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Welcome back to the Never Been Promoted podcast. I am your host, Thomas Helfrich. Thank you for joining today. You know, our mission is to help a 1000000 entrepreneurs get better at entrepreneurship, get them unstuck, get them started, maybe just even get better at life. So if this is your first time visiting, I do hope it is the first of many times you've come here. And if you've been here before, thanks for coming back. The goal of the today's or any other shows is to learn just one thing from a guest. And the guests are entrepreneurs, and they've done things in the world, and they've succeeded and failed, and they're in the middle of it always. And if you could pull out one thing from today, you've done everything you need to take another step towards being better at entrepreneurship. And today, our guest, is Bo Bennett. He is the founder of Archieboy Holdings, and we'll get into that name titling. But, Bo, nice to meet you. Thank you, by the way, for coming on the show. Sure. It's good to meet you. Thanks for having me. This is a clean conversation. A lot of times I've met with our guests off air. I came late to the show by 6 minutes, so you guys are gonna hear it's just gonna happen. Like, there's just no scripting, not that there ever is. But, Bo, do you wanna do do you wanna kinda give your, you know, your backstory a bit? Yeah. I'd be happy to.
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I let's see. I went to college. And during college, I always wanted to go for business. I always know I wanna do something with business because at that age, I really wanted to make money. That was pretty much my only priority. So I went to business school. Although I had a love for psychology, which we'll get into a little bit later. So I went to Bryant College, or now it's Bryant University in Rhode Island, and I actually got kicked off campus for starting a business. Not like an illegal business or anything like that, but apparently back in the early 19 nineties, you couldn't start a business on campus that was against the rules. Of course, nowadays, virtually everything is online computer, so I'm sure that's not an issue. But back then, when the staff thought about it, like an on like a business on campus, they probably thought, like, customers would be walking into the dorm room, something old school like that. Anyway, I couldn't even explain to them that, no, I was doing everything through the computer. But, they just told me, yeah. Sorry. You gotta leave, which I did. So I ended up, running a business, an advertising specialty business, which is like the promotional business where you print on, like, pens, mugs, t shirts. And I had an in because I was a student at the school, so I was kinda connected with a lot of the local universities that gave me the business. So it was enough to basically pay my way through school. I ended up doing a really bad deal with some guy who took advantage of me as, like, a a 20 year old, like, a young guy, ripped me off of, like, $250,000. So I was basically the business was bankrupt. I ended up fortunately selling it to my partner for $1.1. So I sold that business. I got rid of all that debt, and I just kind of moved to Colorado. And when I moved to Colorado, I was planning on staying there for quite some time. It ended up that I was only there for about 5 months. It turns out that the mountain life really wasn't for me. That it was just a lot slower there than I'm used to on the East Coast, like in the Boston area, Connecticut, New York. So I moved back. I started a graphic design business, which was basically a continuation from what I was doing, but it focused on the graphic design aspect using the fax machine to, to get designs back and forth through clients. And that is the time when I heard about this thing called the Internet. I'm like, oh, that sounds interesting. And it was interesting to me because, again, I was using the fax machine to get black and white, really grainy designs over to clients. I thought, what if they could see the full color version immediately? This would be amazing. That's all I was thinking about with this technology. So I learned everything I could about the Internet, and then then I just said forget about this graphic design business. I just basically gave it away to somebody, and I said this Internet thing has so much potential. So I really jumped in. I became a programmer, and I started building a a company that hosts websites. We were one of the first at the time. And about 6 years later in 2001 before the big Internet bust, I sold the company for $20,000,000. And that was kind of like my, my my big success. And then a lifetime success, and you did get that. And then, and, of course, part 2 and 3, but I guess I'll I'll take a breath there, and I'll let let you enjoy. Going. Part 2. I mean, 20,000,000. I mean, we're gonna we're gonna get you sponsored the show for sure now. There's no question. You can't even say I can't afford it. So number 1. In fairness, I didn't get to keep all of it. I was the sole owner. I didn't use any borrowed money. All the money that I used to build that company was just basically done on credit cards. I didn't have any money to start with. I was I was just living paycheck to paycheck in a small apartment in Boston. But I had a couple credit cards that gave me a few $1,000 cash, and that was enough to really build this thing up. and it was it was explosive growth as you can imagine. People wanted websites. It was like the big thing, and people were learning about it. Everybody was talking about the Internet, the worldwide web, and what it could do for businesses. So I was in the right place at the right time. I ended I ended up selling to a company called Allegiance Telecom, and that was in 2001 because I saw, like, what was happening at at back in 2001. For those of you who remember, it was crazy, like, before 2001. Everything like pets.com, like all these crazy businesses that had basically no income, very low revenue, tons of expenses were worth a fortune. Not just on the stock market, but even private companies. People were paying a fortune for these, and nothing made sense back even Warren Buffett had something to say about that. He's like, I cannot advise my clients to put any money in Internet companies because there it makes no sense whatsoever. And he got he got hammered for saying that because people were making a lot of money off Internet companies. But then the bust of 2001, people are like, oh, maybe he was right. So, anyway, I saw that craziness going on, and I said, I gotta get out here, this business, because what people are willing to pay me for my business, it's so much more than what it was worth. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I think I was I was pulling in about maybe $400,000 a month, you know, which was pretty good, but not a $20,000,000 company. So so a company was willing to buy me for $20,000,000, and I was a little bit questionable about the longevity of that company. But it was it was mostly stock deal, but, 2,000,000 in cash. So I took it, and then I did some fancy financing with some companies that allowed me to take out a good portion of my stock right away. And sure enough, the company went bankrupt after 6 months that bought me. So I didn't get all my money out, but I ended up getting, like, 12,000,000 at the end, and that was pretty darn good.
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I mean, that's just a big one. But that's more than most people would ever make in a lifetime. If you get in one shot, set you up. Let's just do that math. Right? It's a half a 1000000 a year. It's about 5%. Right?
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It's a 10. If you were wise enough to put your money in the stock market.
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If you just don't in the S and P and wrote out, you'd be fine. I mean, I spent it all. But that's that. And that's what the entrepreneurial things that happens. Right? You make a ton of money or you make any money and you always you pump it back into the system. Right? If you pump it back in there to do something else, it's an it's an addiction
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for sure. It is in a way. Yeah.
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So what happened after that? So 12,000,000 and you have a holding company now, so your entrepreneurial ADD is in full effect. Once you have a holding company, entrepreneurial ADD has taken over and you've just accepted the down. But numbers came behind it. So tell me what happens after the sell for 12,000,000. There's you know, you know, I was part of the dotcom. We're about the same age probably. So toward that time, I was, a year or 2 behind in that. I was on the developer side and worked for somebody who didn't take the plunge, but it was probably a good thing because it all fell apart. Right? Like, you know, a year and a half, 2 years out of school. Right. and but but what'd you do after that? Like, when when no no technology companies were doing anything at that point?
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So I retired for one day, and then the day after, I decided, okay. Let's let's get this holding company going. Because I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to do something. So I started a holding company, which I would eventually build different websites and try different investments both online and offline and see how it worked out. Do it under the this cover of the holding company because I didn't wanna start a company for every little venture I did because that's a pain in the neck especially back then with legal paperwork and bank accounts and all that. Didn't wanna get into that. So I, I basically tried a lot of things. I did blow a lot of money. I spent, more money than I'm I'm proud of trying things that definitely did not work. And I came to the realization pretty quickly that, yeah, I'm not some kind of tech entrepreneur genius. I think I think I'm I'm pretty smart and I know what I'm doing for the most part, but I really do attribute a lot of my success to being in the right place at the right time. I mean, look where I was. I was I was I had zero debt. I didn't have a job. I was I was looking for something to do back in 1994 just when the Internet was coming out, and I had the time. I mean, it was perfect. I was in the perfect situation. I didn't have any kids. I didn't have a wife. Like, nobody to support. No mortgages or anything. I was in the perfect situation to jump in head first and put everything I had into this business, which is what I did. So I realized that, that kind of perfect success is very difficult to duplicate. and it was it was a bit humbling, to be honest. Like, after trying so many things and saying, oh, you know, this is a bad idea. This didn't work. And unfortunately, I've I've never been very good with money. So I didn't I didn't have it. I didn't That's where marriage comes in. You find the right partner to help guide that one a bit. I mean, I wish I wish I was a little bit more into, like, in in tune with with money and what was going on. But at the time, it's like, oh, I've got plenty of it. I'm not gonna worry about that. I'm just gonna worry about, like, seeing success. But unfortunately, I didn't realize that understanding money and keeping track of things down to the penny, that's how you measure financial success. So I didn't quite make that connection right away. Anyways, a lot of lessons learned. I ended up, a few years later, I ended up buying a data center in Boston, one of, Boston's largest data centers. And the data center, for your listeners who don't know, it's basically a whole bunch of computers that are connected to the Internet. You maintain the hardware for all the clients, and the clients could come in like it's called colocation. They could put their own things in or they could use your your computers and you charge them, like, a monthly fee for it. And the data center has to be carefully constructed. It was in the whole the old, hood ice cream manufacturing center. So it was it was climate control that it was it was a pretty good facility, but the company was losing money big time. So that's why they brought me aboard and then I ended up buying them out. I did manage to get the company profitable again, and then we sold to another company in from North Carolina. So I made a little there. So that was that was a little bit good. Kind of reassuring after a bunch of losses, like, to have to have that win. And then, you know, from from that point on, one thing that I do say is I missed the social media bubble. There there are a few and your lifetime as well, again, since we're about the same age, there are a few key moments in in technology and business in general in our lifetimes. The first was of the personal computer. For me, I was about, I think, like, 6th, 5th grade, actually, when they first introduced computers into the school. I fell in love with them immediately. The personal computer. We had a computer lab, you know, the big dot matrix printer, the green pixels that you could fit about maybe 15 across the screen. Very different from what we have today, but I fell in love with it. and the programming to be able to write 4 then loops and watch little thing go up and down, I mean, it it was kind of a rush for me. So I kind of, embraced that. the next one was the Internet 1994. I told you about that. I embraced that fortunately. The next one after that was the social media, like, or the web 2 point o. And I definitely missed that one because, I basically was so involved with, with other things, and I just I just could not, could not devote the time and attention to that at the point at that moment.
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So We can keep yeah. Keep going because I'm I'm curious how you, you've picked yourself up off the floor after being on the clouds. Right? Like, you it's like so, yeah, please. This is great. I mean, like, you don't you don't need a ton of people who've done a multi, you know, a 10 10 you know, a 9 figure exit, right, or an 8 figure exit. So, but keep going, please. Great. Floor is yours. Let's learn, people.
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So I was just busy doing other things. and, actually, I shouldn't give you the impression that I was wasting my time. That's when I went back to school and got my PhD in social psychology. Because as I mentioned earlier, I really wanted to make money early on and I knew business was the only way. I'm not gonna make a lot of money in psychology. So I kinda put that in the back burner, but now I had the time. So I studied I studied, like, everything I'd and I was really interested in in, critical thinking, logic, reason, world religions, philosophy. And then with all of that spending about maybe 10 years studying all this, that's when I ended up getting my degree focusing on social psychology. So this was kind of like a step back from from business and really focusing on the things I wanted to focus on. And that included a lot of travel, spending a lot of that money that I was making earlier, and just kind of like enjoying life a little bit and growing up with my kids. My kids were growing up. I always worked out of the house, which was great. So it it was a good time, but not a very productive time financially or business wise. Educationally, it was. Intellectually, it was. But, you know, again, financial that I just kinda let that, it wasn't a a top priority for me. And, and then that kinda brings us to the next stage, the next big paradigm shift, if you wanna call it that, was artificial intelligence. And that was back in March of this year when I finally got access to chat gpt. We had to be on waiting list to get access when it was first coming out. Yep. And then I realized, like, again, it was one of those times when I pretty much just dropped everything I was doing, realized that this was gonna change pretty much everything. And I started focusing on artificial intelligence and using my skills as a programmer to build different websites and then my background in book publishing to build websites using artificial intelligence where we create books, where we could do narration, and promotion. So that's what I've been focusing on now, and I am seeing that same really exciting type of huge climb with with the interest and the demand that I saw back in the web hosting days. So that's what makes this time very exciting as well.
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Yeah. Absolutely. And now and, you know, my background, it you I will throw this out there. It's Intelligent Automation AI Systems. I've still never was in a position myself, right, to be an entrepreneur until, like, 3 years ago where it just kinda I just was done with corporate. and, you know, you keep getting jobs. You never get promoted, not because you probably couldn't because I just didn't I don't think I wanted to. I didn't wanna be in it. And not never having any money to invest in anything. So just starting your own. You know, we're early adopt we've been on beta for GPT since 3 years, something like that, since the start of my company. and I saw the massive advantage, but I also saw the rate at which everything was changing. Yeah. And so you're building things that are on the app side, which I love. But I just I, you know, I went to the services side because I was like, man, this stuff is so confusing and it's moving so fast. Investing in any technology, the next release is likely going to just eat it up. So it's like, you know, so tell me about how you're navigating that speed because it's almost like better to get an index fund right now than it would be to invest in any one company because of the speed at which things are coming out. The big money is just eating up all the capabilities of these small businesses. So how are you in this modern world addressing that speed challenge of where do you put money where it's not like you're not pumping money into something that's going to just never come to fruition?
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Yeah. That's one of the big challenges is with with AI and how fast things are moving, you never know when something is going to completely just upend what you've built. And I'll give you a perfect example of this. A few months ago, probably, like, 6 months ago, I built a platform for creating audiobooks with with AI using, 11 Labs, one of, like well, not one of the top, AI voice company that's available right now. the voices are, like, mind blowing.
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What was the name of that one? What's the name of the company? 11 Labs, it's called.
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Especially when you clone your own voice. I clone my own voice, and it sounds exactly like me. So I do like, all my narration is my cloned voice now, and it saves me. Like, I can't even tell you how many hours it saves me from all the books that I would normally narrate. But, anyways, I built this company because 11 Labs did not have anything like this. They provided the voices with really good APIs that allows companies and people like me to build, like, an interface to it for different uses. So that's what I did. I built it, for, for audiobook narration, and I did it on a subscription base where you could subscribe per month and you could use a certain amount of characters and so forth. So just after I released this, pretty much like a week after, 11 Labs comes out with virtually the same thing. Like, they built an interface for audio books on their side, and it just completely wiped out everything I did. And Yeah. You know, it it sucked. Fortunately, as the programmer, like, it was my time, but I didn't I kinda hedged my best there. I also built a, I built this kind of as a back end for another one of my companies that does that does the books, that creates the books. And so people automatically use my my software, BookBud.ai. They would use that website, and it would automatically interface with other voices for them to do the audiobooks. And they don't have to pay now for, for a monthly fee. So it's just like a per use subscription with which, 11 Labs doesn't offer. So I guess the lesson here is, probably twofold. 1, don't get too involved with your creation or, like, if you're really building something. Understand, like you alluded to, that any day something could change drastically in the market and make your stuff pretty much obsolete or at least bring the demand way down. So you have to expect that, and you have to have some kind of contingency plan. And that's what I did. I did have contingency if that something like that was gonna happen because it it seemed like the obvious next step. So I kinda built that into it. So it wasn't a waste of time. I still have an amazing product, author voices, dotai, which is which is the audiobook company that I built. It's still doing incredibly well. It's just kind of catering to a different market. So maintain that flexibility, and don't be all upset because this is the name of the game. This is this is the way business runs now. And if you're using AI technology and it gets easier and easier for the average person to use, the barrier to entry comes down, meaning more people are gonna jump in, and there's probably gonna be more competition. So there are pros and cons.
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You well and you mentioned some very specific so sometimes you gotta find it's not the it's a hostage marketplace, too. So you're discussing stuff that like a lot of individuals use and it's like that market's almost being cornered by the bigger players. So it's hard to build an app and things like that. But teaching people how to use it is a is a service that will never end. So having a business around understanding and someone's learning from you, that's for 1 or the bigger markets where they can't trust that open platform and they need technology that has certain credentials, essentially. So they'll put it on their own intranets. And so so there's there's another play where you're like, hey, that's great. But if you want to secure, keep your own version, you know, you can you can create these apps, I think, but you just have to sell to a different market that has a different pain point that the masses can't touch. And so are you looking at it that way as well from your apps, or are you just kind of, hey, how are you just using the speed to turn and burn it? Hey, we got about 9 months to make money on this thing, and then it's going to get eaten out Then we're gonna do the next one. And how do you, how do you how do you approach the model, I guess, is probably the question I'm asking. I'm not looking this at this as a short term thing because
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I feel like what I'm building I'm I'm building in this protection. And the way I'm doing that is I mentioned before that I started earlier with a publishing company. Actually, I kinda skipped the whole 10 years of of that story. But to fill in that gap, I wrote a book in 2004 called the year to success because I wanted to kinda catalog and, just kind of document everything that I went through and my thoughts of building this company and selling it. So I, I did that in 2004, and I realized that it was virtually impossible to get published. And it was possible to publish online and ebooks. I mean, that was just starting and that was kinda crazy. So I basically started a company to help people format and publish ebooks, and then it moved to print books and audiobooks. So now 10 years, 13 years later, whatever it's been, I have this full online publishing company, very exhaustive, that has that has all different formats we do and the book marketing. So what I've been doing is I've been using AI and using these services and building it into what I do. So even if somebody comes up with a competitor to what I do, they don't have that kind of integration, that kind of, instant integration to all the book publishing experience that we have. That's really not AI. There's there's very little or no AI based with that. The book publishing, the book marketing, the promotion, the audiobook narration on that side. So there's a lot that's all kinda intertwined. So what I think is gonna happen is that worst case scenario, I start to lose some some market share, but I think that this real market is is big enough for many different players. So I'm not too concerned. I see this as kind of a long term play.
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Yeah. Absolutely. And I think the integration piece is a good point. So bringing multiple tools or having your maybe platform set up in a way that you can always grab best in class technology, meaning, like, maybe OpenAI has the best x and this company has best y, but it's solving a problem by putting, you know, elegantly solution it together. That right. that's once again, not AI. It's just platforms, but it's leveraging AIn multiple pieces. And if you're taking that approach, then you've got your own you've got it because then you're like, you want people to solve these problems better and have different platforms because you just API plug it in? And now we're doing it even better, and we can Yeah. You know, you don't have to go to 5 different tools to go do it. So Yeah. It's a really good point that there's a lot of great companies out there that do
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certain specific things extremely well, but they don't do everything extremely well. But if you take all these different pieces and these companies offer APIs, which for the nontechnical people out there, it's a way to communicate with their system via programming language on the back end and put your own fancy front end to it, then then you could build something that's kind of the best in the market.
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Absolutely. And along your journey, right, you said you had a whole stent of I think the lesson I always try to find these little lessons here, right, is that you pivoted from .com to PhD book writing, which we're gonna go back to that right here. And then now AI. So you haven't fully dropped everything else, but your focus is now like, oh, this is where the next this is the next growth expansion. Tell me about the book journey a bit because I think a lot of people, that's their initial side hustle because, you know, you get 40, 50 years old and or thirties even, and you're like, I got knowledge. I just don't know what to do with it. And I feel like people should would wanna know about this because I would have wanna known. So tell me about that journey a little bit and because it's it's it's it's intoday a bit. So how back it up, and let's let's back that bus up and revisit that part of the journey. Sure. Well, I mentioned after I sold the company, I wrote year to success, and it took 1 year to write. It was a 740
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page book. And when I say 1 year to write, I mean, 8 hours a day writing this book. It was really a full time endeavor, and I loved the process. It was really good. It it felt, kind of hate to use the word spiritual, but but in in a sense, you know, it was just like connecting with with the universe in a way of, like, everything that's come together, and it was just really good to, to get it out there and write it. And I kind of fell in love with the process. And then I said, okay. Like, after that book, there was a lot more that I wanted to write and wanted to talk about. So over time, I've written about, like, 14 different books, and I've written these books the old fashioned way. I mean, you know, not not by hand, but I've written them on the computer, like, without using AI. So In order to publish them all, I again, I use my own publishing company that helped me out with the process, with marketing, and all of that. And then that's, I guess, enter AI and discovering that using AIn a certain way, you could have AI write these books for you. And this was a major issue for me because I literally have I literally have a notepad, I'm sorry about that, with about 20 or 30 different ideas of, at at I say 20 or 30. 20 or 30 a month.
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Different ideas that I've been putting down. I Wait. Wait. Let me check. Entrepreneurial ADD. Let me just translate that for who the who people who don't have it. Sure. There's 2 to 3000 a minute. 1 comes out a day. That's good.
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That sounds familiar. Okay. Please continue. So so yeah. That's the reality. Wait. What in it? And I lost it. Yeah. Exactly. Like, what happened to it? You remember at 4 AM or 3 AM or something. We're in the shower. That's a common time.
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Yep. That's a 100%.
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I knew I can't write all of these books, but now, you know, thanks to AI, like, I actually could. I could actually create the outline, just the ideas just like here, like bullet points. Boom boom boom boom. Feed it into AI, like and then AI comes out with with this perfect, like, beautiful nonfiction book with, like it was kind of cocreated in a way. they're my ideas, but AIs kind of like a a very advanced, personal assistant that does all the wordsmithing for you. And when you get through it and you could change it. So So that's how I essentially created BookBud. I said, this is amazing. And I can imagine so many people would love this idea to be able to do this. So with BookBud, I created over a 100 books so far, and that's that's been in the past, you know, 6 months or so. And this is just totally, totally part time. I mean, I'm so busy with other things I'm doing. It doesn't take very long to do it. So it it it's a way to get all of these ideas out, and I'm going through that list of ideas that I have. And, of course, as you know, when you read through some ideas, you're like, oh, that was a stupid idea. Why did I write that down? But you write it down anyway, and that's the nature of ideas. and AI will help you make it better.
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Are you now are the books monetizing?
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Yes. Yeah. All of my books are are published. They're published on Amazon. They're published on Barnes and Noble, on Apple, and all the different, formats. And so this is, I also offer this as a business opportunity like a publishing empire. You could build your own publishing empire and it's like literally you could you could publish a book, write the book, publish it, cover everything for, like, $25.
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That's, like, on the minimum end if you do, like, 30 a day. That's you know? So I'm interested. I'm gonna do this with you because okay. So I'm one of those people who's like, that would be a good book. I don't have time. Right. Right. Like, I'll give you an example. I was in Costa Rica in the last 8 days. Right? And the place we stayed at, like, it's just random weird stuff. And so throughout the few days we were there, I was like, we're gonna write a non we're gonna write a fictional murder mystery from because the property managers were on-site and there was this weird pipe that came out that didn't connect any gutters. I'm like, that goes to a basement. and I was like so we were creating this whole thing. And so my point is I'm going to go put that into GPD and see what it does, but I'll use yours instead. And we're going to do it in the Dan Brown style of, like, you know, 2 things going on. So I think what you're describing is amazing. I have a book called Never Been Promoted. I used AI not to write it, but I gave AI the chapter structure, my experience, the things that happened to me, the things that I wanna communicate. And it helped me with the analogies, helped me with, like, the examples in business, helped me put it together, come up with the better strategies, you know, and simplicity and really helped the tonality across multiple, you know, through 75,000 words. And I and that was, like, the initial editor. And then I still use a person to ghostwrite to kinda help me tie it together to be even better. That's where I think AI and I love your take on this. This is where I think AIs not there yet to kind of look at larger text formats and say, this might be a better way to do this big, big manuscript. It still kinda does better on shorter mid form chunks, let's say, at 1500 words or less. But what's your take on that? I mean, because may maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like it it kinda loses focus after 1500 words or 50,000 words. AIs notorious
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for short term memory. That's the way it is right now. That's kind of the state of things. So when you're requesting something, you could have a conversation with AI just if you use, like, chat GPT or something. You go back and forth a few times and then eventually you get to a point where it forgets everything earlier. Now the problem with this is when you're writing a book, the book is, you know, gonna be chapter after chapter, page after page. And if if you don't have a way of informing AI what you've already been talking about and what you've been writing, it will just repeat things, and you're not going to have a good product. So one of the magic behind BookBud is we found a way to do that to, to fully inform AI of everything that it's already worked on in the past. So although, like, you may have some repetition, that's you when you just read it, you just kind of remove a sentence or sometimes AI loves to use, like, phrases over and over again, like, little strange phrases. And that kind of The alchemy of. Something like that. It's like I wanted, like, do it. Kept to bespoke the word that is constantly yourself. So, so you could just kinda go through and just kinda get rid of that, but that's that's easy in the human editing process when you just remove some of that. But I gotta tell you, like, recently, I've I've adapt this system because we started with nonfiction and I adapted it to fiction, and I just love this process. It is so much fun. I've created a way where you start with just the idea. You tell the idea. So for example, a murder mystery in Costa Rica involving a lead pipe, something like that. You could tell it the characters. You could tell it whatever. And then you it you start out and it's makes 5 suggestions on how the story starts. So you could choose 1 or you could put in your own section. You could you could write just like a sentence or 2 how you want it to start. You click next. It creates the first section, which would be a couple pages, and then you read it. And It's, like, mind blowing. Like, this is exactly what I was thinking. Like, how did they know this? This is so good. So you have this two way communication with AI, and then so you have the next chapter. The next it gives you 5 different ways, like, how do you want this story to progress? And it gives you 5 different suggestions. You could just keep on auto letting it choose and it'll write the whole book or you could guide it the whole way. But the process is wonderful. It's a lot of fun and the final product is fantastic. And the way I do this, I'll give away a little secret because it's important with the fictional books. I actually send the entire book back, the progress of the entire book back to AI every single time. So AI knows everything, every character, every move, every scene. Like, there there's no, re repeating or just like all of a sudden we were in cost Costa Rica and now we're in China. You know, how do we get there? So it it's it's it's there's no con, continuity or what what's the that, the it on IMDB, it has the name for the problems when there's, like, there's the break in, the continuous story. Anyways, there's a term for it, but it doesn't have that.
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It has a through line, you're saying. Has the tumbleweed. I don't know what the break is. Now anybody listening, just go and say it out loud. I'm like, idiots, it's this, and then we'd all. Alright. I'm I'm all in for this. Alright. So here, let me just take a pause. First of all, I like it. Like, tell us how to get a hold of you for this specific you got a lot of stuff, but this is the one we're going with because it most interests me, and it's my podcast. So damn it. I'm being selfish today. Do what you want. He's I love this is the fun of owning something. You can just do what you want. Alright. So,
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how did they get a hold of you? There's a company you do the bud. BookBud, b o o k b u d as in dog, dot a I. That's the company. So you could just go there and then you could see, you could chat with me. I'm I'm on live chat usually 12 hours a day there.
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I love that. By the way, live chat, which is a great use case for AI on paper, is much better with humans that have AI helping them behind the scenes reply or what are they really asking for. Well, really, the reason this AIs not for users, it's for me.
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And I'll I'll happily say that because building the company, I need to know exactly what's going on pretty much every moment. I want the real time feedback from the users, and I'm constantly making changes. So if I screw something up, I wanna know, like, right away. I don't want it to go through some system or automate. I wanna know. So at least for the time being, while the company is in the stage, I am extremely involved in pretty much everything, including the day to day monitoring of the support.
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That's I agree with you, by the way. I think that's the best way to get the customer voice questions, what things you put in your FAQs, how you position your landing pages to reduce people coming and asking that question. So I think that's brilliant. And then you're also describing a skill set. You've had lots of success. You've done it already. You're still in it. You're in the weeds doing it because you love it. And if you don't have that love and that passion and just the excitement to build, you know, I'm gonna guess in SimCity, you know, that game. Right? I'm sure you played it. You love building, and then you just said, you know, it's built. I'm gonna go to the next one. And then you leave it, and you come back, and it's burnt down, and the crime's taken off. What kind of SimCity player were you, Bo?
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I've played that game once, So I'm gonna I'm gonna be shocked. But just to work with the metaphor, I'm the kind of SimCity player who will build it and run it and put everything into it until I actually sell it or turn it over to somebody else. And I really do have an investment in in that, you know, I wanna have I wanna be really confident that the person buying it is going to build it up. Now, ironically, I did tell you that I sold a company that went bankrupt, like, back in with the web hosting company. At the time, I had full faith in them and the team, and the team was still fantastic. It was just this huge corporation that had their their money in so many different places that despite how strongly many of the web hosting companies were doing that they did acquire, The main company went bankrupt, but the companies were broken off and sold and they were taken care of and I think the company is still active today under the name hosting.com.
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Yeah. That's amazing. And I love this this journey you've had. It's I mean, it truly is. Wait. Go back, and think what you know, if you're fine you're the entrepreneurs are finding success. So we're gonna talk to a specific audience here. Any level. Would you maybe and I'll say any level above what they expected, which is, you know, like, oh, man. I really did it. What's your advice to them? What's the one thing you would tell them to do or not to do?
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Flexibility is usually my one of my top suggestions at least. Being flexible in what you want to do and kind of having the bigger picture that look, I want to succeed. I want to build something great. Good. Now when you look at the details, that could be many many different things. Don't get stuck on one thing and don't worry about failure because failure is often just moving on to the next thing when you realize that what you're doing isn't working. So you're you're constantly moving towards success. You're moving towards away from failure even though, like, each individual step may be a step backwards or what somebody may call failure. the bigger picture is flexibility. you gotta be flexible. You can't be married to this idea even though you think it might be the best thing ever. Try it out and if it's not working, it's okay. Like, people are so afraid of giving up, you know, it's persistence and determination. Well, yes, but be persistent and determined for the bigger goal. Be persistent and determined for success, for building something great. Keep your persistence and determine, and determination on that, not on the little steps it takes to actually get there. Even though that little step may be a a company or a website you think is a great idea, maybe it's not. And have enough humility to say, okay. This was a stupid idea. It didn't work. Learn from it and move on. Oh, and by the way, the word I was thinking of was continuity. Continuity is the big thing. That's the word they use in IMDB when when you, when you look up the different movies and you see the continuity problems, like all of a sudden, somebody was in in, you know, one country and now they're in another with no explanation. It's, it's kinda funny if you if you go on IMDB, look up your favorite movies and look up that problem, and you'll see how often that occurs in movies.
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That's that's funny. Incontinence is important as you get older. Not
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there yet. You have continuity in your continents.
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I you know, I think expanding the idea of, sometimes they're not even stupid ideas. It's like good idea, but first try out it. and I'll give you example for me. You know, I have a channel called AI Nerd, and I did it. I started it right in the beginning of COVID. And because my background being there, I wasn't traveling as much. So I was interviewing other AI nerds. And so not too unsimilar to this channel, but but I found it for 400 interviews, and no one really it was boring. and but it still monetized. It did it. But but here I am on a new podcast, you know, and we monetize this day 1, and we've gone from 0 to a 1000000 subscribers on YouTube in 33 days. And so but that was all a planned business model because of what I learned on AINERT. I still have the channel. I still see the videos out there, but I don't touch it anymore because it's just a distraction to what actually works. Oh, I have plans to revisit it or sell it or something. But I know what you mean. And sometimes, you know, you just got to let go of the idea because it might be wrong timing. It just might have been your stepping stone to go where you are. And you remember it like you're you're looking at it as your first car that you're probably like, oh, I really didn't want to get rid of that old Honda Accord with bumper stickers and duct tape on the trunk,
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but I have to. Well, I guess the bigger picture is you don't you don't have to win all the time. You just gotta win more than you lose. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And, and things will turn out just fine. And don't Or 1 win one time really big. Yeah. Yeah. If you could do the one big win, then that makes that gives you more leeway to do a lot of the losses.
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This and this meeting is brought to you by Gamblers Anonymous. Beau is a active member,
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describing his craps table experience. I just went big. I did gambling pretty much well, a couple of times, but the first time I did was the day I turned the hour the minute I turned 21, I was at Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut. I was waiting at the front door until midnight on my, 21st birthday. I bet, like, a $100. I won $300,
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and then I didn't gamble again for, like, 30 years until we went to Vegas. And then every time I go to Vegas, I'll put, like, $20 in the slot machines. That's it. I do. You know, it's funny. I don't I like playing poker from a gambling standpoint, but I do love the Willy Wonka machine in Vegas. It's just entertaining to me. You like you always lose your money, but it's like, I can sit there for an hour for, like, a 100 or so and have 2 drinks and have a $100. Right? I was like, yeah, it's worth the entertainment. See if something Yeah. Exactly. If if you if you see this entertainment, then that's good. I do a 100%. Just, you know, listen, you know, conscious of time here, what's one question I should have asked you that I didn't?
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One question you should have asked me. I, I can't think of anything that, that we didn't cover for the topic that we've been talking about. you asked me about the website bookbud.ai. That's a good place to go. I guess, like, if if people are interested in my books that I've written, like, hey, Bo. Where can people get all the books that you've written? Good question. You know? There are times. I'm glad you asked it. the answer is boe bennett.com. That's my name, boe bennett.com. Those are all the books that I personally wrote. Again, those that's this is pre AI. the AI books are a different category, but this is where you could find my books on mostly, mostly critical thinking, success, business, and, logic reason. That's my Awesome. Psychology, science.
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Fantastic. Bo, thanks so much for coming on today. I'm I'm I'm gonna after we get off air here, I'm I'm definitely following up on a it's BookBud or BookBud.ai. Yep. B b u d, singular, BookBud.ai. Just because I have tons of ideas that and I have a fun comedy streak. Some of the content we do is very point of view. And so this I am gonna 100%. If it's if it's someone inexpensive to get it out there, I might do it on a completely different brand. But, I'm gonna a 100% do this. I'm gonna go, and that's happening. So I'm leaving time. I'm cutting this podcast early just so I can be selfish and get my time with Bo, not your time. Thank you for coming. Alright. You bet. Thanks for having me. Hey. Listen. If this was your first time here, thanks coming. Like, listen. You gotta follow Beau, and check out his, you know, the book, bud, and all the things he's doing. Do you wanna give your LinkedIn or some other kinda just personal social media so they can get kind of the top of the funnel for you for all the stuff? I'm not a big social media person, but, but, yeah, you could you could just go to, go to my 2 sites that I mentioned, book by dot ai and, Beau Bennett dot com. Okay. Perfect. Yeah. And that's Gen X speaking for you. Anybody who came up through it doesn't you know, we're on social media, but we don't wanna be. It's just how it is. Thank you so much. Hey. Hey. Listen. If this was your first time, thank you for staying this long. And if you've been here before, you know what's gonna happen. I'm gonna give some dad points out. Dad points are important because you can get 1,000,000,000. You just can't spend them anywhere because that's what dads do. But it's great. Thank you. And until we meet again, everyone who's listened to this podcast, get out there. Go unleash your entrepreneur. Thanks for listening.