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Josh Schachter:
Hey, everybody. Welcome to this episode of Unchurned. It’s myself, Josh Schachter here with my co host, Christy Falterusso. Christy. Hi. Hi. They can’t see you waving. They can’t hear you waving, but yes they can.

Kristi Faltorusso:
They Absolutely. Can hear me waving.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. The energy. Can you bring it to the table?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Right. Exactly. Josh, this is the last time that we’ll record before you’re a married man.

Josh Schachter:
Well, yes and no, so.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Well, last time I’ll record with you.

Josh Schachter:
Well, I’m actually already a married man. I’m not wearing my wedding ring ironically, but I did technically get married. Yes. At City hall on Friday. Last Friday. Did I send you the photos?

Kristi Faltorusso:
No, you didn’t send. See, this is where it’s like, I really doubt our friendship.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah, yeah. You weren’t in the inner. Inner circle, but you were invited to all the inner circle things on Friday.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I do appreciate the invites, but you know, me coming to the city on a Friday, doing things like that, that’s tough.

Josh Schachter:
I know, I know. It’s that. That. That bridge and tunnel divide Christie. New York City, Long Island. So, yeah, so we got married at City Hall. So how’s this for some, like, New York City marriage, unique things that you won’t get anywhere else.

Kristi Faltorusso:
All right, let’s go. What do you got?

Josh Schachter:
So we had a photographer at the wedding, and I had him take a photo of us. Instead of, like, exchanging pieces of cake bites of cake after, you know, the ceremony, we went to a Sabrette hot dog stand right afterwards, and it was the best $8 I’ve ever spent. We got two hot dogs, and we’ve got a great photo of us exchanging hot dog bites for. As our first taste.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I mean, that is iconic New York. Right? So it’s nothing better than a dirty water dog. I love that for you guys.

Josh Schachter:
And it was dirty water. I hadn’t had. I don’t think I’d ever had them, actually, to be honest with you. What? Yeah, yeah. And it was street meat, right? You’re not supposed to eat street meat, but, like, we all know this.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh, no, you’re not supposed to eat street meat before, like, 12:00am Right. But anything after 12:00am Is, like, fair game. Like, 12 to 4:00am Is street meat. Like, that’s appropriate time to be fair.

Josh Schachter:
This was 12pm Right. So definitely you’re not supposed to eat street.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Right? So, yeah. You’re not supposed to eat questionable food when the lights out. Like.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah, but I was. I was a little bit even more disturbed than I had thought I would be because I thought the sobriety hot dog is actually a pretty decent New York hot dog. It’s up there with, like, Nathan’s and some. Not. It’s not Hebrew national quality, but it’s, you know, it’s. And. And by the way, that’s not a Zionist comment, but it’s, it’s, you know, it’s up there. But it did not look like a Sabrette hot dog.

Josh Schachter:
It was, it was pencil thin and it had a grayish tone to it and I was really disturbed. I had one bite. I did swallow, but I had one bite of the hot dog. Jess did not. She wasn’t even going to go there. And anyways, but it was worth the picture. And so now we’re married and. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
Onward and upward. And you’re coming to the official ceremony and reception in London. Two weeks and I can’t wait.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I’m so excited. Apparently the only time Anthony and I take a trip together is to go to somebody’s wedding. That’s what I’ve come to realize is like we don’t travel at all. And so the last couple trips that we’ve taken have been for out of town weddings.

Josh Schachter:
Well, hopefully this is the only time I can help you in that regard.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I mean, I certainly hope so. I certainly hope so.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. And then the second photo we took was right in front of City hall and in front of all the paparazzi for P. Diddy’s trial, which was at the courthouse next door. This is a very iconic New York themed wedding. Like, you can’t get this anywhere else.

Kristi Faltorusso:
That’s so good.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh, man. Okay, well, yes, please send me the photos. I’m actually having a little FOMO right now, so please get those over as quickly as possible. And I’m sure Jess had a very specific outfit and dress for that.

Josh Schachter:
We’ll save that for the other episode.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay, great. I can’t wait to see the photos. Okay, very good.

Josh Schachter:
But no, I thought you were to say this is our last episode before a little summer break here. We’re going to go on a summer break and we’ll come back TBD and go from there. So this is you and I kind of piecing out to all of our five followers here.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah, I mean, my mom knew that this was going to be our last episode. So the other four people though, like, this is going to be a nice way for us to just send them off for the summer, right?

Josh Schachter:
Yeah, exactly.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay, very good.

Josh Schachter:
So, yeah, so that’s the, the highs have been very high and I want to ask about you shortly, but. But you probably. You’re more glued to LinkedIn than I am these days. But you probably saw this a few hours ago. I just saw it five minutes ago and I’m a little bit shaken by it. And I do want to.

Kristi Faltorusso:
You’re going to tell me about Plan Hat, right?

Josh Schachter:
Yes, go. You can tell everybody.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. So Keva, who’s the CEO at Plan Hat? So Plan Hat, if you’re not familiar with them, they are customer success platform. They play in the same space as us at client success and gains at Tango, Cattle, Levit, all of them. Unfortunately, their CCO passed away last Wednesday. He was 42 years old and he had a heart attack. Unfortunately, he’s behind his wife and his two daughters.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah, yeah. Chris Register.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I mean, so unexpected and so, so sad.

Josh Schachter:
Did you know Chris?

Kristi Faltorusso:
No, I didn’t know him personally. No. I, I, it’s not to say that we didn’t cross paths at some point, but I don’t, I don’t believe that we had like, you know, obviously any deep relationship there.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah, yeah, I had gotten to know him a few times. We’d had, we’d had a couple of one on ones and I mean, really nice guy, really nice guy. Really, really sharp guy. From what I knew, he was the CCO of Plan Hat. He was Kaveh’s number two.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I mean, yeah, I mean I read the letter in the post there and it talks about like their 20 year relationship. So it sounds like they, they go back pretty far. And it was like really, it was a beautiful note that he had left and a beautiful call to action of like sharing stories of him and you know, people’s memories of him. But yeah, it sounds like that’s a big loss for the organization. And you know, interestingly enough, I do believe that their CRO recently made a move and a head left also. So I mean, for, for Kevin, I mean like he’s losing his CRO, his cco.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Kind of all within weeks of each other, which is, you know, I’m sure they’re navigating a lot over there at Plan Hat.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah, yeah. Well, like you said, our hearts and thoughts go out to all of Plan. Those guys. I know Plan Hat is a very, very tight group. Like they are more so than I’ve seen actually in any other company. I had the opportunity to go to their, their plan had open a few years ago and they are all like family out there. So I know they’re really feeling this loss and of course, like my biggest prayers and consultancies to his family, to his wife and his kids, it’s a big loss to the community. So.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Absolutely, it’s, it’s really sad. I honestly, like I said, it just, the letter was beautiful. I’d encourage anybody who didn’t come across this to go head over to Kevin’s page on LinkedIn and go read his post. It was a beautiful tribute to Chris. So I think everyone in our community should take a few minutes to go read that and recognize him.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. All right. I’d say we’d have a moment of silence, but I don’t think Charlie in the background is going to go for that. Christy.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I keep muting myself. It is definitely I’m gonna blame a UPS FedEx situation that I can’t see something happening downstairs. But no, she is. She’s not here for silence.

Josh Schachter:
Oh. All right. So what do you got going on? What’s. What’s new in your world?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay, so, Josh, I just came off of a very interesting weekend, so one of the things that I’ve been trying to do is just, like, educate myself and, like, go all in on AI and like, I am doing, like, micro learning. I am taking any certifications that I can and going through any courses, like, ad. Like, everybody that has a free one, I’m kind of going through, like, right now I’m in the midst of AWS is offering one through their kind of skill builder program. And it’s like the foundations of prompt engineering. So, like, I’m going through that one now. But, like, I’ve been really just trying to immerse myself in AI, not only from, like, a practical, like, how what are the use cases and like, what can we do with the tools that are readily available to us at no cost? So I can kind of tinker and play then. Also, how do I just, like, really formally educate myself? How do I learn the language of it and really understand how to do it and do it well and approach it very thoughtfully? So I’ve been spending a ton of time on that. And like, any downtime I have, I’m like, playing YouTube videos over here to the side while I’m doing my work.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So I’m giving a little break to my reality TV binging and trying to educate myself a bit. But Lovable had a full weekend this weekend of like, build for free.

Josh Schachter:
Really?

Kristi Faltorusso:
And so I have a subscription to Lovable, and I’ve been like, paying for it again, nominal cost, whatever, but they had a free weekend of, like, no credits, no limits build. And so I, I spent an on.

Josh Schachter:
The weekend in the middle of the summer when nobody’s actually going to be using it.

Kristi Faltorusso:
But yeah, and Father’s Day, which I was like, I lost all of Sunday in the midst of building because I was like, oh, I’ve got to host the family. But it was, like, super cool to just see the power of some of these things. And what I really love about these tools is, like, if you can visualize something, you can build it now and how disruptive that really is to every product that’s on the market right now. I mean, some of the things that I brought to life in minutes, I’m sitting here scratching my head, going, oh, my God, this would have taken some organizations years to build these products. And I’m pretty sure I did a pretty good job of getting somewhere close in 30 minutes.

Josh Schachter:
Okay, so what did you bring to life?

Kristi Faltorusso:
I’m not telling you.

Josh Schachter:
Okay, then I assume it’s a. It’s a. It’s a, like, prioritization of Netflix shows to watch this month. If you’re not.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh, my gosh, no, but that is definitely now something I think I should be building. There is probably an app out there that I need to develop for shows and, like, if you’ve watched it and if you’ve rated and how do you, like, pool your community to recommend shows? Like, I would definitely love a community based.

Josh Schachter:
Okay, fine. Yeah, yeah. What did you build? What did you. This. So this is. This is. This is your. This is Christie’s hobby stuff here.

Josh Schachter:
That. This is not necessarily.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Like, I really can’t tell you what I built because I think what I built is actually really cool, and I want to maybe continue to build on this idea. So the thing I built. I am actually pretty impressed with what I built, and I do think it would be something that our community could benefit from. But something else I did build was that I. Like I said I was doing this all weekend, so I built a few things. The second thing that I built that I am willing to talk about is so I. I love using Trello. Like, I love the.

Kristi Faltorusso:
The Trello cards and like, the framework and like using it for certain projects that I’m working on. But there are certain elements of it that I feel like it falls short for me. So I built what I would want that has like, a Trello component with, like a Salesforce component with like a reporting view, and like, I brought to life this platform that actually gives me the ability to understand projects that are in flow and like, what I’m doing and kind of filtering and prioritizing different things based on certain custom fields that I had added. But then when you log in, I have like an account view, and then when you log in further, it gave me, like, Trello cards that I could also collaborate with folks on.

Josh Schachter:
Wow. And you did that all in lovable.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
That’s incredible. Is it connected to a database?

Kristi Faltorusso:
I know they have, like, no, no, I haven’t connected it to anything yet because I just wanted to build it to see, like, functionally. Like, can I, like, is it, is it doing these things? I mean, even from like. Okay, I don’t want you to open up a new window. I want you to expand from the right side. So that way I just like brings me like everything. Like the UI of. So cool. I like formatted my colors and I’m like, upload these, these icons and put these logos in there and it was so cool.

Kristi Faltorusso:
But for somebody like me who has zero technical aptitude when it comes to like building, I have no engineering, no development background to bring something like that from my head to like, be able to see it as a product. I, like, had a super geek out fast. Like, I’m sitting there with Anthony in bed, I’m like, look what I built. And you know, he’s not impressed, but it was really cool.

Josh Schachter:
That’s cool. Well, you’re doing the right thing. You’re doing the right thing by just diving in and figuring it out and playing around with it. Because many people aren’t doing that. And I think those laggards are the ones that are at most risk. I mean, what, what, what is it? Is it excitement or anxiety that has driven you to go all in on learning about AI?

Kristi Faltorusso:
I think excitement. Like, it’s been so long since I felt that there was something happening in our ecosystem that I, I could go all like, something that I really didn’t know. Right. Like, think about it, like my customer success journey. Sure. Early on it was like, learn, learn, learn, learn, learn things I didn’t know. And I kind of felt like I hit a plateau. By no means do I think I know everything there is to know about customer success.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Not what I’m saying. But there hasn’t been this, like, big shift to need to learn something new, to really invest time in to something like, where I think about it through the lens of mastery. And so for the first time in a long time, I’m excited about learning. I’m excited about growing new skills and being able to solve new problem problems. And so for me now I’ve kind of gone back and I’ve looked through, like, all of my newsletters that I write and publish for, like, my own stuff and like LinkedIn posts that I’ve written previously, and now I’m looking at them through the lens of AI. Right. So every Problem that I had solved manually. Every creative workaround that I’ve done, every Google site that I have built in place of a portal, can I now do something differently using AI? And then if I could, what is the way that I would imagine it in ways that like, have no limits.

Josh Schachter:
So what I’d like to see you build. And this is based on a podcast I was listening to this weekend. Jeff. I’m gonna botch his last name. So I’m not even gonna say it, but, but Jeff, he’s partner founder of flybridge Venture Partners. They’re AI. AI kind of focused.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay.

Josh Schachter:
Seed Series A VC based on the Northeast. In the Northeast. He’s also a professor at Harvard Business School. Really sharp guy. And he. And in the podcast he was talking about how he’s taken like all his lectures over whatever, 20, 30 years and all the blog articles he’s written and all this. And he’s basically created a bot to scale his office hours to his MBA students because he doesn’t have time. Right.

Josh Schachter:
So he.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Right.

Josh Schachter:
You know, for 1am emails or whatever of like, hey, professor, what do you think about this? What about this? And so he just has. He just built a. Yeah, a chatbot based office hour, you know, digital twin of himself based on all the content. So you should really do the same because you have a lot of content.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Well, what I did is. So I’ve been really good about creating my own GPTs. I haven’t made any of them public because the way like I’m using them for, to scale me, like scale my work and then like use it externally as opposed to me making that accessible externally. So that’s an interesting use case. But like I’ve built like 5gbts that I use on a regular basis that I think are so cool. But very similar to what he did is I uploaded all of my templates, all of my resources, all the guides, my website, all of my written content. Right. Like just said, here’s all of my ideas, my concepts, my philosophies over the years to kind of feed that engine and then use it.

Kristi Faltorusso:
And I’ve got really creative prompts through the gbts that like the outputs are.

Josh Schachter:
So, so okay, so how did you though? Because actually, you know what? I have, I’ve done like a really like hasty version of that. I. I’ve wanted to do that with a few things. I’ve wanted to uplo all of the, the unturned episode transcripts. I’ve wanted to, you know, all these things. And it’s honestly, it just Takes time and I’ve never really gotten around to it, which is a really poor excuse. And, and, and something. I’m like advocating for people to dive into AI, you know, themselves, and here I am.

Josh Schachter:
But like, how, what, how did you actually do that? Like, it was on chat GPT, I take it and take a long time. And like, what was the process?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Well, I mean, listen, it’s iterative, so I mean it doesn’t take long to get these things stood up. But I think you need to be very intentional about like, what is it that you’re solving with the G, B T? So like, I’ll give you one. For instance, one of the ones that I built is like basically using all of my frameworks around certain things that I might go analyze around a customer success program. And I’ve got all of my philosophies and all of my things and all the milestones and journeys and how I basically think about it and how I would audit against it. And so I uploaded all of my content to kind of feed that I gave it all of the frameworks of how I do the things, what the outputs would look like. And I just was very prescriptive in like exactly what I’d want it to do, how I wanted to do it, how I think of scoring and rating and. But I had built all of this stuff already. It’s stuff I had been doing manually, so I had all of it.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So I basically fed it samples so it already knew how I think, how I score, how I do. And I was able to create it so that the GPT prompt kind of experience is such that it’s asking for. It follows my guide of like, questions, right? Like, so it’ll prompt me to answer answer questions and then as I complete the questions, it then starts to bring all this stuff together to then give like this full comprehensive report. And it looks and feels exactly like the ones I would have done manually. So I’ve been doing a couple of these as samples to see, okay, if I use this, how good is the quality of the, the output? Josh? It’s spot on. Yeah, it’s spot on.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
And it’s just like written so much better than I would have written it myself.

Josh Schachter:
It’s gotten really good.

Kristi Faltorusso:
It’s. It’s really, really good. And so wait, what’s the, what’s the biggest use case?

Josh Schachter:
What’s like the top job to be done that you’re using those GPTs for?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh my gosh. Well, I have another one. Another fun. I don’t want to divulge all of my stuff. So there’s like a bunch of stuff. Like if this wasn’t like a very public podcast and you were just asking me as friends, Christy, the entrepreneur that we’re talking to. I’m not. Yeah, I’m gonna, I’m gonna put a hat on for a second and just say like, I can’t share all of them, but I will say to anybody if you have, if you have the paid version of ChatGPT, and first of all, let’s preface it by saying if you don’t, you’re silly.

Kristi Faltorusso:
It’s the best 20 you’ll spend a month. And even if you upgrade to the pro or like whatever the next level is best $60 you spend a month. If you need a little bit more security, you will get 10x that investment. Just gonna start there. So if you’re not paying for it, you’re crazy. Don’t get a latte for two weeks and, and go get this for two weeks. The second they will say is like fine. I mean, I don’t know, like I, I don’t get a lot of coffee take out.

Kristi Faltorusso:
You know, I get my 7 11. So it takes me a lot of 711 coffees to add up 20 bucks. You need to start playing with this because the power of these things, like just think about it as anything that you do repetitively, anything you have to do more than once, that is a heavy lift. You can create a GPT around it, even if it’s a process, right? Like you can go, and it’s going to facilitate the execution of these things really, really well. And there you can iterate on it. So I’ve also gone back and I keep adding to it and I keep feeding to it and I keep getting new ideas and new material and I just keep building it. And the more I put in, the smarter the output is. So it’s just one of those crazy things where I’m going to say if you’re just not investing any amount of time.

Kristi Faltorusso:
10 minutes a day. 10 minutes a day. If you did 10 minutes a day, you’re gonna get to over an hour a week. That’s like real time. It’s going to pay off. It’s the folks that are sitting here consuming the information but not actually trying and playing with it. I feel like you guys are at a huge disadvantage. And even if you’re reading about it, but you’re not actually using it and like building with it, it’s not the same.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So like I said, I’ve got like this Two pronged approach here where I’m like I will invest in the learning. I’m going to watch all these courses. I mean the amount of stuff that’s on, I have a short attention span. TikTok. The amount of AI contact content on TikTok is amazing. I’m following some brilliant people and I love it because it’s 10 minute videos or less and I save them and I take notes and I’m consuming it in micro, my micro learning as I like to think about it. And then the flip side is if I do have we’ll say 20 to 45 minutes, I’m going to go watch a YouTube video because those are going to be a little bit more lengthy and I’m going to get a side by side. I’ve gotten exposure to new tech, new tools, new ways and concepts of thinking about things.

Kristi Faltorusso:
It is crazy what people are doing out there. And I feel like especially if we live in our little customer success bubble, you’re only hearing what other CS professionals are doing. And I don’t think that we are on the cutting edge of AI. Sorry, no offense.

Josh Schachter:
No, no. The key word is that is investment, right? You’re investing your time and you’re smart enough to see that that this is an investment that’s going to pay off exfold in the future. It’s tough for people. Again, like I just use myself as an example. Today’s a busy day. I’m back to back on meetings. I don’t want to put 15 minutes into compiling all those URLs and putting them to a shared folder and you know the GPT like right? But like you have the discipline of that. I mean it’s the same reason that you get up at like 4:30 in the morning to go work out, right? Like you’ve got good discipline and hygiene and you see the future of these things and the benefits that it will pay off.

Josh Schachter:
So kudos to you on that. There was another thought buried within that kindness that I was bestowing upon you. I’m also hearing for you’re telling people that to not follow you on, stop following you on LinkedIn and spend that five, 10 minutes a day in investing their time. No, no, no.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Go engage with my content and then go right? Because an engagement takes like less than a minute. You can go like my post, maybe even drop a little like a repost or a share or comment and that’s going to take less than five minutes. Then use the rest of your time to go do this micro learning like.

Josh Schachter:
Your posts that are written by ChatGPT. But in any case, they are not written by ChatGPT.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Read my stories. They’re cleaned, maybe.

Josh Schachter:
I was listening to another podcast this weekend. I guess this was a podcast weekend for me. And it was Reid hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, and a couple other CEOs that were talking to graduating students and answering their questions and anxiety around AI. And a lot of it was just kind of just high level, crappy responses. But the one thing that did sink into me was younger people that are now graduating, now entering the, you know, the workforce, they’re, they’re at a disadvantage for sure, because AI can do a lot of the entry level type stuff, but where they are absolutely at an advantage is being AI native, that they know this and they can invest this stuff and know this stuff like the back of their hands. And folks that are a little bit longer in the tooth, like you and I and others, right, May not be as motivated you are, but many aren’t. And so I’m just saying that as additional encouragement for folks that are out there that are excited about AI, I’d recommend being scared of AI and using that as a forcing function to get yourself motivated to go in there and learn about it. Because if you don’t, then I guarantee some 25 year old out there that grew up in the world of AI will, will just kind of completely, you know, just, just take over and be, be, be leaps ahead of you in a few years and how they can use the tooling.

Josh Schachter:
I know you got to go, Christy. I see you in the corner of your eye.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I do, Josh.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah, that’s fine. We’re gonna, we’re gonna wrap this up. It’s been a great season. I don’t know what number of season this is. It might have been three, but it’s.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Been a long time.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah, it’s been a long time. I’m looking forward to the future together. And we’ll see everybody back in a few weeks.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Bye, everyone. Josh, I’ll see you in London.

Josh Schachter:
Bye.