Macpreneur

Running a Marketing Automation Business on Mac with Shaun Whynacht

• Damien Schreurs • Season 6 • Episode 128

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In this episode, you'll learn how Shaun Whynacht, a seasoned Mac user and founder of Blue Cow Marketing, is using his Mac to streamline his business operations.

Links and video version at: https://macpreneur.com/episode128

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Running a Marketing Automation Business on Mac with Shaun Whynacht


Teaser

Shaun Whynacht: For me, it has been the voice feature—being able to enable that and dictate. I mean, sure, it's been there a while, but I found myself doing a lot more on my phone with the voice keyboard function, being able to just dictate everything from there. I had said to myself, if only I could do this on the desktop.

Nova AI: Welcome to Macpreneur, the show for seasoned solopreneurs looking to streamline their business on a Mac. Unlock the secrets to saving time and money with your host and technology mentor, Damien Schreurs. 


Introducing Shaun Whynacht

Damien Schreurs: Hello, hello! Today, I have the pleasure of introducing Shaun Whynacht. Shaun is the founder of Blue Cow Marketing, a firm specializing in simplifying business operations through innovative marketing automation. A dedicated Mac user for longer than he hasn't been, Shaun embraces the Mac way of life in both his personal and business worlds.

With over 12 years of experience, he helps financial advisors, coaches, and speakers streamline their sales and marketing processes, freeing up time to focus on what they do best. Known for his friendly, straightforward approach, Shaun delivers tailored automation solutions that save time and reduce stress, all while enjoying a good dad joke.

Shaun, welcome to the show.

Shaun Whynacht: Thank you for having me.

Damien Schreurs: Thank you for coming on the show.


Shaun's Current Setup

Damien Schreurs: Let's jump right into your Mac setup. What's the current Mac that you have right now?

Shaun Whynacht: I have a Mac Studio in front of me. I just acquired it about a month ago. Prior to that, I was using a MacBook for three years. On the other side of the room, I'm doing some audio work. I have a Mac mini, a MacBook Air, an iPad, an iPhone, and an Apple Watch.

So, we also have an iMac in the house. I think I've got the whole lineup.

Damien Schreurs: I'm curious, Apple recently released the M4 Pro Mac mini, but the Mac Studio is still on the M2 processor. Did you get the M2 Ultra or did you go for the M2 Max?

Shaun Whynacht: No, I just went with the standard version out of the box. I'm not running a lot of processing that I need to do with it.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah, it's not clear when the M4 Mac Studio will be released. Since you're using a desktop computer, what kind of screen do you have? Did you choose the Apple Studio Display or the Studio Display XDR?

Shaun Whynacht: No, I have two curved Samsung display monitors here with a desk mount and a motorized standing desk. Prior to that, I was using two tabletop mounts. I've never really had an independent Apple display other than the ones that come with a laptop or an iMac.

Damien Schreurs: Those monitors are curved; are they ultra-wide?

Shaun Whynacht: No, they're a little bit wider than a standard display, but they're not ultra-wide. Each one is 32 inches, so they provide a lot of real estate for your windows.

Damien Schreurs: Yes.

Shaun Whynacht: Aha. Very good.


How Shaun Got His First Mac

Damien Schreurs: If we go back in time, what was your first Mac and how did you get into the Mac ecosystem?

Shaun Whynacht: Well, my background is in television production. That's what I went to school for. When speaking to people in the industry, I was looking for a computer that I could edit video on. I was at the cusp of the transition from nonlinear to linear editing, learning how to edit on tape before moving to a digital format.

It was suggested to me that if I wanted a reliable system, I should go with a Mac. Back then, Final Cut Pro was the industry standard for video editing. So, I got a Mac when I left school; it was an iMac. I don't remember which version it was, but it had a white design and a little articulating arm with brass accents.

To this day, I think that's an amazing-looking Mac. I wish I still had one just for the nostalgia of it. That was my first Mac, and I would shoot wedding videos and burn DVDs using the DVD burner it had. I've never had an issue with any Mac since, aside from wanting more power as time went on. I would typically upgrade about six or seven years later, whereas in the PC world, I found computers had about a year or a year and a half of shelf life before they either died or needed an upgrade.

Damien Schreurs: Yes, the iMac you mentioned was nicknamed the Sunflower iMac, and it had a G4 processor at the time. For the anecdote, this was the first Mac I bought—not for myself, but for my grandfather. He wanted a computer to write his books; he actually authored many books.

I had been eyeing the Mac for a long time while still using PCs, so I found him that one, which was secondhand. I still have it today. Unfortunately, my grandfather passed away, but I was able to get the Mac back. I still have that G4, and I booted it up during COVID because I was looking for a machine for my daughter.

Unfortunately, it wasn't powerful enough, but it still boots up and works. As you said, it's a gorgeous machine; for me, it's one of the most beautiful Macs ever produced. Very good. And yes, as you mentioned, the longevity of Mac hardware is incredible.

Shaun Whynacht: Absolutely. From there, I moved on to a more standard design of an iMac where the drive was on the side of the monitor. That one lasted me for many years, and I completed a lot of projects on it.

Damien Schreurs: Yes. Sometimes, it’s a bit of a pity for me because the hardware lasts much longer than the operating system is supported. I have so many iMacs and Macs; I still have a Mac Mini from 2010 that, unfortunately, I can't use online seriously. It's a shame that they stop supporting the operating system after a certain amount of time. Speaking of operating systems, are you on the very latest version, the Sequoia version, or are you still a bit behind?

Shaun Whynacht: Yes, I've enrolled in their beta release program, so I always get the updates in advance and try them out.


Shaun's Favorite Apps

Damien Schreurs: Are you living on the fringe then? Are you using beta software on your production machine? Yes. Okay.

Shaun Whynacht: Yep, I've never had an issue. I would never do that if I didn't have a Mac, though. I'm not on the developer version; I'm on the public beta version.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah, which is usually two releases behind the developer beta. So, what are your favorite Mac apps at the moment?

Shaun Whynacht: Ah, for me, I use a lot of different apps. I don't edit in Final Cut anymore; I've switched to Adobe because of Photoshop and all those elements. However, I've come to use the Photos app a lot more, mainly because of its integration with my phone and its ability to do some really great processing.

From what I need in my line of work, it works really well. Obviously, I use the iCal calendar a lot and the Mail program. One of the features that saves me so much time is Airdrop; I think Airdrop is an amazing feature.

Then there's the shared clipboard feature. There are many times when I want to view a client's website or landing page that I've built on my desktop. I just copy the URL, pull up my phone, hit paste, and it's there. I don't have to type it out. If I were to track the amount of time saved by not having to type those out, I would have days saved.

I just think that everything works really well together. And then, of course, my vehicle now has wireless CarPlay, so everything is just integrated. It's like my entire life is one single operating system.

Damien Schreurs: If we talk about the operating system, what did you notice with Sequoia? Did you notice anything special? Do you have a favorite new feature that came out?

Shaun Whynacht: Not necessarily a new feature, but I just think that the apps start to work better together. I like the ability to wirelessly use my phone camera as a webcam. The new version on my laptop, when I updated, allowed me to have the virtual phone feature.

You receive a lot of notifications on your phone that you don't get on your desktop with different apps. I don't always want to pull my phone out, and being able to check it on my laptop has been really beneficial in my line of work.

Damien Schreurs: Because you're on the beta, you must already be on point 2. Did you manage to get on the beta testing for Apple Intelligence?

Shaun Whynacht: I haven't seen it show up on my phone yet, not in the sense of what has been rolled out in the new iPhones and everything like that. I haven't utilized much of it. I was excited when they announced it because I'm big into AI and the work that I'm doing. But until I can actually utilize it to its fullest capacity, when it becomes mainstream and public for everybody, I haven't seen too much use of it personally right now.

Damien Schreurs: For the moment, even though I installed the betas, I couldn't try it because it's not available in Europe. I know it's available if the device is set to US English, but I don't know about Canada. They are looking at the country associated with the Apple ID and the language with which the device has been configured.

Even then, there is a waitlist. You have to go to Settings and apply to be on the beta track for Apple Intelligence. I heard a podcast recently on an AI-related topic, and the host was wondering why he didn't see anything. He then realized he had to apply for the beta program.


Shaun's Mac Tips

Damien Schreurs: Very good. So what tip or trick did you discover recently on your Mac?

Shaun Whynacht: For me, it has been the voice feature, being able to enable that and dictate. I mean, sure, it's been there a while, but you know, I found myself doing a lot more on my phone with the voice keyboard function, being able to just dictate everything from there. I had said to myself, if only I could do this on the desktop.

So, you know, in true Shaun style, I started to Google, you know, is this possible? Then I found the shortcut to be able to do that. I did it a couple of times, and until we just mentioned that again, I was like, why am I still typing things? I should use it more, but again, getting ideas out and being able to dictate into it.

Now, you know, I use ChatGPT a lot. I know it's not an Apple application, but everything is moving toward voice being key. I think once we see Apple Intelligence roll out fully in devices, we're going to see more of that and what Siri can do for us.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah, I've personally never been someone who would use the phone with voice. I don't know. It's just that I tend to think in typing, not...

Shaun Whynacht: Mm hmm.

Damien Schreurs: But I was coaching someone this summer who had a MacBook and wanted to get better at using it. That person was frustrated with the dictation on the Mac, and what we realized—because I'm not a user—I was trying to see what was happening. He demonstrated using the dictation feature on his iPhone and his iPad, and what happens is that when you dictate, you can see immediately what appears on the screen, and it better reproduces new paragraphs, etc.

Then, when he tried it on his Mac, which was running Sonoma, yes, it was Sonoma, you don't have that. It's not as fully fledged as on the iPhone. He was frustrated because he was speaking, and you wouldn't see anything being written; then it would start writing, but when he said "new paragraph," the text wouldn't move to the next paragraph.

He would continue, and it was only when he finished speaking that the text would look all right. He was frustrated.

Shaun Whynacht: Right.

Damien Schreurs: Is it still the case with Sequoia now? Have you tried it with Sequoia?

Shaun Whynacht: Yeah, I haven't tried it as much, but I did notice that too. It's almost like it caches the audio, and then once it's finished, it processes it and displays it. But I think that's the difference with dictating; you've got to learn to dictate your punctuation—right, you know, commas, periods, new paragraphs, those types of things. I learned that a lot when driving because obviously, you don't want to be holding and texting, but being able to audibly get Siri to dictate replies back, especially with Apple CarPlay...

Damien Schreurs: Yeah, yeah, I've been using the voice feature of ChatGPT more and more on the mobile app. So that's not really dictation; you don't need to think about that. I also tried once with a tool called MacWhisper, which uses the Whisper transcription engine—an AI tool from OpenAI that they've released completely for free, allowing us to install the model locally.

There is a tool that does that called MacWhisper. What is nice about MacWhisper, in contrast to the dictation from Apple, is that you don't actually need to say "next paragraph" and so on. It understands, so you can speak totally naturally, and it will handle the paragraphs and new lines by itself. I hope that next year or the year after, there will be a Siri 2.0 with a large language model, and that the engine behind dictation on the Mac will also be more natural.

Shaun Whynacht: Hmm.

Damien Schreurs: If you had to compare dictation on the Mac to dictation on the iPhone, where do you do most of it?

Shaun Whynacht: Definitely on the iPhone, because I'm dictating more emails and things there. But when I'm at my desk, I can type probably faster than I can deal with the dictation part of it. However, on the iPhone, my hands are big, and the keyboard seems pretty small, so dictation is a lot more accurate for me that way.

Damien Schreurs: Very good. We're almost at the end of the show.


Future of Mac

Damien Schreurs: If you were in charge of the Mac division at Apple, what would be your first priority in terms of either new development or improvement? Mm hmm.

Shaun Whynacht: Wow. That's a good question. For me, I’m an audio and video guy, so you know, you've got iMovie that comes standard in the Apple operating system. I would love to see a better multitrack editor that isn't GarageBand or anything like that, to enhance the production side of things.

While there are non-Apple programs like Odyssey that you can download, I think Apple needs something that isn't a GarageBand-type audio program.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah, when I started the podcast in 2018, I looked at GarageBand and quickly became frustrated. At that time, we didn't have Descript or any of those AI-based tools. So, I ended up using Audacity, right? There were so many tutorials online, and it’s cross-platform.

I remember finding a guy with a really nice setup and process for editing podcasts using Audacity. At the time, I was also audio-only. Now I'm doing video, so obviously, I can't use it anymore, but it was so fluid to edit the podcast with Audacity's keyboard shortcuts and features.

GarageBand was really frustrating. I think GarageBand is more of an audio composition and production tool rather than a podcast editing tool.

Shaun Whynacht: Yeah, absolutely. With all the other Apple apps that are cross-device, from Photos to iMovie pulling in clips from your phone, it would be great to have an app that allows you to remotely record episodes using Bluetooth microphones. Then, you could pull up the program on your desktop and start editing and publishing right from there.

That would be key, allowing for a full-circle production studio for podcasts.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah, I don't know where I saw that. Recently, there has been a new version of Final Cut Pro.

Shaun Whynacht: Mhmm.

Damien Schreurs: Didn't Apple finally add transcription and automatic captioning or something like that?

Shaun Whynacht: Maybe. It's been well over a decade since I used Final Cut Pro.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah, I'm not a Final Cut Pro user either, so I don't know, but I seem to recall something in the news along those lines. From my side, I'm using Descript now to edit the podcast, and the ability to remove parts of the video just by selecting text and hitting backspace or delete is fantastic. You can also find all the "ums," "uhs," and so on, just like in a word processor, and delete them easily.

Shaun Whynacht: Yep. I use Descript all the time.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah, it's so good. I would say it’s a pretty good video editor as well. It may not be the most user-friendly, but I think it does the job very well. So, thank you for sharing how you're using your Mac.


Connecting with Shaun

Damien Schreurs: And so where can people find you online?

Shaun Whynacht: Yeah. So the easiest way is I'm not going to try to spell out my name for people to search that way. But if you look up Blue Cow Marketing, you will find me there. It's just bluecowmarketing.ca.

Damien Schreurs: Thank you very much, Shaun.

Shaun Whynacht: Thank you for having me.


Applying to be a guest too

Damien Schreurs: And so if, like Shaun, you would like to share how you are using your Mac to run your business, it's simple. 

Just visit macpreneur.com/apply. 

If you are already on Podmatch, just click on the button, and you will land on a show profile. 

Otherwise, fill out the application form, and I will get back to you within a few days.

Once again, it's macpreneur.com/apply.


Outro

Damien Schreurs: If you found this episode helpful, please share it with a fellow solopreneur and tag both Shaun and me on LinkedIn. I will put a link to both our profiles in the show notes.

And until next time, I'm Damien Schreurs, wishing you a great day.

Nova AI: Thank you for listening to the Macpreneur Podcast. If you've enjoyed the show, please leave a review and share it with a friend right now.