We launched a new AI platform!

We have now officially put out into the world wave by gravia Studio. And I can't tell you how excited I am to not have to say the platform anymore. I will probably still refer to it as that, but I can at least use the name now, and we can start building up some brand recognition for it.

Welcome to the next evolution of the podcast entrepreneur school in the AI era, we are here to figure out how to integrate AI into the business you've worked so hard to build in a way that still feels like you. I'm your host. Kelly Sinclair, award winning marketer turned AI platform co founder, AI has fundamentally changed how I thought about work systems and what's actually possible. This show is about navigating that new reality together. It's going to be a wild ride, my friend, but I truly believe there's a way to leverage AI in a way that's intentional, human, centered and aligned. It's an ongoing evolution, so let's explore, because AI may just be the unlock you need to achieve the life first business you truly desire.

Welcome back to entrepreneur school. I know you missed me last week, but I was busy. I was launching a new AI platform. And so we decided to take a week off and focus on the launch. And then I wanted to come back to today and tell you what we did, what we released, what it's called, what it's for. And I'm also going to share a little bit of a few clips from our launch event and talk to you about how you can get involved with the next steps. So we were having a really fun time being very coy about the name of our platform. I was talking in sort of some peer circles and whatnot, and people kept asking me, what's it called? What's it called? And I thought, I'm not gonna tell you. I'm gonna wait until we can publicly say it. So it's really fun. We set up a wait list, we dropped some hints, shared the founder's journey, talked about how Andrew and I came together not even a year ago. Now, honestly, and it's crazy that that it hasn't even been a year yet since we first started talking, and now we have a brand new company and a brand new AI tool launched and out in the world. Pretty awesome. But when we were thinking about how to name this platform, I'll show you a little bit of the story. We actually got together back in December, on a Saturday, we ordered some pizza, we had a whiteboard. We were figuring out, like, kind of we needed to name two things. We needed to name our company, and then we needed to name the platform itself, because I want them to each have separate brands, and we, you know, give us some flexibility as to what we might do with the company itself, and then the platform can have its own name as well. So the way that chat GPT is the platform belonging to the company open AI, for example, and quad is anthropic. So we came up with a bunch of different ideas, wrote a few things down, kind of hummed and hot, and did not make a decision that day. We just put them on the whiteboard. And we were like, we'll come back to this when we have to.

Because in very much startup fashion, we only deal with what is absolutely critical to deal with right now. And the name of our company was not critical until such time as we actually had to get our incorporation done legally. So we left it sitting there, and when we came back to it, I basically went and did a little review and kind of pointed out a few things about what we were thinking about. And I sent Andrew briefing note, and it looked a little bit like this. It was like, well, the company name we kind of came up with was gravia Studio. And gravia Studio comes from a previous company of Andrews called gravity. But we wanted to be like a creative space, so we use the word studio, and we want to sound a little more tech forward and fun, so we switch the name to gravia, and we like having the letters A and I in the words, so we can, you know, maybe do some playful animation and stuff like that. So gravia studio, okay, that's the name we're, I'm suggesting for our company and the platform. We're going to call it wave W a is from something it's something that water does. Water makes waves. Water is very much what we're thinking in terms of how we feel when we're using AI well, when we're in flow, when our creativity is. Flowing. Our businesses can flow. So we really liked that kind of water metaphor in the name, and then the letters AI right in the middle. So we're actually spelling it with lowercase w, capital AI, and then lowercase v. And so it's nice and symmetrical as well. That was one of the clues that we gave in our emails. That's four letters, AI is in the middle, and it's something that water does. And then I'm like, and science fact, gravity makes waves, so therefore gravia studio and waves makes total sense. And then the last line of my briefing note just said, and it doesn't suck, because that's the truth. Honestly, the hardest part about naming a company is getting the URL. So we were successfully able to get the URLs for both those companies,

and that was a huge factor in whether or not we could choose those names. And I tell you, there are a lot of URLs out there that are taken and people are trying to charge you, like, millions of dollars for which is crazy. That's an it's his own industry. I think people just like scooping up URL names and trying to sell them to people. So anyways, so that's it. We have now officially put out into the world wave by gravia Studio. And I can't tell you how excited I am to not have to say the platform anymore. I will probably still refer to it as that, but I can at least use the name now, and we can start building up some brand recognition for it. So that was really fun. I moved to share to you, like, what we're trying to do here, where this came from. In a perfect world, Andrew and I would have been able to actually sit together and record this podcast episode. But quite honestly, he's too busy programming. He's too busy like making all the things work and adding all of the layers of security and making sure that things are functioning well, as we're starting to invite some people in. So I think it's really important for you to hear that Andrew is also a real human, not just a person that I made up online. And here's a little clip from his introduction at our launch event, and a bit of an overview around our shared philosophy on why we built wave.

I've been in tech 30 plus years. Started off as a software developer, then went into creating my own business, and have created several software businesses since three and a half years ago, I stepped into the world of AI when chatgpt dropped, and have been immersed in that ever since, from coaching to helping companies adopt AI. And then when I met with Kelly, actually through the local startup incubator here, we had coffee, and you might might have seen some of that in the story, and we said, let's build something basically. And here we are. We built something that's we think is pretty cool and pretty helpful to all you folks and a bunch of others that are queuing up. So that's enough about me ready to go.

I feel like also it's important to say that when we started talking to each other and you just brought up the age gap between us, so I'm blaming you for that. But I mean, I was a teenager when we rolled into the millennium, when the internet came out, and as much as like, all I knew about it was this is cool, dial up internet and MSN Messenger, which I give all the credit for my typing speed, quite honestly, but I didn't know the impact of how that was in the world, right? But we are, at that point, right now, with AI coming in as such a disruptive industry, which we don't understand exactly how it is going to roll out. And there's definitely a dark side, right? There's definitely a lot of things to be aware of around jobs and how people will be replaced, but Andrew and I really both believe in human first AI adoption and and taking a leading role in that, and helping people to bring AI into what they're doing in a way so that it actually enhances you as the human. And what we're seeing, you know, with respect to people who are online business coaches, course creators and whatnot, is that when you're developing AI tools that support your frameworks and your learning, that you that you help your clients with they're coming to your coaching sessions where you can have much deeper, more nuanced conversations, and opens up capacity for you to actually go deeper with your clients. So that's one of the things we were also thinking about when we were naming the platform. Was death. And was flow, and right now we are doing a beta. So we have a few creators that we're working with in a very high touch capacity, where we're supporting them with building out their bot squads that they can securely monetize and sell through our platform. So the way that wave works is you can create AI tools that are squads. We call them bot squads. And so the way, like you would have a custom GPT, this is like a custom GPT plus a quad skill plus a workflow had a

baby. So the way that it interacts with you or your clients is in sort of a group chat setting where you can talk to and work with a variety of different bots within the squad that produce a specific result.

And I am going to give you access to a tool that we have that is a bot squad that will help you understand what a bot squad is, and will also help you understand what kind of a bot squad you might want to build for your business. So it's very meta in that way. So that is called the AI tool launch playbook, and you can grab that at the link in the show notes. So what I want to do now is share a few moments from our launch party. And we're so happy for everybody who attended that launch party. And I have to tell you, like, just from a personal perspective, it's one of those moments where, like, I know and Andrew knows that it was a big deal, but we also kind of needed to downplay it a little bit, because there's this whole parallel universe that we're navigating, which is the marketing side and the development side, and how those two things need to integrate with each other. So I bet, as with anything, and we've talked about this like in all the versions of the show, and you're an entrepreneur, you know, you have high standards. You want to put out something that's really great. You want more than a like minimal viable product. But also, the reality is you need to just put out the minimal viable product and go from there. So we have definitely been very forthcoming about the fact that what we're putting out is not the final shiny object at all. It is very functional. I use it. I'm like, the number one user. Obviously. I've been using it to produce this podcast for months, but now using it in different ways, because the technology just evolves right like as we're launching this anthropic drops a brand new Opus model the day before our platform goes live. So those are the kinds of things that we'll just be constantly dealing with, is identifying and embedding new the new models, making sure everything is up to speed, changing things as things need to change. So it's always going to be evolving. So there was never going to be a point at which we'd be like,

Okay, it's perfect. Let's put it out. So quite honestly, it was almost arbitrary. The date that we selected. The launch event was on April the 16th, and the primary reasons for that was, I'm part of a marketing event that's happening this week where we're letting people in. I'll be doing a live demo. I'll be opening the doors to our AI tool launch playbook for people who participate in this particular event, and then in another week's time, I'm going to be in California at the AI business world event, where I want to be able to share about our platform as well. So we just, we had to pick a date to make it public, and it was going to be whatever it was going to be. And so that version of that is, it's like we said, Okay, we have a thing you can play with it, but you can't really. So I'm having a hard time with that. As a marketing person who likes, you know, has a big PR background and everything, I would love to do a big, splashy launch, and we will when we're feeling really good about the way that the platform works. But we also have to recognize that we can put it out there, we can allow people in, but we also need to make sure that we don't just become tech support, right if there's issues that prevent us from them being able to deploy the updates and the enhancements that we want to on the roadmap that we have built. So that's me just being very transparent about what to expect if you do want to jump on the AI tool launch playbook and start playing with it when we feel comfortable, which we're pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones constantly, we will be inviting access to get creator accounts we're. Where you can start building your own bots and squads and looking at deploying those and selling those to your clients. So that's what we're doing with our beta testers right now, and we're doing that in a very like I said, high touch way that is kind of invite only or by application, to ensure that we're getting full cycles of feedback.

Because there's two layers here. If you want to sell AI tools, it's building those tools, making sure they work effectively. But then also, there's the onboarding of your clients to using those tools, which they have sort of a different level of account than the creators do, and so without, like, being able to show you all the things behind the scenes, and not overwhelming you with this conversation, I just wanted to sort of point that out, that there's a lot to it. It's not just like, build the thing, sell a thing. We made a very comprehensive platform, and I'm, like, so proud of Andrew for what he's put together. It continues to surprise both of us, honestly, because that's kind of the fun in programming AI, is that it almost has a little bit of a mind of its own, or it ends up just being even better than you expected.

One of our beta clients who started implementing it, she has a squad that has about nine bots in it, and they kind of each work through a process as part of what she teaches inside of her membership program. And when she was just doing some testing with the first couple of bots, she was so impressed by the outputs, it's made her rethink her entire way of delivering her program. So she does it like with live check ins over the course of, you know, six or eight weeks, and she's already seeing how that can be sped up, which is what's really exciting, is that we're kind of entering into this new space of AI expert backed AI as a product, and then thinking about how you actually integrate that alongside your program or your membership or your coaching offer, and how that might change the way that you work with your clients a little bit. It's intended to, like enhance your human abilities, right? So if your clients are able to access your thinking, actually use your thinking, which is the difference between expert backed AI as a tool and your and a course that just teaches somebody how to think through a process, it's actually helping them with the implementation, right? So theoretically, and what we are hearing from market research conversations and from our beta clients so far is that the clients are coming back with much deeper questions. They're coming to calls with drafts, with things ready for review, instead of being stuck at the get the starting line, which is often what happens when you work through, like, complex strategy and, you know, transformation, or whatever it is you do as a creator, right? So if, if you feel like that's kind of an issue with your program too, not an issue with your program, but if you feel like that, if you feel like that's a challenge that your clients have as well, this could be a really great solution where you're implementing AI tools that are built based on your expertise that support them when you're not there. So

it's a gap filler. It's something that helps them to get further, faster and to come to conversations with you, with you know, more sophisticated questions, so you are able to deepen your experience with them and really get into that nuance and that strategic thinking and the thing that only you can do, the thing that an AI tool cannot do, no matter how well you program it. So that is the philosophy behind wave. We're here to help expert based creators put together AI tools that they can securely sell on our platform. So it's very gated. It's very protective of your IP, your knowledge, your expertise. You don't have to give that away. You don't have to worry about access, because you can manage access to all of your subscribers directly through our platform, then you can sell it directly through our platform, so you're monetizing and getting paid for the experience that you have, which is absolutely what you should do. And it's just really interesting, this, this whole new industry that we're moving into, this whole new market, really, of how we manage our IP as creators, in a space where AI is very prevalent, right? I was having a conversation with one with someone the other day, and she was saying how, you know somebody was in her program. And had all the worksheets and everything, and they were giving it to AI, and then they were basically like, well, I don't need to be in your membership anymore, because I'm just going to work with your worksheets with AI. It was like, Oh, is that what's going to happen now? Like, is that what people are doing? Like, first of all, people like, this is, I'm sure you signed it terms and conditions when you entered into somebody's program that you wouldn't do something like that.

But also, just like, where are your ethics as an individual, you know? But that's the truth, and it happens all the time in the online space, people, you know, sharing things and doing things with things that aren't theirs, and that's something that we're really trying to help protect, because we believe that your expertise should be paid for. You earned it, you built it. It's yours. So that's what we're doing with wave. So if you want a first little peek at wave and what it does, then I would encourage you to subscribe to the AI tool launch playbook, which will give you the experience of being inside of a bot squad and understanding how it works as a workflow. First of all, because this one is actually like a step by step process, it's going to ask you some questions, and then it's going to synthesize your responses through a few different layers. And what it will do is actually give you the structure of the bot squad that could help your clients that aligns with the program or the offer that you currently have, and helps you to identify some gaps or some stuck points that you could help fill with AI tools. And then it's going to give you the actual instructions for all of those bots. So it's basically like giving you everything you need to build a bot squad on wave, and within the next short time, we will unlock the ability for you to go in and actually do that. Because I've created a monster here. I've created a tool that makes you want to use our tool, but then, right now, I'm saying, but you can't quite use it yet, but we're really getting there. We're getting there quickly. I don't know, by the time you listen to this, it might even be actually a live feature, but it's kind of just the balance between gating access and creating interest. And either way, if you're listening to this podcast, I know you're in my inner circle, so you can definitely reach out to me directly, and we could talk about how this can work for you. I have a new instagram

handle because we launched a new Instagram for wave. It's at join wave again. That's W, A, I, V, and my new personal Instagram is Kelly, underscore, makes underscore wave, so you can find me there, and of course, in my email or I will respond to you about how this all works. And if you're really interested, I would love to hear more, because that's what we need to figure out is all the different use cases that this can apply to how it can help and that helps us with our marketing as well as our develop. So I love that I'm working with people directly in our beta who are giving feedback, who are providing different examples of use cases on how we can apply this to their business. So that we're going to have all these different examples of ways that you can use Wave, how it's going to work with for your clients, how it's going to support your business, and how you can use it to really be a key part of your business, and the way that you deliver your expertise to your clients. So very excited about the future. I know these next couple of weeks are going to be crazy.

So I'm going to just keep coming in with these very behind the scenes podcast episodes so you can just kind of follow along on how this experience is going, and I'll share updates about the platform as we have them as well, and just different ways that people are using it. And it's just, it's just an interesting time, folks, it's, it's a, what a day to be alive, what a time to be alive, as they say, right? Well, for now, I will leave you until next week and go and enjoy playing with the AI tool launch playbook. And if you do, please send me a note or tag us on Instagram when you're using it. We'd love to just start getting some exposure for what's going on and see where that goes. So excited. Thanks for being on this wave with us.

Thank you for listening. If this episode got you thinking about how AI is impacting your business and what it might look like to integrate it in a way that actually fits. I'd love to help you think that through you can book an AI strategy chat using the link in the show notes. It's a space to talk about where you are, what's shifting, and how to move forward with intention. And if this episode was helpful. Please share it with another business owner who's navigating this evolution too, and make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss what's coming next.