[Podcast] How to Leverage AI to 5x Your Impact (With Rob Walling)

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Ryan

Last season, I exclaimed, "Is anyone sick of hearing about AI? Surely we can't get enough of it, right?" Well, I hope not, because today, we're going to tell you all about 5xing your impact through AI. I can assure you don't want to miss today's conversation. And just like the topic, we have an album that still many can't seem to get enough of.Welcome back everyone, viewers and listeners of the program. This is On The Record. This is our fourth episode of season 3. Michael and I today are joined by the wonderful Rob Walling.

Rob, tell us a little bit about you before we get into this topic of AI and its transformative nature and we talk about Daft Punk. Who are you? Why should people care?

Rob

Well, I started as a software engineer, didn't like working for other people … unemployable, I think I would call myself today, and eventually started building software products on the side. So, I have run SaaS companies, but I've also run an e-commerce website. I've sold information products. I ran a micro agency. So I have experience across a lot of things, and I think that maybe will be helpful today. Even though these days I'm immersed in SaaS, I'll try to answer for all business owners.

Ryan

I jokingly said that because there's a million reasons you should care why you're on the show today: successful exits, funding of many businesses, many of which are thriving today as well. So Rob, your perspective will suit us well today.

And here's a funny little story: You two knew each other before this episode came to life

Michael

I have interviewed Rob several times on a podcast I used to host, Rocket Ship FM.

Ryan

Boy, the world spins around in mysterious ways, does it not? Rob, thank you for joining us. 

Today, it's really going to look at how we leverage AI to maybe 5x your impact as an individual contributor, business owner, or marketer, from a variety of perspectives. And we're going to tie it back to a wonderful record from Daft Punk known as Random Access Memories. For those watching, you can see something all of us are familiar with. It’s the helmet, the Daft Punk brand. Its notoriety is prolific, but we also want to tie it back to what it means to the topic of AI and its transformative nature.

Michael

Yeah. Well, one thing that I think stands out about this album that's different than some of their previous work was the guest appearances. Much like we talked about last season with Beyoncé's Lemonade, it felt like they were leveraging some of the insights they had gotten from previous releases to tap into markets.

They started in the dance/EDM world, but they drew fans from some indie and more underground audiences, fans of bands like The Strokes, or Panda Bear from Animal Collective.

So I felt like they were trying to branch out and acknowledge the entirety of their fan base, rather than just tapping into the EDM movement, which I feel like came from data insights. They were seeing something that said, “Yeah, this is a good idea.” Now maybe it was just an artistic choice, but it felt purposeful and it certainly worked for them.

The album was a huge success and broad-reaching. It felt like they were using those insights in the right way to produce something that was very Daft Punk but also a bit bigger than their previous work.

Ryan

Yeah. Number one in 14 countries upon release. Much like AI has popularized itself, this record certainly did upon launch. Rob, did anything spark your interest or align it to the topic of AI?

Rob

It brought back memories of it coming out in 2013. I always respected Daft Punk’s branding and marketing. There were a lot of good albums that year, but they stood out. When I first heard Daft Punk, I thought, “It’s punk, let me listen,” and it wasn’t punk music. It sucked you in with the helmet. That’s table stakes: you have to stand out. Then, how do you market and brand yourself to be recognized above the noise?

Ryan

I love it. We'll talk a lot about man versus machine or man and machine working together. In Daft Punk's record, it's exemplary. They take tools like a vocoder, this way of automating and modulating your voice in a way which became popular in music, very niche and trendy.

But they interplay, where it doesn’t matter who’s actually inputting the vocal into the vocoder. Could be either of the two gentlemen that are in the band. It comes out the same. AI can mirror a similar path. If we don’t give AI the right inputs, it looks the same as everything else. We’ll talk about the technology, practices within it, and how you can apply it to your role or business.

Rob, I’m looking at you because you’re at the forefront of many businesses getting out of the starting blocks. What are some things you would lean into most if you’re an upstart marketer or business owner? Where can AI impact you the most?

Rob

Yeah, I think about AI and again, it’s across whether you’re an agency or whether you’re e-commerce, whether you’re SaaS. I’m invested in 212 SaaS companies. There’s a lot of them out there, but I break it down into three buckets. 

One is internal operations, so this is anything I’m doing over and over that no customer sees; not customer-facing stuff.

Then I think about marketing and sales. This is “how do I get more leads?” You know, the content generation. We can talk about the dangers of that but also the good way of doing that. There’s sales cold outreach, right? So marketing and sales.

And the third one is in your product delivery. What are you actually providing value? So if it’s SaaS it’s the software. If it’s consulting, it’s the actual work you’re doing for clients.

People get overwhelmed by AI and want to use it everywhere, but well, think about it in these buckets. Internal operations, it can make you more efficient but they’re not going to get you more business. So if you think about what’s the bottleneck in your business, if you don’t have enough clients or customers right now, well, then start implementing in sales and marketing first, then in the implementation or the product delivery, you know? And then operations is maybe the lowest priority. But if right now you’re drowning in invoices and internal operations stuff, we’ll start there and you can move around it.

Ryan

Michael, what are your feels? How is AI best leveraged in this very moment?

Michael

I think that’s absolutely one of the great use cases and unlocks that AI gives us. I think the other is the ability to test and iterate quickly, right? Bringing an idea to life. You don’t need months or heavy funding. We can skip some of that early painful point of “I need three months to build the product. Maybe you can vibe code it over the weekend, just to get something out to customers, especially in the bootstrap world.That was always a big topic of conversation: How do I test this? Because if I’m going to invest all of this time, which is really my own investment into this, I want to make sure that I’m headed in the right direction. But it used to take us a while to get a site up to get the basic functionality for the problem we’re trying to solve. Now all of that is speeding up and so we can leverage it across both our marketing to hit more people at once, but also across the product itself – give me a couple days and maybe I can get another iteration out.

Ryan

We’re seeing a lot of headlines right now suggesting 5x or 10x your impact. Rob, is it real? Are you seeing it in your businesses?

Rob

Yeah. In software development, AI has me coding five to ten times faster. But I have heard anecdotes that a company with like 150 developers – juniors, mid-level and seniors – and they basically banned the juniors from using AI because they were misusing it. This is the danger, so there is a balance here. 

On my team, we create a ton of content, we record a YouTube video every other week, 52 podcast episodes a year, and we're funding a lot of companies, which of course requires a lot of looking at fuzzy data, right? It's not things I can just load into a spreadsheet, so to speak, but I can have AI do it. And it has definitely reduced the amount of hours that we need to spend doing.

Ryan

I love that. Michael, your belief – five and 10x – are you seeing it at Leadpages? And if not, do you see a future of which that might be happening soon?

Michael

Yeah, I mean, look, our whole dev team is using these kinds of enhancements. We're trying to figure out though, um, it still needs human involvement, but it does help with testing. It does help with some of those tasks, like you’re buried in invoices. Developers are often buried in testing. They’re buried in the non-creative side of the work.

And AI really helps to unlock their time so that it can write the unit tests while they continue to do the creative kind of production. Yeah. And so we are seeing it. It is now a requirement that everyone is leveraging it…and it’s been a huge unlock.

Just in the last 24 hours, the CEO of Shopify, Tobi, just set a mandate across their company: before you hire anyone, you have to explain why AI can’t do that job. It’s an interesting paradigm. So if you’re a solopreneur, you’re just going to probably get the work of maybe two or three people, you know, that you would have needed to hire. But if you’re a bigger org, maybe you don’t need to lay people off. Maybe you don’t need to hire as quickly, right?

So it’s really interesting. I mean, if they’re doing it at that scale, it’s moving the needle, right? They don’t make decisions by accident out there.

Ryan

No, clearly. Wow. That’s an astonishing sound bite, but it makes a ton of sense as well. Yeah.

A lot of listeners – so AI is thrown around so loosely – but you guys are right at the forefront of the technology that is being employed at operational level, sales and marketing levels.

Rob, are there some point solutions people should be looking at right now that enable this 5x, this 10x stuff? And if so, could you name-drop?

Rob

Yeah, it depends on what folks are struggling with. It’s always, what’s that bottleneck for you, right? So for me, my email inbox is a disaster because I’m technically a venture capitalist. I don’t like saying that, but you know, I’ve invested in 200 companies, so eventually I have to admit it.

So there’s a couple solutions out there. I use Fixer, fixer.ai, and then there’s one called Inbox Zero, it’s at getinboxzero.com, and you’ll link them into your inbox and it categorizes it. It spins up a reply that you then get to approve or edit.

It takes all the cold outreach and Gmail is not filtering that, right? So the AI is smart enough to put it in a “probably cold outreach” thing, and I go through and I can just delete quickly. So that’s like a really quick one given how much time I spend in my inbox.

And of course, if you’re writing software, Windsurf and Cursor are these tools that are kind of used across the world now.

Ryan

Yeah, I love that. Michael, do you have some favorite tools of choice you’re asking the team to use or you’ve been around or experimented with?

Michael

Internally we’re using Cursor, we’re using GitHub Copilot, right? On the development side we’re using a lot of ChatGPT deep research to do kind of initial idea generation or research on a market segment as we’re expanding, right?

We’re no longer just a landing page builder. We’re now more of a conversion optimization tool, a data tool. So we’re touching on different markets and we’re now competing with companies that we’re not as familiar with.

And so it really does help to speed up that “get something on paper” idea and get something that we can start to make decisions against. We don’t have an internal researcher. We don’t have a market analyst, right?

So it’s giving us these capabilities for us to move faster. Rather than taking a week to do the research, we can kind of get it in 20 minutes and it’s usually good enough.

Ryan

Yeah. I want to dive in a little bit to something that most people are pretty familiar with right now: it’s Agentic AI, right? It’s the year of the agents, and it probably will be for this year and well beyond.

Rob, how are you seeing it used in some of your businesses? Is it too soon? Is it time now? And if so, what’s it look like?

Rob

I think we’re getting there. Yeah, it’s complicated stuff. It is. I think we’re at the forefront. I think if you’re not using AI today and you’re kind of listening to this thinking, “How should I dip my toe in?”, I don’t know that Agentic is there yet.

I think we’re thinking six months out, 12 months out on Agentic AI agents. I think of them as like having ChatGPT that gets pinged, right? It gets a webhook and it does something, or it’s polling.

I mean, it’s like Zapier plus AI is how I think about it, right? It’s automation. So at this point it’s not much more complicated than that. Almost anything that I’ve seen that you can do with Agentic AI, I can manually go in and just do with a chat interface, you know, whether it’s Claude or Perplexity.

I am seeing folks use it in kind of novel ways, but I don’t know that I would put a bunch of time into it yet. But I do think the time is coming for things to be. It’s just going to automate things more.

Instead of, right now, we record a podcast episode, for example, we upload it to PodSqueeze, and PodSqueeze does the full transcript, then the timestamps, then the show notes, then links out to all the things, writes a tweet with @mentions of everyone.

It used to take a person four, five, six hours to do that, right? Now that’s done. Agentic AI can just make it so, you know, we don’t have the upload step and you don’t have some other things, but to me it’s still a rounding error.

I think it’s where we’re headed, but it’s not a panacea yet.

Ryan

Yeah, that’s great framing. And you mentioned PodSqueeze. So that’s one of your go-tos for podcasting automation. What about visuals? Because we’re seeing a ton of buzz around video generation, image generation, even cloning voices. Are there any tools or workflows you’ve actually found useful, or at least promising, in that space?

Rob

Yeah, absolutely. So we use Midjourney for some of our imagery, but honestly, we’ve been leaning more on Ideogram lately. It’s a little more consistent for text. If you want words on the image, it doesn’t butcher them as much.

And then for video, there’s Runway and Pika Labs. They’re both moving incredibly fast. I wouldn’t say they’re replacing full production yet, but for prototypes, storyboards, or quick visuals to support social, they’re huge time savers.

Voice cloning, we’ve played with ElevenLabs. It’s wild how good it is, but also kind of terrifying, right? You definitely need to use it responsibly.

Michael

Yeah, I’ve tried it too. The moment I heard my own cloned voice reading copy I didn’t record, I was like, “Okay, this is either amazing or the start of the robot apocalypse.” But for marketing, yeah, it’s a game-changer for scaling assets.

Ryan

Totally. And I love that we’re being honest about both sides of it, because the tools are incredible, but they also introduce a new level of responsibility.

Rob, one thing you’ve mentioned on your show before is how founders should think about building with AI versus bolting on AI. Can you unpack that a bit?

Rob

Sure. So when I say “build with AI,” I mean that it’s part of your product’s DNA. It’s not just a gimmick. For example, when we’re evaluating startups, if someone says, “We added AI to summarize customer feedback,” that’s a bolt-on.

But if AI is core to how the product delivers value, say, it learns from user data to improve recommendations or automates a previously impossible task – that’s built with AI.

The market is already saturated with “AI features.” What’s going to last are the tools that are fundamentally smarter because of it.

Ryan

That’s such a key distinction. Michael, are you seeing that mindset shift happening in marketing tech too?

Michael

I think a lot of marketing tools are still in that bolt-on phase. You’re seeing “AI headline generator” or “AI email writer” bolted into every platform. But the tools that stand out are the ones that actually learn, the ones that make you better over time.

Like, we’re already starting to see systems that take real performance data and evolve the next campaign automatically. That’s when it stops being a feature and becomes a co-pilot.

Ryan

Exactly. It’s like the difference between having a helper and having a strategist on your team.

Let’s look ahead a bit. Rob, you’ve been through several big tech shifts over your career, from open source to SaaS to no-code, and now AI. What do you think founders and marketers need to be doing right now to stay ahead of this one?

Rob

Yeah, I think the big thing is to just start using the tools every day. Don’t overthink it. You don’t need a huge strategy. Just start small. Use ChatGPT, use Claude, use Perplexity, use whatever tool you want. Get familiar with what’s possible.

The people who are hands-on now are the ones who are going to see the opportunities later.

Like, ten years ago, if you were tinkering with Stripe and Zapier before everyone else, you probably ended up building something meaningful. Same thing here.

Ryan

That’s a great analogy.

Rob

Yeah. And the other thing is: Stop thinking AI is going to replace you. Think of it as leverage. Every time I see someone say, “Oh, AI is going to take my job,” I think, “No, someone using AI might take your job.”

That’s the mindset shift. It’s a multiplier. It’s like hiring a super-assistant who works instantly and doesn’t sleep.

Michael

Yeah, and the people who figure out how to manage that assistant well, those are the ones who are going to pull ahead.

Ryan

Totally. And to your point earlier, we’re seeing AI compress the time between idea and execution.

Like, a marketing team used to take a week to brainstorm, brief, draft, and design something. Now that can be a morning’s work. So the advantage goes to the people who can ship faster, iterate faster, learn faster.

Rob

Exactly. I think of it as “speed compounds.” The faster you can move, the more experiments you can run, and the more shots you get on goal.

And that’s the thing: AI isn’t just about saving time. It’s about getting more reps. The best founders and marketers are already treating it like that.

Michael

One thing we’re noticing too is that creativity is coming back into focus. AI can generate drafts and ideas, sure, but human taste still matters.

So it’s like, AI handles the heavy lifting, and we get to focus on judgment, voice, and story.

Ryan

That’s a great point. It’s kind of like what we’ve talked about before, this idea that AI gives us more space to be creative humans again, rather than production machines.

Rob

Totally. And the irony is that’s what tech was supposed to do from the start: Free us up to do higher-level thinking. It’s finally starting to feel like that’s actually happening.

Ryan

Yeah. That’s a good note to close on.

So before we wrap up, Rob, for folks who want to follow your work or dive deeper into some of the topics we hit today, where should they go?

Rob

Sure. The main hub is robwalling.com. From there, you’ll find my newsletter, podcast, and links to everything else I’m working on.

Ryan

Awesome. Thanks so much for joining us. This was packed with insight and incredibly practical advice.

Michael

Yeah, thanks, Rob. Always fun talking with you.

Rob

Likewise, guys. Appreciate it.

Ryan

And to everyone listening—thanks for tuning in to On The Record. We’ll see you in the next one.

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