Skip those repetitive tasks by using this spreadsheet with GPT-4 superpowers

A weekly newsletter that highlights new and innovative AI products that are worth exploring.

Hey all!

Welcome to everyone that joined this week. We passed 3k subscribers 🥳

This week, a guest post I co-wrote with Evan Hamilton was published in Lenny's Newsletter. For those who don't know, Lenny writes the largest business newsletter on Substack, with 450k subscribers. Our guest post is titled "What 5 years at Reddit taught us about building for a highly opinionated user base," and was months in the making. It has turned out to be highly relevant with the recent mod blackouts that have been making headlines.

If you want to read about what the pitch and writing process was like for Lenny's Newsletter, check out my Twitter thread.

Now, on to AI and this week’s issue:

• Start using GPT to automatically research your leads on the internet with my product of the week

• Use this smart AI inbox to stop getting distracted by all of your notifications at work

• AI to plan and recap collaboration sessions with your team that are fun and engaging

• Plus, a recommended read on the economic potential of generative AI

PRODUCT OF THE WEEK

After testing dozens of new AI products this week. Here’s my top pick.

Double: Clean, enrich and qualify leads using AI.

One of my businesses is a blog where I test and review e-bikes. It’s a lot of fun and I make a small affiliate commission when website visitors click through one of my links and buy an e-bike. However, I am also working on growing another revenue source by getting brands in the e-bike space (gear, bikes, apparel, etc.) to pay me to create videos/images that they can use in their ads.

This is where Double comes in. Double is a spreadsheet with GPT plugins tailored for lead generation. It’s worth noting that they are in the Winter 2023 batch of YCombinator (the much idealized Silicon Valley accelerator program).

I use Double to create a more personalized pitch to the people who run marketing for these companies. I input a list of people and their companies that I want to reach out to, and Double helps me find their email addresses, recent Google News or LinkedIn posts about their company, and then produces a personalized email pitch for each lead. I've been impressed with how well it's worked.

Last week, I had another use case that I wish I could have used Double for. I was invited to a small Techstars Seattle dinner with eight Seattle-area investors and mentors on the guest list. Before the event, I googled each person on the invite to get a little bit of background on each person so I had a sense of who I'd be talking to (and who I wanted to avoid sitting next to 😬 ). If I'd had access to Double, I could have had an AI do the research for me instead of having to manually Google each person like a neanderthal.

Here’s a 5 minute video of one of it’s creators, Gonzalo, demoing Double:

RUNNER UPS

Two more AI products that are worth your time.

theGist: A smart unified inbox for all of your work apps. Stop getting distracted by notifications in Slack, Gmail, Jira, and other platforms. TheGist's AI tells you what's most important and where you should focus your attention. It's like having an MVP version of your very own Chief of Staff. TheGist has chosen a good starting point by addressing the issue of notification and distraction overload that many people face in today's always-on, always-connected work environment. I know I had trouble with this at Reddit when I would be in a meeting and see my Slack notification badge increasing incessantly. I'm excited to see how they further expand the product.

Butter: AI to plan and recap engaging team collaboration sessions. There are many meeting notes apps available, and I've highlighted a few on the list. However, Butter stands out from the rest because it's so much more than just an AI meeting summary bot. Butter is a comprehensive platform for team collaboration, idea mapping, brainstorming with virtual sticky notes, and hosting workshops. Recently, Butter has added AI agenda generators and AI-generated summaries. With its built-in agenda planner, integrated collaboration tools, and auto-generated recaps, you can effortlessly plan, run, and recap super-engaging workshops, trainings, and meetings all in one place.

What's cool about Butter's AI capabilities is that you don't just get a basic, generic summary. Instead, you tell it what type of session you had (e.g. brainstorming, user research, one-on-one), and it creates a more nuanced recap of the meeting. So, imagine yourself doing a brainstorming session with your team, using virtual sticky notes to come up with ideas and grouping them by theme. Now, instead of having to go through and pull out all of the key insights, Butter does it for you.

OTHER AI THINGS HAPPENED

Some other notable news and product launches from this week.

Google has started to roll out access to their AI integration for their Workspace products, including Sheets, Docs, Gmail, and more. The introduction of AI directly in Google's apps is going to disrupt many people who build Chrome plugins. I am very interested to see how this plays out, and I will provide a thorough review of Google's Workspace AI in the coming weeks. You can join the waitlist here, but note that you need to be the Workspace admin to request access.

A well-researched exposé from Forbes states that the CEO of Stability AI has been making misleading claims about his experience and the success of the company, as well as transferring money from the company to his personal accounts. Stability AI has quickly become a $1 billion company, but this story and recent departures from its Head of Research and Chief Operating Officer are raising a lot of red flags.

London calling! OpenAI announced it’s first international office: “We are eager to build dynamic teams in Research, Engineering, and Go-to-Market functions, as well as other areas, to reinforce our efforts in creating and promoting safe AGI.”

Snowflake, one of the top cloud computing–based data companies announced a partnership with Nvidia to make it easier for Snowflake’s customers to leverage generative AI applications. Everyone company is scrambling to make themselves an AI-native company.

Speaking of which, DataBricks (a data storage and management startup based in San Francisco) announced a deal to acquire the generative AI startup MosaicML for $1.3b. Like Snowflake, DataBricks want to capture the fast growing demand of companies that want to build their own ChatGPT-like tools.

WHAT I'M READING

If you only read one thing this week let it be this.

The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier by McKinsey

"AI has permeated our lives incrementally, through everything from the tech powering our smartphones to autonomous-driving features on cars to the tools retailers use to surprise and delight consumers. As a result, its progress has been almost imperceptible. Clear milestones, such as when AlphaGo, an AI-based program developed by DeepMind, defeated a world champion Go player in 2016, were celebrated but then quickly faded from the public’s consciousness. Generative AI applications such as ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Stable Diffusion, and others have captured the imagination of people around the world in a way AlphaGo did not, thanks to their broad utility—almost anyone can use them to communicate and create—and preternatural ability to have a conversation with a user. The latest generative AI applications can perform a range of routine tasks, such as the reorganization and classification of data. But it is their ability to write text, compose music, and create digital art that has garnered headlines and persuaded consumers and households to experiment on their own. As a result, a broader set of stakeholders are grappling with generative AI’s impact on business and society but without much context to help them make sense of it…” MCKINSEY

Until next week!

-✌🏻 Tyler

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