Michael Whitehouse in Rick’s Room

Rick Grant welcomes Michael Whitehouse, entrepreneur, networking expert, community builder, and author of The Guy Who Knows a Guy. Whitehouse explains that he became a connector largely because connecting people was what he knew how to do. Over time, those relationships exposed him to thousands of entrepreneurs and gave him a practical education in business. He estimates that he has spoken with roughly 3,000 entrepreneurs, experience he now draws upon in his coaching and consulting work.

When COVID pushed conferences online, he found many virtual events disappointing because they reproduced the presentations while eliminating much of the networking that made conferences valuable to him. He responded by creating highly interactive live virtual summits using breakout rooms, roundtables, and hot seats.

Whitehouse eventually developed what he calls the Easy Summit, a month-long, on-demand audio event built around approximately 15-minute presentations. Participants can listen whenever and wherever they want—at their computers, walking the dog, or exercising. He estimates that approximately 2,000 to 2,500 audience members and about 150 speakers have participated in his summits.

Whitehouse explains that AI is beginning to give entrepreneurs the ability to build tools around their problems instead of continually reshaping their problems around the tools they can afford.

Transcript Highlights

Rick Grant: Hi, and welcome back to Rick’s Room. In each episode, I introduce you to someone you should probably know, and my next guest is absolutely no exception.

He’s a master connector, entrepreneur, and networking expert. He helps businesses create authentic relationships and strategic partnerships. He runs summits, coaches entrepreneurs, and builds communities. He also wrote a book called The Guy Who Knows a Guy, which is how I—and many of the people who know him—think of him.

His name is Michael Whitehouse. Michael, thanks for being with us.

Michael Whitehouse: Thank you for having me.

Rick: First, give our viewers a little history and background. How do you talk about yourself?

Michael: You captured it pretty well. Basically, I sprang fully formed out of the earth in 2020. Nothing before that really matters!

There was some stuff that happened, but I got started as a connector because I didn’t know anything else. I knew people, and I knew people who needed to know those people. I started making those connections and discovered that it got me somewhere.

Then I met more people who taught me things, and met more people who taught me things. After you talk to 3,000 entrepreneurs, you learn a little bit about business. That’s what I now call upon as I do coaching, consulting, and supporting.

But I’ve always been about connecting people and building communities, and that’s where the summits came from.

Similar to you, when I go to an event, my favorite part is the hallway, the bar, and the lobby. That’s where the good stuff is. The speakers are what get people to show up, but the lobby afterward is where the real action happens.

I was really disappointed when events went online. Before COVID, there were a lot of events I couldn’t afford to attend. I’d think, “I wish I could go.” Then suddenly they were all online, and I thought, “This is great.”

Then I attended them online and discovered it was just the speakers and nothing else.

I thought, “This is the worst part of the event!” Nothing against speakers—I like speakers—but I go for the connections afterward. I’m an extrovert. That’s where I get my payoff.

So I started running my own live virtual summits. We had a lot of interaction. We’d go into breakout rooms and do live roundtables and hot seats on Zoom. That worked pretty well.

But the problem with a live summit is that people have to show up live. They need six hours to sit in front of their computer and join us. I still run those occasionally, but last fall I discovered the concept of what I now call the Easy Summit.

It’s a 15-minute, on-demand audio format. The summit runs for a month—28 to 31 days, depending on the month—and audience members can listen to whichever talks they want whenever they want.

Some people sit in front of their computers taking notes. Some are on the treadmill. Some are walking the dog.

A summit is really a chance to sample a whole bunch of potential experts, vendors and coaches and decide, “I like that one. I like the sound of their voice. I like their spirit and energy. I want to know more.”

Then they can decide to engage further.

That’s really what a summit is all about. This format lets people discover speakers with a minimal investment of time and energy. When they find someone they like, they can grab that person’s gift, get into their universe, and go further with them.

That’s the concept of the Easy Summit.

Rick: That’s how I met you, Michael. How did you develop this?

Michael: It actually started by misunderstanding someone, as many of my best ideas do.

Somebody invited me to speak at her audio summit. When I heard “audio summit,” my mind went, “Oh! An audio summit. It would be like a podcast on demand, available for 30 days. You could highlight certain speakers every day, but people could listen to whatever they wanted.”

That was my idea.

It turned out her idea was something completely different.

When I got into her summit, I thought, “This isn’t what I was thinking of at all.”

So I started thinking about how I could create the thing I had imagined.

If it’s going to take place over the course of a month, you need gamification to keep people’s attention. Some people respond to getting points for doing things. That meant I needed a way to track what people listened to and recommend more content so there was always another presentation to listen to afterward.

So I went to AI.

I went to ChatGPT and said, essentially, “Could you build me a WordPress page where I could plug in a speaker number and have it customize everything?” That way I could build one page and use GoHighLevel for everything else.

ChatGPT said, “Yeah, I could do that, but for what you’re doing, it sounds like what you actually want is a plugin.”

And I said, “You can build a plugin?”

Little did I know!

So we built that plugin.

The first summit I ran with it was the Grateful Growth Summit in November. It was a hybrid between this plugin and GoHighLevel.

As it turned out, the things I still needed to do in GoHighLevel—sending emails and so forth—took me more effort than building the other parts.

I thought, “I could probably just build the rest of this and put it all into one tool that does its own thing.”

I learned a lot about how vibe coding works—AI-powered coding. I discovered the limits of what ChatGPT could do and what Gemini could do. I discovered integrated development environments, agent coding and various other tools.

Basically, whenever I hit a wall, I’d go to AI and say, “I hit a wall. What do I need?”

It would say, “Next, you should be using this tool.”

Okay, cool.

Then I’d hit another wall and ask again.

AI became its own support documentation. I just kept going. When I encountered a problem, I asked a question and figured it out.

Eventually, I discovered that upgrading my software to do everything internally actually took less effort than running a single summit using GoHighLevel.

In March, I ran the first summit with the new, fully integrated software.

One of the great things about it is that because it’s AI-coded, someone can come to me and say, “Could you add this feature? Could you tweak this?”

For many of those things, I can say, “Give me a minute.”

Click, click, click. Boom.

“How about that? Does that look better?”

Done.

I don’t have to send it to developers. I don’t have to pay developers. I don’t have to wait six weeks for them to come back and discover they misunderstood the instructions.

Now, this isn’t a terribly complex application. If I had a million users on seven servers, AI couldn’t handle that for me. If I were hosting health or financial data, I don’t know that AI could handle that for me.

But a summit is basically a really pretty database behind the scenes. It’s mostly a matter of understanding what a summit needs to do, explaining that to AI and having it build the tool I need.

Rick: That’s amazing, Michael. I’m an old tech reporter, so I’ve been writing about technology for generations, as my children would say. Many of my friends are starting to play with these tools. But you’ve actually created something that’s production-ready and in production.

Do you have a rough idea of how many people have benefited from it? How many speakers or audience members have come through your summits?

Michael: I can ballpark it without looking it up. Probably about 2,000 to 2,500 audience members and about 150 speakers at this point. You seem to think about these problems differently. I want to understand that.

Michael: Constraints are valuable. That’s how I’m going to start the answer.

I don’t have the resources to hire a team. If I were a corporate leader with a team and a budget, it might not occur to me to use vibe coding to build something. I might say, “Let’s deploy this budget and do what we’ve always done.”

I don’t have an “always done.” I don’t have employees. I don’t have contractors. I don’t have the budget to hire contractors. My business as a solopreneur supports me and is fairly successful, but it’s not “hire five employees” successful.

So when I want to do something, my favorite of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is “begin with the end in mind.”

I start by getting clear: What am I trying to do? Where is this going to end up?

Once I know where I want to go, the question becomes: How do we get there?

This can be done. How can we do it?

Often, my favorite AI prompts start with “Can you?”

I don’t know everything AI can do. In some ways, there are probably things AI can do that nobody knows it can do because nobody has tried them yet.

So when I have something I don’t have the tools for, I’ll go to AI and say, “Can you do this? Can you build a summit platform that is gamified and delivers these things?”

I also have some background in computers. I’ve never been a professional-grade coder, but about 15 years ago I built a database that became the point-of-sale system for a store. I’ve done some other things, too.

So I know what a database can do. I know what a website can look like. I know what JavaScript can do.

I don’t necessarily know how to do it, but I know what it can do.

What is a summit, fundamentally? It’s a bunch of data stored in a database: the speaker’s name, description, title, gift, and recording. Then you need a way to display it, track logins, and track activity.

Fundamentally, it’s a database with a front end that makes the database look pretty.

I know that can be done.

Then I go to AI and say, “Can you do this for me?” Or, “I know you can do this. What’s the best way to do it?”

A key to working with AI is understanding that you shouldn’t treat it like a conventional computer program that will always do exactly what it should. I think of it more like a very competent, very confident, very distractible and sometimes fairly lazy collaborator.

It can also very confidently give you a very wrong answer because it thinks it knows something.

That’s exactly how chatbots can be. They’ll tell you something confidently, but if you say, “Could you check? Could you actually look that up for me?” you may suddenly get, “Oh, it turns out I’m wrong.”

Once you think about AI more like a collaborator than a conventional computer, it’s much easier to get the results you want. You’re not assuming it will automatically do the thing it should do.

That mental model saves you a lot of trouble.

Rick: Some of our viewers may want to learn more about you or get engaged with you. What’s the easiest way for them to do that?

Michael: If they want to learn about the summits, they can go to summits.fun. It has a list of all my upcoming summits, and there’s a link where you can learn about the Easy Summits.

If they want to learn about me, they can go to guywhoknowsaguy.com. You’ll see my website, which was not built by AI but really should have been because it’s hideous! But it does have a bunch of information and links about me.

Rick: We’ve been visiting with Michael Whitehouse. Michael, thank you so much for joining me today, and thank you all for watching. Have a good day.