While Sam Alman and his gang are betting on who will be the first $1 billion oneperson startup, I've been thinking these solarreneurs won't really be working alone, will they? No, they'll be deploying tons of AI assistants. In fact, there's new research that shows the difference between AI power users and everyone else is that these power users think of AI as a teammate, not a tool. Okay, but how? Today, I want to show you exactly how to use Gemini's powerful gems feature to build these AI assistants from the ground up. We'll be training them on your specific business knowledge, instructing them on your precise operational playbooks and essentially be building digital teammates. While running my marketing agency, I worked with well over a 100 startups from soloreneurs all the way up to highly venturebacked scaleups. I know firsthand the constant battle for resources, speed, and efficiency. So today, I want to focus on building AI assistants that actually work, not these theoretical agents that just over complicate your life. Focusing on simple assistants that do their job well will set you up with a strong foundation for achieving more with a leaner team than ever before. So, what exactly are gems? Gems are customizable AI assistants tailored to your specific tasks and processes. These can be super helpful when it comes to any sort of repetitive work, especially repetitive processes that can stay all inside of the textbased LLM workflow. You notice today I'm going to be using the word assistant and not agent. Agents are different. Agents go out and interact with different tools out there. And despite all the hype, these agents are really just barely starting to be useful. I've experimented with these agents a ton, and while they're cool and they're fun to build, I can tell you that none of them have made it into my day-to-day workflow. This is because, in my experience, they failed to deliver repeatable, successful outcomes. And this is why I want to help you build a strong foundation of using these gym assistants. One, it'll be immediately useful to you in a repetitive way. and two, it'll set you up for success once these agents get a little bit better. And once they do, I can guarantee you I'll be making a video all about that. The first step in this process comes down to strong documentation. And this is something that I always struggled with until I had dinner with this super successful software founder. This guy was running seven successful software startups and I asked him, "How are you doing this and still having time to, you know, buy and drive sports cars all around Europe?" He said, "One word, traction." And this book is my business bible. It goes so well with AI automation that I've talked about it in many videos. If you haven't checked out the book, Traction, definitely give it a spin and try to get past the first part of it. There's a whole lot about values and some of these kind of softer um things around your business, but there are a ton of uh bits of gold in there. And one of the bits of gold in there he talks about are how to do your processes and your process documentation. And this guy, the author Gino Wickman says that every organization and he works with organizations that are up to about 500 individuals. So above that, you're in the enterprise level, things change a little bit, but he says any company really up to that 500 person uh level should be able to have their process documentation fit into seven major processes. And this includes your sales process, your marketing process, your customer service process, your accounting process, and three operational processes that will vary depending on um you know what your business does. basically and each one of these processes should have three to seven major steps. The operational processes might have more because that's really in you know your uh special sauce of what you do. And each step should have just two to five bullet points written in plain English that almost anybody should be able to understand. This framework has been so helpful for me as I have always over complicated the processes. When I was running my marketing agency, we had these extensive process documents that nobody looked at and you know they were so detailed that anytime a little piece of software changed, it was it was broken, need to be rewritten, it was always out of date. It was a huge pain. So thinking in these simple uh process documents can be really helpful, not only to get your mind wrapped around what your company does, but in the way that you guide these AI models. So, when I'm making these videos, my week is separated into exactly this. My video creation process is just one of my processes. It has about five or six major steps. And those steps just have a couple bullet points under each one. And guess what's associated with each one of those bullet points. If you guessed a gym or something similar, you are absolutely right. I found that creating lots of little assistants that are really good at doing one little thing is much better than trying to create one giant assistant. So, here we are in Gemini. To get to the gyms, you just scroll into your left navigation into this gym manager. And let's create a new gym by clicking this link here. Here's where we name our gym. This gym is one of the first ones I use in the week. I'm going to call it my YouTube title creator. This is going to be a simple one, but we'll get to some pretty fancy stuff here in a second. For this, I'm jumping into the cheat sheet. I make a cheat sheet for every single video that I create. They are all instantly available to anybody who joins my Patreon. There is a link in the description if that's something that's interesting to you. This is the simple gym assistant instructions and it just says the user will enter an idea for in my case a YouTube video and you will generate a few options based on the examples below. From trial and error, I had to add this sentence where I ask it, please do not use words like unlock, harness, or other hype oriented words. And then I say, here are the examples. So, we'll copy that right in here along with the examples and click save. And just to test it out, I'm saying I'm thinking about creating a video to help startup founders create compelling marketing strategies. See what we get. Awesome. Really nailed it. These are the exact type of titles that uh work well with my audience. Now, a lot of people might try to describe these titles in different words by saying, you know, non-salesy or uh you know, conversational or all these different words. I found you leave all that out and just give it examples. You want to show it, don't tell it, because it's really easy for you to steer it off course if you're just trying to describe these titles. But if you give some solid examples, that's the best way you're going to get the most use out of these tools. And honestly, these little simple things like this are what I go through uh on my dayto-day throughout the day. Each day of the week, I have like three or four of these. I start with these titles and then I might say, "Okay, now I need to write the first intro to the video." And I have three examples of the intro there. And it just helps me flesh out that intro. just go from step by step through my entire process, getting the AI to kind of generate things based on what has worked in the past. I like to keep the examples right here in the instructions rather than adding them as a knowledge file because they're so easy to edit when they're right in here and I get a when I get a new successful title, new successful video, I can update them very quickly right in the instructions rather than having to upload a new knowledge file, etc. because that's another way you can add reference material is by giving it knowledge here uh context around what you're doing. It's a very powerful feature. Definitely experiment with that. But for little things like this, these little assistants that are my true workh horses throughout the week, I put the examples right here in the instructions. That would be very different if I'm giving it context about a client or so forth, you know, and I had very long documentation. That's when I would use this knowledge base. But anything that's, you know, uh, an example of maybe a LinkedIn post or a Twitter post or an outline for a video, those types of things can all fit very well in the instructions. All right, so now that you got a feel for the basics, let's move into warp speed. This is my four-step process for automating almost anything that can stay inside of the LLM. And it first starts with just creating a step-by-step process. Now, you may have that in your process documentation, but if you're like me, a lot of times you don't. And you can use Gemini to create this process documentation. I'm just copying and pasting this prompt. Just tweaking it a little bit about what I'm looking for. So, this just says, "Please create a step-by-step process for whatever your process you're trying to build is." In this case, it's going to be building a CPC campaign, cost per click. That's Adwords, Facebook marketing, that type of thing. Here's a little more about my situation. This will be for promoting a SAS app. Please make it about eight steps long. All right, it's mapped out that process and now we're going to follow it up with this prompt. This basically says, can you help me create the process that will allow the user to interact with an LLM to work through these steps? I'm not looking to create an interface, just a series of wellthoughtout prompts and user instructions will do. So, we're going to convert this process into a list of prompts. I also want to define what the input is going to be. So I'm going to input a bunch of copy about my service so it can just go ahead and start generating some ideas. So I'm just saying let's assume that the user will upload a bunch of copy related to the SAS tool and the first step for the LLM will be to come up with a bunch of campaign ideas. So again we start with process documentation. Then we get into converting that process documentation into a prompt sequence. And from here, we're going to convert this prompt sequence into a set of instructions that we can then upload into the gym. So, this has returned a very robust sequence for uh this process of prompts that we can work through. And you may be able to get away with just putting this right into the instructions. So, you can test that out. But, I found cleaning it up a little bit can really help. Here's an example of uh the instructions that work really well where you're basically just saying, "Hey, take the copy the user uploads and perform the following steps on it. Come up with five paid campaign ideas, return these, and just move through making sure that it's returning each result to the user to you asking, hey, is this good? Can I go on to the next step?" step because that's where the problem is with a lot of these LLMs is they try to go ahead and do too much without looping you in. That's called human in the loop. Keeping the human in the loop at the appropriate times I found at each step just allowing the user, which is again you to just click yes, no, or I like choice one or choice two, that type of thing as you're working through these sequences. So, I did these manually for a long time doing these edits until I realized, you know what, I've got some pretty awesome examples. And then I went and just created my own bot that converts these prompt sequences into these instructions. And I'll put a link to that in the description. Right now, I use a custom GPT for this. It's just what I've been using for a long time and had a lot of success with. Here's what that looks like. I'm going to copy this prompt sequence that we just created in Gemini into my custom GPT here. That will then convert this to these instructions and see these are now much cleaner, a lot easier for that gym to use. So now we're back in Gemini. We can fire up a new gym right down here. Gym manager, new gym. This one I'm going to call it a CPC campaign creator. And I'm going to copy all of this out of that uh custom GPT. Drop that right into our instructions here. And this goes through that eight-step process. We'll save this. Now, we got to test it out. And like I said, I'm going to supply some initial copy to this. And what I've been doing in the past is just grabbing homepage copy. And since I've been thinking a lot about consumer healthcare apps, I'm just going to grab this copy from headspace.com. I'm just going to select all, which grabs everything here. And we're going to copy this right into our gem. And we're going to create some CPC, a CPC campaign for Headspace. So, that's real messy. Just drop that whole thing in there. And it is hitting those uh instructions. It's got it here. It's got a bunch of campaign ideas. Pretty cool. It's asking you which of these are you interested in, why? What's the primary goal? Going to answer its questions there. And it moves on to that second step in our process. After brainstorming those ideas, defining the target audience and personas, instead of explaining all these different personas, I'm just asking it, hey, please give me some choices that I can pick from. That's another uh enhancement you can do to these instructions is instead of having it ask you questions, make sure that it is generating options. So, you can just select between a handful of options rather than you having to do too much of the mental work there. And if there's something here that you're not seeing, you can always add that or combine these different things. Awesome. So, it's returned some choices for different personas. It's returned different pain points, motivations for this campaign. So, this is just going to go on and on through this eight-step process from, you know, generating the ideas, figuring out the keywords and targeting to actually creating the copy itself. Even it has a step in here for creating the sales landing page and creating um a video script that you can use uh in order to promote this type of service. So that is a really more advanced way that you can use these gyms to walk through a step-by-step process and loop you in at every step so that you can guide it appropriately. Uh but super helpful stuff here. Another example I want to show you is how to turn a gym into a communication hub. So with all the projects that we have flying around and all the different stakeholders to each project, communication is critical. And with the tool that I'm about to show you, this allows you to quickly customize your messaging to each stakeholder rather than sending one email to a group of people that you know none of them are going to read and none of them are going to you know process or having to spend the time to write individual emails to each different stakeholder. This is the best of both worlds where it will automatically create um information that is most necessary for the right uh stakeholder and create these bespoke custom uh different pieces of communication uh very quickly. So these are the instructions here. It says the user will input updates about whatever the project is. In this case it's a pottery website project and you will create a concise yet informationrich email to each of the following stakeholders. You will only generate one email per response. Starting with the first stakeholder, returning that to the user and asking for tweaks before we move on to the next stakeholder and continue in that fashion until all the stakeholders are accounted for. Customize the messaging to address unique roles, interests, concerns of each stakeholder. You have access to the detailed list of stakeholders in your knowledge base. So, this one we're going to use that knowledge base as our list of stakeholders with a little description about each one. Uh, and we're going to be able to create, you know, very custom and very targeted messaging to each one of those folks. So, here we are creating a new gym. Just calling it Pottery website project communications. Dropping in those instructions. And here's the list of stakeholders. These are all fictional if you're wondering. Download this as a PDF. and we will add this to our knowledge file here. So, uploading our knowledge file. All right, let's click save. And let's just say we found a major bug in the way the e-commerce part of the site is collecting payment. Not fun emails to write. And this went and hit the knowledge files and found Elena, the owner, and wrote a very nice email letting her know that we found this issue. Uh it says, "Hey, do we want to make any adjustments to this email before we move forward with the next stakeholder?" I'm going to say no, please proceed. And this is moving on to the next stakeholder who happens to be the technical lead. So, we're saying hey, we found this. You got to get on it and prioritize this. It will then move on through each of these stakeholders letting them know about this issue and what they need to know about it, what they should be doing, what they should be thinking. So, this can be a very helpful way for project managers to utilize these gyms when they are managing a project and trying to hurt all the cats, if you will. This cheat sheet is absolutely packed with a ton of great information, including everything that we went through here today. But then it gives you another set of instructions to look at for building out a LinkedIn campaign. This bot goes through all of these different steps here. This one is what 10, 11, 12, 15 different steps for launching a LinkedIn campaign. It also has that link to my custom GPT for converting your prompt sequence into instructions that can be used inside of gyms and a ton of good resources for how to use these gyms, including some of them that are now actually starting to connect to your email, starting to connect to your calendar, and getting more into this world of agents. I've got a whole video all about connecting Gemini to your workspace inside of Google. There's a link to that right here. I will see you over there. Make your dreams come true.