Macpreneur: Helping Solopreneurs Streamline Their Businesses on a Mac

How This Solopreneur Turned a $1,000 Mac Into an AI-Enhanced Workhorse with Ely Delaney

• Season 7 • Episode 176

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In this episode, you'll learn how Ely Delaney, email marketing architect, uses his Mac Mini to streamline his business.

Discover Wisprflow for fast voice-to-text dictation and how Ely links Claude with Notion to auto-generate and organise content, SOPs and ideas.

We walk through practical Mac setups you can copy—from multi-monitor rigs and a Mobile Pixels attachable screen to an affordable Mac Mini serving as a compact workhorse.

We also dig into Claude features like skills and the Chat vs CoWork trade-offs so you can build reusable AI assistants without burning tokens and still retain the human touch in your emails.

Show notes and video version: https://macpreneur.com/episode176

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MP176 - How This Solopreneur Turned a $1,000 Mac Into an AI-Enhanced Workhorse with Ely Delaney
===

[00:00:00] Welcome
---

Ely Delaney: The laptop I'm looking at is gonna cost me 3,500 bucks when I go to upgrade, which is one reason why I was like, "Eh, I'm not really ready to spend that money right now."

Let's go spend 1,000 on the Mini.

But this thing is such a workhorse.

I beat it up.

I put it through, I don't know, 10 to 12 hours' worth of heavy work all day long, and it just goes, and I love that about it.

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.


[00:00:33] Introduction
---

Damien Schreurs: Hello, hello.

Today I have the pleasure to introduce Ely Delaney.

Ely is your email marketing architect and is also known as the people whisperer.

He's the creator of the Follow Up Rockstar system, teaching entrepreneurs how to go from surviving to thriving in any economy through the art and science of building strong relationships and following up for life.

He's an Amazon bestseller with his three books, "Marketing Tidbits," "Networking Tidbits," and his latest book, "The Follow Up Code: Seven Virtues for Building Trust Through Email."

With a passion for connecting people, his best-selling training course, Networking Like a Rockstar, has over one thousand four hundred and twenty-four students registered globally.

He's the guy to help turn you into a follow-up rockstar.

Ely, welcome to the show.

Ely Delaney: Thank you so much for having me.

It's a pleasure to be here today.


[00:01:36] Mac Setup
---

Damien Schreurs: So let's start with your current setup.

Which Mac are you using right now to run your business?

Ely Delaney: I'm using Mac Mini as my primary.

For the longest, since 2013, I had used a MacBook Pro, and then I was like, "Am I ready to upgrade my laptop yet?"

No, let's try the Mini and see.

And I love this little thing.

It's a workhorse.

I just got it this last year, so it's got the M4 chip in it?

Yeah.

Damien Schreurs: So what kind of monitor do you have hooked in?

Ely Delaney: I actually have two Sceptre monitors, a 24-inch, a 22-inch, and then I also have a third one, which is actually a tablet, so I can draw on it and all that kind of fun stuff, 'cause I do a lot of visual training and things like that.

So I have the three set up, and depending on the day, I try to figure out if I can hack in more in there somehow.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah, it's difficult, when you get used to a multi-monitor setup, to go back to a single screen, and even going back to the MacBook screen.

Ely Delaney: Yeah.

And here's the thing, Damien.

My MacBook, I actually, years ago, I got behind, a company called Mobile Pixels, and they have a mobile monitor that actually just attaches to the back of your laptop, and so it just slides out, and I carry that with me everywhere.

So even if I'm at a coffee shop or if I'm traveling or anything, I still have two monitors.

So I'm not the full setup, but it definitely gets me by, and it is a struggle to go back to one.

Damien Schreurs: I've seen, I don't remember where, there are even—you can have two side monitors, and they—

Ely Delaney: Yeah, they have one.

That's a newer model.

The one that I have is several years old.

It still works like a charm, so I haven't upgraded yet.

Yeah, at some point I'll be getting that one, so then I'll have three monitors for the whole display.

And yeah, people at the coffee shop still always freak out.

They're like, "What is that?"

"That is so cool."

And I'm like, "Yeah, it's..."

I got telling the whole story, and I'm like, "You know what?"

"I wonder if I can make affiliate commissions off of how many of these I've sold."

Mm-hmm.

Damien Schreurs: So let's go to the next segment.


[00:03:36] Mac Apps & Wisprflow
---

Damien Schreurs: What Mac desktop applications do you use on your Mac?

Ely Delaney: So the vast majority of my stuff is completely web-based.

I try to do that so then, no matter what happens, I can, God forbid, if I have to, I can go back to a PC if I needed to go get access to stuff.

But most of my stuff is web-based.

But a couple of the apps that I do a lot with is Notion, obviously.

It is web-based, but I do have the app on my computer, which is cool.

Claude is where I do a lot of my AI-related stuff.

My favorite one is a much more recent one, Wisprflow.

And that app alone has been crazy phenomenal.

Super excited about it because now it doesn't matter if I'm in an app, if I'm on the web, it doesn't matter where it is.

If there's a spot where I'm supposed to type, I click in there, I hold a button, I talk, and it transcribes.

It cleans it up, so it's just not a bunch of garbly gook, but it makes it legible.

And then that cuts my time down by so much.

I think I looked at my stats yesterday, and it says that I've written three full books by talking.

And so Wisprflow is my single favorite app that I've seen probably in the last five years.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah, speaking and transcribing is as powerful as text expansion.

It's like, you can take any typing classes you want.

You won't be as fast as the way we speak, keyboard shortcuts, and stuff like that.

Ely Delaney: Yeah, and I've been using text expanders for years, probably close to 15 years, if not more.

And so when this came out, and for anybody who's been around for a while, we've had things in the past, but Dragon was one, and there was a couple of other ones out there, and they were just horrible.

Like, all of them.

I think I paid for Dragon through three different models, and I hated every one of them.

I just kept hoping that it would get better, and it never did.

And when Wisprflow—I was like, "Ah, it's a free trial."

"I'll check it out."

And I played with it, and it was like I was sold immediately.

I went through my trial.

I didn't even finish the trial before I paid them money.

I was so happy to upgrade and use their service.

Damien Schreurs: An iOS app, a companion app?

Ely Delaney: Now I am an Android guy, and they've had the iOS one for a while now.

The Android one just came out, like, a month ago maybe, something like that.

And that's been amazing too, 'cause there's nothing better than not having to type on that little tiny keyboard, 'cause, especially for those of us who are a bit older, that just sucks.

Super happy.

You hold a button down, you talk, you let go, and it just puts the text in place, and it does good cleanup and punctuation.

It's not perfect, but you can get what would normally take you five minutes, it's gonna take you 30 seconds.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah, I'm very frustrated with the iPhone keyboard.

I have a 14 Pro Max, so I have supposedly the biggest screen.

But still, what's getting me each time is I see a predicted word in the middle, and I want to hit it, but instead of hitting that predicted word, I hit the letter below.

And I'm going so fast, then I realize that's not what I wanted to write.

Ely Delaney: I'm an Android guy, but mine, it just seems like autocorrect is drunk and just makes up words, and it just changes everything.

I have no clue.

It's "That is not what I said."

"That's not what I wrote."

"I have no clue where you came up with that."

But I send stuff, and what happens for me is I tend to type, type, enter, and then it's gone.

And then I look at it, it's, "Oh, no, that's not what it was supposed to say."

And people on the other end are, "Huh?"

"What?"

"What was that?"

"Please translate."

And I'm like, "Yeah, autocorrect is drunk again."

So I've gotten to the point where I try to just avoid it, and Wisprflow has fixed easily 98% of that problem for me.

Mm-hmm.

Damien Schreurs: I'd like to circle back to Notion.

Can you explain to the listeners who might not know Notion or have maybe heard about it,


[00:07:30] Notion Deep Dive
---

Damien Schreurs: What's the appeal with Notion and also regarding the desktop app versus using the web interface?

Ely Delaney: Okay.

So Notion, I switched over to Notion.

I started hearing a lot about it.

I'm an old-school Evernote user, back when it was really new.

And the problem is that it's kinda gotten defunct over these last few years.

And so I started playing with Notion.

I had somebody else that I follow that was like, everything they delivered was all Notion-based.

And I was like, "All right, let me look at this thing."

And then I watched a few videos, and I'm like, "All right, this is kinda cool."

So it's a way to store everything you have, but the cool thing is, if you're familiar with Evernote, things like that, it's just a place to hold stuff, which in itself was great, but Notion takes it to the next level and creates databases as well, so you can have things that are searchable, and you can reorder things and filter things out as well.

And so I use it for everything on a personal level.

I use it for all my receipts.

I scan in my receipts.

The one thing I don't like about it, it's a little bit slow doing that, where other software is usually faster, but it does do it.

Recipes.

Yeah, I like to cook, and so if I find a recipe, I essentially have an online database cookbook of recipes that I've found, and I can do searches and find anything I want within seconds.

But from a business standpoint, a couple things that I really use it for are storing processes, SOPs, things like that.

And then most recently, I've started taking that, like, content scheduling, ideas, things like that, especially if I'm using AI for brainstorming and idea generation.

Then I'm like, "Okay, so here's our topic, and we have five different directions we could go with this."

I take that, and I have AI talking to Notion, so it creates a database for me, and it all says, "These are ideas."

And then when I create the idea, I can move it into another column and tag it essentially as, say, I recorded a video or I wrote a post about it or whatever it is.

And then when it's finished and edited and everything, I can label it as ready, which means I have a whole view that's purely on anything that's ready to post.

I can just say, "Hey, this is ready."

"Use it."

And then I put it as used, so I can have it track that way, and it just gives me this nice, clean dashboard to do all of that kind of stuff.

So I do it for a lot for that.

As I'm creating content ideas for my trainings and things like that, I'll organize them inside of Notion, and it's great 'cause you can have...

You have a page, but then you can page inside of pages, and you can have tables.

So if you have something you want it to look more pretty, or you wanna have something that's more of a Kanban style where you can move things from one category to another category, you can do that.

It's both a blessing and a curse that it is extremely flexible, which means if you don't know which direction you wanna go with it, you're probably gonna get overwhelmed.

But if you actually stop and think about, "What is it I would like this to look like?"

There's a good chance you can make it do that, and that's what I do love about it.

So it took me a lot at first.

I have a bunch of really goofy, hacked-together stuff that I started with.

But now that I've been using it for a while, especially where I have AI helping me, and I have it just feed right into it—they talk to each other.

And so now I'm like, "Okay, I have all this great stuff that you worked with me on."

"We need to put this into Notion so I can organize it in a good way."

And I'm like, "What—how best should we do that?"

And it says, "I think we should do it this way."

I'm like, "I like that idea."

"Go for it."

And it just creates it for me.

And so then when I go into Notion, it's nice and clean and organized and very easy to find things.

Damien Schreurs: And when you talk about AI, you talk about the one that is built by Notion itself or an external one?

Ely Delaney: I'm using an external.

I have it connected to Claude.

I played a little bit with the one inside, but I was like, I don't...

The one thing, and it's just everything out there, it's kinda like all your streaming services, they cost a fortune once you start adding them up.

20 bucks here, 20 bucks there.

And I just didn't...

I was like, if I can do most of this inside of Claude, which is the one that I pay for—it's the only one that I actually pay for—if I can do it in there, I can have it do 90% of what I need.

I don't need to do the paid upgrade for the AI inside of Notion.

It looks cool, and if you wanna throw another 20 bucks at it and you find that works better for you, go for it.

For me, I keep things super simple, and it just annoys me when you go through and it's like, "Hey, it's only 20 bucks."

You count that times 50, that adds up.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah, and if you're using Claude anyway, and you have projects and really stuff that you have really fine-tuned Claude for your business, for your use case, the best is really to hook it up via...

Is it the Notion—is it the desktop version of Notion that has a built-in MCP server, or how does it go for the—

Ely Delaney: It's through the web.

You don't even have to have it through the desktop piece.

I have the MCP set up inside of Claude, and it talks to my Notion account.

Damien Schreurs: Okay, so—and it's an extension that is offered by Anthropic, then?

It's from their own—

Ely Delaney: I don't remember for sure if it's within their own stuff or if I had to go follow the steps to create it or something.

I know it was easy, 'cause it took me seconds to do.

I think it's in their internal stuff, though.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah.

Yeah, if it's fully blessed by Notion, then it should be a piece of cake.

I've recently—so I'm using NotePlan, which is a bit—it's not the equivalent of Notion because it doesn't have all the database stuff.

But the developer actually built the MCP server and integrated it into one of the latest versions of NotePlan.

And so I just went on the website, explanations from the developer says, "You go there in Claude, you enter this information, and you're good to go."

You restart Claude.

You quit Claude, restart Claude, otherwise it doesn't work.

And yes, I'm glad to hear that there is a direct Notion connector that talks to the web.

And so how quick is the synchronization, then, if you are in Claude on one screen, the other screen Notion?

Ely Delaney: Yeah, it's very fast.

I've had it literally—I think it was even just this morning—I had something I was playing with, and I literally am watching it change over on my right-hand side.

I've got Notion, left-hand side...

And two monitors, so I'm looking at Notion over here reading something, but this is stuff that's gonna get added to that, and I go over here, I'm like, "Okay, yeah, let's go ahead and add this," and I look back over, and I see it going bing, bing, and things start changing right in front of me, and I'm like, "Okay, that's nice."

So it's pretty quick.

It's within seconds.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah.

I've realized as well that's one of the powers of Claude, is these, all those connectors.

And also, it's a little bit like Apple.

It's a question of trust.

And personally, even if OpenAI introduced something similar in the ChatGPT app, I'm not sure I would trust them with my data.

But Claude, yeah, I have no problem.

So maybe—


[00:14:53] Claude AI & Workflow
---

Damien Schreurs: Let's talk a little bit about Claude in the desktop app.

For people who don't know, in the desktop app, there are now three tabs.

We have the Chat, we have Cowork, and we have Code.

Where are you the most in those three?

Ely Delaney: I still spend the majority of my time in chat, and there's a couple reasons for that.

Elephant-in-the-room side is Cowork is awesome, but it eats up tokens like you would not believe.

I was working on something yesterday, and my five-hour window got beat up in 20 minutes.

It didn't take me any time at all, and I just burned through everything that I could do with it.

So I don't use it a huge amount.

Also, that is still set up where it's desktop-based, which means if I just happen to grab my laptop and go someplace else, I don't have that conversation or the reference.

I can create the folder, and I have the folder synced, which I'm kinda getting that figured out right now.

I haven't had a chance to fully test it on my laptop yet.

But I do have my dedicated Claude folder set up to sync with my Google Drive, and then that way, my laptop is already set up to sync that same drive.

So that should help.

Most of it should—the context should stay there.

But it doesn't control the con—like, the conversation's not there.

And so chat is different.

Chat, it actually has that synced across whether it's a browser or on your app or whatever, and so I prefer to still use chat more.

If it's super heavy lifting, then I'll go over to Cowork, but the vast majority of my stuff is in chat.

Number one is 'cause I can just get more done, and it's synced.

Even if I'm working—a great example is I recorded...

I'm sitting there having lunch before we started this recording.

I had a thought in my head of something I wanted to write an article on, and so I recorded it on my phone.

I have it using a piece of software called Letterly, which will record everything, transcribes it.

It does some rewriting.

I don't like the rewrites.

But it has an MCP, so what I did then was, as soon as I finished talking through what I wanted this post to look like, I then went to Claude and said, "Hey, I just recorded something on Letterly about intention, and I would love for you to grab that and help me draft—take what's there and draft it into a post for me so I can go through and edit that when I get upstairs."

And it did it, and it was all on my phone.

And the beauty of that is, if I were to go open up Claude right now on my computer, it's all there: the conversation, any back and forth, the article itself.

Everything is ready to go.

And doing it with the app on your computer, that is definitely not as easy to keep that in sync.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah, the only newer feature that they introduced that kind of solved the remote aspect of it is called Dispatch, but it's not really the use case that we are—we're—it’s not between two computers, right?

Especially for you, like me, I also—I have an iMac, so I have a static computer.

It's on 24/7.

So with Dispatch and Cowork, you can open your phone.

You first have to pair Claude on the phone with Claude Desktop on the computer.

And once they are linked, then you can chat a little bit like how OpenClaw is running now as an agent.

You can chat.

You can send commands via Dispatch to the local Cowork on your Mac, and then you will see Cowork doing stuff and telling you that it has done stuff.

But I can tell you, I've tried it, it's still rough around the edges.

Ely Delaney: I just looked at a couple different things with it.

Number one is, I do shut my computer down at the end of the day, so that means everything is shut off.

And so that means it's useless if I don't leave the computer on.

And two, everything in that is in its own...

It's in one dedicated chat.

So it doesn't—you can't go back and say, "Hey, we were working on this thing," which has all your context, and say, "Okay, show me what you did and let's continue," or anything that has the human element needs to be in it.

You don't have any of that control.

For me, it's not useful.

Like I said, chat does most of what I need to do.

It does the vast majority of my stuff.

And then if I have something that's much heavier that has a lot of moving parts, then Cowork is a good place to do that.

But I don't do that very often because, like I said, it just burns tokens like you wouldn't believe.

I feel like I'm literally burning $1 bills.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah, recently, I got offered 17 euros of free credits if I want to continue using Claude if my five-hour window was already elapsed.

And I was like, "Wow."

One euro, two.

I was seeing the euros go, like, disappearing.

Ely Delaney: Yeah.

What they did, 'cause I saw all of that stuff happen, 'cause everybody was upset because all of a sudden their credits were burning way faster than they had been.

And in what I understand of it, and I don't follow all this stuff deep because I'm not an AI guy, I use it where I need it, and I ignore the rest because most of it is just noise and I don't have that kind of bandwidth.

But they said that they've basically been subsidizing all of our accounts for the last two years, and all of a sudden it's like, okay, with the uptick of so many people that jumped on board, we can't afford to do that anymore.

And so they basically put these limitations on there where it's like, you're supposed to have this much room, but we've been giving you this much room, but now there's too many people.

We can't do that anymore.

It's kinda like the small bar that gives you an extra drink every once in a while for free because they like you.

But when the place is packed, they can't afford to do that anymore 'cause everybody else wants a free drink too.

So that's kinda what I understand happened, and then they got a bunch of backlash on it, and so they basically said, "Hey, we're sorry this is the situation, but have a free month on us," basically.

And that's kinda how they did it.

Does it really solve the problem?

No.

I guess they had, from my understanding, made some additional changes that make it so it's not as extensive or as limited as it was, but I don't know where that comes to be.

I do know that my day-to-day usage has been going much better since they made that announcement.

But again, going into Cowork, if you're heavy in using Cowork, you can't do it on the $20 plan.

You just can't.

You have to go into the $100 or $200 plan for that.

And I just don't...

It's, eh, not yet.

I'm not ready with it yet.

And the vast majority of what I do, as long as I'm doing it in chat, I can easily cover it.


[00:21:56] Claude Projects & Skills
---

Damien Schreurs: Yeah, same for me.

And yeah, so if we talk about chat, have you been working with projects?

What kind of functionality do you use in the chat version of Claude?

Ely Delaney: I do have projects.

Projects were great at first for the way I designed them, because I would start with projects that were trained on a specific skill, and then once a client got far enough in for anything I'm working with them, I would create a project for that person.

Now that Skills was introduced, that actually has been phenomenal because now what I was doing to train a project, I'm training as a skill instead, and it speeds that up.

But yes, projects are great just to keep things organized, and I'm like, "Okay, this is the goal here," so it's self-contained, which helps my brain stay focused on everything.

I use a lot of projects.

And then, like I said, skills, I'm doing a lot to design skills that do the bits and pieces that I need it to, which is a whole different, newer, fun level.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah, for people who don't know much about Claude and skills, liken them to SOPs, standard operating procedures.

So it's a way, in any conversation, to get Claude Chat up to speed in a way that you like it to work for you.

And I haven't yet converted a project to a skill, but I realized...

So I have custom GPTs.

I still have custom GPTs that I share with other people because they are a bit like lead magnets, but also things that I provide, corporate training, and so sometimes I do little AI assistants as custom GPTs and as Gems, and I share them with my students.

It's like a little gift and no gate and no email gate, and it's just a direct gift.

But I realized I can't do that with Claude projects.

I can't share a Claude project.

And then I realized, maybe if I created a skill, then I could potentially make it downloadable.

And so a skill—

Ely Delaney: You absolutely—

Damien Schreurs: A skill is just a Markdown file called skill.md that contains all the information needed to follow a procedure to do something, but it is packaged into a .skill file.

The file is actually just a ZIP file.

If you replace the .skill by a .zip, you can double-click.

It will open on a Mac.

It will automatically open.

It will be a folder with the name of the skill, and inside that folder, skill.md.

Ely Delaney: It'll also, depending on how complex you get with it—like, a lot of mine tend to be much more complex—it'll have other documents.

So if you have reference files, or say, for instance, like in your situation, if you were creating something for a client, you could actually put any of their brand voice-related stuff in there.

And instead of having to embed it in the main prompt, per se, you could attach it as another piece and say, "Okay, here's this information."

"Here's some examples."

"Here's the sample documents, the formatting."

And you can have five or six different documents or even more, and then say, "Okay, now we need to turn this into a skill."

"Here's the core instructions," but it's going to reference all these other documents as part of it.

Which, if you think of a project, you would do that.

You would just attach those documents to the project files.

It can do the same thing.

And so that's kinda cool because then you have the self-contained creature that basically isn't just an SOP, but you can also give it a decent amount.

It's not going to—the skill can't learn more, but you can give it a lot of context to begin with that will help it lean in the right direction right out—

Damien Schreurs: I hadn't thought about that at all.

I was like creating a—let's create a skill.md file and then zip it up.

But no, very good.

So yeah, that would mean just create a folder named with the name of the skill, put a skill.md file plus all the reference documents, zip everything up, and rename it as the skill, or—

Ely Delaney: First and foremost, go to Claude and install the Skill Maker skill, because there is a skill that will help you create skills.

And what you're gonna do with that is then you're going to create a chat and say, "Okay, here's my instructions."

"Here's all the attachments for reference."

So again, if you have a brand voice profile or if you have some examples of stuff you've written or whatever you're putting into it, then you say, "I wanna create a skill that has all of this stuff."

"Let's go through that process."

And it'll ask you questions, and it'll help you build the whole thing, and at the end, it's gonna give you the skill file ready to go.

Damien Schreurs: Okay, it's good to know.

So that's now on my to-do list, my, the—

Ely Delaney: And this is funny coming from me, 'cause I'm like, "Yes, you can use AI, but don't be an AI person."

I'm not an AI person.

I'm doing some fun stuff behind the scenes.

It's pretty cool.

Damien Schreurs: Very good.


[00:28:02] AI Philosophy & Email Marketing
---

Damien Schreurs: Anything else that you're doing with AI, maybe apart from Claude?

Ely Delaney: That's where the majority of it is, but there's a lot of stuff we've got in...

I have, using simple things like I have, obviously, Wisprflow is an AI-based platform that helps with the formatting and dictation.

I'm using Descript, so for my videos, I record the video.

It does the transcriptions.

I can do all the editing if I...

I don't do a whole lot with the AI piece, but I know it can do a lot more than I even use it.

One example, I just recorded one thing, just testing the theory, and I was like, "All right, go in here," and one of the things is remove filler words, and it got rid of a whole bunch of ums and ahs and stuff in my transcription in five seconds.

Those are the big ones.

I'm not—I am not an AI-is-the-solution-to-everything person.

And I'm to some degree anti-AI for that because of the fact that so many people just focus on, "How do we add AI to this?"

"How could we do this with AI?"

And I was just in a meeting this last week, and it was like, "So what could we do with AI to fix this?"

And I was like, "This problem does not need AI to solve it."

"It needs human beings to solve it."

And so I use it, but I use it very strategically.

I have a platform that I use.

Some people are familiar with things like Opus, where you can take a video, upload it, and it'll help you select all the best clips that would be great for reels on social media.

I have another one called Minvo that's very similar, and so I use it for stuff like that.

But those are the big things that I use it for, and I don't go down the rabbit hole of, I have to automate everything, and I don't have to have AI run everything, 'cause we're in a phase right now where so much stuff is AI that we're losing the human touch, and that's very anti my entire personality.

And so use it as a tool to leverage your time, but don't try to use it as a replacement.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah, I see that AI is basically still an amplifier of personality, and if someone is lazy, they will use AI to actually do a lot of work for them, and it's gonna be crap because they don't care.

So if they don't care, they're gonna use AI that way, and then other people will actually use AI to learn to be better humans and to better use technology, and not necessarily as a direct, "Let's create something with AI," but "Let's leverage AI to be a better marketer, to be a better salesperson, to be a better communicator," and so on, huh?

Yeah.

Ely Delaney: Yeah.

And that's a—for me, I'm a big one of use it to help speed up your process.

Even the stuff that I use it for, first off, it's heavily trained on my 30 years' experience.

And so I'm not just having it— a lot of people, the biggest objection, quote-unquote, that I get from prospects is, "I can just have ChatGPT write all this for me."

I'm like, "You can, and it'll probably be better than what you would write on your own."

"But it doesn't mean it still doesn't suck."

You gotta make it you.

And I use it to help me speed up my process, but I'm still there, and there's a lot of nuances and fine-tuned details that I, as a human being, know after studying human psychology for over 20 years, that AI is not going to catch from a transcript.

And so it can help me speed up everything.

It can give me a draft, which is great because I don't have to type all that stuff in.

But it is not—it's not great by any means.

If we put it out as is, I would say, yeah, it's 80% there.

But that extra 20% is the human fixing it and putting in that real personality.

And as a—for me, I'm essentially a ghostwriter for my clients.

And one misconception for ghostwriters in most situations, whether it be books, or like in my case, emails or writing content for LinkedIn or anything like that, is that they think that a ghostwriter just makes stuff up and writes all this stuff.

A good one is not going to just do that.

They're going to be going to the founder, and they're going to be interviewing them and asking them questions and looking for their experience and their stories and their background and all the things that make them unique.

And then they take that and pretty it up into words.

And so what I'm doing on an email standpoint is the same thing.

None of the stuff that I ever put out for our clients is made up.

It's all their words.

It's so funny because I'll give them stuff and they're like, "I knew what I wanted to say, but I couldn't figure out how to say it."

"And you made it so good."

And I'm like, "That's why you pay me, is because I took your own words."

"You said this, but I just massaged it into a nice, readable format that makes sense, that people can emotionally connect to."

And that's my specialty.

AI can't do that yet.

And so that's where people should get—they cut themselves off short and let AI just do a bunch of garbage that just sounds robotic.

It's got no heart behind it.

And then they can't figure out why it doesn't work.

And my usual response, they're like, "Hey, email doesn't work."

"No, it's because your email sucked, dude."

"Fix that."

"You'll be fine."

My clients get great results.


[00:33:30] Back to the Mac
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Damien Schreurs: So let's switch gears, go back to the Mac.

What delights you about your Mac and maybe your Mac Mini in particular?

Ely Delaney: With the Mac Mini, the thing that delights me about it is that it was so cost-effective.

Now I paid for upgrading.

I upgraded the RAM, upgraded the hard drive, all the different things with it, but it was still very affordable, which Macs are not really known for.

If you're just trying to get in there, the laptop I'm looking at is gonna cost me 3,500 bucks when I go to upgrade, which is one reason why I was like, "Eh, I'm not really ready to spend that money right now."

"Let's go spend 1,000 on the Mini."

But this thing is such a workhorse, and I know, as of right now, they're crazy on...

It's hard to get them, and they've got 90-day waits and all these kinds of things.

I can see why, because they're simple, they're clean.

This thing is a workhorse.

I beat it up.

I put it through, I don't know, 10 to 12 hours' worth of heavy work all day long, and it just goes, and I love that about it.

I was really happy with this model when it came out, 'cause I wasn't really a fan of the iMac in itself.

It's just that big, self-contained unit and everything.

That's not really my style.

There's cases on Amazon where I can basically put my entire computer in this little travel case, stick it in my backpack, and take it with me, which is pretty appealing.

That's cool.

So that's the thing I like the most.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah, and when I saw the latest model, it shrunk it further.

It was already small, but the latest Mac Mini is really mini.

Ely Delaney: I keep wanting to pick it up and show people.

It's, "Look at this cute little thing."

But it's a beast.

It works really hard.

It's fast.

I love it.

That's my biggest thing with it.

I was super impressed, one, how powerful it is based on how small and affordable it is.

Damien Schreurs: And yeah, maybe on the flip side of that, if you were actually in charge of the Mac division, then what would you change?

What would you ask the Apple engineers to improve upon?

Ely Delaney: Number one, more ports.

That's always an issue with me, 'cause I'm a gadget guy, and I got my two monitors and my third with my laptop and hard drives and all these different things, and I'm like, I keep having to buy more accessories, which is really frustrating.

The other thing, it's specifically for this Mac Mini, do something different so you don't have to pick the thing up to turn it on and off.

That's just silly.

That was the stupidest thing they ever could have done.

I do not understand that.

Even if it's small and light, it's tiny, it's cute, but I should not have to pick it up to turn it off.

It just makes no sense to me.

So yeah, that's my number-one real complaint to them.

But my wish list would be always add more ports and capabilities because there's never—

Damien Schreurs: I don't know if you've seen Satechi has an accessory for the Mac Mini, and actually I think it's doing two in one.

So first of all, it's putting the Mac Mini a bit above the ground, so it has feet, so it's easier to actually put the finger under the thing to turn it off.

Ely Delaney: Yes.

I have—

Damien Schreurs: On top of that, you—

Ely Delaney: I have—

Damien Schreurs: Okay, you lose a port, but then you gain—you get a bunch of other additional ports.

Ely Delaney: You get a few more.

Damien Schreurs: Some models you can even fit in, like, an M.2 hard drive, so you can even extend the storage of the Mac Mini at the same time as well.

Ely Delaney: I've seen those.

I definitely am thinking of getting one of those at some point, especially with the extra storage, with the SSD, 'cause I have just standard external hard drives and they get rattled around and everything.

But it's—I have to plug my external hard drives in the front because there aren't enough ports in the back for it, and I'm like, this is something that was gonna stay on here all the time.

Why can't we have more ports in the back?

Just makes no sense.

And those are cool.

I like the idea of having that.

You can literally three or four times the space using an SSD drive that's in those units, and they're cooling units too, if I remember correctly.

So that—it's got a multiple purpose.

It's pretty cool.

I like those.

Haven't got it yet, but definitely it's on the wish list.

Damien Schreurs: Thank you, Ely.

And for the audience, if you want to find Ely on social, it's very easy.

There is a website.

You can just go to connectwithely.com, and you will see all the social media profiles, and you can pick the one that you prefer just to say hi to Ely and say that you heard him on Macpreneur.

And, Ely, what else do you want to plug today?

Ely Delaney: Yeah, the first thing is I do wanna make sure to call out on Connect with Ely.

Ely is with a Y, 'cause most people spell it with an I.

So we do have to qualify that because I think if you connect with Ely with an I, it's like some—I think he's real estate out of Iowa or something like that, which is not me.

So I always have to call it out: connectwithely.com with a Y.

Obviously, if you go there, all of my connections and everything are there.

But the one thing that I'm super excited about, this came out last month, which is The Follow-Up Code.

This is my new book.

Having a blast with that, getting some really good feedback.

And if you're in business or even if you're in sales working for somebody else and need to follow up more effectively without being an annoying pest, that's what this book was written for.

It's how to build a system of follow-up using email that creates loyalty, respect, kindness, all the things that you should be doing anyway, but they then appreciate what you send them instead of looking at your email going, "Oh God, what is he selling me now?"

Damien Schreurs: And so that's the whole point behind it.

Very good.

So thank you, Ely, for being on the show and sharing how you run your business on your Mac.

Ely Delaney: Thank you so much.

It was my pleasure to be here.

This was a fun conversation.


[00:39:16] Applying to be a guest
---

Damien Schreurs: For the audience, if, like Ely, you would like to share how you are using your Mac to run your solopreneur 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 the show profile.

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

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


[00:39:40] Outro
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Damien Schreurs: And until next time, I'm Damien Schreurs wishing you a productive 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.