In this episode, John Kozicki (Michigan Rock School and RockSchoolProprietor.com) talks with Brian Carrion, founder of Best Lesson Ever in Friendswood, Texas, about how he is using AI tools to build custom applications for his music school and automate operations in ways that go well beyond the basics most studio owners are experimenting with.
Brian is not just using AI to write marketing copy or generate images. He is using tools like Claude, Lovable, and OpenClaw to create actual software solutions tailored to the specific problems his school faces. The conversation gets practical fast, with John walking through a real use case: building a concert planning app that factors in venue capacity, student experience levels, sibling scheduling, and set length. It is a concrete example of what becomes possible when you start treating AI as a builder, not just an assistant.
In this episode:
- How Brian is using Lovable to build AI-powered apps and web tools for his music school without a traditional development background.
- What OpenClaw is and how Brian uses it to give AI agents access to his business apps and communication channels.
- How his team interacts with AI agents directly inside their workflow, not just as a behind-the-scenes tool.
- Brian’s longer-term goal of building an AI agent capable of running an online business autonomously.
- A practical walkthrough of building a concert planning app, and what that process reveals about what AI can actually do for studio operations.
- How studio owners can start moving past surface-level AI use and into tools that solve real, specific business problems.
If you have been using AI mostly for content creation, Brian’s approach is a clear look at what the next level actually looks like.
Brian’s website: https://www.bestlessonever.com
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Episode Transcript:
John Kozicki (00:01.541)
Welcome to Rock School Proprietor podcast. My name is John Kazicki. My cohost Mandy York is not joining us for this conversation. Instead, I’ve got a guest. He is the founder of Best Lessons Ever, a performance based music school in Friendswood, Texas, which I believe is a suburb of Houston. Correct. OK, and he’s.
Brian Carrion (00:22.85)
That’s correct.
John Kozicki (00:26.573)
starting to dabble, maybe a little bit more than dabble in tech and AI apps for his music school. Brian Carrion is my guest today. How you doing, Brian?
Brian Carrion (00:37.046)
I’m doing great, John, and I’m glad to finally get a clear pronunciation of your last name, because Zicky, got it now. Got it now.
John Kozicki (00:41.885)
All right. So Brian, before we get into what will be, think, much of the conversation, which is about AI and how studio owners like ourselves can start to get more comfortable using AI for other functions besides maybe
writing marketing copy or creating marketing images or maybe using it as a sounding board for ideas before we get into that part of the conversation. Maybe just a little bit of background on your school best lessons ever, which is a great name by the way.
Brian Carrion (01:23.858)
Thank you. Yeah, best lesson ever. think I got lucky and stumbled upon the domain when I was looking to start a school. I’m a lifelong musician. I started playing professionally at 19. I had a band. I fired the band. I bought a loop pedal. I’ve been a solo live looper for more than a decade. And when I started having a family and kids, especially around COVID where the gigs dried up, I had just had twin boys then I realized that I’d always wanted to teach music.
and always had a couple students along the way. And I just kind of dove head first into it and started teaching in people’s homes. think one of the coolest things about my story is I built my business from the ground up debt free, literally laying block after block. And it’s like one of those things like it is possible to create something out of nothing. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of dedication. But if you stick with it now six years later, I have a storefront. We’ve got 160 students. I’ve got 11 teachers working for me and support staff.
So that’s it. I just started teaching in people’s homes. I teach all instruments and that’s where it really helped along the way. I know how to teach every instrument, including voice and drums, but those aren’t my specialty. Guitar and piano is…
taught in home. got one small room, hired a teacher, got two rooms, had a few teachers, and then took the plunge and had a storefront. And here we are. Now a little bit of background. Before I became a musician, I went to school for computer engineering. So I think people have known me as a musician. They know me as a music school owner. And when I start talking about AI and agentic orchestration, they’re like, Brian, where did this come from? They call me BC. That was my stage name. They’re like, what a strange pivot. But it hasn’t. I’ve always been involved.
John Kozicki (02:49.954)
Mmm, there we go.
Brian Carrion (03:06.7)
in tech and as a solo loop artist, I built my own automation into Ableton Live. I had two MIDI controllers I used with my feet. I synced it up to a projector where me and a drummer could play. So technology and integrating automation has been part of my process since being a musician. This is just kind of me returning back into the business space and using the new entrepreneur skills I’ve learned, being a business owner, being part of BAM Squad and getting, you
amazing mentorship, even from you. We’ve had a friendly call before this just talking about band programs. So now I’m combining the years of being a solo musician and the marketing you learn and how to just kind of go out and do it on your own, plus the years of now running a business being systems and operations and marketing focused and now.
John Kozicki (03:41.884)
Mm-hmm.
Brian Carrion (03:57.045)
Now that AI has caught up where I didn’t have to get my college degree and all the computer programming has met me, I can still use all these skills of business operations and systems.
John Kozicki (04:07.096)
There’s a theme here, Brian, and you even said something in that description. And I’m going to reference something that we talked a little bit about in conversations before recording, which was I had asked you what maybe some of your business goals are with your school and then also personal goals. And one of those goals you mentioned.
building an AI agent to run a business. And previously, you know, a few minutes ago, you just said, I think you said, I don’t know if you said he fired your backup band and you started doing live looping. Like there is a theme here. Do you see where I’m going with this? You are replacing.
Brian Carrion (04:55.808)
I do. I didn’t know this was gonna be a therapy session, John. I didn’t know that we were gonna dive into-
John Kozicki (05:00.098)
It almost always ends up being a therapy session. You are replacing like, I hate to put it this way, but like this is the fear people have. You’re replacing people with with machines, right? You did it with your band and you started live looping. You’re the you’re the great Oz behind the curtain here. And. But I do want you to expand a little bit on on the concept of.
Brian Carrion (05:21.422)
That’s right. Okay, go ahead.
John Kozicki (05:28.56)
building an AI agent to run a business. Now, does that mean like your music school business? Is it a different online business? Because I know you’re also trying to expand your music school into more online offerings as a means of diversification. So what does that mean to you?
Brian Carrion (05:49.601)
Okay, first I want to address these personal attacks you’ve just made against me.
John Kozicki (05:53.436)
Hahahaha
Brian Carrion (05:56.239)
It’s so funny that you mentioned that and I appreciate the insight because I just love when someone can give me a novel insight into how I operate and you’re not too far off there. I think I’ve always operated from a place of efficiency. Even when I had a band there were only three of us. I can play the guitar and sing. We don’t need other members. So it wasn’t this idea of I want to replace everyone. It’s this feeling I’ve always had of I just want things to be more efficient. How can things be more efficient? Less effort and more output.
John Kozicki (06:25.308)
Mm-hmm.
Brian Carrion (06:26.242)
go to a solo act from three you’re like how can I make more money with less that’s really how that goes I want to address your fears about
removing people in business because I think it’s a big thing that people think about when they think of AI and agentic AI. I’ve already started implementing these agents in best lesson ever and the big thing is just training staff on how to use it and letting them know this agent is not here to replace you, it’s here to make your job easier so you can focus on the customer. That’s really what it is. I’m not trying to replace anyone, I just want them to focus on the things they’re good at and I build agents around the stuff that they’re not so good at. That’s basic
John Kozicki (06:55.004)
Mm-hmm.
Brian Carrion (07:03.606)
I look at my staff as people themselves, find their strengths and their weaknesses and try to build agents around that. I do think that once the AI is implemented, it will allow a business to scale without hiring and that’s where your fears about job loss or job opportunity are very valid right there. And I do think that’s what’s happening with the whole AI field. Like if you’re not good at it, then you’re gonna be passed up for someone who knows how to use an AI agent.
in the era of hyper productivity. And if you don’t know how to use AI and be hyper productive, some kid who spent their life on it is going to. And that’s actually the message I’m trying to deliver to people, which is you can learn it. It’s easy to learn. You treat it like a person. Let’s be hyper productive. It’ll make you feel good when you’re doing three to 10 times the work, and it’s gonna make you more valuable at work.
John Kozicki (07:58.429)
I’m gonna try and avoid us getting into the philosophical conversation about it. But I do wanna talk about the practical things. And you’d mentioned you’ve built these agents for your staff to use. And that’s exactly what I think is important and useful to our listeners. Maybe give me an example of an AI agent that you’ve built and implemented into your studio.
Brian Carrion (08:03.094)
Okay, bye!
Brian Carrion (08:26.488)
We’ll do, okay. So this is what I do and I actually, we can talk about this later. I have my first client now that I’m doing this for their business because it’s been so impactful to Best Lesson Ever and the results to me are just, I see it every day. The first thing I do is I use this thing called OpenClaw. It runs through a clawed subscription and in it I have a bunch of channels in my Discord. So I different Discord, one for CEO, one for Best Lesson
of her strategy, best lesson of her marketing, one that’s called Schedule Master. Let’s talk about Schedule Master, and I actually have two agents here. One is for all the executive functions, one is for the support staff, and more like an admin assistant. So my admins use our agent called Bella. She sits in the Schedule Master. She takes all of our attendance data, all the lessons that are on the schedule. She has all parent contact information. She’s also connected to our quo.com, which is our voice service.
So here’s what Bella does in that channel when we have a free trial.
On a Monday, it finds all the trial lessons. It looks through our database of numbers. It finds the number and it sends a message to the parent and it says, we can’t wait to see you for your trial today. Reply yes if you’re gonna make it in. This is like the most simplest way that the agent works. Here’s another thing that the agent does that I’ve programmed. It goes through all of our attendance through the week and if there’s any double bookings on the schedule, it’ll highlight them in a daily report. Hey, you have a double booking here. Whether someone had a trial lesson and converted, but there was another trial.
a lesson for the next week, that’s usually how it goes. So it finds schedule anomalies, double bookings, and it alerts us so that we can get ahead of it and solve those as soon as possible. It also lets us know all the available…
Brian Carrion (10:14.452)
openings for that week for persistent gaps in teacher schedule so that my teachers aren’t sitting around and if they have a 430 opening, we know that that’s going to be a priority. That’s the main way that I use these agents. They crawl the schedule. They crawl through our database of information and if we ask it to communicate with parents directly, it can do that. That’s the main way that we use agents right now. Now as I was talking about the BLE Strategy Channel, here me and my director will go in
and we’ll just chat with ideas on what can we do. It’ll look through our leads through OPUS, who’s coming down the pipeline, who’s scheduled for warm leads. It’ll give us ideas on events in the area. It’ll research local events and give us the email and the phone number to call and register for these events. So basically it’s just doing the work of a junior employee. And that’s what I tell my staff. Treat it like a junior employee who’s still learning, who still needs to be told to remember, but they’re kind of a genius.
John Kozicki (11:14.364)
Okay. All right. So you just gave a lot of information in there. All right. So my I’m gonna I’m gonna try and
Brian Carrion (11:21.538)
Yes, and I told you I was going to speak in short bites. And as I’m going, I’m so excited about this, John. I’m so excited.
John Kozicki (11:28.346)
I know man.
Brian Carrion (11:29.742)
I’m in my Discord magic. Let me tell you, my daily driver is not chat GPT anymore. My daily driver is I’m working on like three active channels in Discord all at once. One of them’s developing an app, one of them’s working out strategy for best lesson ever, and one of them I’m working on new ideas to find new income. And that’s what’s exciting about it. My productivity has gone through the roof and why I’m so pumped.
John Kozicki (11:53.989)
Okay, so I am not afraid of tech. All right. I’m generally comfortable around new tech and new platforms. But getting into this territory and and kind of analyzing the description of how you’re using tech, you even said your daily driver is not chat GPT anymore. I would guess that most people are still
Drive and chat GPT as their daily driver though. Okay, and I’m gonna read something. This is a direct quote from again, from our interactions back and forth and messaging before when we were setting this up. Okay, so you wrote, right now with my open clause set up, I have my agent in different channels for different parts of the business and team members in each channel chatting with the agent too. I can also code apps from Discord.
but only because I’ve set up all the APIs already and can just chat with it now. All right, now, my perspective on this. Again, not someone who’s afraid of tech, but that’s starting to get a little heavy. So let’s kind of start to unpackage this as like, what is it on Reddit? Explain like ELI5? Explain like I’m five, okay? Let’s say,
Brian Carrion (13:18.85)
Great.
John Kozicki (13:22.18)
Let’s say that my daily driver is chat GPT and I’m using it for proofreading content. I’m using it for writing email marketing, maybe some image generation for promotional materials, strategizing on different things, kind of chatting back and forth, as I think most people do, or just generally getting answers.
But I’m gonna give you a practical, all right? And I just kind of thought of this yesterday. One thing that I’ve done in my studio is when we have our concerts, there’s a pretty big job of planning the schedule for the concert. And what it involves is we have about two full days of performances.
anywhere from say I don’t know like 17 to 20 bands is pretty typical. That translates to around a hundred kids. Our venue can only accommodate 100 people so we section it off and we do about six shows over the course of two days. So I’ve created like a pretty elaborate spreadsheet where we put data in
on each of these bands. And then we have a way to play with it a little bit to determine what is going to be the best way that we can group the bands in small little blocks spread out over the course of two days, right? So we call them sets. So we might have three or four bands in each set, which allows us to have enough performers.
and enough people in the audience to fill out the venue. We also want to mix it up with, you know, a good mix of maybe like very beginner bands, intermediate bands, some more advanced bands, so that from the audience perspective and from the kids perspective, they’re getting to see a nice variety, right? So there’s all these variables that makes it pretty complicated to plan these concerts. Oh, let’s throw in another thing in the mix.
John Kozicki (15:45.009)
What if we have siblings that are in two different bands and we want to do our best to try and get those bands in the same set. So given all those variables, we’ve got a pretty good spreadsheet going and it went from like this crazy manual process to then utilizing this spreadsheet that made it a lot easier. But this seems like a great thing for AI to do.
Brian Carrion (15:52.91)
Hmm.
Brian Carrion (16:11.863)
Yes.
John Kozicki (16:12.016)
Now, if I wanted to create an AI app that I would use specifically in my studio for this use case, where should I start?
Brian Carrion (16:22.146)
Very nice. OK. This is how I would run this. And this is a nice kind of stepping point, because what I described earlier is definitely like the advanced level of agentic stuff. There’s a nice in-between step. And the first thing I would suggest is getting a Claude account.
John Kozicki (16:38.35)
Okay, I use Claude as my actually for my AI now. Yeah.
Brian Carrion (16:42.028)
Okay, great, and do you have the app on your computer? Okay, great, have you used Co-Work? Okay, so I would, the first thing you wanna do is create a folder on your computer where you add this CSV or XLS file. Now, that’s right.
John Kozicki (16:48.826)
No.
John Kozicki (16:59.578)
That’s the spreadsheet for the layman there. Yep.
Brian Carrion (17:02.252)
Now I know in Co-Work you can connect this to your Google Sheets and this is what I would be working on is like having the agent try to work through sheets correctly. Now Co-Work I’m not as well versed on but I use it pretty frequently but I don’t connect it to anything if I’m doing that I usually use a personal agent for it. But I would go into this file add your spreadsheet, add the student list of performers if you can export that from whatever your calendar app is and then you want to create a file
John Kozicki (17:30.94)
Mm-hmm.
Brian Carrion (17:32.176)
of all the instructions you told me, which is a context file. I would name it context.md or context.txt. So in…
John Kozicki (17:40.464)
Now is this just a regular like a Google Docs, like a Word document?
Brian Carrion (17:46.029)
Sure, but you want it in a TXT file. the Clawed works really well with Markdown files, which is what you use when coding. They’re basically just text files. The text files fine, too. You’re basically the agent needs.
John Kozicki (17:58.758)
So you can, sorry, I’m just gonna jump in here. And again, my goal is to translate this to the daily drivers, FJAT GPT, right? So create it in Word, you can export it as a .txt file. Okay.
Brian Carrion (18:05.282)
That’s right. That’s right.
Brian Carrion (18:11.597)
Sure.
or copy and paste into a TXT file on your own, that’ll be fine. And you could probably export as DocX. It’s an agent, it’s smart, it’ll read it. You could also paste it just into the chat with the context, but it’s good to have it all in. Basically what you wanna do for Claude Cowork, you wanna create a file that has all the files you need, which is your spreadsheet. I would say the student list of it, especially with last names, because you’re talking about siblings. And then you wanna create a context file that has everything that you described that you wanted.
then I would also give it a reference set list of how it’s gone before that was really good. Like this really worked, check out how the siblings were grouped, how the timing was of the event. I would put all those in a folder, give it the list of bands, so that’s the thing, you’ll need to know who’s in what band. It needs the context of who’s together. How easy would that be to get?
John Kozicki (19:05.712)
probably pretty easy. Yeah, we’ve got that. We’ve got that in other spreadsheets.
Brian Carrion (19:08.62)
And I think some of this, some of working on this is.
Okay, great. So I put that spreadsheet in there too. I would say, hey, here’s all the list of rules I need. Create a set list for two nights of shows using all these bands. We’re gonna do it on March 17th and 18th, whatever your date is, and show me what you got. Hit enter, and co-work is gonna work for a bit. It’s gonna work for three to five minutes, maybe 10 minutes. It’s gonna view the data, take your context. It’s gonna try to put something together, and it’s gonna say, here you go, is this it? And the magic is when it’s 90 %
of the way there and the first time you’re like yes this is it but you missed this here but you missed this here there’s always going to be a little bit of pushing it together doing the Michelangelo sculpting your masterpiece but Claude you now you’ve got to make sure using Opus 4.6 right now this is the frontier model of Claude and your credits might be maxed out every five hours it resets I think for most people the $20 a month plan works for them but that’s it right there go to your folder put all your materials in the folder give it a context layer give it a reference
John Kozicki (20:06.331)
Mm-hmm.
Brian Carrion (20:12.768)
for what good is and say please do this for me on this date and you should have magic in your hands right after that.
John Kozicki (20:19.855)
So there’s no other apps necessary. It’s just that, I mean, for my use case, that’s already built into Claude with the cowork part.
Brian Carrion (20:28.076)
That’s right.
I think Claude and Anthropic right now is trying to do what OpenClau is doing. OpenAI bought OpenClau. There’s Lang chain. There are all these agentic things. And I think Claude, they haven’t really released their agent yet because they’re trying to build it foundationally using scripts and folders. Something in a folder, has everything. You don’t need an agent. Run the process. All the material and context is right here. It’s separate from everything else. The agent and the model is smart enough to figure out what
to do. And that’s why we haven’t seen Claude move on the agentic stuff so much yet. They’re shipping new features every day. I do think that in Cowork, you can connect it to Sheets. Don’t quote me about that because I don’t use Cowork a whole lot. But I think you can connect it even to Sheets so it could work offline on your Google Sheet.
John Kozicki (21:18.989)
Okay, I’m going to fill in a couple of little holes too that might leave some questions. You mentioned OpenClaw. Now this one is new for me, but my understanding and like, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t, isn’t OpenClaw an AI that essentially does things for you? Like you connect it to say maybe like your Gmail and it’ll, it’ll like work on, you know,
Can you email people for you? Is that what OpenClaw does?
Brian Carrion (21:47.993)
Yes, I can.
And that’s what I use to message people through phone and email. Open Claw is what we would call an agent wrapper. So Open Claw does not have the AI. It uses your Clawed or chat GPT subscription or the many free options or cheap options out. There’s some Kimi 2.5. There’s a lot of options that uses whatever I like to use Opus 4.6. I think it’s the frontier model right now. I have the max 200 a month account and I’m trying to use as much of it as I can. And that’s where I think things are going back to it.
OpenClaw uses your AI subscription as its brain. What OpenClaw is is a set of memory. gives the…
AI a little bit more memory some context and it has this thing called heartbeat where it wakes up every 30 minutes to check on what it needs to do You’re able to program Chronological chronological jobs that fire at a certain time at a certain day of the week So that’s all open claw is is helps you connect it to everything open claw is the thing that connects it to discord you can connect it to slack you can connect it to your messenger service on iMac so that is the thing that connects to everything else because
OpenAI, Anthropic, they want it within their own ecosystem. OpenClaw allows you to take your AI subscription and connect it to all these open subscriptions. Yes.
John Kozicki (23:09.371)
Okay, so this sounds like, and this sounds like kind of like what Zapier does, but with connecting apps in a similar way.
Brian Carrion (23:17.486)
And we’re living in the age of everything we’re doing is automations. This is just taking Zapier and N8n and make.com. Now you just have a smart buddy that helps you program it. That’s really, that’s what developing an app is. Like an app that’s a web app, it’s just a series of automations with a UI in front. So yes, this is, it’s Zapier on steroids and honestly probably putting Zapier and make.com out a bit. I use N8n still. do find, I do still use a lot of hard automations.
Just because some of the stuff like I don’t understand code that well I can parse through it, but I don’t know it But I know when I build something in an 8n for automations I know exactly how the modules are working and how to troubleshoot so I’ll still use that for some of my hard automations But yes, basically we’re connecting everything together and there’s an intelligence layer now where like the example I said earlier I’ve connected my lesson data. I’ve connected my parent contact information I’ve connected my phone service and now on this channel
can tell my agent, hey, go find the free trials and send them a message and do this every day at 10 a.m.
John Kozicki (24:24.059)
It sounds like what I guess kind of the thought process with all of this is because you had mentioned you’re not really good at coding. But what it sounds like you are good at is being able to see what you want as your end result and figuring out how all the pieces are going to fit together to reach that end.
Brian Carrion (24:50.218)
And knowing also how to troubleshoot and using Claude, you know, as I’m coding, have Claude app asking questions. What does this mean? Where is this going? So I am also learning, you know, am I I’m good at orchestrating things. I don’t know the exact language all the time, but I know it enough to still be able to parse through it. And I do think that’s where my advantage is with this. Not everyone’s like that. And I’ve been getting excited. Like I’m in the terminal using Claude code and looking like
and I’m pumped up and that’s what makes me strange.
John Kozicki (25:23.739)
So I’d also mentioned in our communications back and forth some of these other apps, like I think lovable you had mentioned and softer was one that I’d looked at. And these are AI apps. Yeah, these are AI apps that, that they’re AI that create apps for people who don’t know anything about coding, right? So speak a little bit about that.
Brian Carrion (25:37.398)
Okay, software.
Brian Carrion (25:52.009)
Lovable, it was my first love. started using Lovable in October of 2024. I used it for a couple months. It was so buggy. It just never did what I wanted to and I left it for a bit. And then a friend of mine mentioned it and I went back and it got better. And as soon as Opus 4.5 came out, Lovable turned into something amazing. I highly recommend Lovable for anyone who doesn’t want to get too heavy into it. You can start an account, you can ask it for something you want. It’ll deliver it to you. It handles a lot of the backend APIs and credentials. It does a lot of
stuff for you so you don’t need to do it on your own. Now will you be able to connect it to your own data? No, that’s something that you kind of have to have that next layer of understanding about. Here’s what I use Loveable for that was super, really great for our operations. When someone requests a schedule change.
They call your admin, hey, this time’s not working for me. We got baseball now. We need to move it to Tuesdays at 5 p.m. Okay, now there’s a back and forth between the parent and the admin. Hopefully your admin’s taking notes. They don’t always do. It gets lost in the mix, and it takes forever. So now what happens for us when a parent wants a schedule change, we send a link, change.bestlessonever.com. The parent puts their name in, the time they have now, the new time they need, and their absolute can’t do, so we absolutely can’t do this time.
on this change page is our policy stated again. Hey, give us two weeks to get this done. We can’t do it right away. We’ll do our best to get it done. We’ll let you know when it’s in. When someone hits enter on this, it sends a webhook that goes into our Trello. I use Trello. Some people use Monday. It also sends it to our Discord as well. So now my admin has a new support ticket. We have, you know, in two different places and my admin can get to work on it. The parent knows that there’s gonna be a two week timeframe. They’ve given all the information and we can get
get it done and we’ll get back to the parent. These are the simple ways we get it done. I’ve also created another page like this for withdrawals. Okay, you want to withdraw? Here’s our withdrawal form. Why do you want to withdraw? We need this much notice, you know, and it kind of leaves our policies out. It takes the work off of my admin being the bad guy when it comes to withdrawing and you know how much notice we need for that. And it also makes it very clear to the parent what information we need so we can process that quick. These are two of the quick things I’ve done with Lovable that impact Best Lesson Ever right away and we see
Brian Carrion (28:12.066)
the change in operations.
John Kozicki (28:14.243)
What are some applications, because a lot of this has been related to admin functions, are you doing anything that is helping instructors in lessons?
Brian Carrion (28:26.102)
Yes, so I launched an app recently that failed and some people signed up for it in BAM Squad. I was so excited that I launched it for beta testing and we’ll get into why it didn’t work later. But it’s an app called Sesh Recap, which pretty much a student comes in, you hit record, you record your whole lesson. When it’s done, you hit stop and it transcribes it. It comes up with a recap. It automatically sends it to parents because I wanted my teachers to not have to take manual notes after every lesson. But the notes are great for retention.
John Kozicki (28:54.107)
Yes, yeah.
Brian Carrion (28:56.016)
but I’m a teacher first business. I want my teachers to feel comfortable. I want them to do as little work as possible so they can focus on the student. So that was one of the apps that I built for that. There are some reasons it didn’t work. Teachers don’t always have a great battery to record five hours of lessons. There was a lot of connecting, but I did this app through Lovable and got a working version of it in Lovable that day. So that’s one of the apps I do, but that I’m still working on teacher stuff.
John Kozicki (29:21.509)
Wow.
Brian Carrion (29:25.936)
I’ve created a best lesson ever, Wikipedia, for when I hire someone, they go through an onboarding process that I’ve programmed for them. Teachers also have a curriculum page when they’re teaching. There’s a Wikipedia page and they can go through our curriculum or other repertoire or other curriculum that’s approved to teach here. They have a quick resource on going for that. That’s some of the quick stuff I’ve done. I want to say like
And I didn’t do this one through Lovable. This was through the agent because I needed business data. I think one of the best things I did was I got all of our revenue information, all of our numbers, all of our accounting information, all of our lead flow data. And I asked the agent and I put it in a dashboard. So now I can go in a dash. I can see our revenue, our lead flow. And so now the director and I can go in and just get a quick check on the business. How are we doing this week? How are we doing this month? Anything we need to attend to? These are the things that are really helpful to me that enable me to
kind of now look other where because I know my business is being taken care of and I’ve set up these automations that I can go check on it you know weekly or every other week.
John Kozicki (30:29.527)
Okay, what do you think is the the yeah, that’s okay.
Brian Carrion (30:31.448)
Let me say one more last thing about that. I’m so sorry. This dashboard we have with the revenue and the marketing metrics, this to me is like…
You know how you use chat GPTs, way to bounce ideas off of or to keep you on track? Well, imagine if you had chat GPT but hooked up to all of your numbers. That’s what this is. So now I hook all my numbers up and I chat with my agent. Hey, where are we lacking here? Where could we be better? Where’s the business doing well? Where do we need to improve? Show me the gaps in my thinking. Show me novel ideas about my business that will help us grow. It’ll return some things. You know, it’s silly. The most useful thing I got was, Brian, why are you
tracking your lead sources. You’ve had 300 families come through your business. You don’t know where they’re coming from.” And I said, Chat, I don’t know why I’m not doing that. And the first thing I did was implement automations on our lead form where it’s coming in. I mean, this is business 101. So some of these things that I’m missing were just right there in front of my face. And I just needed someone to see the big picture of data and say, hey, you need to do this. And that, to me, is the biggest upgrade that I’ve gotten from all the agentic connections.
John Kozicki (31:38.876)
OK, what do you think of the learning curve is on some of these, like lovable, for example? I’ve not played with it, but it seems like that would be a good option for a studio owner who maybe thinks like, man, could I use AI in my studio for this, for instructors? OK, another use case in my situation. It’s very important in.
in my school that our band coaches are communicating with the private lesson instructors because whatever’s going on in that band rehearsal, the band coach is aware of, but that information really needs to get to the private instructors because one, the kids will probably forget to say like, I need to work on this part of this song, or they might not even say like, yeah, I’m struggling in this part of the song.
And that’s where the private instructors can really step in and make a difference to get these kids prepared for band rehearsals. And it’s going to elevate the band as a whole. So I’m thinking, well, is there a use case for platform like Lovable to create some sort of communication system between the band coaches and the private instructors?
Brian Carrion (33:01.376)
Yes, I love this. Not only would I run this through Claude to ask it suggestions on this, I think there’s some like basic questions we have to answer here like what is your team’s main source of communication with each other now? And do you have one? Okay, so you slack for this. So,
Brian Carrion (33:23.542)
So I’m installing Slack for Slackbot for a business right now. You know, and having a dedicated bands channel where that agent has access to all the kids in the band and who their private lesson teachers are and can mention them directly in the Slack is what I would do. to me, this could be solved more with SOPs and training in terms of creating a band kind of category in Slack and then assigning people to each role and just like
like asking them to check, because really what’s going on is teachers don’t know they have to check, so they need to be buzzed. The second would be, right, well, I’m going to connect this to my quo.com or to Twilio and send them a message. That’s really what it is. It’s that the teachers need to be reminded. It’s not so much that information is being lost. The band directors need to send the info out, and we need an agent to process it and send a direct message to the instructors of the kids. So that’s the mechanism.
that I would start working on, which would require building a small, I wouldn’t build an app for this, you could. It’s just.
John Kozicki (34:30.561)
Mmm, good, good advice. Yeah, okay.
Brian Carrion (34:32.11)
It would require more login and more work for the teachers. So I’m always trying to take it away from them. And at the end of the day, if you’re not going to like the first thing I would do is come up with an SOP and say, hey, we have to communicate this through Slack. And if that doesn’t work, the next step is I’m going to hit you on your cell phone in your pocket because you haven’t done the SOP. And if that annoys you, go to the Slack and I’ll take you off the SMS. That would be how I approach that issue. I would brainstorm a bit with Claude figuring out which APIs and integrations were best available.
And the best thing is to always ask the bot, what’s your best advice here? Not that it’s gonna give you the best response, but it’ll probably take you on that tangent that’s in between what works and what the bot can do.
John Kozicki (35:12.453)
That’s great advice because yes, we have this all in place and it’s kind of refreshing to hear you say like, hmm, probably not. Don’t complicate it any more than what you already have in place. Yeah, I guess I was more thinking about, similar to your app that’s doing a lesson recap, is this a situation where you turn something on during a band rehearsal and it’s essentially taking notes and then recapping it where the band coach would say like, hey, Tommy,
you gotta watch your timing on this section and then that gets translated back to the private instructor. But from your experience with building the similar app, it sounds like maybe it’s not there yet. So yeah, good advice.
Brian Carrion (35:56.535)
Yeah, think the issue is getting the teachers and getting them on it and training staff to know to go there first to look. Because we could also train the individual teachers to go look on the notes for the band. And you could just leave them in a public Google Doc for each teacher to look at. But I do think there’s something here with the automation.
I would just be sending a text, what you said with the SESH recap. So that’s it and I’m actually redoing my SESH recap to make it more simple to where it just records a meeting and sends a webhook out with that audio to be transcribed later. So if I was really working on that app, that is what I would do. Have that SESH recap for the band director. Have them hit stop. It’ll send the webhook out. It’ll transcribe. It’ll find the students in that band. It’ll find their private lesson teachers and if we have their direct number, it’ll send them a text message. Say hey by the
way, your kids are working on these songs and this is the one that your student needs to work on the most today. I do think that would be like a week long build, but I think we can get it done.
John Kozicki (36:56.933)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (37:01.668)
Mm Okay. Okay. So, Brian, you mentioned that you’re building something for another studio owner right now. Is that something that you’re doing regularly for folks and music school owners?
Brian Carrion (37:13.878)
So with this whole wave, I’m just excited. And you can tell how I talk about it. I’m just so excited about it. I feel like back in the AOL chat room days when I first got on the internet and was downloading wares, I’m just pumped up. the next client I’m working for is not a studio owner. They’re a trailer manufacturer. And I’m installing a Gentic. So there’s three things I’m doing for this company. The first thing I’m doing is what I described earlier. I’m compiling all the business data.
so we can ask questions about the data and make informed decisions about what the business is doing, where it’s heading, and solving problems. That is just the first thing. Get everything together so we can speak intelligently with our data. I don’t think there’s any higher ROI on what AI can do. The second step is in their Slack, their key support members, there’s four or five of them, are all gonna have their own kind of dedicated agent. We’ve talked about this. Imagine if your chat GPT, if all of your team
had their own chat GPT that whatever they worked out with their agent always got back to you so yours knew about what was going on and it was connected to all your business data so they could also make great decisions with your agent. That’s pretty much what I’m installing. a clod for your whole team where all of their responses go back up to the CEO and we can you know delegate data just like that. So that and then the third thing I’m doing for businesses I’m making software for them. I’m making
I’m little software, I’m making customer-facing software, making different apps and stuff to help their business grow. So those are the three things that I’m selling out, which is basically what I do for best, less, and ever. I found that it works. I feel like I’m hyperproductive, and I’m trying to go into other businesses and be their hyperproductive employee and help their other staff be hyperproductive too, because we are in the age of hyperproductivity.
John Kozicki (39:07.587)
I love it. So can listeners and other studio owners hit you up and pick your brain about some of these things?
Brian Carrion (39:15.638)
I would love that. mean, Facebook is good, Brian, carry on. I do have a site called hirebrian.ai. I haven’t really released it, but you can find my contact info on there. And I didn’t release it because I already got my first client, so.
John Kozicki (39:28.315)
All right. All right.
Brian Carrion (39:31.695)
I’m not no more.
Yeah, that’s right. I was about to launch it and then I got a client so I probably won’t take on another one until May. Just like, I mean, I’m super pumped up about AI and entrepreneurship. You got to know this when I’m going into my first client year, I’m documenting every process. I’m making SOPs because I want to do this again and make it easier for everyone along the way. And if there’s something you know about me, I have pivoted into this AI and agentic space and I don’t know where it ends up. I’m just excited and I’m trying to stay in front of it because it’s moving me. And in order to do that,
I’ve used the agentic stuff that I’ve installed here at Best Lesson Ever and my staff is amazing. You know, my director, my curriculum manager, my admin manager, they’re holding the fort down to enable me to do this and this has been in the plan since December. We had a staff meeting, I said, guys, I see a wave coming, I need to get in front of it, I need y’all to take care of Best Lesson Ever for me and they are and Best Lesson Ever is gonna continue to grow. I’m still, you know, working with them on that.
John Kozicki (40:28.289)
Awesome, awesome. Well, Brian, I appreciate you coming on the podcast and sharing your excitement for AI. It’s something that I’m interested in too, but like I would say, I am more on the, you know, kind of dipping my toe in the water side.
Brian Carrion (40:48.398)
What do you think we talked about with co-work get in lovable. I want you to feel the magic John. That’s what this is what this is. It’s I see magic every day in my discord magic working with other people. It’s we’re still so new. This is this is the this is how work is going to be we’re going to be babysitting computers tapping them on the side hitting inner tapping. We’re to be doing 10 times the work with these agents and we’re going to be happy we’re going to be chatting with co-workers and we’re going to be working less. I think well I don’t I don’t say we’re going to be working more hard
but maybe work in less hours. You know, this is the wave here.
John Kozicki (41:21.114)
Yeah.
Well, I think there’s something there and I would invite other listeners because I had a I shared this on on the podcast very pretty early episode. I think it was episode 32. I had a week long experience with chat GPT where it was hallucinating and it continued to lie to me over and over and over again. And it was it’s comical. So I did I did encourage listeners to kind of.
Check that one out if they haven’t to yet. I think it’s a bonus episode, like episode 32 or something like that. And just to kind of get my perspective, you know, I’m not anti-AI. I think there’s benefits and like I’m all for, I’m into productivity too, you know, I’m into efficiency. So I’m all for this stuff. But yeah, I appreciate you kind of shedding a little bit of light on some of these more complex things that were new to me.
And hopefully listeners can maybe gain a little bit from what, how they can leverage this in a way that’s more than just like, write this marketing copy for me.
Brian Carrion (42:30.604)
That’s it. I’m excited to see what you do with Co-Work and anyone can take that on. Make a folder, put all your documents in it, give it a context file, and go into Claude Co-Work and ask it to do something magical for you and you’re gonna get something very magical back.
John Kozicki (42:46.331)
All right, well, we’ll wrap this one up. Brian, I appreciate it and we’ll see you next time.
Brian Carrion (42:51.523)
John, thanks so much.
