Using custom agents to create "fly on the wall" communication
A very simple tactic I’ve found helpful
Right now I’m working with a few different contractors and service providers, as well as a bunch of clients, and it’s a constant challenge to keep everything on track especially as our business evolves so rapidly. Recently, I’ve found an effective solution which I’m calling “fly on the wall agents.” It’s almost embarrassingly simple, I share just because it works pretty magically in most situations where you need to communicate something nuanced with someone else. And you need zero money or expertise to do it.
Basically, the insight here is the same as what Amazon found with the PR FAQ format, which is that the most effective way to give people the answers they might have on a topic is to ask and answer those questions yourself.
That works when you’re writing a big strategy doc or giving a formal presentation, but if you’re firing off an email to a contractor or sending a Slack message to a coworker it’s pretty odd and potentially even insulting to say “here are the questions you probably have, and the answers to them.”
So what I’ve started doing is creating custom GPTs for different personas and having a quick conversation with them about whatever it is I need to communicate. You can also do this by just prompting ChatGPT/Claude each time, but getting the prompts right takes some time and I find myself digging for old conversations to copy/paste the prompt. For example, I created a custom GPT to help me talk through an idea I have for an article like this one, which you’re welcome to use yourself. I use it to create conversations I send to people I work with on writing.
This is also a big improvement on the typical voice-note-as-comms strategy many busy people employ. Instead of sending an 8 minute voice note to my cofounder when I’m on the go, I can just speak into a GPT and then send him the transcript which he can skim in a minute or two. I often ask the GPT to summarize the conversation at the end as well if it was especially rambling. If you want to get really fancy, you can pipe the whole conversation through another prompt and turn it into whatever you want, but again I think the conversation format is really effective as a form of communication on its own.
In terms of creating your GPT Rolodex, it evolves pretty naturally over time but generally there are two types of agents to create to get things started:
Third party subject-matter experts you “work with” frequently. For example you can chat with a sample “tough customer” agent prompted to ask the hard questions about your product idea and then send the convo to your cofounder.
FAQ oriented agents where the agent is the same persona as the person you are sending the chat to. For example the “content advisor” agent you chat with before sending the convo to the person who is ghostwriting for you.
Custom GPTs work great and are easy to set up, but if you want to get fancier and design more complex agents using other models it’s really easy to do on Vectorshift. I have a few Claude-based agents in my rolodex there, and the rest as Custom GPTs.
Hope something in here is helpful! If you have ideas for something I should write about next, send me a conversation :)