, you know, but you're not gonna get as many sales if mostly nurses buy foot rollers and you're you know what I mean? So you still need to optimize for that. But I agree that the the human is is when the last time we talked about this, I'm a very much an AI doomsday as well. Um, I recently started vibe coding. I built an app uh my first time vibe coding. My very first time, I built an app in on my lunch hour, built, published it on my lunch hour, and an app. An app, yes.

Scrappy Prompts, Tokens, And Buildy Workflow

SPEAKER_02 31:55

So I've been doing the miracle morning, um, which is how L. Rod's Miracle Morning. Love the guy, loved Miracle Morning Challenge. Um, so I made my own 30-day miracle morning challenge. Well, when I do these challenges, I want to follow the process. So he basically the miracle morning is um is where you take time first thing in the morning for yourself. And Hal Elrod, the author of the Miracle Morning documentary and book, he talks about how he researched the most successful people and what they do to maintain their happiness and their success and their motivation. And he came up with the Savers, which is an acronym for the six things that the most successful people do every day. And instead of just doing one, he does all six every morning. Right. And so I created a 30-day challenge, but he has an app. His app is horrible and it's been horrible for years, but it's great because you can get into the app and you can check off like, oh, I did my silence, I did my affirmations, I did my visualizations, I did my exercise, I did my reading, and then I did my scribing. I did all six of my savers, right? So it's great, but you can't turn off like the vibration. It has like a vibration when you click on the it's just really like I'm gonna my phone is always on do not disturb. I don't, I don't get notifications, I don't get dings, I don't get vibrations, nothing. And in this app, you can't turn them off. It's really glitchy. So I decided, you know, me and my husband were doing this 30-day challenge together. And I was like, you know what? I'm gonna invite the amazing and home community to do it for us. I think I'm gonna vibe code an app. And so I mean, here's how I did it. And you can do it too, Pete. All I did is I, yeah, I'm gonna make an app right now. You're gonna become an expert vibe coder right now.

SPEAKER_03 33:42

Okay, let's do it.

SPEAKER_02 33:44

So, step one, you go to your handy dandy little grok or chat GPT or what is whatever LLM is your best friend, and you go, hi, I think that I have an idea. Like, I would really I I do the miracle morning. Are you familiar with the miracle morning? And ChatGPT says, yes, and it gives me a full write-up. And I'm like, oh, cool. Well, there's an app for it and it kind of sucks. Like, and I want to do it for 30 days, and I would, I uh I wanted to do this. The current app, it does this, and I just I want an app that kind of does this. Could you help me imagine

Websites, Funnels, And Fast Prototyping

SPEAKER_02 34:18

that app? And then ChatGPT comes back and it's like, yeah, it would look like this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this. And I'm like, okay, well, I like this, I don't like that, but that's cool. Okay, yeah. Uh yeah, I want to vibe code this. Can you? And I use an app called Buildy to vibe code.

SPEAKER_00 34:35

I was saying, I've heard of a company that does this specifically. So yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:38

So Replit, lovable, uh, Claude Code now does this. Um, and Buildy. So I love Buildy because I met the founders at uh an e-commerce event and they're just really cool. And I love the way Buildy works, it's super easy. But what you have to know about these vibe coding apps is that every time you ask a question, it takes tokens, and tokens are expensive. So, how is Amy gonna teach you to be scrappy today? You just go to Chat GPT after you have that little conversation, and you're like, okay, cool, I'm gonna build this with an app called Replit, Buildy, whatever, right? Buildy in this case. And then you give it a screenshot of that app so it kind of understands the interface.

SPEAKER_03 35:21

Right.

SPEAKER_02 35:21

And then you go, can you write me a prompt to have Buildy build this? And it writes the whole prompt in a language that your vibe coding app will understand so that you're not like having a conversation with it, right? So then you paste it in, you go over to Buildy. Buildy builds the whole thing. It looks amazing. You get to try it out right there before you publish it. You get to like mess around. It was amazing. Few things that I didn't like so much when I started trying it out. So I went back to Chat GPT and I was like, hey, here's a screenshot. I don't like this or this. Uh, can we fix it? And ChatGPT goes, Yep, let me build the update prompt for you to go send that over. Now, the difference is if I would have done that on Buildy, it would have cost me way more tokens.

SPEAKER_01 36:08

Right.

SPEAKER_02 36:08

It hardly cost me any tokens because I just had ChatGPT do it every time, right? And I'm already paying for that service. So why not? So yeah, by the end of my lunch hour, I had an incredible app with my logo, everything, and actually asked ChatGPT

Superintelligence Fears And Work’s Future

SPEAKER_02 36:24

how to embed it into an iframe on my website. So now I could invite the Amazing at Home community and everybody can do the Miracle Morning Challenge with me. So you can go to amazing at home.com forward slash MMC for Miracle Morning Challenge, and you can see the app that I built on my lunch hour.

SPEAKER_00 36:41

I'm gonna pull it up here as soon as we're done. That's amazing. I mean, it makes sense that the that the AIs would know what the other AIs want to hear. I just found it.

SPEAKER_02 36:50

And the thing is, like we're we're at a place now where the human does not have to be in the loop anymore.

SPEAKER_03 36:59

Right.

SPEAKER_02 37:00

If Amy Wees can build a better app than a paid app on her lunch break, what's happening to the future of software? What's happening to the future of software development? You know, you can, I just used it to build um, I built websites for people, like just by vibe coding. And so you can use that same process. You can build a website, no time. So I'm working with a few clients now to do funnels for them. So on their website, I build funnels for people. Conversion optimization is my JM, right? So um if you're not getting the traffic you need, right, that's because you're you're not you're not speaking to the customer. Your flow sucks. So what's great is you can also use these vibe coding apps to um to build a visual representation and you can even publish a website right then and there. And then you can apply your domain. On Buildy, you can just apply your domain so you don't even have to um, so I can have it build a whole thing with several pages. You can build a website with several pages with apps integrated, everything. I just built a really cool quiz app for Kevin King's upcoming event that we're about to launch to, you know, help people get discounts and play a fun game to win discounts to his event. And I told him, I said, let's make this fun. Let me vodcode an app that's a fun quiz that people can take and then they learn about the event and they also win great prizes. And so, you know, and again, I built that in less than I used manus for that one and I built it, I built a website for him and to do some uh changes as well as this quiz in less than 20 minutes.

SPEAKER_00 38:47

Well, you're not making me any more excited about moving into a future of less AI, um, which seems like it's not gonna happen. I will leave you with one last thing that I read. I don't again, I read it on the internet, so it has to be true, right? Definitely. I saw something where they put like 72, like a millions of AIs together in a room to communicate, and it came up with a bunch of different

Be The Bank: Build Durable Assets

SPEAKER_00 39:12

things of like their own religion, their own country. Like they they came up with a bunch of weird, uh very Terminator style things that I look at that and say, okay, well, we're doomed. That's it. That's we're done.

SPEAKER_02 39:26

So we did it. Did the uh I think it was called mod mod blog or mod blog, something like that. Um, that thing that you're talking about. Yeah, it did come out that a lot of those posts were actually made by humans, so they were not made by bots. So that's a good thing. But I don't think that we are far from that. And I do think that humans, you know, I was on a podcast yesterday and I was telling um the host we humans are going to need to find meaning in something other than our work, because our work and our careers is going to be very quickly replaced. And now we have people building, you know, my friend Tim Jordan's been locking himself in a closet for the last, you know, six months, and he's been just doing crazy things where he's like all these ideas that he's had in his head, he's building um kind of companies where, you know, whole teams are made out of AI. And, you know, he's just been playing with a lot of really cool things. And and that's me too. That's what I've been doing. That like when I realized that notebook LM that I could take like all my conversations and it would automatically transcribe them, I was like, oh my gosh, I can learn anything. I can put 30 YouTube videos from for uh learning N8N. I wanted to learn N8N. I put 30 YouTube videos, didn't watch any of them into note Notebook LM and it synthesized all of them all at once, and all I had to do is ask questions to it. So it literally gave me a learning plan, everything to do it. And then I had step by step, and then I was able to take that guide because notebook LM is closed, right? It only uses what you add as a source and its own knowledge to help you. But then you can take that guide because it's very pointed, and you can put that into like ChatGPT and say, okay, I want to build an app based on this. You give me the code for it, and then then you can take that code and you can put it into like Recklet or Billy. And it's just to me, the possibilities are endless. But also, what happens now with superintelligence when you no longer need the Amy?

SPEAKER_00 41:37

Right. When it's just doing that automatically because it's I don't want to say a means to an end or it's trying to accomplish something, but it's scary. It's a little scary. I won't even say it's interesting because it's not scary. Um, but it is, it is I would be curious to see where this wave takes us. Um, to see where we are end up in again back to base and not back.

SPEAKER_02 42:01

I think it's important to remain grounded and know that, like, especially for us business owners, we it this it's more important than ever right now to be the bank and not the banker.

SPEAKER_03 42:11

Right.

SPEAKER_02 42:12

Um, and I think we're in a very good position um having our own businesses because people still need to buy things. Now, we consultants who trade our time for money, we may eventually be replaced. And you know, that's fine, but we need to build assets. And this is what the rich have been teaching and doing for years is buying assets that pay them so that they don't have to go out and work for those dollars. And so buying or building assets that pay them. So you guys in e-commerce are listening to this podcast right now. People are still gonna need to buy things. And if you're the owner of that business, I don't know about resellers, but you're probably gonna be replaced because AI can resell probably better than you can. But um, but if you are a private label brand owner and you are bringing new products to market, it doesn't matter how fast you bring them to market, how cheap they become because of automation, if you are the owner of that business and people still need that product, you are in a good place and you still have an asset. So I would just keep focusing on that. And if you're not in that place, then I would start looking for how do I, how do I, you know, really start investing in assets that are going to protect me long term.

SPEAKER_00 43:30

Right.

Closing Notes And Challenge Links

SPEAKER_00 43:31

I think we'll end there. That's a good thing that that's a good way to end there, a good quote to end on. Um Yeah, now I gotta go rethink a lot about AI and about what's happening. So thanks, Amy. Uh, appreciate you being a guest as always. You always manage to make me think about things that I wasn't planning on or wanted to think about, which is a good thing. I should be thinking about this stuff, but it's very scary. Um, but yeah, so I really appreciate you being another guest. I will have your website along with a 30 day challenge, the um the miracle 30 day. A miracle challenge, savers.

SPEAKER_02 44:01

Miracle morning, yes.

SPEAKER_00 44:03

Miracle morning. And then you're LinkedIn along with the homepage. Uh linked down below in this video. So make sure all of you watching to check that out. Um, join the challenge. I might check that out. Sounds that sounds like something I should be doing. I think I do a few of the savers, but I think I could be doing better. Um, my uh fiance and I sometimes like to just stand outside in our bare feet to do a little grounding in the morning. And that's that's pretty good. It's been a little cold. Um, so that's tough. Even down here in Florida, it was cold for the last couple of weeks, but yeah, we'll check that out. But yes, I'll have all that linked down below. And really, again, thank you so much for being an amazing guest.

SPEAKER_01 44:38

Thank you, Pete, for having me. It was great. Thanks everybody for listening.

SPEAKER_00 44:42

I stole my line. Thanks everyone for watching. I'm your host, Velocity Pete, and we will see you next week.