The Commission Code for Success
Does your gross revenue come from commissions, fees, and other types of 1099 MISC income? If you answered yes, then the Commission Code for Success is a podcast created specifically with you in mind. Each episode is designed to deliver a concept or idea that will help you increase your revenue and have more time to enjoy it.
If you are an employee on 100% commission or an independent contractor you are a business owner when it comes to how you go about doing your daily work. The mindset of a business owner puts you in exactly the right spot to maximize your revenue and maximize the impact you have with your clients and customers.
The Commission Code is the library of knowledge and the set of skills you need to grow your business and reach your desires. Please join us and our guests at The Commission Code Podcast! I look forward to seeing you there, I'm your host, Morris Sims.
The Commission Code for Success
The Intelligence Era: Treat Every Customer Like a Market of One, Lee Russell
Most teams use AI like a fancier word processor. We went further with Lee Russell—best-selling author, product strategist, and founder of Minimal Viable Launch—to show how unstructured data and AI agents can transform a business from mass-market to market-of-one. The shift is simple to say and powerful to execute: capture what buyers tell you, store the meaning (not just the words), and let agents assemble bespoke proposals, emails, and sales materials in minutes.
We start with the bottleneck entrepreneurs know too well: discovery calls packed with insights that die in notebooks. Lee breaks down vector databases in plain language—how transcripts become searchable “meaning” through embeddings—and why that unlocks personalization at scale. He shares a compelling case study of a university replacing generic prospectuses with custom booklets tailored to each student’s goals, turning interest into action with materials that feel hand-made.
From there, we map the path out of copy-paste ChatGPT workflows into true automation. Using tools like n8n, LangChain, or LangGraph, agents can ingest transcripts, retrieve the right context, generate documents, and deliver them—no human glue required. We also reframe marketing with Google’s “messy middle”: instead of blasting one email to 10,000 people, collect richer qualitative data and send 10,000 different emails, each grounded in what the recipient cares about. If the tech sounds daunting, Lee offers a practical entry point: run short customer interviews, transcribe them, and build a custom GPT that role-plays your buyer. It’s a fast, accessible way to capture voice-of-customer and improve offers immediately.
We close with a clear build-versus-buy lens. Buy agents for generic tasks; build when it touches your core IP—your diagnosis, methodology, or delivery—because that’s your moat. The models are a commodity; your unstructured data is not. Ready to treat every customer like a market of one and outpace competitors who still spray and pray? Hit play, take notes, and then try the simple customer-interview exercise this week. If this sparks ideas, subscribe, share with a teammate, and leave a review telling us the first workflow you’ll automate.
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Lee Russell is our guest today on the That was good, didn't I? I can't remember the name of my own damn show. We're gonna do this again.
SPEAKER_00:I've just recorded my own uh YouTube video. I think I did the intro about f six times. I was like, oh god.
SPEAKER_01:Lee Russell is our guest today on the podcast. Uh the commission code for your success, because that's what we want to talk about is how to help you be successful and get what you want in your business. Lee's a best-selling author, product strategist, and founder of Minimal Viable Launch, helping entrepreneurs become the most AI integrated companies in their niches and disrupt their competition. Now, I just read that, but let me tell you this. Lee knows what he's talking about when it comes to AI, and that's why I'm so excited about having him on the show today, because I don't know crap about AI other than I can ask Chad GPT to write something for me. So, Lee, welcome to the show. How are you?
SPEAKER_00:I'm very good. Thank you very much for having me, Maurice. And yeah, can't wait to sink our teeth into this conversation around AI, maybe dehype it a little bit, stop being so doom and gloom, and help your audience understand how they can use it uh to advance their lives. Outstanding.
SPEAKER_01:That's that's wonderful because I don't know about the rest of the world, uh, but I assume that most everybody's kind of like me. We use AI as it is today for stuff that probably is the least that it could do. What do you see people using AI for today? And what do they need to do differently?
SPEAKER_00:I think um, as you say, like people's immediate ideas really are around, you know, how do I use AI to generate more leads, create content, you know, that that kind of stuff is is the um is the initial thought that they have. But what I think is very transformational and a trend that I see increasingly become the way to get the return on investment of AI, become the disruptor of AI, is using AI to become a high-tech, high-touch business that is able to do personalization at scale. What does that mean? I think if we all think back to a time when we started our businesses, we probably did custom proposals, custom um presentations for every sales meeting that we got because we felt so thankful for having that opportunity. And as we scaled, we realized that was a massive inefficiency in our business. We started to standardize our service, standardize our presentations and proposals, and we started to treat customers as this faceless mask, as we call it. I think the true promise and power of AI and what you can really use it to do in terms of transforming your business is to start treating your customers like individuals again. That is to use the data you get from the conversations and interactions with them to completely customize your sales presentations, proposals, your um sales emails, nurture uh uh letters and video sales letters, all of that stuff can be instead of mass market spray and prey, it can be turned into bespoke one-to-one assets that's for the individual. And I think that is what really excites me about AI.
SPEAKER_01:Wow, that is a neat idea to be able to use the information I got, maybe from a discovery call, to uh to carry it on to the next step without me having to go through and and build an entire individual proposal. Because yeah, I mean, in a lot of businesses, that takes days to come up with all the data and the input.
SPEAKER_00:Days. And then you've got to, as you try to fire yourself from that role as a as an entrepreneur, right? You want to scale that that organization, you've got to then maybe have a graphic designer, marketing manager, do all of that. It's it's inefficient. And I think, you know, if we take this idea of the discovery call into custom proposal, the true gold of the intelligence era, which is what I call this new age of the economy that we're moving into, right? We're in the information age, it was internet businesses, large data sets, large databases. You've got a connection to the internet. We can have conversations like we're having now. The intelligence era is all about plugging in these AI agents to your business so you can create remarkable products and services for your customers. The gold dust of that era that we're moving into is this unstructured data. It is your transcripts from the sales calls you've had with your customers. It is the facts that you've got in your CRM system about them. It is maybe some assessments that you've done with them. If you've used lead magnets, what did they put into there? That stuff is the mo, it is the edge that you have because everyone has access to the latest state-of-the-art model, GPT-5, Gemini, whatever it is. It's one line of code to switch between those models that is never going to be your mo. We all have the same capabilities with AI. What we don't have is the same unstructured data about our customers. And the cleverer you become as an entrepreneur of how you gather that qualitative information and use it to create custom assets, the more successful you will be with AI. And it's quite a shift in the way that marketing is done.
SPEAKER_01:Because right now it's all in my head. I mean, I've got all this information that I just learned from having a wonderful conversation with you where I asked all the right questions and I now know more about why you want whatever it is that you want. And now I've got to take that data in my head and figure out how to propose something that's going to help you, and then put that into whatever format I want and whatever delivery system. How in the world do you go about using AI to do that?
SPEAKER_00:I think the the example we'll we'll get into the I think the technical weeds of how you do it is something called vector databases, which is this technology I think all entrepreneurs should be aware of. It is a little complex to explain, but I'll I'll do my best to do so.
SPEAKER_01:Good, because you're gonna have to, brother. You just you lost me right at the beginning there.
SPEAKER_00:What did you call that?
SPEAKER_01:I missed the name.
SPEAKER_00:A vector database. You can imagine a normal database is like rows and columns, looks like a spreadsheet, really. Right, right. A vector database is a database that sits, uh it has 3D space within it. And what we do is we take that information from your, let's say it's a sales called transcript. We take that information and we chunk that up into small paragraphs, let's say. And we take that.
SPEAKER_01:Now you say we do that, AI does that, right? AI does that. AI does that.
SPEAKER_00:And we feed that to a a specific type of AI called a classifier, and it takes that chunk of text and it says, well, what does this text mean? What's the what is the meaning in the text? Maybe it's a paragraph that's talking about a customer's roof is leaking. And um, they last had the roof replaced 20 years ago, you know, and and that's really what that paragraph is about. The AI uh puts this through some incredibly complex algorithms, uh, which are far above you know my pay grade, even. Um, and it creates what's called a vector embedding. You can imagine this like a series of coordinates on a map. Okay. Um, so it looks like you know, your longitude, latitude, but you know, massive long series of numbers. And then when you speak with that AI and you say, Hey AI, uh, return me the data, any data we've got on this customer that talks about roof leaks. Part of that query that you give is exactly matched with the semantic value that it understood from that paragraph, and it returns that paragraph back to you that now your AI can use to customize its content. And so uh we start to be able to customize these assets based on the data we've got. So the game really becomes how do I collect more data? How do we understand that data with the help of AI for what that data really means? And then how do we use that data to create these custom assets? And it's the vector database that is the key to unlocking all of that.
SPEAKER_01:And AI builds that vector database for us.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, vector database is like it's a specific piece of technology. There's providers, there's many versions of these, right? It's it's a type of database. Um, but you set one up and you connect it with an AI model who inserts the data for you and does all of that kind of um hardcore mathematical analysis of what does this piece of text mean? And you can do it with images and videos, but let's take most people are dealing with text in it, if I'm honest with you. Uh and the power of this, and and why I would encourage those listening to go on this journey of learning vector databases or learning about them. You don't need to know how to build them or um uh really the maths that sits behind it. We just need the concept because once you understand the concept, you can use it. And I'll give you an example of a business um that we're helping, you know, set up uh vector databases for and the power of transformation it can have on your customer experience. So they help students in the UK go to university or you guys would call it college, right? Um, and basically what happens is they have a career advisor and that speaks with those students, and those students say, Hey, I you know, I'm interested in uh math, science, maybe want to be an engineer. This is my career uh aspiration. And that uh advisor then goes, Ah, okay, we've got a prospectus for you. We're gonna send it out in the post. It's gonna contain some courses, but I think you should look at these things. We'd be a great um uh university for you to go to. That prospectus was built mass market, mass scale. It was never designed to be a custom asset for that student. So it contains a really broad set of courses in there, and it's all positioned for the average student. But people are now individuals, right? Everyone has their own taste in music, their Netflix collection is completely tailored to them, their feeds are completely tailored to them in an individualistic way. So, what we've done with this vector database is they stick the core transcript into that database, and their AI agents go into it, and their AI agents understand all of the courses at their university, and it builds a custom prospectus off of the back of that conversation that says they're interested in engineering, maths, science, this is their career path, and it pulls back the 50 courses that are right for them instead of the 100 courses that are a complete average of that university's course offering. That's the power of the vector database.
SPEAKER_01:That's amazing. Because I mean, I I create digital courses, and uh one of the most challenging parts of that is then creating a a document that we'll call a workbook that the student can use as they watch a video. Well, one day I got really excited and I said, gee, I wonder if AI could build that for me. And I went in and I said, here's the transcript of the video. I need a workbook, I want it to look like this, that, and the other. Think about it. Don't don't just give me the top of your head. Think about it for a while. Let me know what you come up with. My God, it just saved me days of work in building this whole thing. Maybe I shouldn't have given away my secret. I want people to think that I really worked hard on that course. And I did. But it yeah, that that's how that's the most expensive use of of AI I've ever utilized. How do I how do I begin doing this kind of thing? Because I mean, like you say, I don't understand, other than what you just taught me, what a vector database is or how to begin to create one. But do if I want to enter into this and get started thinking about it, where do I begin?
SPEAKER_00:It's it is difficult. There's a barrier to entry right now, and I think this is one of the issues with uh the world of AI. Um, you know, uh in in the early days of any technological disruption is you know, getting into it is is harder. So there's some good solutions like Pinecone is is a provider that does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. But is there a complete solution for someone who's totally non-technical? Right now, I would say not. Um the closest maybe is integrating Pinecone with a platform like N8N, which is an automation platform that you can build AI agents on and can do some fantastic, amazing things there. Right now, I think the the uh way that you really get started is you know um is partnering with people who can spin these things up for you because once you have them, it gives your AI agents so much power. Like I think a lot of entrepreneurs are stuck in this weird copy-paste world of Chat GPT, right? When you were building that workbook with ChatGPT or or whoever your favorite model is, you were speaking with it, copy paste, in and out, maybe new conversations to produce the asset. When you start using platforms like NAN, Langgraph, Langchain, um, you break out of that box. You now have an AI agent that can do things for you. It can create the email, it can send the email, it can create the PDF and customize it based on those things. So that's really the step that I would encourage entrepreneurs to go to is if you're wanting AI agents to do things in your business, so outsource complete tasks to the AI agent and not have to have someone there copy-pasting. You've got to take this next step, which is to use a platform like NAN, Langgraph, to interact with this infrastructure that you need to build in your business. Um, and you know, there are off-the-shelf tools coming down the pipe. We're building something ourselves internally here at Minimal Viable Launch called contextengines.ai, um, which would allow you to have the vector database set up and the simple agents to do that at a click of a button. We're going to be launching at the end of Q4 this year, but we're not quite yet ready to share that. But those platforms are coming. But I encourage you to learn about the concepts, learn what a vector database is, learn how to uh think about AI agents because it is a superpower right now in the world of business.
SPEAKER_01:All right. So what if you hang on, Kalee? Hang on. My job is to sell widgets. I I've got a widget factory and I need to sell widgets. That's my focus, is finding people that want to buy blue widgets and then going out and talking to them and selling them blue widgets. I frankly, I ain't got time to learn all that stuff. Do I interact with someone like you? Do I do I you know say, well, we'll wait until they turn make it a turnkey kind of how do I even begin to have that conversation specific to my business of selling blue widgets?
SPEAKER_00:I I think the uh framework that I like to advise entrepreneurs to use for this conversation is is the kind of build-or-by- mindset, right? I agree with you to build your website or did you have a website designer to build and develop that before you're gonna do it?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, yeah, I hired somebody to do that.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly, right? Um and it probably is many, many things like lawyer, like your contracts, you probably hired a lawyer. So um partner with good people, but specifically ask yourself, should I build this or should I buy this? Buying it, I think, makes sense when this is not core to the IP of your business. If it is an AI agent system, it's gonna create social media content, or maybe it's some lead generation. Like there are people out there who've made it their life's mission to build a company, it's gonna build some software, it does an incredible job at that. Where I think it really makes sense to build is when that agent helps you with the core IP of your business. To give you an example, um, we were working with an animation company. He does uh technically complex animations of um uh uh products that people are trying to raise money for. They have some kind of mechanical element to them, so you can't just explain it with an image, you want something that moves. And before his job was to get in contact with inventors, founders, and people raising this, and and he would charge them to do a storyboard and he'd say that'd be$5,000. And then my animation is$50,000 to$100,000 off the back of that. And it was a tough sell because they didn't know him, like him, or trust him, and they hadn't seen him how good he is at his work, and they don't want to spend the$5,000 yet. So, you know, it was a hard sell. And what we came up with, we were uh spitballing some ideas. I was watching the film Glass Onion. Um I said to him, Man, have you ever seen this? There's this napkin sketch in this film, which he sketches out the entire business model of how they're gonna make this organization that makes them all this money. I was like, what if you used AI? So instead of charging for the storyboard, you sit there as he's a he's a talented draftsman, you sit there and you have a great conversation with that customer about their product and you sketch the keyframe visual, like the one shot that they really need in the animation that would sell their product. And we use the AI to then customize a 20-page documentation document that tells them the strategy of the animation, the process, what their big pain points were, what their big objectives were. You stick your your um million-dollar napkin sketch on, and we're not gonna charge them for that because you're gonna do all of this in space of you know 90 minutes, uh, used to taking weeks to do these storyboards. And we use that to sell the animations. That made sense for him to build because it's a core part of his IP. It's a framework that he's now developing out, and there isn't really gonna be any software company in the world that builds that product because it's too niche and specific for him. So for that widget space business, they should build uh AI agents that help them get in contact with people who might want to buy their widget, maintain relationships, or analyze stock levels and and those kind of things that get in their way from selling more widgets. That's where they should build. Everything else should be a buy.
SPEAKER_01:So you you intrigue me with one thing you mentioned there. I can use AI then to help me find prospective clients.
SPEAKER_00:You definitely can. And I think um it depends on the industry that you are in. Uh, but I think marketing is going to go through a massive shift because you know, right now we build, let's say let's say you have 10,000 people in your CRM right now, and you think we really want to generate some new customers this quarter, and we want to do it for uh this specific product, right? We we want to sell, uh you said you were selling courses, we want to sell courses on um how to grow your business to become uh to break through the you know the million-dollar mark, let's say. And traditionally, what we would do is we'd write one really good email, we'd send that out to 10,000 people, and we'd hope that maybe 3% of those people open, read, and click the link, and maybe uh uh go to the landing page and book or buy your course, right? And and that's kind of how marketing has existed for a long time in the information age, the age of the internet.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Now, though, um the way that you can change this is that you have unstructured data points against all of those customers. So you know what did they interact with? What courses of yours have they bought before, Morris, for you as an example, right? What courses did they buy before? What did they rate them? Maybe in your courses you've uh analyzed some of their answers, so you know some of their pain points. And now instead of writing one email, we write 10,000 emails and we send it individually to those 10,000 people. Um, and so we have a much higher click-through rate, we have a much higher um response rate. And we can really start to think about this game and how it's changed is okay, if I have better data about their pains, needs, and wants, I can sell more things in a more compelling way. We know if you've ever been in the sales role, you are looking for the need. You are asking questions. If you're doing sales well and you're not pitching, right? If you're you're asking questions to uncover the need and you're getting them to sell the product to you. Once they have sold the product to you, you turn around and reflect what you've heard and close the deal. You can never force anyone to buy anything in a legal way, right? Unless you've got a gun to their head. You can't do it. Yeah, you've got to get them to sell themselves. And you do that through questions and uncovering the need. This means that AI has changed the game in the world of marketing, lead generation, and prospecting. It becomes, well, what assets can I make that gets people to divulge information to me in ways they find fun? This is, I think, very, you know, clever businesses often have these quiz funnels, right? That that we see so often. Why does that work? Well, and the quiz funnel is supercharged in the world of the AI because now I get to get you to uh answer questions so I have the data to customize the asset, to know what to offer you. Um, and Google has this incredible piece of research called the messy middle. Don't know if you've ever seen this research by Google, but essentially people um they have a problem, they they become aware of this problem, they start reading the journey of researching the solutions to the problem. You've probably done it, you've got 50 tabs open of different providers, different products on Amazon, whatever it is, you're like, oh, I don't know uh what to buy. You're in the messy middle, you're stuck and you're confused. And the clever businesses understand this that they're gonna have to kind of throw little things at you just to give you a little bit more information, get you to divulge a bit more information so they can deepen the relationship, maybe get you on a discovery call, then a clarity call, then a strategy call, you know, little by little. And we're trying to get people out of this infinite loop where they're stuck in this confusion and pull them into our world where they can actually make a purchasing decision. With AI, what we throw at them while they're stuck in the messy middle should be optimized for them to divulge more information, qualitative information. Don't just ask them yes or no questions. We want the deep stuff. What is your biggest problem? Why is that causing you issues in your life? How does this show up in your life? And when you have that information, you can spin out the bespoke asset to convert them.
SPEAKER_01:Lee, you're still way above anything I could actually start doing today. And I'm wondering, I know, I know you've got a masterclass coming up. Is that a place for me to start to understand what I should be doing? Or do I need to engage you or or someone like you to begin to help me understand exactly what to do to make this work and maybe even hire you or or someone else to actually do it?
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. Um, yes, the masterclass would be a great place. Anyone who's listening to this who's thinking, I really want to build some agents. Like I've been hearing about it all year now, or maybe for the last two years, um, and you're stuck using Chat GPT in this copy-paste way. This masterclass is all about how you disrupt your industry with AI agents, and it gives you some of those principles that you need to learn about. Um, and then off the back of that, you can book an AI opportunity audit with myself where we dig into your business one-to-one, and I can help brainstorm some ideas of what you could build. Um, I would say though, uh Maurice, you can do something today. You're using Chat GPT, you're already concepting um uh products with your use of ChatGPT. And I think if you were to reach out to some of those customers who have bought your courses and say, hey, I'm offering a$50 Amazon voucher for you to jump on a call with me for 15 minutes. And I'd love to ask you some questions about your experience with the course so we can improve it. And you recalled those calls and you transcribe those calls, you've just generated a wealth of qualif uh of unstructured uh qualitative data, and you could create a custom GPT in uh open AI's uh in your open AI account, and you could feed each of those transcripts in to your custom GPT, and you could have that custom GPT play role play as one of your customers. It's kind of an amalgamation of like 10, 15 of your customers, right? Depending on how many of these calls you you want to have and how many uh Amazon vouchers you want to put towards this. But then you have an incredible resource. You've got an AI agent that can role play as a customer that you can spitball course ideas for, podcast episodes to, uh lean magnets and assets with. And it's not informed by the the kind of more general um suggestions that open AI would give you straight out of the bat, because it's it's a generalized solution. What you've done is you've built fine-tuning data, stuck it on top of the model, and now you've got something that is a unique asset in your business. Um, and that's probably you know, setting up a custom GPT, half an hour worth of work. You can find YouTube tutorials that would take you through that very, very easy. You do not need to be technical in any way, shape, or form, having the conversations longer, right? Five hours of work, maybe. But if you did that, you'd start this journey. You've built a mini vector database without going the full way. And uh, you know, I've done that for some businesses, and we've had some wild, wild um marketing ideas come out of those things. Uh um because people will tell you about their problems.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, all the time. That's for sure. Lee, that's that's truly free. Yeah, exactly. Uh tell us more about this master class. Where do we find it? How much does it cost to be a part of that? And and where can we where can we begin with that piece?
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. Um, so we run it, it's free. Uh, we we we run that uh once a month and we dig into a particular aspect of AI. So we look at the current trends, we look at giving you some principles and strategies, we talk about how you become an AI enhanced entrepreneur and some of the tools you can use to start this, what we call the AI agent flywheel in your business. It's this process of building agent after agent after agent to speed up um and basically become a company that's very hard to compete with in your uh niche. So I think uh Maurice, we can give you the link for that. People will be able to maybe find it in the show notes um and and book on um uh we host it online, and I would love to see people there.
SPEAKER_01:Outstanding. And what is your what is your website, Lee?
SPEAKER_00:What's the URL? Uh so it's www.minimalviable launch.io.
SPEAKER_01:Excellent. Excellent. Man, you have opened up so many ideas for for me and for our audience. It's incredible. Thank you very much for being with us today on the Commission Code.
SPEAKER_00:No worries, Mars. My pleasure. And uh yeah, hopefully people got some value out of that and and go and execute on those ideas that we've sparked.