AI transcript
(upbeat music)
– Hey everyone, welcome to the Next Wave Podcast.
I’m Matt Wolf, I’m here with Nathan Lanz,
and today we’ve got an exciting episode for you,
live from HubSpot Inbound 2024.
So a little bit of a different, special episode.
We don’t normally GIs in front of an audience.
But we’re gonna talk about the AI-powered growth
that we’ve used for our own businesses in both Twitter,
our podcasts, our newsletter,
the various platforms that we have.
We’re gonna share some tools.
We’re gonna share some workflows.
Should be a fun session.
It’s just gonna be me and Nathan sort of having
a off-the-cuff conversation.
(upbeat music)
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But with HubSpot, they can achieve their best results
without the stress.
Tapping to HubSpot’s collection of AI tools,
breeze to pinpoint leads, capture attention,
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Visit hubspot.com/marketers to learn more.
(upbeat music)
But yeah, let’s go ahead and start by talking a little bit
about YouTube growth.
So I do have a YouTube channel.
Right now I’m hovering around 640,000 subscribers.
The channel is really focused on AI,
but surprise, surprise, I actually used AI quite a bit
to actually grow the YouTube channel.
So some of the ways that I’ve leveraged AI
to grow my YouTube channel,
number one is probably the most obvious way
that I’ve used AI to grow my YouTube channel
is the thumbnails.
So all of my thumbnails are created with AI right now.
And I’ll try to quickly walk through the workflow
of how I make some of those thumbnails.
– And they’re awesome, by the way.
That’s like the first way I noticed you
was like these crazy AI art thumbnails.
– So the way I’ve actually done that is,
I use a tool called stable diffusion for the AI art.
And stable diffusion has all sorts of like plugins
and add-ons that you can use with it.
And one of the add-ons is a tool called dream booth.
And dream booth actually lets you upload
about 20 images of your face, it learns your face,
and then you can go into stable diffusion
and say generate an image of Matt Wolf
in a field of strawberries.
And it will generate that image, right?
And it’ll generate an AI version of my face.
I’d say about 75% of the time they look horrible.
25% of the time they actually look decent.
And that’s kind of how I generate my thumbnails.
One of the ways that I like to do it now
to get a little bit more dialed in with those thumbnails
is I like to go and use either a tool like mid-journey
or Leonardo.
They make a little bit higher quality images in my opinion.
So I’ll generate an image of like guy standing
in a field of strawberries to go back to that same example.
And I’ll get that image generated
and then I’ll pull it into stable diffusion
and I’ll sort of mask out my face
and say, “Reflece this face with my face.”
So I get the main image generated
in a different AI image generator.
– That’s awesome.
– And then mask out the face.
– I was gonna ask you because in mid-journey,
obviously you can’t put your face in there.
So that’s how you do it, awesome.
– Yeah, yeah.
So that’s been one of the biggest sort of like growth hacks
I’ve had from my YouTube channel
is I’d like to make these bright thumbnails.
And a lot of times the prompts are like super bright,
super colorful, man-statting in a field of strawberries,
strawberries, vibrant colors, brilliant greens,
you know, things like that.
I try to make it as colorful as possible.
I want these thumbnails to really, really pop
when people see them on YouTube.
I want it to stand out among all the rest of them.
And mid-journey and Leonardo are the two best at that
in my opinion.
And so I use that sort of face swap technique.
Now, the other ways that I use AI
is I really, really love using Claude from Anthopic
for helping with like title generation.
And one of the things I like to do
is I’ll create my whole video.
So I’ll make a video that’s explaining
how to create a chatbot trained on your own information.
Something like that, right?
I’ll create a tutorial on how to do that.
When I’m done making that tutorial,
I’ll pull it into a tool like Descript
and get the whole transcription of that video.
I’ll take that entire transcription,
plug it into Claude, and then say,
help me come up with 10 titles
that will grab a lot of attention
based on this transcript.
– That works pretty well?
– It works pretty well.
It’ll give me, it’ll give me close, right?
Sometimes I’ll change the words a little bit.
Like the titles will be,
I don’t know if I’d actually say that in real life,
but for the most part, it gets me close.
It gets me a lot of ideas to use for those titles.
And I’ll use that as like this sort of rough draft,
the beginning of that title ideation phase.
And so that’s worked really, really well as well.
Another thing you can do with Claude
is they have this tool called Projects.
And Projects lets you upload additional information into it
that it can use as context.
And so what I’ll do is I’ll go find other YouTube titles
that I really like and I’ll make a text file.
And I will list out 30 different titles
that I came across and I’m like,
this title works really well.
This one got me to click.
This is a really good title.
I pull all those titles into a text document
and then upload those into a Claude project
and then say, use these as examples of titles
that have worked well.
And then Claude will sort of do a decent job
of finding titles that are sort of similar
to the ones that I gave it as example.
– I’ve done the same kind of thing with Twitter.
So you showed examples of things you like.
Do you show examples of things you don’t like or?
– Just things I like.
I mean, I couldn’t do that as well.
You could just like in the same text file,
here’s the titles that I like.
Here’s the titles that I really don’t like.
Use this information when creating new titles.
And that kind of stuff works really, really well.
I also use Claude for scripting.
One of the ways that I use Claude for scripting
that has been really effective
is almost the same idea as the title generation idea
where I will go and find maybe 10 to 15 different
YouTube videos that I really like the flow of the video.
They have like a beginning, a middle and end
and it’s just a perfect flow.
I watched the video, it grabbed my attention,
the whole video, I didn’t want to click away.
So what I’ll do is on YouTube,
you can grab the transcripts from those videos.
I’ll grab the transcripts from those like 15 different videos,
pull each one individually into a Claude project
and then tell it, this is the style of script
I want to make for my video,
make a video in the similar style.
And then I’ll all give it the topic.
I’ll say, I want to talk about the new open AI,
01 model, write me a script about open AI 01 model.
Here’s some information about it,
write it in the style of the scripts that I uploaded.
– Do you modify it or do you just do what it says?
– No, I modify them heavily.
What it gives me, it gives me that flow, right?
What I’m really looking for is the flow.
I don’t need a word for word script.
I don’t actually read a script when I make my videos.
It’s very off the cuff, but–
– I like the bullet points of like,
here’s the kind of stuff I’ll give up.
– There’s always like a, you know,
a hook in the beginning to grab the attention.
And then once you grab the attention,
then you want to move on to, you know,
showing what the end result is going to be.
And then you want to move on to getting into the tutorial.
And then you want to move into, you know,
and it gives you that flow of where you want the video to
start and where you want it to end.
And, you know, the little bits in the middle,
and it sort of helps me find that arc of the video.
And then I’ll use that as the sort of rough draft
outline for my video, because I will upload information
about the topic I want the video to be about.
And it will sort of give me the beats to follow
based on the scripts.
– Yeah, I wonder how many YouTubers know about
all of these strategies, because it seems like
your team is way leaner.
Like for the size of your channel,
like I know other YouTubers who have like
way larger teams for like the same quality
output that you’re doing.
– I have taught one other person in my process
who was making thumbnails for me for a little while.
So it is very sort of teachable, duplicatable.
Anybody can follow that flow.
The shorts is the same flow, right?
So I will go and grab the transcripts of shorts.
– Shorts is a brand new thing I just started doing.
I’ve done like 10 total shorts on my YouTube.
– I don’t know, I think you said with shorts
you’re allowing it, you’re like kind of following
what it says a little bit more on the shorts.
And the reason I do that for shorts
is ’cause you’ve got to hit 59 seconds or less, right?
And you’ve got to hit it like right on that time.
And so if I try to add limb too much, I tend to ramble.
I mean, I’ve already been talking about my YouTube stuff
for 10 minutes here, right?
– You’re still going on it.
– Yeah, I’ll keep going.
So I kind of need a script to keep that 59 seconds
or less on my YouTube shorts.
But if you go and find a short on YouTube
that you really like, if you go and you see
the youtube.com/shorts/, you know,
a long string of letters and numbers, right?
If you replace the word shorts with video,
it’ll actually take you to the video landing page
instead of the short landing page.
And you can grab the transcript from that page.
So for shorts, I’ll do that.
I’ll go and pull in transcripts for inspiration
so that I know I’m hitting all the sort of beats
that I want to hit throughout my video.
– Right.
Have you tried to get the faceless kind of YouTube stuff
or do you think it’s good?
– I haven’t yet, but I do want to explore it.
I was watching the Hagen session yesterday.
– Yeah.
– And that really made me want to play around
with some of that.
See if I, I want to test it,
put a video up on my channel where it’s,
I want to do the Hagen where it’s my face.
It sounds like my voice and then put some like B roll over it
and then see if anybody notices.
I don’t think I’ll do that for like all of my videos,
but I kind of want to test it.
Just be like, is there any way to call me out
and tell if it’s an AI generated version?
– Yeah. I think you know, I’m considering starting
an AI video agency with Lord.com and the two guys,
I’m working with it on,
they showed me a workflow yesterday using make.com
where we could like script out an entire YouTube video
and then use AI video to generate all of this stuff.
And it’s amazing.
I mean, like you probably could like grow
a pretty large channel.
– Oh yeah.
Once you get into some of those make.com workflows,
it gets really, really fun.
But yeah, those are some of my main YouTube strategies
that I’ve used AI to grow on YouTube.
– Yep.
– But let’s talk a little bit about Twitter
because you’ve grown a pretty big following
on Twitter as well.
– Yeah. I mean, so, I mean, I was like a Twitter lurker
for like five or six years.
Like I would use Twitter, like mostly just like read Twitter,
you know, now X, whatever.
And I never really tweeted often.
And then I still had like 5,000 followers,
just got did startups in Silicon Valley and rate up cap,
you know, raise VC funding and stuff.
So I had like 5,000 to start with.
And then I started getting really excited about AI.
Obviously like writing my newsletter.
And I was like, well, how do I grow the newsletter?
– Yeah.
– I was like, okay, well, I guess you use Twitter
and like share whatever you’re learning about.
And so I started doing that.
And then quickly I learned that I could use AI
in so many different ways to grow the Twitter.
And a lot of it’s similar to what you said.
Like I would teach the chat to BT,
like what are the kind of Twitter threads that work?
Like what are the kinds I like
and what are the kinds that I don’t like?
And it probably, it would save me like two or three hours
like doing threads.
And I’m not as active right now.
I’ve been more focusing on getting our podcast going
for the last five months.
But when I was like doing it every day,
like I could consistently get at least 300,000 views
on tweets every single day.
– So how are you using AI to do that?
Like what was the workflow?
– Well, so what I would do,
I use this thing that’s not an AI tool.
It’s called a tweet hunter.
It’s like a Chrome extension.
So I would use that.
And then what tweet hunter would do is you can look at
like who are the top people in your category, right?
So it’s like, okay, AI or creators or whatever.
You can look up those people
and then you can see what are their top tweets ever, right?
So I would do that and I would make a list.
Like, here’s the people I really want to,
not copy, but I like their style.
And so I would look at,
and I would get their top one or two tweets
and I would put that into a chat to BT
and say, here’s the kind of tweets I like.
I’d use AI as an editor, not as like the writer.
‘Cause like the writer, I felt like there’s only
a few niche use cases where you can actually use it
to like write the content.
I think it works a little bit better in LinkedIn.
I’m not sure why, maybe like the quality of the content
is a little bit different on LinkedIn.
On Twitter, I felt like it writing the content
for me didn’t do that well.
So I would write the content myself
and then use it as an editor.
And I felt like they need probably like two hours or so.
‘Cause like editing a Twitter thread
to make it like really go viral can take hours.
Like I’d be sitting at a coffee shop in Kyoto,
like just sitting there like, okay, look at it again.
Let me look at the hook again.
And then having the AI where I could just like
show it all that and get feedback.
It’s taking me so much time.
And actually I felt like when I was doing it myself,
I was getting a lot less views.
And as soon as I started using AI as like an editor,
all of a sudden like, oh, every time I tweet,
it goes viral.
Well, that’s great.
– Yeah, yeah.
(upbeat music)
– We’ll be right back.
But first I wanna tell you about another great podcast
you’re gonna wanna listen to.
It’s called Science of Scaling, hosted by Mark Roberge.
And it’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network,
the audio destination for business professionals.
Each week hosts Mark Roberge,
founding chief revenue officer at HubSpot,
senior lecturer at Harvard Business School
and co-founder of Stage 2 Capital,
sits down with the most successful sales leaders in tech
to learn the secrets, strategies, and tactics
to scaling your company’s growth.
He recently did a great episode called,
“How Do You Solve for a Siloed Marketing in Sales?”
And I personally learned a lot from it.
You’re gonna wanna check out the podcast,
listen to Science of Scaling wherever you get your podcasts.
(upbeat music)
Now you were telling me a story about Naval Ravicon, right?
– Yeah, a lot of things came from me growing on Twitter.
I mean, like, in a way, like,
’cause like very quickly I went for like 5,000 followers,
like 50,000, I think in like three months.
– Right.
– But, you know, a lot of stuff came from that.
Like I went on TV two or three times
and talked about AI, Elon Musk started responding to me.
– Right.
– You know, Jeff Bezos followed both of us.
– Right.
– And that’s kinda how we connected is
’cause Jeff Bezos saw one of my tweets
and followed both of us.
– Well, I think it was a tweet that you put that was like,
here’s the people to follow in AI
and you listen to a bunch of people
and my name was one of them.
– Yeah.
– Jeff Bezos just followed that whole list.
– The idea for that thread came from AI.
So I was like, here’s the kind of stuff
that’s the other people doing in different categories.
– Right.
– And I do that in the AI category.
– Yeah.
– Like, oh, here’s the top people to follow or, you know,
and those kind of, you know,
threads don’t get as many views,
but they would like,
a lot of people I would mention, they would all follow me.
– Yeah.
– Right, so in terms of the Naval,
that was the one use case where I found with the Twitter
that you could actually use AI
to actually create the content.
To give people context,
Naval Ravik, the founder of Angel List,
in Silicon Valley,
he’s one of the most famous people in Silicon Valley.
He did a great podcast episode with Joe Rogan.
It’s one of my favorite podcast episodes ever
’cause it talks all about like,
everything from business to like life, right?
How to live a good life.
And so I literally just like fed the transcript
of that episode into chat to BT.
And so he, and then he already knew like,
what kind of threads I like and all that sort of,
had that context.
And I just fed it to transcript and said,
make me a thread, put that into Twitter, you know, Twitter.
And yeah, it got like maybe like 500,000 views.
Naval retweeted it.
I didn’t write any of it at all.
I literally just like fed it to chat to BT and everything.
– Do you remember what sort of prompt you gave
to just to get that kind of output for it?
– It was literally just like me giving you the contact.
So here’s the threads I like and the ones I don’t like.
– Okay.
– Right, ’cause like, yeah,
I want to have like a good hook and all that,
but I don’t want to be like too cheesy.
I don’t want to go too like click maybe.
Oh, there’s like a fine line there, right?
Like a little bit, but not too much, right?
And it’s literally just providing the context,
kind of like the same thing you do with YouTube, right?
Like giving it like, here’s the kind of titles I like,
or, you know, the flow as I like.
Same kind of thing works for Twitter,
probably works better for LinkedIn, honestly.
– Yeah, yeah.
And I mean, something like that works
if you’re trying to grow a podcast
or grow a YouTube channel or even grow a newsletter, right?
You can go in, plug the content from the YouTube video
or the transcript from the podcast
or the entire newsletter that you just wrote up,
plug in the chat GPT and say, hey, summarize this
into something that would work well on it as a Twitter thread.
And at the end, add your little call to action.
And yeah, I think there’s a lot of ways
we probably could be using AI more, right?
Like we both have AI newsletters, you know,
he’s got future tools, I’ve got lord.com.
And I used to do more like free call to actions
and post call to actions to promote my newsletters.
Like, okay.
– So you need to find that?
What’s a free call to action?
– A free call to action is like, okay,
my newsletter is coming out tomorrow.
Here’s what you might learn in this newsletter issue, right?
– Okay.
– And then the post is yesterday, so-and-so, you know,
20,000 people got this newsletter,
you know, the Lord newsletter, here’s what I learned.
Here’s what you missed out on, basically.
Got it.
And subscribe.
And so those typically don’t get tons of views.
They may get like 10,000 views versus like one of my other
tweets getting like over a hundred thousand views,
but they convert really well.
And so, yeah, I think you probably,
we probably should be automating that, right?
Like we probably should just like be like feeding our
newsletter into like a system and then having it like,
just generate those tweets and like schedule them
through the Twitter API or something.
– Yeah, yeah.
I like that idea.
I think when it comes to Twitter personally,
I still really like it to be me, right?
It’s going to be my voice.
But if we started like a next wave podcast Twitter,
I could see like trying to automate that with, you know,
here’s what we talked about in this episode.
Every episode gets fed and like you can use something
like make.com, right?
And I’m just sort of spitball like ideas here.
You could use something like make.com,
where whenever you make a new podcast episode,
it watches that RSS feed, pulls it into like a descript
or some sort of transcription tool, right?
– Or we can make a newsletter.
– Transcribe it.
And then it automatically uses the cloud or GPT API
to then turn it into a Twitter thread
and then automatically post on a Twitter account.
That actually is something we probably should do
with the next wave.
– Yeah, we can make a newsletter, right?
We could like, we’re like the key takeaways of every issue.
And then you could also automate the promotion of as well.
Yeah.
– Yeah, well, I mean, let’s talk a little bit more
about some of these newsletter strategies
to like grow a newsletter, right?
We’ve both grown fairly substantial sized
newsletters in the AI space.
You’ve got Lord.com, I’ve got the future tools newsletter.
So we’ve used obviously AI to help grow those
and manage them and maintain them.
One of the ways I’ve been experimenting with growing it
is actually using AI to create the sort of lead magnet
to bring somebody onto the list in the first place.
And with these AI tools, it’s so easy to create
really high value lead magnets right now, right?
Like I can go and take some of my YouTube tutorials
that teach really valuable concepts
that people really wanna learn, have those transcribed,
pull those transcriptions into something
like Claude or Chad GPT and say,
this is a transcription, make it read more like an ebook
or make it read more like a blog post
or you know, that sort of thing.
So that it feels more readable
than just reading a transcription, right?
And now you’ve got a PDF that you can offer
as an opt-in to get people to join your newsletter.
Another thing that’s gotten really, really easy now
is even easier now with the OpenAI 01 platform
is going and creating a simple software app, right?
Like so some of the things that I’ve seen,
I’ve seen like in the real estate industry,
people making like fairly simple mortgage calculators
and things like that, make really simple tools
where you ask for the email in order to use the tool
and you put a little check box below
and saying, would you also like to sign up
to my newsletter when you use this tool?
That reminds me of the stuff that Greg Isenberg
was talking about when you came on our show,
like creating widgets for like SEO and stuff, right?
Like you see widgets, you have to like hire a team
and go build that and like now,
especially like with 01 that just came out,
like OpenAI recently released 01.
It’s not clear if it’s a new model or what it is,
but it’s way better at coding
and like creating apps rather than before.
And so I’m pretty sure most of these widgets now,
like a single creator can create like 10 useful widgets
and like get tons of SEO traffic.
There’s so many things like it’s hard to figure out
like what to do ’cause like there’s plenty of opportunities
now.
You can really dial it in towards whatever niche
you’re operating in.
So you can create something like really, really customized
just for the people that you’re speaking to.
And there’s another tool that’s been fairly popular lately
called Cursor, which is like a fork of visual studio code.
But it’s got like AI scripting directly built in.
I use Cursor, it’s amazing.
Like I’m like an amateur coder,
like I’ve been in Silicon Valley for a long time
so I used to code more and now I don’t code a lot,
but now it’s like easier to go back to coding
’cause like it can look at your entire code base
and like suggest changes or like,
oh, here’s a bug in the code
and like it knows the entire code base.
It’s right.
Yeah.
You know, in another way that I use AI for my newsletter
is I let it to be my proofreader for me.
It’s essentially become like my editor, right?
I actually have a team that helps me
with the newsletter as well now,
but I still write a bunch of it.
My team still writes a bunch of it,
but the final pass, we let AI look at it
and we usually plug it into,
I was using chat GBT in the beginning,
now I’m using Claude a little bit more,
but I’ll plug in the whole newsletter
and I’ll say proofread this for grammar,
spelling and readability and it will look through it
and it’ll tell me all the grammar and spelling
looks pretty good, but you might wanna, you know,
move this sentence down a little bit,
move this sentence up a little bit.
It just makes it easier to follow
what you’re trying to say, right?
And it’s really good as sort of rearranging some,
you know, little nuanced stuff in the email
to make it more readable for the newsletter subscribers.
– Yeah, I found the same thing,
like I tried to have AI write part of my newsletter
and like it’s really clear when like you’re using AI
to actually write the thing, right?
Like I tried that one issue
and like people like responded back, like, what is this?
– Yeah, yeah.
– Like, okay, that’s obviously not Nathan, like, okay.
And so I use Claude to like edit my newsletter.
– Yeah, for sure, for sure.
And then we also talked a little bit
about the Twitter threads, right?
Like, I’m assuming is Twitter the way
that you’ve grown your list the most?
Is it mostly because of the–
– Yeah, yeah, it’s mostly been Twitter.
Like, you see every time I do a viral tweet, you know,
you get like 100 to 200 subscribers every single time.
– Yeah.
– You know, of course some people unfollow,
you might lose 10 or 20 people.
They’re like, yeah, and it’s pretty consistent.
– Yeah, yeah, I mean, my newsletter’s mostly grown
off the back of the Future Tools website
a little bit from the YouTube channel.
I found that a lot of people, like I always have a call
to action at the end of my YouTube video
that goes to subscribe to the Future Tools newsletter.
I find that most of the traffic that goes
to the newsletter does not actually come from YouTube.
It mostly comes from the Future Tools website,
which is a tool that I built to help sort of organize.
– Yeah, it’s hard to convert like different mediums, right?
From like video to text and vice versa.
– Yeah, that’s really the way that I’ve grown my newsletter.
I’m at about 160,000 subscribers on mine now,
but it’s mostly come from basically building a tool
over at Future Tools, a tool to help you find tools.
– Yeah, you were talking about widgets earlier.
So have you actually created the widgets yet?
Or is that like an idea you’re thinking about using AI for?
Or you already have done it?
– So I’ve messed around creating a few widgets,
but I actually haven’t used them as an opt-in yet.
So it’s something that I want to play around with more.
I mean, if you look at Future Tools as a tool
that helps you find tools,
that’s the biggest growth for my newsletter, right?
But I mess with VS Code a lot.
I’ve been using Claude mostly for coding.
I’m gonna probably start using OpenAI01
for coding a little bit.
And I’ve made little widgets and stuff
that I use internally for myself,
but I haven’t actually given many away yet.
– Yeah, I think you should,
’cause like you said that Future Tools,
so Matt has Future Tools,
it’s basically the top AI tools directory.
And my understanding is like when people search for AI tools,
you’re often like the top two Google results
at the time, right?
– Yeah, yeah, with Future Tools,
yeah, it’s really well SEOed.
And all of the descriptions of every single tool
on Future Tools was generated with AI.
– That’s great.
– So basically the way that works is perplexity goes
and looks at the tool, gives me a description of the tool.
All of this is through a make.com automation, right?
– Yeah, we’re not sponsored by make.com.
– We’re not either.
But basically perplexity will go and look at the tool,
give me a description of the tool,
send that description over to Claude.
Claude will write a single paragraph of it
and then feed it into Webflow,
which is what the whole database is built on top of.
So that workflow is all AI.
Every single description on that entire site is AI.
And if anybody says that, you know,
you can’t rank for AI-generated content,
I’m proof that that’s false,
because it’s usually the tool that’s number one.
And then the Future Tools listing for that tool,
that’s number two for a lot of AI tools.
– Yeah, I know.
I mean, so we had Greg Eisberg on like several times.
And I know he has like an AI SEO agency
and he said is like killing it.
Like they’re doing it really well.
And I think they’re mainly,
they’ll do stuff where they have like AI generate
like thousands of pages of content and they rank.
And then what they do is then they’ll see,
’cause obviously the quality will be a little bit lower
with the AI content.
And so what they’ll do is they’ll generate
like thousands of pages of content
and they’ll see what it ranks.
And once they find out what’s ranking,
then they’ll go in with humans and edit the ones
that are ranking to make them really, really good.
– Smart.
– Right?
Yeah, so that’s, if you have like one key takeaway,
that’s one, probably everyone who’s doing SEO
should be probably doing that right now.
– Yeah, one thing I want to share before we wrap up,
’cause we’ve got a couple minutes left here,
is if you don’t have a newsletter,
it’s probably easier than ever to have a newsletter
because you can use AI to sort of help you out,
at least at the very least outline the newsletter
if you still want to write it yourself, right?
So if you’re in like a specific niche,
like we’re both making newsletters in the AI niche,
I can go and find, you know,
the seven biggest news stories in the AI world
for the week, take all seven of those stories,
plug them into something like cloud or chat GPT,
and then say, you know, either write up
or outline a newsletter for me
with all of these news pieces worked into it.
And you can even feed it some of your past content
so that it’ll try to write sort of in your style.
And now you’ve got a quick and easy newsletter,
at least at the very least,
you’ve got an outline or a rough draft
that you can go back in
and sort of add your own voice to,
but it makes it really, really easy
to consistently put out a new newsletter.
Just pick your niche,
make sure you’re keeping an eye on the news in that niche,
and then feed that in once a week or twice a week
or whatever the cadence of your newsletter is.
– Yeah, and I think it works for like curation
focused newsletters.
I do wonder though, like in the next few years,
if that’s gonna die off,
because the AI tools are gonna get so good
that you’ll just be able to like have your own
custom newsletter of like curated information.
And then–
– Oh, it’s newsletter, well, I think.
– Yeah, so like, that’s why I’m trying to be like
more editorial too,
like actually writing what I think
about stuff emergency is just like, here it is, you know.
– Yeah, yeah, no, I definitely think
that’s where it’s gonna go.
Unfortunately, that’s probably gonna sort of
devalue your newsletters,
but we still have a window of opportunity right now.
– We still have a podcast.
So, you know, I feel like people should always capture
that window of opportunity while you’ve got it and–
– I mean, it’s helped us, so we started our podcast
with HubSpot maybe five months ago.
We got, I don’t know, three something thousand subscribers
in the first month, and now we’re–
– Where are the episodes?
Was it first episode?
– Oh yeah, that’s right.
– Yeah.
– And then now we’re like 10.3, I mean, in five months,
and a lot of that’s from our newsletters.
So, yeah, newsletters work.
– Yeah, yeah, well, I think that’s about
all of the time we have.
This has been a fun, interesting episode.
Fun story, this is actually the first time
Nathan and I have met live in person.
We’ve been doing a, we’ve known each other
for a couple of years now.
We’ve been doing a podcast.
– I told him I was six months old, you know.
– But this is actually our first time meeting in person.
He lives in Japan, I live in San Diego.
And we’ve finally converged here at HubSpot
to record a few of these episodes live.
So, we really appreciate everybody hanging out with us
and enjoying the podcast.
If you want to hear more content like what we did here,
our podcast is on YouTube.
It’s called the Next Wave Podcast.
And you can find the audio version
wherever you subscribe to podcasts.
So, thanks again for hanging out with us
and tuning into this episode.
– Thank y’all.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
[MUSIC PLAYING]
– Hey everyone, welcome to the Next Wave Podcast.
I’m Matt Wolf, I’m here with Nathan Lanz,
and today we’ve got an exciting episode for you,
live from HubSpot Inbound 2024.
So a little bit of a different, special episode.
We don’t normally GIs in front of an audience.
But we’re gonna talk about the AI-powered growth
that we’ve used for our own businesses in both Twitter,
our podcasts, our newsletter,
the various platforms that we have.
We’re gonna share some tools.
We’re gonna share some workflows.
Should be a fun session.
It’s just gonna be me and Nathan sort of having
a off-the-cuff conversation.
(upbeat music)
When all your marketing team does is put out fires,
they burn out.
But with HubSpot, they can achieve their best results
without the stress.
Tapping to HubSpot’s collection of AI tools,
breeze to pinpoint leads, capture attention,
and access all your data in one place.
Keep your marketers cool,
and your campaign results hotter than ever.
Visit hubspot.com/marketers to learn more.
(upbeat music)
But yeah, let’s go ahead and start by talking a little bit
about YouTube growth.
So I do have a YouTube channel.
Right now I’m hovering around 640,000 subscribers.
The channel is really focused on AI,
but surprise, surprise, I actually used AI quite a bit
to actually grow the YouTube channel.
So some of the ways that I’ve leveraged AI
to grow my YouTube channel,
number one is probably the most obvious way
that I’ve used AI to grow my YouTube channel
is the thumbnails.
So all of my thumbnails are created with AI right now.
And I’ll try to quickly walk through the workflow
of how I make some of those thumbnails.
– And they’re awesome, by the way.
That’s like the first way I noticed you
was like these crazy AI art thumbnails.
– So the way I’ve actually done that is,
I use a tool called stable diffusion for the AI art.
And stable diffusion has all sorts of like plugins
and add-ons that you can use with it.
And one of the add-ons is a tool called dream booth.
And dream booth actually lets you upload
about 20 images of your face, it learns your face,
and then you can go into stable diffusion
and say generate an image of Matt Wolf
in a field of strawberries.
And it will generate that image, right?
And it’ll generate an AI version of my face.
I’d say about 75% of the time they look horrible.
25% of the time they actually look decent.
And that’s kind of how I generate my thumbnails.
One of the ways that I like to do it now
to get a little bit more dialed in with those thumbnails
is I like to go and use either a tool like mid-journey
or Leonardo.
They make a little bit higher quality images in my opinion.
So I’ll generate an image of like guy standing
in a field of strawberries to go back to that same example.
And I’ll get that image generated
and then I’ll pull it into stable diffusion
and I’ll sort of mask out my face
and say, “Reflece this face with my face.”
So I get the main image generated
in a different AI image generator.
– That’s awesome.
– And then mask out the face.
– I was gonna ask you because in mid-journey,
obviously you can’t put your face in there.
So that’s how you do it, awesome.
– Yeah, yeah.
So that’s been one of the biggest sort of like growth hacks
I’ve had from my YouTube channel
is I’d like to make these bright thumbnails.
And a lot of times the prompts are like super bright,
super colorful, man-statting in a field of strawberries,
strawberries, vibrant colors, brilliant greens,
you know, things like that.
I try to make it as colorful as possible.
I want these thumbnails to really, really pop
when people see them on YouTube.
I want it to stand out among all the rest of them.
And mid-journey and Leonardo are the two best at that
in my opinion.
And so I use that sort of face swap technique.
Now, the other ways that I use AI
is I really, really love using Claude from Anthopic
for helping with like title generation.
And one of the things I like to do
is I’ll create my whole video.
So I’ll make a video that’s explaining
how to create a chatbot trained on your own information.
Something like that, right?
I’ll create a tutorial on how to do that.
When I’m done making that tutorial,
I’ll pull it into a tool like Descript
and get the whole transcription of that video.
I’ll take that entire transcription,
plug it into Claude, and then say,
help me come up with 10 titles
that will grab a lot of attention
based on this transcript.
– That works pretty well?
– It works pretty well.
It’ll give me, it’ll give me close, right?
Sometimes I’ll change the words a little bit.
Like the titles will be,
I don’t know if I’d actually say that in real life,
but for the most part, it gets me close.
It gets me a lot of ideas to use for those titles.
And I’ll use that as like this sort of rough draft,
the beginning of that title ideation phase.
And so that’s worked really, really well as well.
Another thing you can do with Claude
is they have this tool called Projects.
And Projects lets you upload additional information into it
that it can use as context.
And so what I’ll do is I’ll go find other YouTube titles
that I really like and I’ll make a text file.
And I will list out 30 different titles
that I came across and I’m like,
this title works really well.
This one got me to click.
This is a really good title.
I pull all those titles into a text document
and then upload those into a Claude project
and then say, use these as examples of titles
that have worked well.
And then Claude will sort of do a decent job
of finding titles that are sort of similar
to the ones that I gave it as example.
– I’ve done the same kind of thing with Twitter.
So you showed examples of things you like.
Do you show examples of things you don’t like or?
– Just things I like.
I mean, I couldn’t do that as well.
You could just like in the same text file,
here’s the titles that I like.
Here’s the titles that I really don’t like.
Use this information when creating new titles.
And that kind of stuff works really, really well.
I also use Claude for scripting.
One of the ways that I use Claude for scripting
that has been really effective
is almost the same idea as the title generation idea
where I will go and find maybe 10 to 15 different
YouTube videos that I really like the flow of the video.
They have like a beginning, a middle and end
and it’s just a perfect flow.
I watched the video, it grabbed my attention,
the whole video, I didn’t want to click away.
So what I’ll do is on YouTube,
you can grab the transcripts from those videos.
I’ll grab the transcripts from those like 15 different videos,
pull each one individually into a Claude project
and then tell it, this is the style of script
I want to make for my video,
make a video in the similar style.
And then I’ll all give it the topic.
I’ll say, I want to talk about the new open AI,
01 model, write me a script about open AI 01 model.
Here’s some information about it,
write it in the style of the scripts that I uploaded.
– Do you modify it or do you just do what it says?
– No, I modify them heavily.
What it gives me, it gives me that flow, right?
What I’m really looking for is the flow.
I don’t need a word for word script.
I don’t actually read a script when I make my videos.
It’s very off the cuff, but–
– I like the bullet points of like,
here’s the kind of stuff I’ll give up.
– There’s always like a, you know,
a hook in the beginning to grab the attention.
And then once you grab the attention,
then you want to move on to, you know,
showing what the end result is going to be.
And then you want to move on to getting into the tutorial.
And then you want to move into, you know,
and it gives you that flow of where you want the video to
start and where you want it to end.
And, you know, the little bits in the middle,
and it sort of helps me find that arc of the video.
And then I’ll use that as the sort of rough draft
outline for my video, because I will upload information
about the topic I want the video to be about.
And it will sort of give me the beats to follow
based on the scripts.
– Yeah, I wonder how many YouTubers know about
all of these strategies, because it seems like
your team is way leaner.
Like for the size of your channel,
like I know other YouTubers who have like
way larger teams for like the same quality
output that you’re doing.
– I have taught one other person in my process
who was making thumbnails for me for a little while.
So it is very sort of teachable, duplicatable.
Anybody can follow that flow.
The shorts is the same flow, right?
So I will go and grab the transcripts of shorts.
– Shorts is a brand new thing I just started doing.
I’ve done like 10 total shorts on my YouTube.
– I don’t know, I think you said with shorts
you’re allowing it, you’re like kind of following
what it says a little bit more on the shorts.
And the reason I do that for shorts
is ’cause you’ve got to hit 59 seconds or less, right?
And you’ve got to hit it like right on that time.
And so if I try to add limb too much, I tend to ramble.
I mean, I’ve already been talking about my YouTube stuff
for 10 minutes here, right?
– You’re still going on it.
– Yeah, I’ll keep going.
So I kind of need a script to keep that 59 seconds
or less on my YouTube shorts.
But if you go and find a short on YouTube
that you really like, if you go and you see
the youtube.com/shorts/, you know,
a long string of letters and numbers, right?
If you replace the word shorts with video,
it’ll actually take you to the video landing page
instead of the short landing page.
And you can grab the transcript from that page.
So for shorts, I’ll do that.
I’ll go and pull in transcripts for inspiration
so that I know I’m hitting all the sort of beats
that I want to hit throughout my video.
– Right.
Have you tried to get the faceless kind of YouTube stuff
or do you think it’s good?
– I haven’t yet, but I do want to explore it.
I was watching the Hagen session yesterday.
– Yeah.
– And that really made me want to play around
with some of that.
See if I, I want to test it,
put a video up on my channel where it’s,
I want to do the Hagen where it’s my face.
It sounds like my voice and then put some like B roll over it
and then see if anybody notices.
I don’t think I’ll do that for like all of my videos,
but I kind of want to test it.
Just be like, is there any way to call me out
and tell if it’s an AI generated version?
– Yeah. I think you know, I’m considering starting
an AI video agency with Lord.com and the two guys,
I’m working with it on,
they showed me a workflow yesterday using make.com
where we could like script out an entire YouTube video
and then use AI video to generate all of this stuff.
And it’s amazing.
I mean, like you probably could like grow
a pretty large channel.
– Oh yeah.
Once you get into some of those make.com workflows,
it gets really, really fun.
But yeah, those are some of my main YouTube strategies
that I’ve used AI to grow on YouTube.
– Yep.
– But let’s talk a little bit about Twitter
because you’ve grown a pretty big following
on Twitter as well.
– Yeah. I mean, so, I mean, I was like a Twitter lurker
for like five or six years.
Like I would use Twitter, like mostly just like read Twitter,
you know, now X, whatever.
And I never really tweeted often.
And then I still had like 5,000 followers,
just got did startups in Silicon Valley and rate up cap,
you know, raise VC funding and stuff.
So I had like 5,000 to start with.
And then I started getting really excited about AI.
Obviously like writing my newsletter.
And I was like, well, how do I grow the newsletter?
– Yeah.
– I was like, okay, well, I guess you use Twitter
and like share whatever you’re learning about.
And so I started doing that.
And then quickly I learned that I could use AI
in so many different ways to grow the Twitter.
And a lot of it’s similar to what you said.
Like I would teach the chat to BT,
like what are the kind of Twitter threads that work?
Like what are the kinds I like
and what are the kinds that I don’t like?
And it probably, it would save me like two or three hours
like doing threads.
And I’m not as active right now.
I’ve been more focusing on getting our podcast going
for the last five months.
But when I was like doing it every day,
like I could consistently get at least 300,000 views
on tweets every single day.
– So how are you using AI to do that?
Like what was the workflow?
– Well, so what I would do,
I use this thing that’s not an AI tool.
It’s called a tweet hunter.
It’s like a Chrome extension.
So I would use that.
And then what tweet hunter would do is you can look at
like who are the top people in your category, right?
So it’s like, okay, AI or creators or whatever.
You can look up those people
and then you can see what are their top tweets ever, right?
So I would do that and I would make a list.
Like, here’s the people I really want to,
not copy, but I like their style.
And so I would look at,
and I would get their top one or two tweets
and I would put that into a chat to BT
and say, here’s the kind of tweets I like.
I’d use AI as an editor, not as like the writer.
‘Cause like the writer, I felt like there’s only
a few niche use cases where you can actually use it
to like write the content.
I think it works a little bit better in LinkedIn.
I’m not sure why, maybe like the quality of the content
is a little bit different on LinkedIn.
On Twitter, I felt like it writing the content
for me didn’t do that well.
So I would write the content myself
and then use it as an editor.
And I felt like they need probably like two hours or so.
‘Cause like editing a Twitter thread
to make it like really go viral can take hours.
Like I’d be sitting at a coffee shop in Kyoto,
like just sitting there like, okay, look at it again.
Let me look at the hook again.
And then having the AI where I could just like
show it all that and get feedback.
It’s taking me so much time.
And actually I felt like when I was doing it myself,
I was getting a lot less views.
And as soon as I started using AI as like an editor,
all of a sudden like, oh, every time I tweet,
it goes viral.
Well, that’s great.
– Yeah, yeah.
(upbeat music)
– We’ll be right back.
But first I wanna tell you about another great podcast
you’re gonna wanna listen to.
It’s called Science of Scaling, hosted by Mark Roberge.
And it’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network,
the audio destination for business professionals.
Each week hosts Mark Roberge,
founding chief revenue officer at HubSpot,
senior lecturer at Harvard Business School
and co-founder of Stage 2 Capital,
sits down with the most successful sales leaders in tech
to learn the secrets, strategies, and tactics
to scaling your company’s growth.
He recently did a great episode called,
“How Do You Solve for a Siloed Marketing in Sales?”
And I personally learned a lot from it.
You’re gonna wanna check out the podcast,
listen to Science of Scaling wherever you get your podcasts.
(upbeat music)
Now you were telling me a story about Naval Ravicon, right?
– Yeah, a lot of things came from me growing on Twitter.
I mean, like, in a way, like,
’cause like very quickly I went for like 5,000 followers,
like 50,000, I think in like three months.
– Right.
– But, you know, a lot of stuff came from that.
Like I went on TV two or three times
and talked about AI, Elon Musk started responding to me.
– Right.
– You know, Jeff Bezos followed both of us.
– Right.
– And that’s kinda how we connected is
’cause Jeff Bezos saw one of my tweets
and followed both of us.
– Well, I think it was a tweet that you put that was like,
here’s the people to follow in AI
and you listen to a bunch of people
and my name was one of them.
– Yeah.
– Jeff Bezos just followed that whole list.
– The idea for that thread came from AI.
So I was like, here’s the kind of stuff
that’s the other people doing in different categories.
– Right.
– And I do that in the AI category.
– Yeah.
– Like, oh, here’s the top people to follow or, you know,
and those kind of, you know,
threads don’t get as many views,
but they would like,
a lot of people I would mention, they would all follow me.
– Yeah.
– Right, so in terms of the Naval,
that was the one use case where I found with the Twitter
that you could actually use AI
to actually create the content.
To give people context,
Naval Ravik, the founder of Angel List,
in Silicon Valley,
he’s one of the most famous people in Silicon Valley.
He did a great podcast episode with Joe Rogan.
It’s one of my favorite podcast episodes ever
’cause it talks all about like,
everything from business to like life, right?
How to live a good life.
And so I literally just like fed the transcript
of that episode into chat to BT.
And so he, and then he already knew like,
what kind of threads I like and all that sort of,
had that context.
And I just fed it to transcript and said,
make me a thread, put that into Twitter, you know, Twitter.
And yeah, it got like maybe like 500,000 views.
Naval retweeted it.
I didn’t write any of it at all.
I literally just like fed it to chat to BT and everything.
– Do you remember what sort of prompt you gave
to just to get that kind of output for it?
– It was literally just like me giving you the contact.
So here’s the threads I like and the ones I don’t like.
– Okay.
– Right, ’cause like, yeah,
I want to have like a good hook and all that,
but I don’t want to be like too cheesy.
I don’t want to go too like click maybe.
Oh, there’s like a fine line there, right?
Like a little bit, but not too much, right?
And it’s literally just providing the context,
kind of like the same thing you do with YouTube, right?
Like giving it like, here’s the kind of titles I like,
or, you know, the flow as I like.
Same kind of thing works for Twitter,
probably works better for LinkedIn, honestly.
– Yeah, yeah.
And I mean, something like that works
if you’re trying to grow a podcast
or grow a YouTube channel or even grow a newsletter, right?
You can go in, plug the content from the YouTube video
or the transcript from the podcast
or the entire newsletter that you just wrote up,
plug in the chat GPT and say, hey, summarize this
into something that would work well on it as a Twitter thread.
And at the end, add your little call to action.
And yeah, I think there’s a lot of ways
we probably could be using AI more, right?
Like we both have AI newsletters, you know,
he’s got future tools, I’ve got lord.com.
And I used to do more like free call to actions
and post call to actions to promote my newsletters.
Like, okay.
– So you need to find that?
What’s a free call to action?
– A free call to action is like, okay,
my newsletter is coming out tomorrow.
Here’s what you might learn in this newsletter issue, right?
– Okay.
– And then the post is yesterday, so-and-so, you know,
20,000 people got this newsletter,
you know, the Lord newsletter, here’s what I learned.
Here’s what you missed out on, basically.
Got it.
And subscribe.
And so those typically don’t get tons of views.
They may get like 10,000 views versus like one of my other
tweets getting like over a hundred thousand views,
but they convert really well.
And so, yeah, I think you probably,
we probably should be automating that, right?
Like we probably should just like be like feeding our
newsletter into like a system and then having it like,
just generate those tweets and like schedule them
through the Twitter API or something.
– Yeah, yeah.
I like that idea.
I think when it comes to Twitter personally,
I still really like it to be me, right?
It’s going to be my voice.
But if we started like a next wave podcast Twitter,
I could see like trying to automate that with, you know,
here’s what we talked about in this episode.
Every episode gets fed and like you can use something
like make.com, right?
And I’m just sort of spitball like ideas here.
You could use something like make.com,
where whenever you make a new podcast episode,
it watches that RSS feed, pulls it into like a descript
or some sort of transcription tool, right?
– Or we can make a newsletter.
– Transcribe it.
And then it automatically uses the cloud or GPT API
to then turn it into a Twitter thread
and then automatically post on a Twitter account.
That actually is something we probably should do
with the next wave.
– Yeah, we can make a newsletter, right?
We could like, we’re like the key takeaways of every issue.
And then you could also automate the promotion of as well.
Yeah.
– Yeah, well, I mean, let’s talk a little bit more
about some of these newsletter strategies
to like grow a newsletter, right?
We’ve both grown fairly substantial sized
newsletters in the AI space.
You’ve got Lord.com, I’ve got the future tools newsletter.
So we’ve used obviously AI to help grow those
and manage them and maintain them.
One of the ways I’ve been experimenting with growing it
is actually using AI to create the sort of lead magnet
to bring somebody onto the list in the first place.
And with these AI tools, it’s so easy to create
really high value lead magnets right now, right?
Like I can go and take some of my YouTube tutorials
that teach really valuable concepts
that people really wanna learn, have those transcribed,
pull those transcriptions into something
like Claude or Chad GPT and say,
this is a transcription, make it read more like an ebook
or make it read more like a blog post
or you know, that sort of thing.
So that it feels more readable
than just reading a transcription, right?
And now you’ve got a PDF that you can offer
as an opt-in to get people to join your newsletter.
Another thing that’s gotten really, really easy now
is even easier now with the OpenAI 01 platform
is going and creating a simple software app, right?
Like so some of the things that I’ve seen,
I’ve seen like in the real estate industry,
people making like fairly simple mortgage calculators
and things like that, make really simple tools
where you ask for the email in order to use the tool
and you put a little check box below
and saying, would you also like to sign up
to my newsletter when you use this tool?
That reminds me of the stuff that Greg Isenberg
was talking about when you came on our show,
like creating widgets for like SEO and stuff, right?
Like you see widgets, you have to like hire a team
and go build that and like now,
especially like with 01 that just came out,
like OpenAI recently released 01.
It’s not clear if it’s a new model or what it is,
but it’s way better at coding
and like creating apps rather than before.
And so I’m pretty sure most of these widgets now,
like a single creator can create like 10 useful widgets
and like get tons of SEO traffic.
There’s so many things like it’s hard to figure out
like what to do ’cause like there’s plenty of opportunities
now.
You can really dial it in towards whatever niche
you’re operating in.
So you can create something like really, really customized
just for the people that you’re speaking to.
And there’s another tool that’s been fairly popular lately
called Cursor, which is like a fork of visual studio code.
But it’s got like AI scripting directly built in.
I use Cursor, it’s amazing.
Like I’m like an amateur coder,
like I’ve been in Silicon Valley for a long time
so I used to code more and now I don’t code a lot,
but now it’s like easier to go back to coding
’cause like it can look at your entire code base
and like suggest changes or like,
oh, here’s a bug in the code
and like it knows the entire code base.
It’s right.
Yeah.
You know, in another way that I use AI for my newsletter
is I let it to be my proofreader for me.
It’s essentially become like my editor, right?
I actually have a team that helps me
with the newsletter as well now,
but I still write a bunch of it.
My team still writes a bunch of it,
but the final pass, we let AI look at it
and we usually plug it into,
I was using chat GBT in the beginning,
now I’m using Claude a little bit more,
but I’ll plug in the whole newsletter
and I’ll say proofread this for grammar,
spelling and readability and it will look through it
and it’ll tell me all the grammar and spelling
looks pretty good, but you might wanna, you know,
move this sentence down a little bit,
move this sentence up a little bit.
It just makes it easier to follow
what you’re trying to say, right?
And it’s really good as sort of rearranging some,
you know, little nuanced stuff in the email
to make it more readable for the newsletter subscribers.
– Yeah, I found the same thing,
like I tried to have AI write part of my newsletter
and like it’s really clear when like you’re using AI
to actually write the thing, right?
Like I tried that one issue
and like people like responded back, like, what is this?
– Yeah, yeah.
– Like, okay, that’s obviously not Nathan, like, okay.
And so I use Claude to like edit my newsletter.
– Yeah, for sure, for sure.
And then we also talked a little bit
about the Twitter threads, right?
Like, I’m assuming is Twitter the way
that you’ve grown your list the most?
Is it mostly because of the–
– Yeah, yeah, it’s mostly been Twitter.
Like, you see every time I do a viral tweet, you know,
you get like 100 to 200 subscribers every single time.
– Yeah.
– You know, of course some people unfollow,
you might lose 10 or 20 people.
They’re like, yeah, and it’s pretty consistent.
– Yeah, yeah, I mean, my newsletter’s mostly grown
off the back of the Future Tools website
a little bit from the YouTube channel.
I found that a lot of people, like I always have a call
to action at the end of my YouTube video
that goes to subscribe to the Future Tools newsletter.
I find that most of the traffic that goes
to the newsletter does not actually come from YouTube.
It mostly comes from the Future Tools website,
which is a tool that I built to help sort of organize.
– Yeah, it’s hard to convert like different mediums, right?
From like video to text and vice versa.
– Yeah, that’s really the way that I’ve grown my newsletter.
I’m at about 160,000 subscribers on mine now,
but it’s mostly come from basically building a tool
over at Future Tools, a tool to help you find tools.
– Yeah, you were talking about widgets earlier.
So have you actually created the widgets yet?
Or is that like an idea you’re thinking about using AI for?
Or you already have done it?
– So I’ve messed around creating a few widgets,
but I actually haven’t used them as an opt-in yet.
So it’s something that I want to play around with more.
I mean, if you look at Future Tools as a tool
that helps you find tools,
that’s the biggest growth for my newsletter, right?
But I mess with VS Code a lot.
I’ve been using Claude mostly for coding.
I’m gonna probably start using OpenAI01
for coding a little bit.
And I’ve made little widgets and stuff
that I use internally for myself,
but I haven’t actually given many away yet.
– Yeah, I think you should,
’cause like you said that Future Tools,
so Matt has Future Tools,
it’s basically the top AI tools directory.
And my understanding is like when people search for AI tools,
you’re often like the top two Google results
at the time, right?
– Yeah, yeah, with Future Tools,
yeah, it’s really well SEOed.
And all of the descriptions of every single tool
on Future Tools was generated with AI.
– That’s great.
– So basically the way that works is perplexity goes
and looks at the tool, gives me a description of the tool.
All of this is through a make.com automation, right?
– Yeah, we’re not sponsored by make.com.
– We’re not either.
But basically perplexity will go and look at the tool,
give me a description of the tool,
send that description over to Claude.
Claude will write a single paragraph of it
and then feed it into Webflow,
which is what the whole database is built on top of.
So that workflow is all AI.
Every single description on that entire site is AI.
And if anybody says that, you know,
you can’t rank for AI-generated content,
I’m proof that that’s false,
because it’s usually the tool that’s number one.
And then the Future Tools listing for that tool,
that’s number two for a lot of AI tools.
– Yeah, I know.
I mean, so we had Greg Eisberg on like several times.
And I know he has like an AI SEO agency
and he said is like killing it.
Like they’re doing it really well.
And I think they’re mainly,
they’ll do stuff where they have like AI generate
like thousands of pages of content and they rank.
And then what they do is then they’ll see,
’cause obviously the quality will be a little bit lower
with the AI content.
And so what they’ll do is they’ll generate
like thousands of pages of content
and they’ll see what it ranks.
And once they find out what’s ranking,
then they’ll go in with humans and edit the ones
that are ranking to make them really, really good.
– Smart.
– Right?
Yeah, so that’s, if you have like one key takeaway,
that’s one, probably everyone who’s doing SEO
should be probably doing that right now.
– Yeah, one thing I want to share before we wrap up,
’cause we’ve got a couple minutes left here,
is if you don’t have a newsletter,
it’s probably easier than ever to have a newsletter
because you can use AI to sort of help you out,
at least at the very least outline the newsletter
if you still want to write it yourself, right?
So if you’re in like a specific niche,
like we’re both making newsletters in the AI niche,
I can go and find, you know,
the seven biggest news stories in the AI world
for the week, take all seven of those stories,
plug them into something like cloud or chat GPT,
and then say, you know, either write up
or outline a newsletter for me
with all of these news pieces worked into it.
And you can even feed it some of your past content
so that it’ll try to write sort of in your style.
And now you’ve got a quick and easy newsletter,
at least at the very least,
you’ve got an outline or a rough draft
that you can go back in
and sort of add your own voice to,
but it makes it really, really easy
to consistently put out a new newsletter.
Just pick your niche,
make sure you’re keeping an eye on the news in that niche,
and then feed that in once a week or twice a week
or whatever the cadence of your newsletter is.
– Yeah, and I think it works for like curation
focused newsletters.
I do wonder though, like in the next few years,
if that’s gonna die off,
because the AI tools are gonna get so good
that you’ll just be able to like have your own
custom newsletter of like curated information.
And then–
– Oh, it’s newsletter, well, I think.
– Yeah, so like, that’s why I’m trying to be like
more editorial too,
like actually writing what I think
about stuff emergency is just like, here it is, you know.
– Yeah, yeah, no, I definitely think
that’s where it’s gonna go.
Unfortunately, that’s probably gonna sort of
devalue your newsletters,
but we still have a window of opportunity right now.
– We still have a podcast.
So, you know, I feel like people should always capture
that window of opportunity while you’ve got it and–
– I mean, it’s helped us, so we started our podcast
with HubSpot maybe five months ago.
We got, I don’t know, three something thousand subscribers
in the first month, and now we’re–
– Where are the episodes?
Was it first episode?
– Oh yeah, that’s right.
– Yeah.
– And then now we’re like 10.3, I mean, in five months,
and a lot of that’s from our newsletters.
So, yeah, newsletters work.
– Yeah, yeah, well, I think that’s about
all of the time we have.
This has been a fun, interesting episode.
Fun story, this is actually the first time
Nathan and I have met live in person.
We’ve been doing a, we’ve known each other
for a couple of years now.
We’ve been doing a podcast.
– I told him I was six months old, you know.
– But this is actually our first time meeting in person.
He lives in Japan, I live in San Diego.
And we’ve finally converged here at HubSpot
to record a few of these episodes live.
So, we really appreciate everybody hanging out with us
and enjoying the podcast.
If you want to hear more content like what we did here,
our podcast is on YouTube.
It’s called the Next Wave Podcast.
And you can find the audio version
wherever you subscribe to podcasts.
So, thanks again for hanging out with us
and tuning into this episode.
– Thank y’all.
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Episode 25: How can AI transform your personal productivity and growth on platforms like YouTube and Twitter? Matt Wolfe (https://x.com/mreflow) and Nathan Lands (https://x.com/NathanLands) delve into this with vibrant dialogue and invaluable insights from their experiences. This is recorded from HubSpot’s Inbound 2024.
In this episode, Matt and Nathan discuss leveraging AI for optimizing YouTube titles, creating engaging scripts, and developing effective growth strategies. They share their personal workflows, including the use of tools like Claude, Stable Diffusion, and MidJourney. The episode also covers insightful Twitter growth tactics that helped Nathan skyrocket his follower count from 5,000 to 50,000 in a few months.
Check out The Next Wave YouTube Channel if you want to see Matt and Nathan on screen: https://lnk.to/thenextwavepd
—
Show Notes:
- (00:00) Using stable diffusion to generate AI art thumbnails.
- (03:20) Uses AI tool Claude for video title generation.
- (06:39) Hook, result, tutorial, flow: establishing video structure.
- (10:48) Utilized Tweet Hunter for style inspiration via AI.
- (12:44) AI-inspired thread on top people to follow.
- (16:51) Repurpose YouTube tutorials, create PDFs, build software.
- (19:01) AI proofreads newsletter for grammar and readability.
- (23:26) AI simplifies creating consistent newsletters easily.
- (25:42) Podcast now live, available on YouTube.
—
Mentions:
- Inbound 2024: https://www.inbound.com/
- Claude: https://claude.ai/
- Stable Diffusion: https://stability.ai/
- DreamBooth: https://dreambooth.github.io/
- Tweet Hunter: https://tweethunter.io/
- Midjourney: https://www.midjourney.com/
- Leonardo: https://leonardo.ai/
- HeyGen: https://www.heygen.com/
—
Check Out Matt’s Stuff:
• Future Tools – https://futuretools.beehiiv.com/
• Blog – https://www.mattwolfe.com/
• YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/@mreflow
—
Check Out Nathan’s Stuff:
- Newsletter: https://news.lore.com/
- Blog – https://lore.com/
The Next Wave is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Darren Clarke // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano
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