Unbox the Inbox | Email Marketing for Online & Offline Businesses
Gary Redmond founded his Subscription Box business BusterBox.com in 2016 with no prior business experience (and no money).
After failing for many years, he eventually grew it to over $11 Million in total sales, learning exactly what it's like trying to grow a business on limited resources.
This led Gary to try and master the super-powerful and free (but often underappreciated) marketing channel which is email marketing.
Everything you hear on the show is proven, and Gary shares these battle-tested growth hacking strategies so you can implement them in your business right away to make more money.
If you're a beginner, you will get a grounding in the fundamentals of email marketing and how to apply it to get your business off the ground.
For more advanced folks, we'll dive deep into cool and clever hacks you can use to optimise and automate the most critical areas of your business.
This podcast is for entrepreneurs & business owners who want to learn how to use the power of email marketing to acquire, retain and upsell to their customers on autopilot.
Gary will also do his best to entertain and inspire you to create the business and the life of your dreams through your online business.
Topics covered include email marketing, e-commerce, consultant, coach, expert, entrepreneurship, automation, productivity, subscription boxes, advertising & business.
Unbox the Inbox | Email Marketing for Online & Offline Businesses
AI Agents Are the New Internet, and Most People Have No Idea
The digital revolution that transformed our world with the internet in the 1990s is happening again—only this time, it's through AI agents. While most of us have become accustomed to working with AI assistants like ChatGPT, we're standing at the threshold of something far more transformative.
AI agents aren't just responsive tools waiting for your next prompt—they're autonomous workers that execute complete tasks without continuous human guidance.
Picture sending a simple voice message and having an agent transcribe it, understand your request, and independently handle tasks like summarizing your recent emails or drafting personalized messages to contacts. These digital workers can manage your inbox, schedule meetings, run marketing campaigns, negotiate with prospects, and move deals through your pipeline while you focus elsewhere.
What makes this shift particularly powerful is the ability to create hierarchical systems of specialized agents.
• AI agents can manage emails, book meetings, create calendar events, and even handle sales pipelines autonomously
• Unlike ChatGPT which requires continuous prompting, agents take independent action based on instructions
• Multiple agents can work together in a hierarchy, with one generating content and others reviewing before it reaches you
• Solopreneurs can leverage AI agents to compete with larger companies by automating sales, marketing and fulfillment
• AI agents can replace expensive SaaS tools by scraping the internet for leads and managing personalized follow-ups
• Early adopters who implement AI agents will gain significant competitive advantages
• Tools like N8N (n8n.io) provide the infrastructure to build and deploy these agent workflows
Start by identifying repetitive tasks in your business that drain your time and creativity, then explore how AI agents might handle those responsibilities.
This isn't just about efficiency—it's about fundamentally reimagining what's possible for solopreneurs and small businesses competing in markets previously dominated by larger organizations with deeper resources. The AI agent revolution is here—will you lead it or follow it?
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Welcome to Unbox the Inbox with me, your host, gary Redmond. On this podcast, you'll learn how to grow your online business using the power of free and mostly automated email marketing, and we'll hopefully have some fun doing it too. I'm a co-founder of BusterBoxcom and also a mentor and coach, helping founders like me and you create their dream life through their online business. Okay, so today's topic I want to talk about something that is relatively new to me, but I'm so excited about it that I wanted to create a podcast about it pretty quickly. Okay, and that is AI agents. Okay, which I believe is the next big shift in business and in life. Okay, so I literally came across these things on Wednesday and today is Saturday, so I'm really excited about them. I've kind of spent a lot of time messing around with them over the last three or four days, which is not a lot of time, of course, but it really sucked in my interest and for many different reasons. I love automation, I love saving time and you know, maybe there's the lazy man inside me somewhere and but I also kind of I'm quite kind of technical and I've always kind of liked these kind of things and it really just kind of suits my skill set and what I kind of like. So it's almost for me like a hobby, okay, so I'm pretty excited about it, even though I'm not a nerd, trust me, I promise.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I want to talk about AI agents. So, like, ai is obviously evolving fast, and I think we're on the brink of a massive shift, and one that will actually change how we work, how we sell and how we interact with technology forever. Okay, so the big idea is this AI agents are like the new internet. Okay, so, in 1995, when people just didn't fully grasp how big the internet would be, most people still are kind of like that with AI agents. Okay, you probably never even heard of them before. Maybe you did, maybe you didn't. Okay, but today we'll break down what AI agents are, how they differ from tools like ChatGPT and why they'd be as big as the internet itself.
Speaker 1:Okay, so what are AI agents? Okay, well, they're not just chatbots. Okay, ai agents can take an autonomous actions on your behalf. So the difference between GPTs or large language models or LLMs is they're essentially like assistants that respond to queries. Okay, you ask them something. Depending on the quality of the prompt, it will depend on the quality of the result that you get back and you'll have to maybe respond again and again and again, to maybe iterate and get even your blog post or whatever to the level that you want. With training and with custom GPTs and by uploading previous examples, you can obviously make that process easier and faster. Custom GPTs and by uploading previous examples, you can obviously make that process easier and faster. And that's kind of the next level of working with GPTs, rather than just you know straight track GPTs to kind of build custom ones. Okay, that you've trained.
Speaker 1:Okay, but AI agents are workers that complete tasks without you prompting them every step of the way. Okay, so they can actually manage your emails, they can summarize your inbox, they can book meetings for you, they can create calendar events, they can run campaigns, they can even negotiate deals and move people down your sales pipeline. Okay, so, um, you know, as I said, an example there an AI agent. An AI agent can, can you know, manage your sales pipeline, follow up with leads, book calls and even close deals. Or one I was messing around with during the week was I recorded a voice note in Telegram, or you can use WhatsApp and basically your AI agent can transcribe your voice note and basically figure out what you asked it to do. And then, for example, it could read your inbox and send you a summary of your five most recent emails, or even send an email to someone you know, send you in summary of your five most recent emails or even send an email to someone you know. Hey, I was like I was messing around with this. I was like talking to whatsapp, send an email to gary at garyrevinnet asking him how he is, make sure the tone of voice is really concerned and ask him you know, why hasn't he emailed me back, or something like that. And literally two seconds later I open up my inbox and I've got an email from, obviously myself, but like it's like whoa, this, this is like it didn't, like it actually went and wrote an email for me and it's in my inbox, you know from a voice note. So it's nuts, right, anyway. So why I think they're going to be a game changer for business and life is because it's like automation on steroids Okay, they don't just help. Like it's almost the end of manual work, okay, and again, again. I know this is big hyperbolic talk, but think of how much the internet changed everything, but it hadn't changed anything in 1995. That's where I think we are now. So automation and steroids they don't just help, they execute and they remove manual work.
Speaker 1:Solopreneurs, I think, will compete with companies by leveraging AI agents for sales, marketing and fulfillment. Okay, like you actually have to think of them as employees. So you can have an AI agent that comes up with content ideas. So basically you train a GPT or whatever to say here's my brand brief, come up with ideas that reflect my brand. Okay, then you can have that basically agent. Pass that and those content ideas to another agent who is told to essentially check the first agent's work.
Speaker 1:Okay, so the second agent will basically also have the brand brief and his instruction or the prompt you'll give to this second agent is make sure that the first agent, um, you know, whatever content he produces, give it a score between one and ten and if it's the score is anything below eight, send it back to him for review and, um, only pass it on to the next person in the chain when it's above eight. Okay, so essentially, all the bad prompts and all the bad outputs and all the having to go back, like you no longer have to go back to the GPT and you know, tell him his content ideas are crap because you actually have another AI agent who will go back and do that for you. So by the time it reaches up the top of the chain to you, you already have content ideas that have been refined by the AI, from the AI, and delivered to you. So again, you're like the manager. You've basically it's like a hierarchy, okay, you've got the basic worker and then you've got kind of like a manager who manages their work and it only reaches you when it's good enough. So what does that sound like? It sounds like a hierarchical business. So it sounds like an employee, okay. So that's kind of what I'm getting at here is these agents can be as good as employees, okay. So why? I think this is an opportunity.
Speaker 1:Okay, like in 1995, the internet was dismissed as a fad, okay, and, like you know, ai up until this point has really been. It's been getting better, of course, but it was kind of just a chatbot and it required human prompts, and the worse your prompt or whatever, it still required you to go back, and the better your prompt, the better the output. The worse your prompt or whatever it's still required you to go back, and the better your prompt, the better the output. The worse your prompt, the worse the output. But the real disruption, I think, is coming now, because you can literally have these agents do things like scour the internet for you and put together a leads list. That would put a lot of SaaS companies out of business.
Speaker 1:Businesses have been built and massively big and profitable SaaS companies have been built on contacting leads or scraping leads and giving you a way to contact them. Think of LinkedIn built and massively big and profitable SaaS companies have been built on, you know, contacting leads or scraping leads and giving you a way to contact them. Think of LinkedIn sales navigator. Okay, you can literally build an AI agent right now that can replace that subscription completely. You can just basically build an AI agent to scrape the internet and find people that you.
Speaker 1:Obviously you can tell the first agent to scrape the internet for people, people that you like. Obviously, you can tell the first agent to scrape the internet for people you're looking for. Then you can train another agent to basically go to to to review the first agent's work and say you know, these people are not closely enough aligned to the target market that we're going for, so go back and improve your leads list. Okay, then you can have another agent who reads who, who, who takes the leads list and prepares an email, a personalized email, to all these people assuming you have their email address and then you have another agent who follows up with them. Okay, nuts, okay, and that's like 100%. I haven't built it yet, but I can see that it's already possible. What's happening with AI agents? Okay. So, if you wanna know who's gonna win here? The people who adopt these AI agents early and use them to scale what used to take teams of people and build businesses one person, businesses that wouldn't have been possible five years ago without a team of 10 people. Okay, that's who's going to win here.
Speaker 1:So, if you're wondering how you can get started with this, there's a tool called N8N, or go on YouTube and look up. There's a great video by a guy called David Andre and he it's like a 40 minute video and explains how AI agents work. It is a little bit technical, to be totally honest with you, but in my opinion, it's going to be worth it to learn. So there's a tool called N8N, which is what people use to build it, n8nio, and yeah, look, go do a deep dive on YouTube for your sort of evening and weekend entertainment Not that it would be much entertainment for a lot of people but if you can see the opportunity in learning something and getting in early with something, I think this is going to be something you you really wanna pay attention to, okay.
Speaker 1:So some other things you can do is look for repetitive tasks in your business and life, okay, like, where do you think AI could handle things for you? I'm thinking content production, content repurposing, leads, lead generation, lead contacting, follow-ups all these kinds of things that you're doing in your business and think about how you could maybe automate that with an ai agent, okay, or several. Second thing is to experiment with the workflows, test the tools out that I mentioned, like n8n, that automate the sales and the marketing operations and things that you don't really like doing. And then the third one is to stay out of the curve. Okay. So I've just drawn your attention to this um, and I think it's a good idea to learn and implement fast and early if possible.
Speaker 1:So that's it for today's episode. I just wanted to open your eyes to AI agents. I think they're going to change everything, like the internet did. The only question is whether you'll be ahead of it or left behind. So if this is interesting to you and if there's enough interest in this, I'm happy to run sort of a workshop, free training, whatever it is on AI agents and if you're interested in that, let me know at gary, at garyredmannet and but yeah, for yourself, just get started, start testing and one area of your business this week and let me know how it goes. So hope this was really helpful and I will see you in the next episode.
