The Proffitt Podcast
Are you thinking about starting a podcast? Launching a YouTube channel? Repurposing your old blog content into something fresh? Hi, I'm Krystal - host of "The Proffitt Podcast." And I'm happy to say you've come to the right place!
Business owners and content creators dream of building a platform where they can connect deeply with their audience, and marketing feels easy. But I also know what it's like to feel confused and overwhelmed.
Join us weekly as we strip down those processes and remove all the overwhelm with new tips, simple strategies, and great conversations with creators like you. Tune in to hear how I help creators start, launch, and market their content confidently. The motto here is, "We all have to start somewhere."
The Proffitt Podcast
Mastering Podcast Production and Marketing with AI Tools
Unlock the secrets to revolutionize your content production with AI as we sit down with Cody Schneider, the mastermind behind Draft Horse AI and Swell AI. Ever wondered how to transform traditional brands into digital juggernauts? Cody shares his journey from e-commerce to B2B marketing, revealing how his expertise in scaling startups led to the creation of Swell AI. Discover the game-changing ways AI is reshaping content workflows, making what once took a village now achievable with a single software.
Join us for an inside look at the cutting-edge tools and strategies used by top content creators today. From platforms like Riverside and Descript that elevate podcast production quality to Swell AI's automated generation of show notes and viral clips, we explore the complete podcasting tech stack. We also cover automation tools like Buffer and Latercom for seamless social media scheduling and highlight the crucial role of newsletters and blogs in audience engagement. Learn how AI can take the heavy lifting out of your content creation and distribution, allowing you to focus on what you do best—creating compelling content.
Finally, we delve into the future of AI in content marketing, from managing workflows that once required multiple roles to envisioning autonomous marketing strategies. Cody sheds light on his big-picture mentality, advocating for the importance of defining processes and letting AI handle the details. Whether you're a content creator aiming to avoid burnout or a business looking to stay ahead of the curve, this episode offers invaluable insights into the transformative power of AI. Don't miss out on learning how to streamline your efforts and amplify your impact with the latest in AI technology.
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Click the "Send Krystal a Text Message" link above to send us your questions, comments, and feedback on the show! (Pssst...we'll do giveaways in upcoming episodes so make sure you leave your name & podcast title.)
OWNR OPS PodcastStarting a business by offering a service to your local community is one of the...
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What do you get when you combine AI and content repurposing? Well, you get today's interview because I had so much fun chatting with Cody from Swell AI and we just had the most fantastic conversation. And it was one of those where we didn't know each other before this interview and I just immediately was like, oh my gosh, we could absolutely be marketing best friends because we had so much fun just chatting about AI and how it's impacting the industry and cool ways that we can do it and use it and how Swell, specifically, is rolling out these features that I just cannot wait for you to try. So Cody Schneider is a serial entrepreneur and innovator in AI powered content marketing. He's the founder of Draft Horse AI and Swell AI and he has helped numerous companies exponentially grow their businesses by leveraging AI to automate content production workflows. He's been named one of Businesscom's top 25 marketers to watch and has gained experience helping scale startups from the ground up through strategic content strategies. So, like I said, this was such a fun conversation. If you're at all interested in digital marketing, ai, content, content repurposing, you are going to love this conversation today. So let's get right to it.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the Profit Podcast, where we teach you how to start, launch and market your content with confidence. I'm your host, crystal Profit, and I'm so excited that you're here. Thanks for hanging out with me today, because if you've been trying to figure out the world of content creation, this is the show that will help be your time-saving shortcut. So let's get right to it, shall we will help be your time-saving shortcut, so let's get right to it, shall we? All right Profit Podcast listeners, I want to introduce you to someone that I think we're just going to become instant friends Like. Step Brothers is one of my favorite movies ever, and so I'm always like did we just become best friends Because Cody is on the show today? Welcome to the show, cody.
Speaker 2:Crystal, thank you for having me Super excited to be here.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, like I did. Like we're sitting here chatting about marketing and I warned Cody it was a warning because I was like I love to nerd out about marketing. My audience knows this and I am so excited about today's conversation because not only are we talking about marketing and content, we're blending it all together with AI, which is the hot topic of the season of the year of the decade. It's the thing that everyone wants to know about. But really, before we dive into that, I'd just love to know more about your story and how you got started in this and what made you fall in love with marketing. Let's actually start there. Do you have one memory that you're like oh, that's when I was like this, is it? I love to do this stuff.
Speaker 2:Totally yeah. So I started in e-commerce. So for me personally it was probably the first dollar you make online. You're like, oh my God, how did this happen, or how did this work? And then you kind of get just sucked down the rabbit hole and I always joke is like for most people they start out where in the marketing careers, like they start out in some type of consumer facing thing and then they end up in B2B marketing because that's where the money is. My path was super similar to that, so it started in e-commerce. After that, I ended up working for a B2B marketing agency that specialized in manufacturing companies Think like windows and bathtubs and wood paneling all of these very unsexy companies that are Fortune 500 companies and so my job there was doing digital strategy for these traditional brands.
Speaker 2:How are we going to evolve into this? And a lot of what it ended up being was really just like content marketing strategy, because they had no idea how to transition from like industry publications to you know, we're going to make a hundred thousand page view a month blog, that type of thing. And so from that, my my boss at that company had gone to Y Combinator, which is like the startup incubator in San Francisco. We always joke like go out to San Francisco to learn, kind of like, the tricks of the trade. And it's like visit Mecca, learn everything, and then you leave. And my story is really similar to that. So he kind of introduced me to this whole other world relationship. To that I ended up going out to SF and working for a company called Rupa Health. I was employee six there and helped scale them from a $20 million valuation to $110 million valuation in about six months. It was the craziest kind of growth and business growth time I've ever seen in my whole life.
Speaker 2:But a lot of what my job was there was basically building out the media arm of that company. Our target customer was practitioners like doctors, nurse practitioners, et cetera, and traditionally very hard to market to a group of individuals because they are historically a high income earning subset and so getting in front of them is very challenging because they're constantly being bombarded with ads et cetera, because they have a lot of buying power. And so we really early on realized, hey, we're going to have to make some type of media component of our marketing engine so that we can basically capture their attention and create this trust and relationships with them. So we ended up spinning up a video podcast and a live class, like webinar series that we did on a weekly basis. And then we take that long form pillar content and we chop it up into all these different forms that we did on a weekly basis. And then we'd take that long form pillar content and we chop it up into all these different forms that we could distribute across social blogs, newsletters, et cetera.
Speaker 2:And that's really the origin of Swell AI, which is the company I'm building now, uh, which is focused on content repurposing powered by AI. So what I used to need for like a team of 20 people for uh, uh, now you can do that with, you know, basically a piece of software which is crazy to even say that it's that's. You know that progression has happened in like four or five years, and so, yeah, that's kind of the origin of this whole thing and how I got into this space. I'm I'm definitely, uh, I would say, a puzzle person, and marketing to me is like this massive puzzle of I'm trying to get people to do X and I'm trying to get people to do Y and I have X resources.
Speaker 2:What's the way to kind of build these connections and that connective tissue, and so I'm really obsessed with that and I kind of geek out on this. I mean, my newsletter is literally just like personal newsletters, dedicated to just growth tactics and business ideas of like okay cool, like here's a company idea, here's how you'd market it, and then here's all these like random tests that we've been running that we've been seeing success with, and so I could talk for hours about this in all reality, but yeah, this is so fun, because this is where I'm like, oh, we're kindred spirits because, cody, I could open up my phone right now and I have pictures of billboards, like driving on road trips, and I'm like I told my husband.
Speaker 1:I'm like, oh, my God, that was so good. He's like, babe, I'm listening to my podcast, I have no idea what just passed by us, and I'm like, no, but I took a picture so you can see it and we could talk about it. See it and we could talk about it. Like this is our road trip game is, we will see small businesses as we drive through towns and I'm like, you know, if we just change that sign just a little bit and gave them a website, and my husband could literally care less. He's just like yeah, that's great, but it's just, but it's where. Like when you get that marketing bug, you see it everywhere. It's not just in your business or in your content. Like you can see great marketing.
Speaker 1:I'm obsessed with watching TV shows and seeing, like, how they build up these character stories online. Oh, like that's. But that's the piece I want to go back to. Swell, because you know when people are in this world of AI. You know, you have chat, gpt, you have your co-pilots, you have all of these. You know pieces of software that can help you just generate stuff. Right, they could just spit out something and it's just very generic and bland. But I love about what y'all do is you take existing content that was already told by me, the original creator, and then you can create something that's even better or more dynamic. So can you just kind of talk about that process, like how does that work?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think at the high level, just to frame this conversation for everybody, there's kind of two different ways to use AI right now for content generation. So I think the first version that everybody's interacted with is just having it, you know, basically one shot like a, like a blog post article. I feel like a lot of people have done this at this point and you know the feedback that we get from almost everybody universally like the first time they see it they're like oh my God, it just wrote, you know, a thousand word article with, you know, in seconds, um, but the, the.
Speaker 2:Once you start to get deeper and deeper, you realize that the content is pretty average and so when you break down, like what's going on behind the scenes, a lot of these AI models, they're trained on the general knowledge of the internet, right?
Speaker 2:So when you think about the average of the internet, it's very average, and so you're not going to get very unique or creative or like even thought leadership type content when you just go and ask the AI to say, for example, write about hotel marketing strategies for 2024. In contrast, if I was to go and interview you know five hotel marketing experts and I take you know those 30 minute transcripts and I put that into a context window and then I say, okay, now write me a blog post. You know the same prompt that I used previously, but use this source material as the origin of like where these ideas are coming from. What you're going to see is that the content that that ends up being created when you provide that source material is, you know 10 X, what like from a quality standpoint, just from a uniqueness and a novelness, et cetera. And so this is really the idea that you know I'm I'm kind of obsessed with and where this all ends up going right Like the cost of producing content is is approaching zero.
Speaker 2:Um and you know it's, it's cheaper than it ever was before, and but the, the, the kind of the opportunity in the long-term arbitrage and really just like the, the only way you're going to be able to differentiate your brand is by making original content and then using AI to repurpose that.
Speaker 2:People that I'm trying to be in front of spend time online, maybe that's social, maybe that's blogs, Maybe that's you know, newsletter, and in reality, it's often a combination of all of these things and you know, historically I would say, hey, you know, pick two of those channels, focus on just two of those for the next 24 months and for most businesses, like you can have an unbelievably successful business just by doing those two things well together and like.
Speaker 2:A great example of this is like Facebook ads with, like some type of ebook download, with an email nurture, right, Like I've grown, you know, medical clinics, like physical medical clinics with that playbook, like it's a very easy system, but now with AI, uh, you don't have the constraints that you did previously of like, oh, this is going to take a lot of resources to be everywhere, to be kind of omnipresent, to use a buzzword, but the uh, like you can create all of those different media types. When you have that pillar, that source content and I think that that is like the you know I'm seeing that be the light bulb or aha moment, especially if you're a podcaster or a marketer you can now just be in all of these places that your target customer is where you. Previously it would just be a massive amount of you know, resource suck or time suck to do that. So, but happy to go any deeper on any of those things.
Speaker 1:Well, I love that you. You know you were putting it very generously, very nicely, by saying the internet was average. It's a dumpster fire, Come on.
Speaker 1:We all know, we know it's a dumpster fire out there, and that's what I love about. You know what what you're talking about is. You are taking the quality content that you've already created, possibly, you know, with multiple guests, or just a single audio file, if you want to keep it so basic and simple. Because I know that there's someone listening right now and they're like, they're getting heart palpitations already. They're like, oh, this sounds great, but that also sounds really overwhelming because, yeah, you could create content for that, but then you have to post to all those platforms and then have to keep up with the metrics. Then I have to engage with the comments.
Speaker 1:It's like there's this whole spiral, because we've seen it happen time and time again. I mean, I've been podcasting since 2018 and I have seen the rise and fall of so many creators because they burn out. And so and I told Cody before this I was like, you know, I want to make sure that we keep today's conversation very less overwhelming than other content may seem, because when I think about repurposing, it gets me excited because I immediately think about the potential audiences that I could reach. But I know there's a group of people that are listening and you're like, that just feels like so much. So can you just kind of talk about, you know, like the actual steps. Like let's talk to someone that's, let's say, creating maybe a video podcast on YouTube and they're also uploading the audio file to Buzzsprout. So those are like the two places where they're already creating content. But if they wanted to branch out and reuse what they're already doing in another way, what would you recommend for them?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think probably the best thing I can do is like lay out how we're seeing creators. For example, I'm friends with Jay Klaus. I'm like this is like a part of his workflow that he's using. So basically they use a tool like Riverside or Squadcast exactly what we're doing to do that high resolution video recording. They then would export that and maybe they throw it into like a descript and what I'm talking about here. It may sound complicated, but in reality this is like a couple of button clicks to get this to actually happen. So they would throw it into the script, they turn on a studio sound which is just like an audio scaling tool and at that point you're like 90% of the way there of having like audio engineer content and video content. Maybe they put an intro at the front of it and that is their video file that they would upload to YouTube. They could export that as an MP3. They upload it to their hosting, their podcast hosting. So you've got those two long forms and I think for a lot of people there's a lot of great information out there on how to make a show and kind of get started. But where the ball gets dropped is okay, cool. This exists now how do I get it in front of people? And so that's really where our focus is on is on that podcast marketing side, or just the content repurposing piece.
Speaker 2:So the next thing that you do is you take that video file that you just, you know, upscale the audio and descript with you, upload it into Swell, and Swell, out of the box automatically, will write podcast show notes, youtube descriptions. It'll make clips from, like the viral moments that we've identified within the episode. Those clips can be auto cropped into like portrait or landscape mode. We built an AI model that does this. So it basically does like a speaker identification, active speaker identification. So say, for example, you as the host ask a question and then the guest answers it, it's going to. You could just upload a landscape file and it's going to automatically jump back and forth between those people. You can add captions automatically from that. Uh, the transcript. Uh, those are AI generated and you know all those different font types. It'll do newsletters, blog posts, and the big thing here is, because you give this source file, this transcript, you can just ask the AI hey, what's the tone, style and voice of this transcript? Now write me a blog post in that same tone, style and voice and use vocabulary that's in that transcript, and so what people often see is like, oh, I can get 95% of the way there from a blog post being written that's a thousand words long, so all that content just got generated, so it's on the clip side.
Speaker 2:Typically, what we see people do is they then export it from Swell. They go to a social media scheduler like Buffer or Latercom. Our friends are building this company called Assembly Marketing. They're amazing and it's basically like a modern social media scheduler. I would highly suggest them. But they then go and they schedule out all that content to be cross-posted across all of the channels that they're trying to do. You know, get those clips on. So TikTok, youtube Shorts, instagram Reels and basically we're seeing that be a lot of like top of funnel inbound for the growth of shows. So on the newsletter side, they then go and they would grow like a newsletter for their shows, just an email newsletter.
Speaker 2:Make it super simple. It's like the newest episode of XYZ podcast is live. Short summary, like what you know. One paragraph summary and maybe like five bullet. Uh, one paragraph summary and maybe like five bullet points of here's the key insights or takeaways, and like that alone. We we see like 50% open rates on those and like have the subject line be like podcast. You know, whatever the name of the episode is, and as long as you're your target listener, as long as you're uh, you know, the people that are on your list are interested in that content, you're going to see great open rates and great click-through rates.
Speaker 2:But really, I think the piece there to kind of zoom out to the 40,000-foot view and think about this is in workflows, rather than you're trying to automate as much as that process and that in-between process is possible. So pick those places that you're trying to create. You know to be present on a weekly or a daily or a monthly basis. So for a lot of podcasts it's weekly. So it'd be like, okay, on all you know, on TikTok, youtube Shorts, instagram Reels, I'm trying to do a daily post.
Speaker 2:Okay, what's a tool that can, like, I can automatically schedule to? I sit down every Sunday and I schedule out my whole weeks of content? And then, okay, what is an AI tool that I can use to generate all those clips? And now that whole workflow. You've got that basically established. Okay, well, let's do that same thing for a blog post right. So I say I use something like WordPress or Squarespace whatever my hosting or my CMS or content management system is and I take that long form piece of content.
Speaker 2:Ai writes a blog post. I then schedule that out to be published as soon as my episode drops. Same thing with the newsletter. I can create a template within one of these AI tools like Swell. So here's a templated output for a newsletter that I'm trying to get created. I provide that raw source material, which is the episode. It automatically generates that template and I just copy and paste that over into my email sender and so, as you can, kind of, if you're listening to this, you can probably guess where we're headed as a company.
Speaker 2:We started out as just like an AI writer for podcasters and what we're realizing.
Speaker 2:People want more and more.
Speaker 2:It's like hey, I want this kind of whole marketing stack for all of my podcasts, like really distribution and promotion, and so that's where we're headed. So, on, our product roadmap is like social media scheduling, is SMS and email newsletter management and just that. You know quick shout out for people like something we're seeing be incredibly successful is SMS for podcast promotion. We're seeing like 90% open rates, 30% CTRs. It's actually crazy and it makes sense, right, because, like, people are on a mobile device when they're listening to the episode and so when you can, like, give them a text message and it's like, literally, this is what we're seeing work. It's like the newest episode of XYZ podcast is live. You'll learn one, two, three, and it's like click the link to listen now and it just you know you'd link out to the Apple podcasting URL and, again, just a really effective way that we're seeing people drive traffic to these. So happy to dig into you know deeper to any of those pieces, but yeah, I love this so much and I feel like we need to.
Speaker 1:I'm like we're building a visual for this, like I love that. You said like it's a workflow, because I've built. I love a workflow, first of all, like going into Canva and building like, okay, we're going here, and then we're going here, and then we're going here and everybody that's listening if you thought, oh man, that still he is replacing potentially seven different jobs that would have previously been on your team. And when I think about like we've already talked about like kind of the rise and fall of creators, I remember there was a period where it was like you start your online business and immediately hire like seven people to do all of these things right, you need to hire a videographer, you need to hire a podcast editor, a social media manager, a content director, a content producer, someone to help you, you know, manage your email marketing campaigns. Like there was just so many moving pieces that were previously people, whereas now it's like what if it's all just condensed into a few platforms that one person could help you manage? Kind of the back and forth pieces. And I have to say one of my favorite qualities that AI has really just improved over the last probably 24 months is just, it's so close to exactly what I would have said anyway that, to your point of like, it gets me 95% there. That's what makes me so happy, because again, we use something like chat, gpt that goes out to the dumpster fire of the internet and whatever they spit out, it's like, oh no, this is terrible, or I would have never said it this way.
Speaker 1:But everything that you're talking about is originating with my voice as the creator, and it's duplicating all of this content, it's replicating it, repurposing it in ways that I'm just like, yes, like I would have told a teammate to do this.
Speaker 1:I would have, you know, previously hired someone to create something, and it does get smarter over time in learning like, okay, you know this is the format, let me give it this type of template. So I love that you laid it out the way that you did. But I'm curious, cody, you know this is the format, let me give it this type of template. So I love that you laid it out the way that you did. But I'm curious, cody, cause you know, I've seen, like I've listened to you know, you've been guesting on podcasts and you've created content. What's your favorite piece? Cause I love to hear people's like content creator origin stories, because I like to let everybody know we're all sloppy and messy behind the scenes, like no one just showed up ready to create content, unless they were like previously on TV or something. But what did that journey look like for you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the biggest thing that I see for me personally was just like showing my go-to quote is like this is a lifestyle choice, like content creation is like this is a lifestyle choice, like content creation and creating a content marketing part uh, you know, or arm for your business, or turning your business into a media company is it is a lifestyle choice like you wake up every day and you eat healthy.
Speaker 2:You wake up every day and you like push things out into the world, right. And so I think, with that as kind of the context, that my advice for people and like you know, if I could go back and give this advice to myself would be like, hey, don't start anything unless you can do it, you know, basically for indefinitely into the future. So think about like the longevity of and this happens to a lot of creators in particular where they're like, hey, burnout is like super high for them. So what you're trying to do is again think about OK, what are these things that I can do on a daily, weekly, monthly basis? That's not going to kill me, that I can do this, you know, for forever. And I'm going to, because there's this compounding effect that naturally happens with content, right, like I see so many brands and I've consulted so many brands where they do like 30 days of writing SEO content or, you know, making like clips for social, and they're like, ah well, I guess that didn't work, like we're gonna go back to cold calling, and it's like, okay, you know, that's 30 days is nothing like try to lose 60 pounds in 30 days, like let's watch that happen and you, basically, you know, pass out because you're not eating, and so the. The thing that, uh, like I am always trying to get back to is like, hey, do some do things that are like bite-sized pieces and and for early for companies, it's like, or for you know, people that are just starting that are listening to the show, if you post two days a week, right, as an example, like you record, you know, every week, you sit down and record and you just post like two clips per week and if you do that for three months, that's going to be way more impactful than you doing, you know, a clip a day for a week and a half, right, and so I think that's a component of it. The.
Speaker 2:The other thing that I would I would really try to emphasize when it comes to this stuff is like you don't have to be everywhere you can. You can be just in a couple of places and then you can tack on these other things as you get your systems defined. So a lot of the times we see people like trying to zero, to one this, where they're like, okay, I'm going to do a podcast and then a newsletter, and then, like there's all you know, they're stacking all these things from the get to go and that's actually, in my opinion, like the wrong thing to do. A better thing to do would be okay, I'm going to focus on social first. I'm going to iron out this process Once I've got it defined, documented and, you know, lined up. Well, now I can move on to. I'm going to add a newsletter. Now I'm going to move on and I'm going to add blog posts and just kind of stacking these, these marketing tech and again, because you have that source file, you have that source material that you're working from, this is really easy for you to go back to and like this is like a part of like swell.
Speaker 2:What I'm actually really excited about is like a lot of creators have this whole content library that they're sitting on that doesn't see the light of day after the first initial publishing, right.
Speaker 2:And so where we see the opportunity is like, hey, we can go back and almost data mine that old content library, pull out these clips that say something's going viral on TikTok or whatever, being able to query against your whole back catalog and then pull out that relevant information as that's needed. That's where we see this kind of like massive opportunity to make the library that you've already created even more powerful and effective for your brand and your business, and that's going to become more and more of an asset as time goes on. And so, again, I just restate that really simply. And so I again I just restate that really simply like, do, do things that are, you know, bite-sized to begin with, layer those and con, like together and compound those, and then, if you start a thing, have the mindset that, oh, I'm going to do this for, you know, at least two years for this to, and a lot of it is with most marketing, like people think marketing, um, it's.
Speaker 2:It's really like evolution, right, like it's the, the last thing standing is what wins. It didn't win because it like beat everybody, it's just like it survived longer. And it's the same idea with your business, with your, your content marketing strategy. It's if you can just like survive and we always say, joe can call it like default, alive, alive, right, like at the end of the day, like it can continue to exist and continue to grow, uh, you're gonna have success, right. And but burnout, for you know, is the is the toughest part of this, this, this game that we're playing. You have to really think about that from the beginning and then again, these tools can assist you in that process so that burnout is minimized. Uh, yeah, and the other thing I want to piggyback on that you said that I think is really important is like everything that we're talking about here. Like I just described that whole, you know, here's a podcast production process and marketing strategy for that. Like that sounds like a lot that can be done in about an hour and a half.
Speaker 2:Like you record an episode for 45 minutes, like you, you click a couple buttons, go do something else, come back, your files are ready, basically, and then you do kind of the final editing touches and then also the uh, the social scheduling. Like that is literally the entire process and that's an hour and a half of your time on a weekly basis, right? I? I think for most creators, like an hour and a half of mental, like energy being focused on this thing is totally doable. We're not asking for, you know, not suggesting this is like a 40 hour a week job. Right, I'm watching like friends even do this where they started these podcasts that are like in the marketing space.
Speaker 2:My friend started this podcast called In Growth, we Trust. It's like a top marketing podcast now in the UK and for them it's like this is just like a side hustle thing. For them it's more, they just wanted to talk to interesting people that were in the marketing space and they sit down like it's two hours of their time on a weekly basis. They both have full-time jobs outside of that. One works at an agency and the other one works at a startup and that's what's possible now. You know, two years ago, this, this, what we're talking about would be impossible, like there's no way that you could have this whole other thing that you were doing, and so I think that's the opportunity that exists now. You don't have to quit your day job and you know, or whatever your current gig is, to do this, this can, this can be something that can be added on, uh, to what your, you know, what your, your life is right now, without a lot of, or really just wasted time, I guess, to create the output that comes from this.
Speaker 1:Well, and I think that that is the key, it's the gift of time. That's what I feel like in all my experimenting with different. There's content-specific AI. Then there's more like just a typical generative AI bot, like I have played with all different variations of it and, at the end of the day, if someone were to ask me, like well, what has AI done for you? I'm like it's given me back time and some of it is like the mental load that I would have previously had to, you know, work for a few hours just sitting there right Wanting to write an Instagram post, and I'm like I have no freaking idea how I should start this or what I should talk about, or writing my newsletter or a blog post, and just having that blank cursor, it's just like pinging at you.
Speaker 2:That's like that is the thing where it's like you know, even just give me ideas, or like what's the five key insights? Okay, give me hooks from this transcript that are based off of these five key insights. I mean, it's going to go find you the exact place where, like good clips probably exist, and then it's like two clicks and I've got like a clip created that's in portrait, landscape, and also you know square format for all every place that I'm trying to post it and landscape, and also you know square format for all every place that I'm trying to post it. And I think again that's that's, that's that's what we're talking about here is like you're what, to your point? This used to be seven different job titles everything that we're talking about.
Speaker 2:And now a single individual and an hour and a half can have a podcast out the door and all the marketing material like, built and scheduled to all of the channels. So I mean it's good and it's good. That's the thing. It's gonna get better. I think that's. The thing with this too is like we're in the early days of this, still right like the. There's so much more. That's every every six months. We see an improvement in all of these models and it's going to get more effective.
Speaker 2:It's going to be able to work with more source material. So, again, like there's a, in the near future you'll be able to take your whole back catalog of 300 episodes. You'll put it in a context window and you'll say, okay, write me a book outline based off of this book title. Like here's maybe a short description of what it looks like. Write me a chapter outline based off of the source material. It writes you a chapter outline. Then you say, okay, now go write me the chapter one, chapter two, chapter three. It writes that first draft. At that point you can take it to a publisher and be like cool, here's my first draft.
Speaker 2:I talked to 300 people. Here's all the insights from that. That is really what AI is unbelievable at. It's great at taking unstructured data and structuring it for you. And again, like we're not doing anything new either. Right, like what I just described there with the book-like production process.
Speaker 2:We've been doing that for thousands of years.
Speaker 2:Right, we talk to a bunch of people, we organize the insights and then we go and like, for example, what is the book called how to Win Friends and Influence People Classic business book right? Right, what is the book called how to Win Friends and Influence People Classic business book, right? Right, that book was three different journalists that went out and interviewed 150 different people on, like, how they view the world. They then organized that information, they wrote a book and then they brought it back to Carnegie and they're like, okay, like, can you give us, like your you know, basically the human elements of this to that to get it that last 10% of the way there? It's one of the best, most, like you know, the biggest bestsellers of all time. All we're talking about is taking things that we're we've already been doing before, workflows that we already have before that were human, and we're just automating them or augmenting them with these AI tools Like that is the mindset shift with this whole thing and that's where we're seeing the most success when people adopt these.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it can be done in hours or days, as opposed to months and year. I mean decades, like you know. Even the book description, I was like, oh my gosh, those people wrote with a pen and paper. They were writing all these notes down, like that, just like it just blew my mind to think about someone walking around with a pen and paper, you know a notepad or maybe even little note cards, and putting everything together. But wait, the way you described it, I'm like, oh my God, and this is within the last hundred years.
Speaker 1:And I, you know, I've been seeing studies about the adoption rate of AI as opposed to like the internet, like you know, the www dot, you know boom, and then all of social media, and then AI is like 10, 20, 100, X I don't even know what the exact numbers are as opposed to when people were just curious about the internet, and I'm so fascinated about where we're going. So my last kind of question about content that I just love your insight on, you know, looking ahead at the next 24 months or five years, like what's the one thing that you're like, man, if we could just figure this one thing out, it could be related to you and your company or just marketers or content creators in general. But what do you think is like the big thing, like the next problem, that if we solve it it could just help so many more creators?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So the thing I'm most obsessed about right now is like can we get a company to market itself? You know, let's like break down that idea but like all the technology exists right now, like I imagine I plug into this like marketing brain and like I have this goal and here's these resources and now, like figure out how to optimize for that goal with these resources I provided Historically. Like all these APIs exist, but there's like a human element that's in the middle. That's that middleware AIs exist, but there's like a human element that's in the middle. That's that middleware AI now has like potential and really it has all the ability it's just figuring out how all these pieces fit together to be that middleware component. So you as a creator or you as a business owner, like what you focus on is building great content or great product Right, and then these AI tools will then go and basically handle just marketing for you and like this is totally possible, somebody is going to do this. We're obsessing about doing this in the content marketing space. Like my vision over the next two years is can we get this to a place where it's like you make source material and we're connected to all your social accounts, to your blog, to your everything that you're trying to do, distribution through, and as much of that as possible is just automatically ran. And then we pull that data back in from Instagram, from YouTube shorts, from Tik TOK. We see, okay, of these 10 different posts that we publish, these two went more viral than the others. What do they have in common? Is there a structure that makes sense? And then that goes back into okay, well, let's go find more clips like those and we'll schedule those out, and so it's basically would be doing the job of what a social media manager was doing previously. That logic, that understanding, totally doable, totally possible, and I think that is the thing that is on the horizon in so many different spaces, whether it's in software engineering, social media management or any of these other kind of like job titles that were previously.
Speaker 2:If there's a process in a system that is very specific and well-defined, a lot of that can be automated, and we're already starting to see this. I mean, it's like I don't know where you know search engine optimization is going, because, like I don't know, I don't know what's going to happen to search and all reality, because I'm watching these companies where they're just like, okay, and you could go do this today, right, like so, go to perplexity dietai. If you get their pro subscription, you use what's called Claude Opus, which is like one of their highest, like you know, basically AI models that exist right now. I can go have it one shot. I can say something like write a 2000 word blog post about Google ads for apartments. I just did this over the weekend. I'm running an experiment related to this. So what perplexity does is it goes and it scrapes all of the search results or that target keyword, google ads for apartments. It pulls that back, it puts it in the context window and then Claude Opus writes an app, like basically a step by step tutorial on here's how to do that exact process. So I wrote 10 articles in five minutes. They were on the website in five minutes and they're already ranking on page two.
Speaker 2:So when you think about like that happening, like that whole system, where what's going to end up is that you know you're going to be a company, right, and you're going to just be able to like basically get all of this content out into the public, like without anybody doing anything, right, and again, we're still in the early days of this, but this is where I think it's headed.
Speaker 2:So I guess my, my, uh. The thought I'd love to leave people with is, like the just by adopting even the small versions of this right now, you're going to be so much farther ahead than the creators of the competitors that are going to not even think about this or even look at adopting this until you know, three years from now, five years from now, right, and like you're, you're there's, we're in a and and to. Another thing I'd like to kind of pull a thread on is like why is this going? Why is this happening so quickly? No-transcript. We had to like get mobile devices in every person's hand for that adoption to happen, in contrast with AI, like tomorrow, and we see this like on a daily basis. Like Twitter right now is literally like that's where demos are just dropping, like cool. We just figured out how to do this and like every day something happens where I'm like, oh my God, like this is and it's accessible instantly, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So that's why this like adoption piece there's no, there's no physical infrastructure that's really needed. This could be argued a little bit with, like we need better chips in our phones so that we can have like local LLMs run on our mobile devices and like these types of things. But like, in reality, majority of people can like right now, they can go to Chad GPT and interact with it from from a phone right, or from a from a laptop, and so I think, with all of this, it's like going to move incredibly quickly. But just by like being even, you know, engaging with these tools at all right now, it's going to get you so much farther ahead than everybody else. And where this all goes and where I see this going is like especially for early stage companies. Like you're going to build a great product and you're going to be like cool, we want to get leads.
Speaker 2:You know whether it's calls or form submissions or whatever and like go figure that out right and there's going to be these tools that you plug into and go do that, and I think that that is the larger like the thing that's on the horizon. That's super exciting but also super scary, I think, for business owners and like people trying to start companies. It's going to enable more and more people to do just like create business right. It's like you get to focus on the business. At its core is two things Like you build something people want to buy and you can sell it. Like it's two sides of the same coin.
Speaker 2:At its simplest form, that's what a company is, and for a lot of people it's like they're good at one of those things often are good at marketing but they're terrible at products, or they're good at product and they're terrible at marketing. So if you can focus on like a cool, like we can build, like I can build a great product, and then that marketing component is handled for me Like, that is, I think, the thing that's on the horizon that is coming way faster than people, I think, realize.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think you know I want to leave this with everybody that's still a skeptic about AI is, even if it spits out something that you're not in love with. The point is to figure out what you don't like. That way it like you can work it back and forth. Like I tell everybody, the secret is in the prompting. And so you know, go try Swell by the way, I am in a proud affiliate of Swell so you can go to crystalprofitcom forward, slash Swell and check it out. But I want you to go in there and I want you to upload a piece of content and then, if it spits out something and you're like I don't like this, don't just shut the app, look at it and say, well, why don't I like this? Like start questioning it, because the next time you could say, oh well, I didn't love it because it didn't have subtitles. Next time you know to say, add subtitles to this blog post, or you know.
Speaker 2:I wanted this type of you know video that was 15 seconds, or this type of you know, like there's so many ways that you can manipulate it Like just keep working with it and don't get frustrated and give up.
Speaker 1:That is my piece of advice to anyone who's just getting started.
Speaker 2:No, I love that and I think that's the thing is, like you can interact with this and do it over and over again. Like the process that I see people having the most success with is like find the prompt chain that like creates the output you're looking for. And then I don't ever want to chat with AI. Once I figured out how to get it to do the thing that I want it to do right, maybe it's these three steps. I broke it down into these three steps. Or say I'm writing a blog post and I'm like okay, define the tone, style and voice. Now write me a blog post outline. Now write me a blog post based on this outline and in the tone, style and the voice defined above. Once I've created that flow and I know that works, I never want to have to go and like write three prompts to the AI and copy back in.
Speaker 2:I want to save that as a template so that anytime I provide raw materials in the future, it just automatically generates that output and like. The analogy I've been using is like hey, we take oil and we make it into gas and diesel and aggregate, and, you know, plastics, et cetera. It's that same concept that's being applied here, so you know.
Speaker 1:Last thing, to leave your listeners with but this is so good it's all been. I mean, it's been gold to go with the natural resources there, like it's. It's just been so much gold today and this has been so fun. But before you go, cody, I have to get you. Are you up for three rapid fire questions? Okay, so the first one is and I feel like you've already touched on this, so maybe you could just elaborate is what piece of advice would you give to a brand new podcaster or content creator?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think. Do sustainable things and try to automate as much of that post-production as possible. Lean into these tools. It's going to pay off dividends long term and the biggest like your enemy is quitting, so all you have to do is survive. If you survive long enough, it will work, like I guarantee it will work. That's, that is the only filter for all of this.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. That's awesome. Okay, my next one is a two-part question, and it is what is the dream podcast you would love to be on and who is the dream guest that you would love to interview?
Speaker 2:Great question. I kind of just went on my dream podcast. So I went on Greg Eisenberg's podcast this last week and it's like literally just a startup ideas podcast, but it's like a top 100 entrepreneurship podcast in the U S? Um, super fun and it was just like great conversation. Uh, I think the other one that would be interesting for me uh, would be like, again, just in, I'm in this space so it's like my first million. They talk about internet companies and that's really what I build and what I'm obsessed with. So I think that that would be interesting. Dream guest um, probably. Just, it sounds dumb, but like, honestly, a musician that I'm like really interested in, like that's more interesting to me than the business side of these things, um, cause it's just like a whole different world than what I exist in. I do a little bit of work in the music space, but I I like that. That is probably you know where I would spend my time if I was trying to talk to those type of people.
Speaker 1:So that's awesome. That's awesome. Okay, my last question is do you consider yourself a perfectionist?
Speaker 2:No, I would definitely say that I am probably more big picture. I'm like two modes where it's like here's this very high view, or like I'm in the weeds. I get in the weeds when it's like figuring out, like I love the puzzles of it. So it's like figuring out the puzzle, defining the process, and then, like my you know, basically I want to hand that off to a person to manage it. I'm, I'm, uh, most effective when I do that, that type of work, and so I think that I'm definitely, like you know, cross the t's, dot the i's is not my personality, I'm, I I'd like to lean on people that are way more effective at that than I am. I'm, I'm more focused on like okay, like we're trying to get this outcome to happen, like how quickly can we get to that and what are the levers that I can figure out that we can pull to? Like make that, that, that time that's necessary, uh, decrease.
Speaker 1:Awesome, awesome, cody, this has just been so much fun, like I mean again, everybody go check out. Swell, we're going to have a link. You know where you're listening to this, but is there another place where everybody can learn more about all the awesome stuff that you're doing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm most active on LinkedIn and Twitter. You can go reach out to me there. And then SwellAIcom. You get in the support chat and say, hey, I have a question for you. I will jump into that. We're still a super small company. We're still a super small company. We're about eight people at this point, depending on if you count like our interns. Um, so, uh, yeah, that's uh. We're like happy to connect with anybody and answer any questions that, uh, that they have. So Awesome.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me. Crystal has been awesome. I hope to come back in the future, so.
Speaker 1:I told you it was going to be a fun interview and Cody did not disappoint. So I want you to go to crystalprofitcom forward, slash Swell S-W-E-L-L to try out Swell AI. This is such a fun tool and I'm going to be sharing other information about Swell. We actually have some upcoming videos that we're producing and some other fun things that I'm doing to partner with Cody and his team to bring some of the best AI resources to you.
Speaker 1:Whether you're just creating your content, you're repurposing it, you are trying to create that marketing brain, that marketing machine behind all the things that you're already doing with your content and your production. Like you are absolutely going to love Swell. So, again, go to crystalprofitcom forward, slash S-W-E-L-L. To try out Swell today. But that's all I have for you. So make sure you go, check out Swell and learn more about Cody's company and all the fantastic things that they are doing to help content creators and marketers grow their business but also create content in a way that keeps it fun and energetic and super creative. But that's all I have for you. So, as always, remember, keep it up. We all have to start somewhere.
