Postcards from Madeira: Beaches, Bargains, and AI-Free Zones

This week I’m writing you from the lush, lava-carved edges of Madeira—my absolute favorite island on Earth. Not just because it’s stunning (though, trust me, it is), but because every time I’m here, I find smarter ways to blend life, work, and tech.

A few pro tips if you're planning a longer stay somewhere sunny (or just want to live like a savvy expat for a bit):

• Hack #1: Hire a Local Chef
  Instead of hopping between overpriced restaurants or playing kitchen roulette every night, we found a local chef who cooks in our Airbnb for €20/hour. Six hours later, we had a fridge full of home-cooked Portuguese goodness, and zero stress for the next three weeks. She even did the grocery run. Game. Changer.

• Hack #2: Morning Beaches, Afternoon Float Mode
  Beach before noon = paradise. Beach after lunch = parking wars and sunscreen shortages. So we hit the sand early, and keep afternoons chill with light, flexible activities. The kids are happier, and we avoid the worst of the crowds.

• Hack #3: DIY Remote Setup That Works
  I brought two budget monitors and an Elgato Neo mic, and boom—tiny but mighty workstation. It’s all I need to stay productive while sipping espresso on the balcony. (Well, sometimes I sip. Mostly I’m on Zoom.)

• Hack #4: Business is Everywhere
  Madeira may be laid-back, but it’s humming with opportunity. Locals are constantly spinning up side hustles—bike rentals, surf lessons, handmade stuff—and almost no one has a proper online presence. Just offering basic sites or Google review help leads to great convos, and sometimes barters. I've traded strategy tips for wine, honestly.

And here’s the wildest part: AI adoption here is basically zero. Except for the occasional ChatGPT use as a tourist translator, it’s untouched. Which means if you're offering AI-enhanced services or automation help, it’s like bringing fire to the village. There's huge upside—and barely anyone playing the game.

Tying this back to everything we talked about earlier:

• That AI-powered brand assistant from HighLevel? You could drop it here and revolutionize a dozen small businesses overnight.

• The custom vector bots? Imagine giving a surf school a multilingual AI that answers questions 24/7 and books lessons in two taps.

• Even Veo 3 video tips? A local artist could build a Pixar-style explainer for their craft shop and finally stand out online—without ever touching Premiere Pro.

It’s a good reminder that while we’re knee-deep in AI updates, tool stacks, and automated everything… sometimes the real magic is using that tech to make real life simpler—whether it’s family meals, beach days, or unexpected conversations with local legends who just need a little digital spark.

🔥 HighLevel Insider: AI Summer Hits, Brand Boards, Smarter Workflows & Warm Emails (Yes, All in One Update)

So HighLevel’s been busy. Like, “get yourself a coffee and cancel your 2 p.m.” kind of busy.

This latest update dump is like a playlist of bangers: AI upgrades, brand boards, community access control, automation filters, and yes, email warm-up (finally!). If you’re the kind of person who wants to scale without losing your mind—or your email reputation—then this is for you.

Here’s what’s new (and what you should actually care about):

🌟 1. Brand Boards & Brand Voice Magic

This one’s for the marketers, designers, and everyone who’s sick of saying, “Wait, what’s our hex code again?”

• Brand Boards let you upload logos, pick your color palette, and lock in your typography.

• Design Kit makes these assets globally accessible across sites, funnels, and emails—no more digging through folders.

• Font Ninja Integration lets you lock in brand fonts so you’re not designing with Arial in 2025.

• Brand Voice Builder scans your website or custom text and creates a tone of voice, brand promise, and even company details.

Why it matters: Your AI, content, and team all speak the same visual and tonal language. Consistency = trust. And trust = conversions.

💬 Pro Tip:

Use your actual homepage or sales page URL for brand voice training. It’ll pull your copywriting style and tone in seconds—no guesswork needed.

🔗 2. Link Estimates & Invoices Directly to Opportunities

If you’re tired of your sales pipeline feeling like a disconnected spreadsheet from 2011, this is your fix.

• Create an invoice or estimate and link it directly to an opportunity.

• See invoice status from inside the pipeline view.

• Automate invoice sends when a deal hits a certain stage.

• Create and send invoices right from the opportunity card.

This gives your sales team real-time visibility into what’s been quoted, paid, and pending—without switching tabs or asking ops for an update.

🎓 3. VIP Community Access + Course Locking

Running a free community and a paid one? Now you can actually separate your content like a pro.

• Create private channels (VIP-only access).

• Lock courses to only be visible to members of those channels.

• Use level-based unlocking, purchase access, or time-based drip to release content.

It's membership gating done right, all inside your HighLevel community. Your freebie seekers won’t stumble into your premium stuff ever again.

🤖 4. AI Corner: Multilingual Bots, Knowledge Bases, and Smart Transfers

Let’s call this the “AI Build-A-Bot Workshop.”

Here’s what’s now possible:

• Multiple Knowledge Bases: One bot for sales, another for webinars, another for onboarding. Upload docs, URLs, and FAQs separately.

• Targeted Live Chat: Embed a bot tied to a specific knowledge base on a specific page (ex: webinar page has only webinar info).

• Smart Bot Transfers: Bots now know when to hand off to another bot (ex: general bot → sales bot → booking bot).

• Multilingual Voice AI: Bots can now speak multiple languages (currently English & Spanish), with more on the way.

This is seriously next-level. You’re not building a bot—you’re orchestrating an entire AI sales and support team that works 24/7 without taking lunch breaks.

🧠 Pro Tip:

Create a “micro-bot” for each step of your funnel. One bot qualifies leads, another handles FAQs, and a third books calls. Cleaner convos, better data, and no bot overwhelm.

🧹 5. Workflow Filters & Smart Lists: Your Automation Declutter Toolkit

Ever wonder why your client’s lead got 7 appointment reminders? 😬

• Use advanced workflow filters to find automations by trigger type, tags, or actions.

• Create smart lists to track workflows for a specific offer, event, or snapshot.

• Instantly spot conflicts like duplicate reminders or misassigned users.

This is a massive time saver for agencies and anyone juggling multiple automations. Basically, you can now debug your systems without losing your mind.

📬 6. Email Warm-Up: A Soft Launch for Your Cold List

It’s finally here—automated email warm-up for new domains. And it’s smart.

• Works with Google Postmaster to protect your domain rep.

• Automatically stages sends (starts small, increases daily).

• Pauses when daily send limit is hit, resumes next day.

• Ideal for large cold lists and new domains.

This is your insurance policy against spam folders and ruined sender scores. No more blasting 5,000 emails on day one and wondering why nobody opened them.

📈 Pro Tip:

Create a 5-email nurture sequence, drop your list in, and hit Start Warm-Up. HighLevel does the pacing. You just monitor the opens—and prep your calendar for more sales calls.

Let’s just say… if HighLevel was a SaaS startup, this would be a product launch event. But for us insiders, it’s just another week in the dashboard.

Bottom line? These updates are built to:

• Save time

• Reduce tech headaches

• Scale your brand and ops

• And yes, make your bots smarter than your interns (don’t tell them I said that)

🧠 AI Builds Corner: Vector Chatbots, Personal Coaches, and the Future of Search

So you want your own private ChatGPT that actually knows your business, your content, or your course material?

Not just "kinda" knows it... but knows it cold?

That’s exactly what this latest drop is all about. We’re talking vector databases, private AI agents, and chatbots with actual memory. This isn’t your basic “how can I help you today?” assistant. This is mini-you, built to serve, sell, and scale—without breaking a sweat.

Let me walk you through what went down (and how you can do it too).

🤖 The Stack: NAN + Supabase + AI

This setup is built around:

• NAN (a modular AI agent framework)

• Supabase (used here as a vector database)

• OpenAI (for embeddings + chat models)

• A little backend glue (HTML, file uploads, and some clever workflows)

And the goal? To build a chatbot that actually understands large volumes of data. Not just a few canned FAQs, but hundreds—or thousands—of documents, transcripts, or pages of content.

💾 Step-by-Step: From File to SmartBot

Here’s the simplified flow:

• Step 1: Build a Vector Database

  • Used Supabase to store “embeddings” of text data (think: compressed memory chunks).

  • Set it up using SQL scripts from NAN docs.

  • This makes your bot lightning-fast at finding and fetching relevant info.

• Step 2: Upload the Knowledge

  • Drag in docs from Google Drive, convert them to .docx or .txt.

  • NAN chunks and embeds these files into the vector store using OpenAI.

  • Each file gets split into bite-sized memory blocks (1536 dimensions, for the geeks out there).

• Step 3: Build the Bot

  • Create a chatbot with OpenAI GPT-4 mini.

  • Connect it to the vector store via API.

  • Prompt it with simple logic like: “If user asks a question, search the store and answer based on what you find.”

• Step 4: Make It Public (or Private)

  • You can embed this bot on a HighLevel page using a widget.

  • Or keep it gated behind a paywall in your community (your VIPs will thank you).

🧑‍🏫 Real Use Cases (This Is Where It Gets Spicy)

This isn’t theory. Here’s how Nuno’s using it:

• 🧠 Personal AI Coaches: Scraping entire YouTube channels (his + others), transcribing them, and turning them into interactive coaching bots.

• 🎓 Course Assistants: Load in all your lesson material. Let students chat with it like a live tutor.

• 🏢 Enterprise Docs: Securely upload thousands of internal files and let teams search them with a friendly AI.

• 🎯 Lead Gen: Embed the bot on landing pages and let it pre-qualify leads before they ever book a call.

This is ChatGPT meets search engine meets your actual business brain.

💡 Pro Tip:

Want to replicate this for your agency or info products? Start with 10 videos or blog posts. Use Amplify (scraping tool), transcribe them, and load them into Supabase via NAN. Your first custom-trained bot will feel like magic.

Then… scale it up.

⚠️ Bonus Insight: Why This Beats Basic Bots

Regular bots in HighLevel are great for small logic flows. But they choke on memory, context, and complex interactions. Once you scale beyond a few canned answers, they can’t keep up.

With vector search, you’re not just giving the bot a script—you’re giving it access to everything you’ve ever written, said, or recorded. And it doesn’t get tired. It just fetches and delivers—fast.

And because it's self-hosted (with Mario’s help or DIY), you own the whole thing. No third-party tool sniffing your data or slapping on extra limits.

If this all sounds a bit mad scientist, that’s because it is. But it’s also the future of how we serve clients, run communities, and scale coaching and consulting offers.

And it’s already working.

🧠 AI Watch: GPT-5 Hype, Avatar Salespeople, and That Time a Fish Got Pants

Let’s be honest—keeping up with AI news lately feels like drinking from a firehose powered by a rocket engine. But I’ve got you. Here’s what actually matters this week (and what’s just fun to know).

🚀 GPT-5 is Coming (Yes, Really)

Sam Altman finally gave us a (vague but real) timeline for GPT-5: “probably this summer.” Which—unless OpenAI is running on Australian seasons—means soon.

Why it matters:

• The naming mess (4, 4.0, 4.1, 40, 03 Pro…) is getting cleaned up. We’re getting plain old GPT-5 next.

• It’ll likely be faster, smarter, and less prone to hallucinations—and hopefully won’t need five versions to work out the kinks.

• Expect big leaps in reasoning, memory, and maybe... autonomous workflows?

💡 Pro Tip: Start thinking now about how your business can actually use longer context and better reasoning—customer support, content repurposing, internal tools, or lead gen bots are all ripe for a glow-up.

🤖 AI Avatars Outsell Real People (Not Kidding)

A Chinese livestream racked up $7.6 million in sales... with AI avatars doing the pitching. Not humans. AI.

These weren’t just static avatars—they looked like real hosts, talking, gesturing, and selling in real time. Viewers didn’t seem to care (or even notice), and conversions increased after they swapped out the humans.

Let that sink in.

If you’re running a product brand, service business, or funnel-based offer—this is a whole new playbook.

📦 Product Placement Gets an AI Twist

HeyGen just launched a feature called Product Placement. Upload your photo, your product, and a script—voilà, instant ad with you (or your avatar) holding the product and pitching it. Think QVC meets Photoshop meets ChatGPT.

Great for:

• Solopreneurs making demo videos without actual gear

• Agencies building prototypes for clients

• Or just messing with cereal boxes labeled “Glass Shard Crunch” (yes, that was a thing)

🎥 MidJourney Goes Full Motion

MidJourney now does video. Not from scratch—you start with an image, then hit Animate, and boom: four video variations, each with that signature MidJourney vibe.

• You can even extend videos with new prompts (like “the wolf runs away”).

• Upload real photos and make them dance. Literally.

• Realism is shockingly good... and also a little unsettling.

🎬 LTX Studio + Google's V3 = Your New AI Film Crew

LTX Studio (the full-stack AI video platform) now integrates with Google’s V3 video model—which means:

• Shot-by-shot storyboarding

• Script generation

• Face training (insert yourself or anyone else)

• And cinematic videos that include sound effects.

This is beyond TikTok filters. You’re building mini-movies with prompts and getting near-commercial quality output.

🐟 Higsfield’s “Fish With Pants” Feature (Okay, Fine, It’s Called Canvas)

Higsfield Canvas lets you paint directly on images, edit with natural language (“put jeans on the fish”), and animate it.

It’s weird. It’s fun. It’s also a sneak peek at the future of product mockups, ad edits, and ecomm creative workflows.

🔍 Google Search, Now With a Voice

The new Google Search Live lets you speak to your phone like a real assistant—and it actually searches Google for answers, reads them back to you, and offers follow-ups.

Use cases:

• Mobile-first customers asking for product info

• Real-time answers while you build a funnel

• Sneaky competitor research while walking the dog

🧠 Halo AI is Quietly Eating Everyone’s Lunch

This one flew under the radar—but Halo AI, out of China, dropped:

• An open-source 1M token model (think GPT-4-level thinking, but free)

• A multi-step intelligent agent that built an entire Louvre museum tour with UI, audio, and content in minutes

• A video model (Halu O2) that can animate faces, animals, and wild physics... and still look solid

They’re coming in fast—and open-source-first.

🏥 AI That Detects Heart Disease from Old Scans

Let’s end on a good one: Researchers at Mass General + Veterans Affairs built an AI that scans old CT records and flags heart disease—without new tests.

This is what AI should be doing more of. Quietly saving lives in the background while we’re busy making dancing monkey videos.

🔮 So, What’s Next?

• GPT-5 is the big one. If you’re already building AI tools, now’s the time to prep your stack.

• AI avatars are no longer just novelty—they’re conversion machines.

• Video + avatars + product mockups = an entirely new lane for content-first marketing.

• And yeah, keep your fish clothed. We have standards.

Google Veo 3 is a beast — here’s how to tame it (or at least ride it into the sunset like a cinematic AI cowboy).

Alright, you know I love a good tool, but Google Veo 3 isn’t just a good tool — it’s an overachieving video generation monster with more features than your uncle’s ‘82 Swiss Army knife. This week I sat through a 30-tip masterclass so you don’t have to. Here’s the coolest stuff you should absolutely mess with:

• Talking Yetis with Vlog Energy
  Want a woolly beast breaking the 4th wall in a snowstorm? Use prompts like "self-camera angle, Yeti holding a fish" and give it dialogue. Honestly, this thing could host its own YouTube channel.

• AI Man-on-the-Street Interviews
  Drop "man on the street interview in Gotham" and suddenly you’ve got hot takes on Batman from disgruntled civilians. Bonus: you can assign exact lines to each speaker. Yes, even Sith Lords.

• Subtitles Are Stubborn
  Even when you tell it “no subtitles,” it’s like that one friend who won’t take a hint. Best workaround? Crop them out in editing or use tools like VMake to nuke them.

• Accents + Ambient Sounds = Immersion
  Characters get believable accents if the setting makes sense (a Brazilian guy in Rio? Sure. A Star Wars Sith with a French accent? Not so much). Also, background sounds like waves or creeks are easy to add and give your scenes life.

• Control the Tone
  Want your character whispering like an old war veteran? Or nervously stammering about Vikings? Just say the word in your prompt. Veo delivers the vibe.

• Consistent Characters = Hackable Magic
  There are four ways to keep your characters looking the same across multiple scenes:

  1. Text prompts (high detail = higher consistency).

  2. Green screen hack (upload your character with a background, use jump cuts).

  3. Ingredients to video (mix multiple image references, but only works on V2).

  4. Image-to-video via Flux + OpenArt = best results.

• Epic Fight Scenes
  Want kung fu or lightsaber duels? Just say so. Bonus if you describe your character’s outfit and weapon in detail. Fight choreography isn’t Bruce Lee-level yet, but it’s impressive.

• Cinematic Angles & Camera Moves
  Mix close-ups, wide shots, high/low angles, pans, tilts, even crane shots — and your video goes from “neat” to “yo, did AI shoot this movie?”

• Genre Swapping = Style Reset
  Prompt the same scene as a horror, sci-fi, or comedy and it completely changes the lighting, colors, even facial expressions. (Pro move: put style keywords like "2D anime" at the start of your prompt for best results.)

• Vertical Videos for Shorts Creators
  Rotate your image 90°, animate it, rotate the result back. Boom. Proper vertical output, even if Veo doesn’t technically support it yet.

• Make It Loop, Baby
  Want infinite jellyfish? Reverse a copy of your clip in CapCut, stack ‘em together. Instant looping magic.

• Preview Before You Commit
  Generate a still image first with Veo’s image tools to check composition, lighting, vibes — then animate it. Saves time and heartbreak.

• Add Dialogue with Lip Sync Tools
  Veo can’t yet make reference images talk, but upload them to a tool like Designify or D-ID with your voice and voilà — your warrior priestess just gave a monologue.

This thing is part camera operator, part screenwriter, part studio exec — and if you know what buttons to push, the results are chef’s kiss. Think of it like your AI Spielberg… if Spielberg worked for tips and prompt engineering.

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