AI Workflows for Building and Running Startups

Honored to be the first to present here, and we'll get this started. So yeah, you know, there's only 10 minutes here, so I can't exactly go over all the ways I use AI in these two startups that I'm building. building, but I can give you a couple use cases that I think a lot of you will find useful and be able to implement and act on right away.

FitCommit: An AI-Native Fitness Platform

So for FitCommit, which is an AI -native fitness fitness platform. It's an iOS app. It's on the App Store. And it's also a SaaS product for trainers.

Using AI to Accelerate Product Design

But with apps, you've got to create a very nice design for people to actually want to use your app, right? And you also need a good dev to be able to read off of those designs and translate those designs into working features.

So the way we used to do design was Figma, right? So we would go into Figma, click the arrow, click the box, the circle, drag it, and we would build out our app designs that way.

Last year, Figma Make came out, which is basically Figma but vibe -coded, which was really great. That really really helped us speed up our product development.

But more recently, some of these new AI models like GPT -Astra, which just came out a few days ago, Fable 5 .1, they're very exceptional at design. They're very good at design. And so I'll show you.

Design Reference Boards and Interactive Prototypes

So what we do is we have a design board, a design reference board with all of our screens, so we have hundreds of screens on there and we have screens for every version. So here we're looking at version 2 .11 versus 2 .12 and all this is

designed by AI for the most part. Actually the foundation of the design is in AI. One of my team members has an app design studio, so the foundational design is actually not AI, it's actually done by real designers.

But that's something else that you want to keep in mind is, if you can, find a designer, if you want to build a software product. If you can't find a designer, find a designer, because it'll make your work stand out, otherwise Otherwise, your designs will just look like any other AI -generated app, right?

But having said that, these new Frontier models, GPT -Astro, Available 5 .1, they're probably good enough where you can get by with stunning designs without having to rely on a designer. But this really helps us speed things up because...

And this, by the way, would be interactive. So it's basically a replica of what the app would look like, except on the iPhone it's on Swift, that's Apple's native coding language. Here it's HTML, that's the only difference. But otherwise, functionally it's exactly the same.

So the front -end dev, you can just go in here, click around and see exactly what it is that And I do sort of the product strategy and the product design in terms of the ideation of the features. And then he can see what my intention is very, very easily. Whereas in the past, you would have to struggle to understand what it is that you want him to build.

But yeah, so if you are building an app, I highly recommend doing something like this. have a design reference board with different versions and prototype on there and then you can get a dev to put it together for you afterwards.

From Design to Development with AI

Actually, you could get AI to do it for you afterwards as well.

I wouldn't one -shot an AI app because you kind of lose track of where everything is, where all the screens are, so I highly recommend having a design reference with all your screens sorry yeah so even if you're going to use AI to build the app first I recommend using AI to do the design and then use AI to build off of

your design that typically works better so this has really allowed us to speed our product development again product development used to be clicking on boxes and circles, dragging them onto Figma, drawing stuff. Now it's just conversation.

You just turn on voice mode, tell the AI what you want, and it does a good job of building it.

So that's one thing you can take away from this AI startup is our product design process.

Building a Custom CRM for Attainment

And then for my other startup, Attainment, And this is something else that I think you guys would benefit from.

Who here has used a CRM? Okay, who likes their CRM? Nobody, yeah. So, yeah, I've always hated using CRMs as well. They're clunky, like things aren't where you want them to be.

whereas so what we did is we used AI to build our own CRM and build it exactly the way we want to look the way we want everything to be placed the way the way we wanted to function in our own branding right and so this is our this is our CRM and so we use this to manage leads and sales conversations with with currently our focus is specialty clinics.

Here's something cool that you can do with a regular CRM, but you can do with your own custom -built CRM.

Using Recorded Voice-Agent Demos in Sales

So for us, we're selling AI voice agents to specialty clinics, right? So we need to give them a demo. So what we do is when they're interested, we build them a demo, we send them a demo, and then they listen to it, and they talk to it, right? So they talk to it. And that call is recorded, right? It's a recorded call. So they talk to our AI agent, it's recorded.

That recording, whoever is working on that contact, whether it's myself or the fellow salespeople, they can just go on the CRM and listen to that call to see what was the user's experience trying out that AI voice agent.

I'll actually see if I can play it. The Wi -Fi here is pretty bad. Yeah, I might not be able to play it.

But basically, I wanted to give you an idea of how good these AI voice agents are nowadays. But that's not the main point here. The main point here is building your own CRM nowadays is easy. and it allows you to have much more functionality at your disposal custom functionality like this like having a a call recording in the CRM super base yeah I would usually recommend using super base it's it's for for startups

Key Takeaway: AI Builds Products and Runs Operations

it's pretty good so yeah in summary AI how do I use AI in my two businesses it It helps me build the product, and it helps me run the business, which is most of what we do.

So that's it for my 10 minutes, or was it more like 30 minutes? Well, you can take more than 10 minutes if you would like, or you can bring it to the audience.

If anyone has any questions for David, or want to know more about either one of the two companies that he's currently running. I work also closely with David on the team, and you can ask me questions.

Here we go. I'll give you the mic.

Q&A: AI Development Tools and Replacing SaaS

give me a second yeah so you mentioned earlier that you developed part of your apps using the AI what kind of apps and programs are using as AI developers what kinds of apps and programs are we using oh I see I see yeah so we use I mean or

everyone on our team kind of likes their own thing right so some of us like Claude some of us like ChagGPT Codex. I'm nowadays entirely on ChagGPT Codex with a new release of this Astra model. It's an incredible model. But everyone on our team is on either Claude or ChagGPT Codex.

We used to be mostly on Claude because Claude was way ahead of GPT about like a year ago for the past year. But as of now, opening eyes really caught up and they're neck -and -neck with Anthropix so they're equally good so yeah it's just a matter of personal preference and in terms of other apps tools that we use like I said

we used to use Figma so we used to pay for a Figma subscription for the for everyone on the team for seats right you gotta pay per seat and now it costs us 100 bucks 120 bucks a month for for Figma right we don't need Figma anymore anymore. We've canceled our Figma.

We used to have HubSpot. We canceled our HubSpot. We don't need it. So yeah, using those two AI agents, Cloud and Codex, you can do a lot with that.

All right. We have one more question per se. I'll come all the way from a lot of questions for you, David. Yeah, please go ahead. Thank you.

Q&A: CRM Adoption and Data Migration

Mine is more of a marketing question, and I think it probably will help a lot of people that are doing startups around here. How do you convince someone that already has a CRM platform to move to your CRM platform?

So the question was, is how do we train someone to use ours? How do you move someone from one CRM platform or convince them to move from their CRM platform to your CRM platform? Got it. What makes the difference, I guess? Okay. Okay.

So, for example, Laisha works with me on a fractional basis in terms of business development and sales and clinic partnerships. And I didn't have...

Can you get set up with an intern when you talk? Yeah, sure. We don't have Wi -Fi. Yeah, for those who are looking for Wi -Fi, it's coming. Go ahead, Dave.

So, saying I never had to convince her because she had no other choice. We only have one CRM, and that's our own CRM, and all our data is inside of there. So it's not like anybody has a choice. They have to use our own CRM. They can't use another CRM.

Now, yeah, typically salespeople, when they join a company, they don't bring whatever CRM they're using. They adopt whatever CRM the company uses themselves. but your question raises another another another question that you might have now is is that what if you already have a CRM is it easy to move your data and it

actually is I mean these AI models are so good nowadays they can copy over your data very cleanly very very cleanly I mean HubSpot Salesforce you can export most of your data and these AI agents can now replicate your data perfectly inside of a database like Supabase, for example.

Hey there, John Sintalic's company over here. How's it going there?

Q&A: Healthcare Data, Compliance, and Canadian Servers

Now, given that your app is adjacent to healthcare or anything industry like that, have you ever thought about the location of any AI calculations or processing from a regulatory perspective right so how does the regulatory aspect of like where the data is being stored where the data is being processed and what like all the SOC 2 compliant stuff like that yeah that's a great question

so yeah that is something we have to be conscious of luckily in Canada in almost all provinces The regulations around AI aren't that developed quite yet. They have some loose guidelines, but they don't have any hard regulations on AI quite yet.

I mean, but generally, one of their guidelines is if you're going to use actually not just AI, but if you're doing anything for a Canadian clinic, most of the data should be processed in servers on Canadian soil.

and so yes we try to run so we use Azure AWS and Google Cloud and all three of those have Canadian servers available so we use Canadian servers and the AI models like open AI and cloud that we run which are embedded into our product as well like the voice agents are part but they're powered by cloud actually they also run off AWS and Azure on Canadian servers sorry just to follow up

on that any PII documentation any PII data you have control of where that is at every given time um yeah yeah so so yeah we we we do structure their uh uh their uh PIPA uh data very closely

um but um uh yeah now it's not possible to process all the data in Canada quite yet because a lot of AI platforms don't have Canadian servers yet so for example our voice models we use 11 labs 11 labs doesn't have a Canadian Canadian servers yet although just a few weeks ago or about a month ago they opened up a new office here in Toronto so because they're anticipating that this year is when AI voice agents are really gonna go parabolic in terms of adoption and so already happening but yeah so they're opening up they're opening up an office here in Toronto so

So hopefully it's just a matter of time before they also get some Canadian servers. And then we can say we're, I'd really like to be able to say we're 100 % on Canadian servers. I can't say it right now, I could say a majority, but soon we'll be able to say that.