7 AI tools you've never heard of, that you need to be using.

[00:00] Justin: What's up, guys? Justin here, and Alec, your two favorite AI guys, self-proclaimed. This was an invite-only session, so if you're here, kudos. We don't take ourselves seriously, but we do take our work seriously. Drop in the chat if you've been here before, and if it's your first time, say first time.

Alec: What's up, man? Let's get after it today. We got a cool format for you. Justin and I have been talking about this for a week or so, and we haven't shared which tools we're gonna show. We're gonna go back and forth over some sleeper tools, things we use a lot that aren't super common. And we have no idea what the other one's gonna say.

Justin: Alec, I have an idea of what I think you're gonna share, but I don't think you have any idea what I'm about to drop on you. What do you say we jump in?

[02:00] Alec: I'll go first. The title was Seven AI Tools, split between Justin and I, and we always shoot to over-deliver. I got five for you, and the first is Codex. It's lightning fast. I'll show you how I used it yesterday. I operate in the lead generation space, and I'm partnering with someone on business development. We needed a list of prospects, and our hottest prospects are people already spending money on ads. My thought was, I'll have my VA pull lists in every city, Google that vertical, see who's running ads. In practice that takes a couple days, maybe a week.

Alec: Anything you'd have your VA do is a good sign of something to try with AI first, because it's inherently low-leverage work that still needs doing. So instead of a week, we did it in about 10 minutes with Codex. If you're familiar with Claude Code, Codex is basically OpenAI's version. You need a $20 OpenAI subscription. You can use it for landing pages, AI agents, or just getting tasks done.

[03:00] Justin: Quick comment, Alec. I love that mental model about what you'd offload to a VA. That's a good way to think about getting started with a tool like Codex.

Alec: It started in regular ChatGPT. I asked, "Is there an API that can pull current advertisers, and I can search by keyword?" The answer was yes, something called SpyFu. I got an account, fed all that to Codex, and said, "Here's the API key, here's the docs, go pull this list." It did it in about 10 minutes. ChatGPT is conversational and great for "how can I do this faster," but it can't take the action. Codex is built for writing and executing code, so it wrote the scripts to use SpyFu's API and formatted the data how I wanted.

[06:00] Justin: For our audience who are not developers, can you still use Codex?

Alec: You don't need any technical background. If something's confusing, ask Codex what to do. Just don't expose sensitive data or API keys. I also used Codex to build the deck you were all just seeing. You need a PDF, Codex makes a PDF. You need a deck, Codex makes a deck.

Justin: How much would it have cost the old way, buying and enriching leads, and how long?

Alec: A VA at maybe two days, $5 to $10 an hour, so not huge on cost. But the real cost is letting momentum die. We saved money, got a great output, and now it's in the biz dev's hands.

[10:00] Justin: I'm gonna go next. Let me share my screen. What do you see, Alec?

Alec: Hermes.

Justin: Who here has heard of Hermes? Crickets. Good, that's the point. Most people think of the retailer, the expensive bags. The point of the session is tools you haven't heard of. Most AIs forget about you the second you close the tab. Hermes is really good at remembering everything about you and storing that memory. It can live on your computer or in the cloud.

[12:00] Alec: So you go to the Hermes website and download it?

Justin: That's right, it's a desktop app now, no need to be an engineer. You can run it from your phone, text it, email it. First, I did an audience analysis. We've had about a thousand people sign up the past month, five hundred show up. I uploaded that data to a Google Sheet and asked Hermes for a cohort analysis. It analyzed five hundred thirty-three attendees over four sessions and broke down titles, returning versus unique, seniority mix. 15% are CEOs or executives, 23% are VP, head, or director.

[14:00] Alec: I'd probably think it took you a week. A lot of AI's capabilities haven't been priced in yet. You can knock out a website in 15 minutes now. At the end of the day, it's the deliverable that matters. Your boss should hope you're using AI.

Justin: Jean asks if she could give a database of zip codes and get demographics of people who live there. Jean, there's a robust tool for that, send me a follow-up email and I'll share it. The other thing on Hermes: you can change models, from Fable 5 to Opus, Sonnet, Haiku, GPT 5.5, even Kimi, which is very cheap. There are free and local models too. If one gets shut down, like Fable 5 just did, you switch and your memory stays in Hermes.

[16:00] Justin: Next is a cron job, a task repeated hourly, daily, or weekly. This took me five minutes before the call. The prompt: "You're my daily AI news scout. Run every day at 3:30 Eastern. Find the five to ten biggest AI stories and email them to me." At 3:30, sure enough, five headlines in my inbox.

Alec: Would you say the main benefit of Hermes versus just using Claude or ChatGPT is the cron jobs?

Justin: Not the cron jobs, you can set those up anywhere. The biggest benefit is persistent memory. It never forgets. Hermes is also great at skills: once you do a skill once, it saves it and gets more efficient, so you save tokens. And the ability to switch models, some free, some dirt cheap.

[20:00] Alec: I'm gonna go two in a row because they're related. Apify. We need to get data that lives in certain places. Instagram post performances, YouTube comments, LinkedIn. Apify is a library of scrapers. You can use one off the shelf, no custom build. Whatever data you're looking for, if it's on the internet, there's probably an Apify scraper for it. You can run it in Apify, or hand a scraper to your Hermes agent or Codex or a workflow.

[22:00] Alec: This ties into the tool that was my impetus for diving into AI. Justin, any guesses?

Justin: OpenClaw.

Alec: Close, rewind a year and a half. n8n. It's visual, lets you connect tools, build workflows, put AI in the workflow. I run an AI implementation and lead-gen agency. This is an automation we built for a client. It might look like a lot, but it's simple and visual. n8n used to be needed more before Claude Code and Codex. But it's a great place to start to get a visual feel for how workflows operate.

[24:00] Alec: This runs every Sunday. It pulls rows from the sheet, a list of creators. The client wanted their site to show live follower counts and a link to each creator's last YouTube video. They worked with high-level agencies for months. Then, "you knocked it out in three hours." It scrapes YouTube for live subscriber count, runs through each creator, Instagram, TikTok, then pushes to WordPress. People also use Zapier or Make.com, which do the same thing but are billed per execution. n8n is open source, host it for $4 a month, unlimited executions.

Justin: Do you still actively use n8n?

[26:00] Alec: I do. The most common case is a new landing page where I need to route the data to the client, or push it to a Google Sheet and Airtable. Simple, quick routing, I'll use n8n all day.

Justin: Sounds like it gives better control over the data, whereas AI can feel like a black box.

Alec: That's exactly it. With Claude Code agents it's a black box, you tell it the outputs and verify. In n8n you see all the executions, find exactly what's broken and why. Good place to start, then switch to Claude Code once you have a feel.

[27:00] Justin: Speed round. Midjourney. Who's heard of it? They had interesting news today. Midjourney started as an image generation model. They've gotten so good they're rolling out a plan to replace MRI machines a thousand times cheaper and turn scans into a health and wellness experience. I used to consult for an MRI company. I'll add it to the show notes, or look up Midjourney MRI replacement.

[30:00] Justin: You can explore inspiration in Midjourney, like Behance, but where it's most powerful is creating. I've been making AI4NTP merch mockups, hats, shirts. You can type "dad hat with green font" and get something great. Expert mode lets you dial it in. My dream car is a Porsche 911 or BMW E30, and this art's cool, I'd hang it on my wall or put it on a T-shirt. I'll ask chat to recreate this image by giving me a prompt.

Alec: Quick pause, what did you just use to transcribe that text?

[31:00] Justin: You introduced me to Wispr Flow about a year ago. It changed my life, I rarely type. Click one key and talk to your computer, and it auto-corrects in real time, so no typos.

Alec: 100%. You can just riff. Sounds like we're sponsored, I wish we were. Press a hotkey and talk. The quality of your prompt determines the output, and it's iterative. There was a question, Wispr Flow versus Super Whisper. I haven't used Super Whisper. If it's working for you, no need to switch. If you're having problems, Wispr Flow's been great.

[34:00] Justin: I uploaded that image to ChatGPT and said give me a prompt to recreate it. This is a big mental shift: stop trying to be a genius. It's like the Model T, or the typewriter, or the internet. People fight the leap, but the more you lean in, you feel like you're cheating. I tag-team, building prompts with one AI and feeding them to another.

[35:00] Justin: Look at that, Midjourney has no context aside from the prompt. If you like another website, screenshot it and ask AI what prompt to give Midjourney or Claude Design to replicate it.

Alec: There is now no excuse for bad visuals, anything client-facing, internal, slideshows. Image generation is indistinguishable now.

Justin: Starry Night, my favorite painting, but as a football field, set in Pittsburgh with Steelers colors.

[36:00] Alec: I won't share a screen, I have the device. This is the PLAUD Note. It's like a wallet on the back of your phone, but an external recording device. Zoom is one medium, but you have phone calls and in-person conversations. PLAUD records all of those. It ties to other tools too. PLAUD has a Zapier integration, so any recording pushes into my Google Drive, and my Claude is hooked to my Drive, so I can reference any conversation. Couldn't do what I do without it.

Alec: Some sauce: online it's about $150. I found one on eBay for 60 or 70. Check eBay first.

[38:00] Justin: When you're on the road, driving, walking, you don't have Zoom transcribers, but you always have this. Alec, you've got 10 minutes, we'll do a speed round.

[39:00] Justin: I showed Midjourney for inspiration. Then I move into Figma or Canva, and push into Claude Design. Has anyone used Claude for design? Let me show what Alec and I built for a friend with Claude Design: Slow Hand Remodeling, who moved from Austin to LA.

[42:00] Justin: Everything here was Claude Design, Canva, and Cory's camera. Alec, I know you like Lovable, and I've used Claude Code for sites, but to get design really good, Claude Design is the best right now. I built the AI4NTP site with it too. We uploaded instructions and source files, did mockups in Midjourney and Canva, light wireframing in Figma, then screenshots into Claude Design.

Alec: 100%. Those are my top tools. I'll give an honorable mention: Higgsfield, which ties into Midjourney. It aggregates image and video models, plus their own tools. NanoBanana from Google, ChatGPT's own, Seed Dance. You run a prompt through five models and compare. They have a marketing studio for UGC content. It's expensive, I pay $150 a month, but generating a UGC video that used to cost $300 is worth it.

[44:00] Justin: I'll do one more. James, you there? Come up to the stage. James is a friend and colleague we help with his business.

James: We started a golf company, apparel and accessories, called Dartee Golf. We have a utility golf belt. I'm learning how to implement AI into our business.

Justin: Check out Dartee Golf. James, I'm gonna rock your world. This is the CRM James works out of, with a new agentic feature. "Show us all the prospects James needs to follow up with ASAP, the high-value targets in his pipeline." Using Wispr Flow, and boom.

[46:00] Justin: We can give you a free month trial to the CRM. It's 99 bucks a month. We're not sponsored, but we have a relationship. It's GoHighLevel. Alec, what do you love about it?

Alec: I've used every CRM, HubSpot, Salesforce, industry-specific ones. HighLevel has more functionality. I use it internally and help other companies implement it. The robustness of the API matters, and as a normal user it's friendly. A no-brainer for my company.

[48:00] Justin: Why does an e-commerce company have a CRM? Wholesale. Companies buy these belts as gifts for employees and golf events, with a customizable ball marker. So a lot of outbound email. Here's James's pipeline, the biggest opportunities, key findings. A lot of people go all-in on AI or stick to old-school CRMs. There's a happy medium: AI tooling embedded in your old-school CRM.

[49:00] Justin: I'm jumping into Q&A. If we missed your question, resurface it in the chat.

Alec: David Toledo asks if I still recommend n8n versus Claude Code for the debugging. Case by case. If you've never built workflows or aren't technical, n8n teaches the fundamentals, system prompts, HTTP requests, where things break. Then for complex work use Claude Code, and for quick tool-wiring use n8n.

[51:00] Justin: Bonus for everyone who came live: a free Hermes training and setup, weekend office hours, a 30-to-60-minute boot camp. If you prefer OpenClaw, Ian's hosting that one. Choose your path, join both if you like.

[52:00] Justin: I'll also give access to the CRM, an affiliate code for two weeks free. The Hermes boot camp you should do with someone for privacy and security reasons, be careful what access you give it locally or run it on a VPS. Jamie asks for the 5,000-foot view on Hermes. GoHighLevel I use for customer and prospect relationships, the best CRM on the market. Hermes I use for high-velocity marketing operations and intel: identifying and enriching leads, building cron jobs. Claude Code is still my daily driver.

[54:00] Alec: My take: anything scheduled or always-on, a cron job, I'd use Hermes or OpenClaw. Claude Code is the daily driver where you've got your environment and API keys set. If it runs all the time, Hermes or OpenClaw. If you're going in to get work done, Claude Code.

Justin: The only way to find out is using the tools. Start tinkering on the weekend, replace something in your workflow with n8n, Hermes, OpenClaw, or Claude Code. GoHighLevel is the most dissimilar, a structured CRM with AI built in.

[55:00] Alec: Closing remarks: I enjoyed that a lot. Whether it's 10 people or 10,000, we're trying to deliver as much value as possible. Hopefully it helps you start building, using different tools, and looking at how you work a little differently. This is the worst it'll ever be. We're leveling up every episode.

Justin: We do these about every week, so come along for the journey. The purpose is to onboard as many people as possible to using AI. Connect with Alec and me on LinkedIn, dropped in the chat. Thanks, everyone.