AI transcript
0:00:04 We might be moving into this future where less and less people work for big companies,
0:00:10 big companies need less and less people. There’s really never an easier time to start a business
0:00:14 than right now because of the tools that make all this stuff really, really easy. They’re all at your
0:00:23 disposal. Hey, welcome to the Next Way podcast. I’m Matt Wolf. I’m here with Nathan Lanz. And
0:00:29 one of the questions that we get asked pretty often is if you were starting over from scratch
0:00:33 with all these AI tools that are available to you, what would you do? What path would you take?
0:00:38 And so in this episode, we’re going to break down exactly what Nathan would do if he was
0:00:42 start from scratch, what I would do if I was starting from scratch, as well as the things we
0:00:48 are actually doing right now with AI that are helping build our business. So some really cool
0:00:55 stuff, get ready to take some notes and let’s dive right in. When all your marketing team does is
0:01:01 put out fires, they burn out. But with HubSpot, they can achieve their best results without the
0:01:08 stress. Tap into HubSpot’s collection of AI tools, breeze, to pinpoint leads, capture attention,
0:01:13 and access all your data in one place. Keep your marketers cool and your campaign results hotter
0:01:24 than ever. Visit hubspot.com/marketers to learn more. One of the things that we were talking about
0:01:31 right before we hit record on this episode was that me personally, I don’t really think starting
0:01:38 an AI business is the smartest path for somebody to take. And what I mean by that is starting a
0:01:46 business that is like your own AI company. I feel like more the path to take would be starting a
0:01:51 business that’s not like a specific AI SaaS or something like that, but a company that leverages
0:01:58 all of the AI tools that exist out there to make your life and make building this business a lot
0:02:03 easier. That’s the path that I would take. But I know, Nathan, that if you were starting over
0:02:10 today from scratch, you would build probably a SaaS company and focus in a very specific niche
0:02:18 audience. How would you build that? What tools would you use for, let’s say, the idea for the
0:02:23 SaaS you’re going to use? How would you go about actually building the SaaS? Would you use AI for
0:02:31 like the marketing? What would that flow look like? How would you break down like, all right,
0:02:37 I’m starting this business. Here’s how I would go and do it. I think I would go for a walk,
0:02:44 talk to chat to BT voice, just chat with it. I would literally just go for a walk and talk to AI,
0:02:50 talk about different ideas I have and go back and forth with it, tell it to summarize what we
0:02:56 discussed and give me a list of the top 10 ideas from that, go back, put them on a whiteboard,
0:03:02 sit down with ideally a partner or somebody who’s helping me implement these ideas,
0:03:08 and then use something like Cursor or something like that to just crank out the websites and test
0:03:17 them out. I like the idea of going for a walk, having a conversation with OpenAI’s new advanced
0:03:24 voice mode, and then just sort of like fleshing out the conversation with the AI. Here’s my
0:03:29 thoughts. What are the pros and cons of this? Do you see any potential downsides of doing this route?
0:03:35 Are there any things you would change about the idea? You have that conversation with the AI,
0:03:40 and then the cool thing is, you can go back to your computer at home and literally look
0:03:46 back at the history and see that conversation and see the conclusions. It’s all there,
0:03:52 saved, stored for you inside of your chat GPT dashboard. What I would probably do slightly
0:03:56 different is, I don’t think I would go and necessarily build the software ideas that it
0:04:03 gave me. Let’s say this is what I would do. I would probably take the 10 ideas that we came
0:04:07 up with from that conversation. Let’s say the end of the conversation is, all right,
0:04:12 give me a recap and list 10 ideas based on what we talked about for cool software companies.
0:04:17 Then what I would go do is, I would use a tool. There’s a couple cool tools out there,
0:04:25 one’s called Mixo. I think it’s mixo.io, which is a tool to rapidly build a website with a single
0:04:32 prompt. You go to that website and you say, “I’m going to build a software product for real
0:04:41 estate agents to help them find leads using AI.” I’m just making this up off the seat of my pants
0:04:46 here. Let’s say you gave it all of those details about the software you’re thinking about doing.
0:04:53 What it’ll do is, it’ll go and create a landing page for you with images and copy and headlines
0:04:59 and sub-headlines and all that kind of stuff with the idea for your software. Then at the bottom,
0:05:05 it’ll have an email opt-in box that says, “Join the waitlist.” Then what you can go do is take
0:05:13 all 10 of those ideas that OpenAI gave you, go to a tool like Mixo, have Mixo rapidly create
0:05:19 10 different websites that flesh out the idea on the website. Then you can go and buy advertising
0:05:25 on Facebook ads, Google ads, Twitter ads, wherever, to all 10 of those landing pages,
0:05:30 and then whichever one has the most interest on the waitlist, whichever one’s waitlist grows the
0:05:35 fastest, go make that product. That’s probably what I would do. That’s kind of like the… Was
0:05:39 it Tim Ferriss that talked about ideas like that, where you would test ideas with ads, where you
0:05:43 would try something? I think that’s how he did his books, right? Like his book covers. He did his book
0:05:48 covers. Yeah. Whereas he would do a Facebook ad and then see which one converted the best,
0:05:53 and that would show him which direction he should go. Yeah. Well, his original book title,
0:05:59 “The 4-Hour Workweek,” was originally called “Something Like How to Sell Drugs for Fun and
0:06:04 Profit,” or something like that. And he actually split-tested that title against the 4-Hour Workweek
0:06:12 and the 4-Hour Workweek 1. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Obviously. It’s kind of funny that he thought it
0:06:17 wasn’t going to, but I wouldn’t depend on AI to give me all the ideas. Definitely, a lot of the
0:06:22 ideas would be coming from me and me kind of brainstorming with the AI. That probably would
0:06:26 go do research after that. I’d probably use something like perplexities, all these different
0:06:33 industries that I don’t know much about. Let’s say it’s landscaping or whatever. I would go do
0:06:38 some perplexity searches and pull up to see if there are existing companies in those areas. And
0:06:43 if there are, I would look at their websites, maybe copy and paste that into chat to BT or
0:06:48 something that uses a reference. And I think what I would do, so I haven’t used Mix. You said Mix.io.
0:06:54 I think it’s Mix.io. Well, this Mix.io website, just to clarify, is literally just designed
0:07:00 to test concepts. It doesn’t go the whole website. It’s designed to make a landing page
0:07:07 with the idea on it and then send people to that waitlist to gauge interest. It specifically seems
0:07:13 to be tailored for that use case. Oh, interesting. I’ll have to try it out. Yeah. Depending on how
0:07:18 good it is, you might be able to just do the same thing yourself though, like using cursor,
0:07:21 like having like a template. And then you go into cursor and like, hey, change this stuff for me.
0:07:25 Like change the taglines. Here’s the kind of stuff I want to change. Change the colors.
0:07:30 You probably like within like five minutes could change all that stuff. Then you, you know, if you
0:07:34 know how to use, if you know how to code, you just push it live and then you’re good. So that’s
0:07:37 probably what I would do. But yeah, I love the idea of using the Facebook ads and just like testing
0:07:42 it, you know, just how Tim Ferriss used to do. Yeah. Yeah. And then, and then the nice thing
0:07:47 is too, you’ve already built an email list. So then when you go and actually release the project,
0:07:53 you just hit up all the people that joined that specific wait list that said they basically
0:07:56 raised their hand and said, I’d be interested in this product because they joined the wait list,
0:08:02 right? And then you’ve got your, your, your sort of first marketing campaign for it because you
0:08:06 just mail that list. I mean, heck, if you want, you can mail the other nine lists as well and say,
0:08:10 Hey, we didn’t make that product, but come check out this one. So maybe we should try this and
0:08:17 record it. It’s like, yeah, they’re actually kind of a fun episode. Okay. If we do that,
0:08:26 who owns it? But yeah, so that’s the way I would do it. And then, and then you would go and like
0:08:31 build the software, right? And you mentioned cursor, cursors probably, I believe like the
0:08:36 biggest benefit of cursor, right? Is that it can use your entire code base for context, right?
0:08:41 Like it’s, it’s using, I believe, retrieval augmented generation, which can like look at
0:08:47 the text of everything that you upload. But when you’re using cursor, it’s looking at all of the
0:08:52 code. So like, even if it’s like 30 files long, right, it’s going to look through all of those
0:08:56 files to sort of understand what’s going on in the software that you’re creating, right?
0:08:59 Yeah, exactly. I’ve actually never used cursor still. So yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s, I mean,
0:09:03 you know, I’ve only used it a little bit, but like the, the biggest benefit I saw was that it can
0:09:08 see your whole code base. So it’s like, it has context of your entire code base versus you copying,
0:09:12 pasting something into Claude. It only knows the one page it’s on. It doesn’t know that if you
0:09:16 change this thing, it’s going to break something somewhere else. It’s important to know how things
0:09:21 are interconnected. Yeah, yeah. But I think, I think, you know, with the tools that are available
0:09:27 out there, you can rapidly get ideas for software, you know, having the sort of conversations,
0:09:34 you can rapidly go and test the ideas by collecting emails. Once you’ve got the idea,
0:09:41 you can pretty much rapidly create the software, right? Between tools like cursor, right? You’ve
0:09:46 got tools like cursor, but then you’ve also got tools like replet and firebase, where firebase
0:09:52 tends to handle like the back end sort of database of whatever website or SAS you’re building,
0:09:56 like firebase will handle that. It also handles like a lot of the single sign in stuff like,
0:10:01 like Google login and Apple login and all that kind of stuff. So you don’t have to really
0:10:07 mess with the login functionality. And then replet tends to host like the front end for your site
0:10:12 a little bit. So if you’re using cursor to write the code, replet to host the front end,
0:10:19 firebase to host the back end, like you use all three of those tools and now replet just added
0:10:23 an integration for cursor. So whenever you make these updates in cursor, you’re going to just
0:10:30 have them automatically pushed into replet for you and fixed live on your site. So I mean, like
0:10:35 we’ve said it before, there’s really never an easier time to start a business than right now
0:10:40 because of like the AI tools and the tools that make all this stuff like really, really easy.
0:10:46 They’re all at your disposal. We’ll be right back. But first, I want to tell you about another
0:10:51 great podcast you’re going to want to listen to. It’s called Science of Scaling, hosted by Mark
0:10:57 Robertz. And it’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for
0:11:03 business professionals. Each week, host Mark Robertz, founding chief revenue officer at HubSpot,
0:11:07 senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and co-founder of Stage 2 Capital,
0:11:11 sits down with the most successful sales leaders in tech to learn the secrets,
0:11:17 strategies, and tactics to scaling your company’s growth. He recently did a great episode called
0:11:22 How Do You Solve for a Siloed Marketing in Sales? And I personally learned a lot from it.
0:11:27 You’re going to want to check out the podcast. Listen to Science of Scaling wherever you get your
0:11:36 podcasts. Yeah, it’s crazy how easy it is to make a database with Firebase. It’s kind of wild.
0:11:40 Like I met James Tamplin. I think Tamplin, I believe that’s his last name. Sorry, James,
0:11:45 if you’re listening. But I met him with some friends in San Francisco, like smoking hookah
0:11:49 together. They’re like, “Oh, here’s this guy, James.” And like he’s building something pretty cool.
0:11:53 I’m like, “Oh, cool. What is it?” They was like, “Oh, Firebase.” I was like, “Yeah.” And he was way
0:11:56 more technical than me. I was like, “Oh, cool. It’s like an easy database or something.” Okay,
0:12:01 sounds neat. Like had no idea if it would work or like what the hell he was building exactly.
0:12:04 And then it became Firebase. Was he at Google at the time or did Google acquire it later?
0:12:10 No, they acquired it. I believe Firebase was a YC startup, I believe. And they at Google acquired
0:12:15 it for, I think, a few hundred million. Like it was a lot. And it all happened like within like a
0:12:18 year or two. It was kind of wild. Like literally, like I’m really like smoking hookah. He’s telling
0:12:23 me this crazy idea. And then a year or two later, like I see the thing like, “Oh, Google’s bought
0:12:27 them for like a few hundred million.” But so most of the stuff we were talking about was like kind
0:12:32 of, you know, the stuff I would do. So what would you do? Like if you were creating a business today?
0:12:36 I do want to add one more like idea to what we were just talking about.
0:12:42 Because like a lot of ideas have been done already, right? Especially since like AI has become a lot
0:12:48 more prolific and a lot of coders are able to use it. We’re seeing just like almost like this spamming
0:12:54 of SaaS companies, right? Like I run the Future Tools website. I have a submission form where
0:12:59 people can submit their new tools. I get like a hundred new tools a day submitted. I only accept
0:13:03 about 1% of them because most of them are just like clones of tools that already exist because
0:13:09 everything’s so easy to make. So the other thing that I would add into the mix of what we were
0:13:15 talking about there is I would go and try to find the products that already exist that are somewhat
0:13:19 close to the idea that we’re talking about because there’s probably something out there
0:13:24 that’s already fairly close to like almost every idea you could come up with. But then what I would
0:13:30 do is I would go to like Reddit and I would search out that software on Reddit. I would search out
0:13:35 that software on Trustpilot. I would search it out on, oh, what’s the other? There’s all those sites
0:13:42 that are like sort of like peer reviewing websites and software that exist out there, right? I would
0:13:46 go to all of those different sites and I would copy and paste all of the comments, all of the
0:13:52 reviews, all of that kind of stuff in the cloud. And then I would get like a sentiment analysis of
0:13:59 like, what do people love about this product? What do people hate about this product? What is the
0:14:04 feedback that this product has gotten? And then I would use that feedback to make sure that I make
0:14:09 my product better than the one that exists out there. That’s a good idea. I always just think
0:14:12 I would probably just look at similar web and see if it was like trending up or down like the
0:14:19 website. Yeah, yeah. But you can always do that sentiment analysis. This is a tactic that a lot
0:14:25 of Amazon sellers use, right? Because on Amazon, every product has like 30 competing products
0:14:30 because everybody just orders them off alibaba.com and sells the same crap, right? So what people do
0:14:36 on Amazon is they go and look at the reviews of the products that exist already and then sort of
0:14:40 get the sentiment analysis of what people do and don’t like about that product and then make sure
0:14:45 that when they go sell their version of the product, they’re fixing the things that people don’t
0:14:50 like and they’re sort of leaning into the things that people do like in the marketing, right? So
0:14:55 like if a lot of people say like, for this software, I love X feature, I love that they added this
0:15:00 feature, you want to make sure that that features in yours, right? Or if you look at the software,
0:15:04 or if you look at the reviews for those various software companies and they say like,
0:15:08 I really, really hate that they haven’t added this feature. It seems so easy for them to add. Why
0:15:13 don’t they add this feature? And there’s like this overwhelming thought that like this functionality
0:15:18 should be in this tool, but it’s not. Well, make sure you add that functionality, right? So that
0:15:23 way you’re making sure that whatever you go and build, you know, you used AI to sort of analyze
0:15:28 what are the features that should be in my MVP and which features should I exclude?
0:15:32 Okay, cool. So Matt, what would you do like if you were starting over today?
0:15:38 So I would likely still go down the route of being really focused heavily on content creation.
0:15:45 I love content creation. I also think content creation is somewhat future proof, right? I do
0:15:51 think like there are tools that make content a lot easier for anybody to create, right? You’ve
0:15:56 got the like, Hey, Jen tool where you can make a digital clone of yourself and now anybody can
0:16:00 just crank out videos of themselves talking, right? You’ve got notebook LM, which will create
0:16:06 really actually good podcasts that people will listen to, right? So I say it’ll feature proof
0:16:13 me to some degree, but I also feel like a lot of people as AI gets more and more prolific,
0:16:18 right? As it’s just sort of everywhere and people are inundated with AI all the time,
0:16:22 they’re going to look for real humans, right? They’re going to look for that like real voice,
0:16:27 that real person that they can trust that they know there’s an actual human being behind it who’s
0:16:31 not just looking to like make affiliate commissions or whatever, right? And so I still think there’s
0:16:40 a lot of value to being a not a faceless content creator, but a face full content. What’s the
0:16:46 word for that? Not faceless, but face full, having a face, having a face, be a face in
0:16:54 content creation, a face channel. So I still think there’s a lot of, I still think there’s a lot
0:17:01 of room to grow and build in that space and leverage AI to make your life a lot easier to
0:17:09 do it, right? So I would probably pick a fairly niche topic that I can, that I’m really excited
0:17:16 about and passionate about, and I can talk about myself, right? And then I would use AI to help me
0:17:22 with the ideation, right? Right now I use perplexity and Claude constantly. And when I am using
0:17:27 perplexity, I have the pro version and I have it set to use Claude when I’m using perplexity.
0:17:32 So like perplexity and Claude are like my AI stack that I’m mostly using right now, right?
0:17:38 But like I would use those tools to research what are people searching for in this niche right now?
0:17:42 What type of content are they looking for? What are things that people are struggling with that
0:17:48 they need help with? And I would go and create as much content around those topics as possible.
0:17:53 And the content is so much easier to create as well, because you can have tools like Claude
0:18:01 go and outline the concepts for you. Like I can say, I want to make a video about how to
0:18:11 make 3D walkthroughs of houses for the real estate niche, right? I can go and go to Claude and say,
0:18:17 hey, this is the video I want to make. What are the things that I need to make sure are included
0:18:22 in this video? What is the flow of this video? How can I make it so it holds people’s attention
0:18:26 throughout the whole video? And it will actually generate an outline for me and I can follow the
0:18:32 outline and make sure I hit all the beats that it recommends I hit, right? Like one of the biggest
0:18:36 questions is what kind of camera am I going to need? So make sure you talk about the type of
0:18:42 camera you’re going to need. How long do I need to set the camera down in each location of the house?
0:18:46 All right, I need to make sure that gets into my video, right? So I can use AI to really,
0:18:50 really help with the outlining process of the content that I would create.
0:18:55 Where would you start first? You’ve mentioned like video, I think you mentioned newsletter,
0:18:59 Twitter, things like that. Where would you start if you were starting a new media brand today?
0:19:06 I would simultaneously work on a newsletter and probably short form video. Now,
0:19:14 long form video is my main game, right? Long form video on YouTube is actually where I make the most
0:19:20 of my money. That’s where most of the sponsorships lie. Adsense revenue is more significant on
0:19:25 long form videos. However, short form videos, I’ve actually started doing quite a bit of
0:19:29 short form videos as well. I’m putting out about three short form videos a week right now.
0:19:37 Short form videos are so much faster to produce, right? I’m making like a 59 second script. I’m
0:19:41 not reading the script exactly anymore. I was for a little bit, but it kind of got too obvious.
0:19:45 Like you can see my eyes are in the script and I’m like, all right, I need to basically like
0:19:49 memorize what I’m going to talk about and get all the points. And so now what I’m doing is I’ll like
0:19:53 speak out a paragraph and then look down at my script and then speak out a paragraph. So it’s
0:20:01 not word for word anymore, but the short form videos, I can, I can batch record three or four
0:20:06 short form videos in a half hour, right? Just like, here’s one, here’s another, here’s another,
0:20:12 here’s another. And then I can either pass them to an editor or I can use a tool. I use a tool
0:20:18 called Timebolt to edit mine, which is basically like an automated tool that will go through and
0:20:22 find all the gaps and silence and remove them automatically. And it tries to find some of the
0:20:28 mistakes and it tries to take out some of the ums and stuff like that. So I can just feed my sort
0:20:35 of rough video into that tool and then it’ll spit out the sort of one minute version for me.
0:20:40 And then I would go in and, you know, add B role and stuff like that, the old fashioned way using
0:20:45 DaVinci Resolve or Adobe Premiere. Now I would pass it to an editor. I have an editor that helps
0:20:50 me with short form, but I would go and I would batch record a bunch of them. At this point,
0:20:55 pass them all to my editor. The editor would go and add the visual effects to them. And the reason
0:21:01 I like short form is because in the content world, the majority of the income that I earn
0:21:07 doesn’t come from the YouTube AdSense revenue. It comes from sponsorships, right? And
0:21:13 all the sponsors care about is how much reach is this video going to get, right? They don’t care
0:21:19 if it’s a 10 minute video or a 45 second video. They want to get the views on their product. They
0:21:26 want to get the views on their brand, right? So the people that are making these 60 second shorts
0:21:31 are making the same amount of money off their sponsorships as I’m making by putting out 20
0:21:37 minute long videos that take multiple days to dial in. Yeah, from a sponsorship perspective,
0:21:42 ad revenue is crap on short form videos, right? Like I can get, you can get a million views on
0:21:48 a short form video and it’ll make you like 60 bucks. It’s really dumb. But from a sponsorship
0:21:54 perspective, I can basically charge the same amount to a sponsor for a short form that might get
0:22:00 100,000 views as I can for a long form that might get 100,000 views. So it’s, you know,
0:22:08 a lot less effort for creating the content. I can crank out a lot more of it and the sponsors
0:22:13 will still come knocking as long as the videos get views, right? So I would probably go that route.
0:22:16 And you would use your face. So you wouldn’t do faceless.
0:22:20 I wouldn’t do faceless. I would use my face on those. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you could use something
0:22:26 like Hey, Jen and train your face into it. And then it also learns your voice using 11 labs. And
0:22:30 then you can copy and paste a script. And I know people that are doing that. Rowan Chung is doing
0:22:36 that. Varun Maya is doing that. Those guys are doing really, really well with it. Like it’s
0:22:43 actually their face, but it’s an AI avatar version of their face. And those work. But I do think
0:22:47 they work for them right now because they’re like the pioneers. Like they’re the ones that are like
0:22:53 the first ones out there doing this stuff and being seen. But there’s going to hit a saturation
0:22:58 point where half your short form content that you see is these like AI generated avatars and
0:23:03 you start to get sick of them, right? Yeah. So I think that’s where being a real human is still
0:23:09 going to be important, you know, going to conferences and, you know, as they say, shaking
0:23:14 hands and kissing babies, right? Like that’s that type of thing. People build the relationship,
0:23:18 they build a bond with you. They realize you’re a real person that they can trust that, you know,
0:23:22 they can get to know personally that they could, they feel like they want to go have a beer with,
0:23:26 right? Like building up that I think is really, really important. And I think it’s only going
0:23:30 to get more and more important as we’re seeing more and more AI generated content.
0:23:35 Yeah. And it’s going to get easier too, right? I think that’s all Peter levels, the, you know,
0:23:39 famous indie hacker. He peeped out something yesterday showing you where you can just generate
0:23:44 an avatar of like this beautiful woman. And all of a sudden she’s like a seen in anchor
0:23:48 talking about whatever and literally like, you literally like copy and paste in seeing in like
0:23:53 a news story into like, you know, chat to PT or whatever and have it produce the script and then
0:23:58 you just feed that into the system and it does all of it. So I mean, you know, I think it’s
0:24:01 kind of thing where that kind of stuff is probably a decent tactic though, like for like the next
0:24:06 year or maybe even two, but at some point there’s like everyone’s going to be doing it and like
0:24:11 you’re going to know, okay, that’s another one of those. And it’s going to start to be associated
0:24:16 with low effort content, right? In the same way, like when I want, when I, when I click on a YouTube
0:24:21 video and let’s say it’s like a 10 minute video and I immediately hear like an AI voiceover on the
0:24:25 video, I click away. It turns me off like immediately. Like I’m just like, I don’t want to
0:24:29 listen to an AI voice for the next 10 minutes. I almost immediately click off because I just
0:24:34 assumed this was low effort content that somebody just slapped together through on YouTube to try
0:24:39 to get quick views. That’s what I associate with that. I, you know, I don’t know if that’s good or
0:24:43 bad, but that’s what my brain associates with it. Like I hear the AI voice. I go, this is obviously
0:24:49 an AI voice. I’m out moving on to the next video. I want to hear a human explain the thing to me.
0:24:54 Right? So, I mean, at some point you might not be able to tell though. That’s the next thing though.
0:24:58 I agree. Yeah, I agree. I think at some point we won’t be able to tell, but I also think
0:25:03 those AI generated avatars, it’s going to be a similar thing. Right now I actually like watching
0:25:10 Varunmai and I like watching Rowan’s videos where they’re doing it that way, but it’s not
0:25:14 really a shortcut. Like those guys put a lot of effort still into making a lot of those videos
0:25:18 and finding the right B role and cutting it at the right time. So it’s harder to tell this
0:25:25 an AI generated video, that kind of stuff. There’s more effort into it than I think they actually
0:25:30 let on it, like to let people believe, right? But there is sort of a part two to what I would
0:25:38 do. So like I did mention, I would simultaneously create an email list while also doing content.
0:25:43 I would probably do a mix of both long and short form, but I’d probably make short form the main
0:25:50 and make long form a little less frequent just because of the pace that I can put out
0:25:54 short form videos. I could put out a lot more of them. But like a newsletter,
0:26:01 there’s never been an easier time to grow on. We talked about this on stage on the HubSpot creator
0:26:08 stage when we’re at inbound is like when it comes to creating a newsletter, like the newsletter could
0:26:15 mostly be outlined and edited using AI, right? Like you could have AI write an outline for you
0:26:20 and then you go in with your own words and write it out, or you can have AI flesh it out, write
0:26:25 the whole thing for you, or you can write it yourself and have AI go back and fix it for editing
0:26:29 and grammar and spelling and all that kind of stuff so that it reads a little bit better.
0:26:34 Like writing the newsletter should be nobody’s excuse anymore, right? It’s easier than ever to
0:26:38 actually create the newsletter. You have perplexity that can do the research. Let’s say you’re
0:26:43 making a newsletter on their real estate niche and let’s say it’s a daily newsletter. You can go
0:26:48 to perplexity every morning and say, “What are the top 10 most interesting things happening in the
0:26:53 world of real estate?” And perplexity will give you a breakdown of like based on the news we found,
0:26:57 here’s the top 10 things happening in the world of real estate today. Okay, cool. Take that list
0:27:02 of 10 things, jump over to Claude and say, “Here’s 10 things that are happening in the real estate
0:27:08 world today. Write me a newsletter around these 10 things and break it all down.” Boom, I got that
0:27:14 newsletter written. You can use make.com and probably make like a API flow where every day you
0:27:18 just press a button and it goes right to the newsletter for you following that formula. Like
0:27:24 it’s so easy to create the newsletter now, right? And then I would leverage the short form content
0:27:27 with a call to action to join the newsletter, right? So at the end of every single video,
0:27:34 you’d have like a two second call to action get on the daily newsletter to be the most
0:27:40 in the no person in real estate in your area, right? Like if you’re not on this newsletter,
0:27:44 your competition probably is, so make sure you’re on it, right? You do those kinds of calls to action
0:27:50 at the end of your short form videos and you grow the newsletter that way, right? And what I love
0:27:57 about the sort of blend of having a newsletter and having a sort of content machine is that
0:28:02 now you can sell sponsorships in a completely different way. Like one question I get asked
0:28:09 a lot when I’m at these events is like, you know, what’s the CPM? What CPM do I charge sponsors
0:28:14 for my YouTube videos, right? Other YouTubers are like, all right, so per thousand CPM is how
0:28:21 much you make per thousand views, right? So let’s say on average, somebody might charge $40 CPM.
0:28:27 So for every thousand views a video makes, they make $40 on it, a video that gets 100,000 views
0:28:34 might make what is that for for grand, right? Yeah. So, but people will ask me like, what’s the CPM?
0:28:39 And I’m like, I don’t play the CPM game. I play the bundling game. I’ve got the future
0:28:44 tools website where I can put sponsors at the top of the website. I’ve got my YouTube channel
0:28:48 where I can integrate sponsors in the middle of the video. I’ve got shorts where I can make
0:28:53 sponsored shorts for companies and I’ve got my newsletter and people can sponsor the newsletter.
0:28:59 So I don’t sell CPM at all. I go to these companies and say, here’s a bundle. You can get
0:29:04 a featured listing on future tools for one week. I’ll integrate your ad read into one video and
0:29:09 you can sponsor two newsletters over the next month. So it’s more of this like package deal
0:29:16 where you’re being seen on all of these platforms, right? And now I get out of that CPM game and I
0:29:21 sort of elevate, elevate above it and I’m charging way more than some other YouTubers would charge
0:29:25 because you’re now getting access to the newsletter, the YouTube channel, the YouTube shorts, maybe
0:29:31 Instagram, maybe Twitter, maybe my LinkedIn, maybe my Discord community and the, you know,
0:29:36 the future tools website, all of that, right? Like all of that can be sort of worked into
0:29:40 some sort of bundle deal. So that’s the game that I play now with my content.
0:29:46 Yeah. You told me that in the taxi in Boston. We were heading back and that was one of the main
0:29:51 things. Like when I got back, I told chat to BT like, remember this. So that was one of my notes.
0:29:55 Like I did like a decompression like after Boston, like what’s all this stuff I learned or whatever
0:29:59 that I want to remember. That was one of my big notes. I’m like, remember this. This is smart
0:30:04 because not only does that help you like better monetize your media properties, but also they
0:30:08 help grow each other. So it’s like, it’s amazing. It’s like amazing for growth and monetization.
0:30:12 I do feel like with newsletters, it’s going to be similar to like the faceless YouTube channels
0:30:18 where it’s easier than ever to create them. So the ones that are really like, yeah, you can have
0:30:22 newsletters right now where you literally just copy and paste up in and say, Hey, give people
0:30:26 these bullet points. Just like just summarize. And there have been like newsletters that are
0:30:30 really successful that are just like purely summarization kind of newsletters. I feel like
0:30:33 those are going to be challenging longterm though, right? Cause like, yeah, people are going to use
0:30:38 perplexity or whatever else to have their own personalized summarization. So I think, I think
0:30:43 if you’re doing it, like make sure that you have a unique voice and have something to say, I think
0:30:47 longterm is going to be important because people are going to want to have that real person and
0:30:53 learn from that real person and hear what they have to say versus just here’s a such an AI summary
0:30:58 of what happened anywhere. Yeah, you know, uh, Peter Diamandis, right? He’s got a newsletter
0:31:04 called future loop and future loop is completely automated with AI. I don’t think he touches it.
0:31:11 I think it like he, he’s created some sort of app that watches the sort of tech emerging tech news
0:31:16 for him writes the newsletter and sends it. Like I literally think it’s completely hands off. It’s
0:31:21 just on a daily basis. It runs through this process and blast out the newsletter without like a human
0:31:26 really even touching it saying that out of, I subscribed to it out of all the newsletters I
0:31:32 read. I sort of have like a priority of like, I always read this one, like Rowan Chung’s run down
0:31:37 is probably my favorite. I always read that one. Ben’s bites is really good with Ben Tossel, right?
0:31:42 There’s a handful that I’m like, these are my must reads every day, right? And I look at future
0:31:46 loop, which is like the one that’s automated with AI. It’s the lowest on my priority list, right?
0:31:50 Like if I’m like rushed for time and I’m just like, all right, give me the really quick news.
0:31:55 I only read two or three newsletters and that one doesn’t make the cut, right? Because I know
0:31:59 it’s automated. I know it’s AI. Sometimes it finds news articles that are like two months old and I’m
0:32:03 like, what did, why did that make it into this one? Probably because automation screwed up and
0:32:10 put the wrong article in somehow, right? So I do think that there is like a sort of limited window
0:32:16 where you can do this and over time, there’ll be so many just junk newsletters that is not effective
0:32:20 anymore. But if you can be that person that has a voice, that it makes a difference.
0:32:23 Yeah. It could be a good short-term strategy. I mean, you could do that and then
0:32:29 once it becomes obvious that it’s no longer working, like, oh, pivot. Now I’m writing the
0:32:31 newsletter. Here’s the new format. You know, sir.
0:32:35 I’m writing, at least as far as you know, I’m writing the newsletter now.
0:32:37 Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I’m writing it. Yeah.
0:32:42 By the way, this is not what I do with my newsletter. I actually like work with a team
0:32:46 and I’ve got an editor and some people that help me with writing. It’s actually still humans behind
0:32:50 my newsletter. So I just want to say that if anybody’s listening going, oh, man,
0:32:55 that’s automating the whole thing. I’m not. But I’m just pointing out how easy it is to
0:33:01 create a newsletter and that the amount of time that goes into that really shouldn’t be a factor.
0:33:07 Yeah. So basically you’re saying that it’s easier than ever to create YouTube shorts and a newsletter.
0:33:11 And so if you were starting over, that’s what you would do. You’d use all these AI tools.
0:33:17 What do you think? So this all works today in like five years from now. Do you think it’ll be
0:33:19 similar or do you think it’s all going to be different?
0:33:26 Yeah, I think timing is a big factor. When it comes to my success on YouTube,
0:33:31 I got insanely lucky with the timing. I started making YouTube content around AI
0:33:39 about six months before AI hit the mainstream consciousness. I was making videos about AI
0:33:45 and cool technology. And then the rest of the world caught up because of the chat GPT launch.
0:33:52 And I had already been making videos on that topic. So I think the earlier you get in and
0:33:56 like this sort of more brand reputation you build earlier on, the better you’re going to be
0:34:03 down the line. I think a lot of people are going and creating AI related YouTube channels now.
0:34:08 And they’re just sort of floundering because there’s already a handful of really, really
0:34:12 big channels that most people already follow. And the smaller channels kind of are starting
0:34:16 to feel like me too channels like, oh, they’re looking at the analytics and going that work
0:34:19 for them. I’m going to try to do the same thing, but it doesn’t really work because
0:34:24 there’s already sort of some established names in that space. I think it’s going to be the same
0:34:30 thing. But I also think when it comes to like what niche you’re going to go into and talk about,
0:34:36 there’s unlimited potential niches, right? Like maybe just think of a sub niche of the niche,
0:34:40 right? Like real estate is honestly probably too broad of a niche. But if you can think of like a
0:34:45 sub niche of that niche, you could probably own it, right? Like it’s the Japanese gardening or
0:34:52 the ocean strategy versus the red ocean strategy, right? Like if there’s a billion content creators
0:34:57 talking about this niche, you know, niche down even further until you’re in a blue ocean where
0:35:03 you’re the only one talking about that specific portion of the niche. I think one other interesting
0:35:10 thing that you told me in Boston was how you were using Proplexity’s API to fill out future
0:35:14 tools. I mean, I’ve been thinking about that a lot. I’m like, God, there’s probably so many
0:35:19 directories you could build using stuff like this, you know? And I’ve got lore.com like,
0:35:23 “Damn, should I be using this? Should lore.com be something else? Should lore.com be like a,
0:35:28 you know, like every single fantasy thing or every game or whatever? Like a page is filled
0:35:33 out and it’s like, I just like, you know, just really game SEO on that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I
0:35:39 don’t know. I mean, it’s a great domain name, but I, yeah, I’m not sure. But yeah, with like the
0:35:44 Perplexity API, it’s been, the problem with the API is you can’t, it wasn’t, maybe there’s a way
0:35:50 to do it, but I wasn’t able to pick like Sonnet or chat GPT. It lets you pick like from an open
0:35:57 source model. So I’m actually using Llama 3.1 paired up with Claude right now or with Perplexity
0:36:04 right now. But basically, the way I used to run the Future Tools website was whenever I came across
0:36:10 a new tool that I liked, I would add it to a spreadsheet, then it would go to make.com. It
0:36:14 would use a tool called scraping bee. It would scrape all the copy off the website. It would take
0:36:20 the copy that it just scraped. It would put it into chat GPT and say summarize this tool for me,
0:36:24 and then it would take that summary. And that would be the sort of content of the listing on
0:36:31 Future Tools. The problem with that method was that sometimes the page that I would plug in would
0:36:36 just have like a YouTube video embedded, and so it wouldn’t find anything to scrape. Or it would be
0:36:40 like a page that’s just full of images and not a lot of text, and it couldn’t figure out what the
0:36:47 tool was about by scraping it. Or they had some sort of like like blocker on it that would block
0:36:51 any sort of scraping tool from actually scraping it. And it would say we couldn’t find any data on
0:36:56 this. Things like that would happen. So what I started doing instead is now when I add that URL
0:37:03 inside of a Google Sheet cell, instead of it scraping the website, it actually takes that URL,
0:37:11 goes to Perplexity and says, tell me what the tool at this URL is about. And why that works is because
0:37:16 Perplexity can go and look at that website and essentially like scrape what’s on it for you.
0:37:21 But if there’s nothing on the website for it to scrape, it goes and finds other sources on the
0:37:25 internet that talk about that tool. So if that tool is listed on Product Hunt, if somebody’s
0:37:29 talked about it on Reddit, if somebody’s written an article about it on TechCrunch or something like
0:37:35 that, it’s going to go still figure out what that tool is about, because it’s going and actually
0:37:40 like searching for information about it, as opposed to just sort of scraping the sales page.
0:37:44 The flow after that’s the same, right? It figures out what the tool is about and then
0:37:50 goes over to like a GPT 3.5 API, I think it says summarize this for me down into like a
0:37:54 single paragraph, and then it sends it to Webflow and populates the website.
0:38:01 But that Perplexity API has made the listings on future tools 10 times more accurate.
0:38:06 Yeah, I wonder how the Google is going to deal with all this. I keep being worried for Google.
0:38:13 I don’t know like this new age, like not everyone’s figured this out yet. Like there’s
0:38:16 going to be like, you can make so many directories with stuff like this. Like
0:38:20 someone who had resources could make like a hundred directories and just like totally
0:38:25 game everything. Yeah, yeah. I mean, using something like Webflow, like Webflow is a
0:38:31 drag and drop no code website builder. Yeah, you know, you can design a website in a matter of
0:38:38 hours using Webflow and then use either make.com or Zapier and link it up to Perplexity and Claude
0:38:42 and some of these AI tools. And the next thing you know, you’ve got it, like you can turn it on
0:38:47 Total Autopilot. I still want to review every tool before it goes on the site. So I pick which
0:38:52 tools go into that spreadsheet and make the site. But you can totally make a tool that’s just like
0:38:58 watching the internet for you. And whenever a new AI tool pops up, it just scrapes the website and
0:39:03 puts the tool on your website. And it’s just automated building up the website for you. And
0:39:09 every day you log in and there’s 40 new tools on the website. You can totally do that. I just think
0:39:15 that when it comes to curation, the value of future tools isn’t just having a site with
0:39:20 the most tools listed. The value of the site is my curation of the tools. Like if I think it’s a
0:39:25 dog crap tool, it’s not going to make the website. And so that’s why I feel like the website is still
0:39:29 valuable to people is that I’m kind of curating the tools and all the tools that are just sort of
0:39:35 like cheap knockoffs or money grabs or feel a little scammy aren’t going to make the website.
0:39:41 But somebody who doesn’t have morals could just. If you don’t have morals, there’s a great business
0:39:47 there. Yeah, just don’t put your face on it. Use a faceless channel for that one, to promote that
0:39:53 one, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, I even think that concept has gotten so saturated, right? Like there’s
0:39:58 so many like AI tool listing websites that do the same thing as future tools now that I think
0:40:03 if somebody went and tried to create the same concept, it’s just not going to work, right?
0:40:08 But if you go and fight a different niche, it’ll work really, really well, right?
0:40:12 Cool. I don’t know. Is there anything else we want to talk about today?
0:40:19 I feel like we covered a lot of ground in this one. I mean, you know, I know what you would do
0:40:23 if you were starting over. I know what you are going to do with a new business that you’re planning.
0:40:28 You know, I talked about how I would do it if I was to start over. I also told you exactly what
0:40:33 I’m doing right now today. So I feel like people listening to this have the strategies we would
0:40:39 do, the strategies we are doing, and hopefully they can fill in the gaps for how can this work
0:40:44 in my business? How can this work in my niche? How can I leverage these ideas? I think there’s
0:40:49 a lot to go off of. I also name dropped a ton of potential tools that you can use to do this stuff,
0:40:56 tools to validate ideas for products, tools to actually create the content for you. I think
0:41:00 there’s a lot here that people should be able to take away and run with and
0:41:06 ideally go and build a business that leverages these AI tools. I think we might be moving into
0:41:12 this future where less and less people work for big companies. Big companies need less and less
0:41:17 people. So I think it’s really smart to learn this stuff and figure out what kind of businesses
0:41:23 could I be building right now because it might become a necessity really soon for a lot of people.
0:41:30 Depend on yourself more versus a company.
0:41:44 [Music]
0:00:10 big companies need less and less people. There’s really never an easier time to start a business
0:00:14 than right now because of the tools that make all this stuff really, really easy. They’re all at your
0:00:23 disposal. Hey, welcome to the Next Way podcast. I’m Matt Wolf. I’m here with Nathan Lanz. And
0:00:29 one of the questions that we get asked pretty often is if you were starting over from scratch
0:00:33 with all these AI tools that are available to you, what would you do? What path would you take?
0:00:38 And so in this episode, we’re going to break down exactly what Nathan would do if he was
0:00:42 start from scratch, what I would do if I was starting from scratch, as well as the things we
0:00:48 are actually doing right now with AI that are helping build our business. So some really cool
0:00:55 stuff, get ready to take some notes and let’s dive right in. When all your marketing team does is
0:01:01 put out fires, they burn out. But with HubSpot, they can achieve their best results without the
0:01:08 stress. Tap into HubSpot’s collection of AI tools, breeze, to pinpoint leads, capture attention,
0:01:13 and access all your data in one place. Keep your marketers cool and your campaign results hotter
0:01:24 than ever. Visit hubspot.com/marketers to learn more. One of the things that we were talking about
0:01:31 right before we hit record on this episode was that me personally, I don’t really think starting
0:01:38 an AI business is the smartest path for somebody to take. And what I mean by that is starting a
0:01:46 business that is like your own AI company. I feel like more the path to take would be starting a
0:01:51 business that’s not like a specific AI SaaS or something like that, but a company that leverages
0:01:58 all of the AI tools that exist out there to make your life and make building this business a lot
0:02:03 easier. That’s the path that I would take. But I know, Nathan, that if you were starting over
0:02:10 today from scratch, you would build probably a SaaS company and focus in a very specific niche
0:02:18 audience. How would you build that? What tools would you use for, let’s say, the idea for the
0:02:23 SaaS you’re going to use? How would you go about actually building the SaaS? Would you use AI for
0:02:31 like the marketing? What would that flow look like? How would you break down like, all right,
0:02:37 I’m starting this business. Here’s how I would go and do it. I think I would go for a walk,
0:02:44 talk to chat to BT voice, just chat with it. I would literally just go for a walk and talk to AI,
0:02:50 talk about different ideas I have and go back and forth with it, tell it to summarize what we
0:02:56 discussed and give me a list of the top 10 ideas from that, go back, put them on a whiteboard,
0:03:02 sit down with ideally a partner or somebody who’s helping me implement these ideas,
0:03:08 and then use something like Cursor or something like that to just crank out the websites and test
0:03:17 them out. I like the idea of going for a walk, having a conversation with OpenAI’s new advanced
0:03:24 voice mode, and then just sort of like fleshing out the conversation with the AI. Here’s my
0:03:29 thoughts. What are the pros and cons of this? Do you see any potential downsides of doing this route?
0:03:35 Are there any things you would change about the idea? You have that conversation with the AI,
0:03:40 and then the cool thing is, you can go back to your computer at home and literally look
0:03:46 back at the history and see that conversation and see the conclusions. It’s all there,
0:03:52 saved, stored for you inside of your chat GPT dashboard. What I would probably do slightly
0:03:56 different is, I don’t think I would go and necessarily build the software ideas that it
0:04:03 gave me. Let’s say this is what I would do. I would probably take the 10 ideas that we came
0:04:07 up with from that conversation. Let’s say the end of the conversation is, all right,
0:04:12 give me a recap and list 10 ideas based on what we talked about for cool software companies.
0:04:17 Then what I would go do is, I would use a tool. There’s a couple cool tools out there,
0:04:25 one’s called Mixo. I think it’s mixo.io, which is a tool to rapidly build a website with a single
0:04:32 prompt. You go to that website and you say, “I’m going to build a software product for real
0:04:41 estate agents to help them find leads using AI.” I’m just making this up off the seat of my pants
0:04:46 here. Let’s say you gave it all of those details about the software you’re thinking about doing.
0:04:53 What it’ll do is, it’ll go and create a landing page for you with images and copy and headlines
0:04:59 and sub-headlines and all that kind of stuff with the idea for your software. Then at the bottom,
0:05:05 it’ll have an email opt-in box that says, “Join the waitlist.” Then what you can go do is take
0:05:13 all 10 of those ideas that OpenAI gave you, go to a tool like Mixo, have Mixo rapidly create
0:05:19 10 different websites that flesh out the idea on the website. Then you can go and buy advertising
0:05:25 on Facebook ads, Google ads, Twitter ads, wherever, to all 10 of those landing pages,
0:05:30 and then whichever one has the most interest on the waitlist, whichever one’s waitlist grows the
0:05:35 fastest, go make that product. That’s probably what I would do. That’s kind of like the… Was
0:05:39 it Tim Ferriss that talked about ideas like that, where you would test ideas with ads, where you
0:05:43 would try something? I think that’s how he did his books, right? Like his book covers. He did his book
0:05:48 covers. Yeah. Whereas he would do a Facebook ad and then see which one converted the best,
0:05:53 and that would show him which direction he should go. Yeah. Well, his original book title,
0:05:59 “The 4-Hour Workweek,” was originally called “Something Like How to Sell Drugs for Fun and
0:06:04 Profit,” or something like that. And he actually split-tested that title against the 4-Hour Workweek
0:06:12 and the 4-Hour Workweek 1. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Obviously. It’s kind of funny that he thought it
0:06:17 wasn’t going to, but I wouldn’t depend on AI to give me all the ideas. Definitely, a lot of the
0:06:22 ideas would be coming from me and me kind of brainstorming with the AI. That probably would
0:06:26 go do research after that. I’d probably use something like perplexities, all these different
0:06:33 industries that I don’t know much about. Let’s say it’s landscaping or whatever. I would go do
0:06:38 some perplexity searches and pull up to see if there are existing companies in those areas. And
0:06:43 if there are, I would look at their websites, maybe copy and paste that into chat to BT or
0:06:48 something that uses a reference. And I think what I would do, so I haven’t used Mix. You said Mix.io.
0:06:54 I think it’s Mix.io. Well, this Mix.io website, just to clarify, is literally just designed
0:07:00 to test concepts. It doesn’t go the whole website. It’s designed to make a landing page
0:07:07 with the idea on it and then send people to that waitlist to gauge interest. It specifically seems
0:07:13 to be tailored for that use case. Oh, interesting. I’ll have to try it out. Yeah. Depending on how
0:07:18 good it is, you might be able to just do the same thing yourself though, like using cursor,
0:07:21 like having like a template. And then you go into cursor and like, hey, change this stuff for me.
0:07:25 Like change the taglines. Here’s the kind of stuff I want to change. Change the colors.
0:07:30 You probably like within like five minutes could change all that stuff. Then you, you know, if you
0:07:34 know how to use, if you know how to code, you just push it live and then you’re good. So that’s
0:07:37 probably what I would do. But yeah, I love the idea of using the Facebook ads and just like testing
0:07:42 it, you know, just how Tim Ferriss used to do. Yeah. Yeah. And then, and then the nice thing
0:07:47 is too, you’ve already built an email list. So then when you go and actually release the project,
0:07:53 you just hit up all the people that joined that specific wait list that said they basically
0:07:56 raised their hand and said, I’d be interested in this product because they joined the wait list,
0:08:02 right? And then you’ve got your, your, your sort of first marketing campaign for it because you
0:08:06 just mail that list. I mean, heck, if you want, you can mail the other nine lists as well and say,
0:08:10 Hey, we didn’t make that product, but come check out this one. So maybe we should try this and
0:08:17 record it. It’s like, yeah, they’re actually kind of a fun episode. Okay. If we do that,
0:08:26 who owns it? But yeah, so that’s the way I would do it. And then, and then you would go and like
0:08:31 build the software, right? And you mentioned cursor, cursors probably, I believe like the
0:08:36 biggest benefit of cursor, right? Is that it can use your entire code base for context, right?
0:08:41 Like it’s, it’s using, I believe, retrieval augmented generation, which can like look at
0:08:47 the text of everything that you upload. But when you’re using cursor, it’s looking at all of the
0:08:52 code. So like, even if it’s like 30 files long, right, it’s going to look through all of those
0:08:56 files to sort of understand what’s going on in the software that you’re creating, right?
0:08:59 Yeah, exactly. I’ve actually never used cursor still. So yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s, I mean,
0:09:03 you know, I’ve only used it a little bit, but like the, the biggest benefit I saw was that it can
0:09:08 see your whole code base. So it’s like, it has context of your entire code base versus you copying,
0:09:12 pasting something into Claude. It only knows the one page it’s on. It doesn’t know that if you
0:09:16 change this thing, it’s going to break something somewhere else. It’s important to know how things
0:09:21 are interconnected. Yeah, yeah. But I think, I think, you know, with the tools that are available
0:09:27 out there, you can rapidly get ideas for software, you know, having the sort of conversations,
0:09:34 you can rapidly go and test the ideas by collecting emails. Once you’ve got the idea,
0:09:41 you can pretty much rapidly create the software, right? Between tools like cursor, right? You’ve
0:09:46 got tools like cursor, but then you’ve also got tools like replet and firebase, where firebase
0:09:52 tends to handle like the back end sort of database of whatever website or SAS you’re building,
0:09:56 like firebase will handle that. It also handles like a lot of the single sign in stuff like,
0:10:01 like Google login and Apple login and all that kind of stuff. So you don’t have to really
0:10:07 mess with the login functionality. And then replet tends to host like the front end for your site
0:10:12 a little bit. So if you’re using cursor to write the code, replet to host the front end,
0:10:19 firebase to host the back end, like you use all three of those tools and now replet just added
0:10:23 an integration for cursor. So whenever you make these updates in cursor, you’re going to just
0:10:30 have them automatically pushed into replet for you and fixed live on your site. So I mean, like
0:10:35 we’ve said it before, there’s really never an easier time to start a business than right now
0:10:40 because of like the AI tools and the tools that make all this stuff like really, really easy.
0:10:46 They’re all at your disposal. We’ll be right back. But first, I want to tell you about another
0:10:51 great podcast you’re going to want to listen to. It’s called Science of Scaling, hosted by Mark
0:10:57 Robertz. And it’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for
0:11:03 business professionals. Each week, host Mark Robertz, founding chief revenue officer at HubSpot,
0:11:07 senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and co-founder of Stage 2 Capital,
0:11:11 sits down with the most successful sales leaders in tech to learn the secrets,
0:11:17 strategies, and tactics to scaling your company’s growth. He recently did a great episode called
0:11:22 How Do You Solve for a Siloed Marketing in Sales? And I personally learned a lot from it.
0:11:27 You’re going to want to check out the podcast. Listen to Science of Scaling wherever you get your
0:11:36 podcasts. Yeah, it’s crazy how easy it is to make a database with Firebase. It’s kind of wild.
0:11:40 Like I met James Tamplin. I think Tamplin, I believe that’s his last name. Sorry, James,
0:11:45 if you’re listening. But I met him with some friends in San Francisco, like smoking hookah
0:11:49 together. They’re like, “Oh, here’s this guy, James.” And like he’s building something pretty cool.
0:11:53 I’m like, “Oh, cool. What is it?” They was like, “Oh, Firebase.” I was like, “Yeah.” And he was way
0:11:56 more technical than me. I was like, “Oh, cool. It’s like an easy database or something.” Okay,
0:12:01 sounds neat. Like had no idea if it would work or like what the hell he was building exactly.
0:12:04 And then it became Firebase. Was he at Google at the time or did Google acquire it later?
0:12:10 No, they acquired it. I believe Firebase was a YC startup, I believe. And they at Google acquired
0:12:15 it for, I think, a few hundred million. Like it was a lot. And it all happened like within like a
0:12:18 year or two. It was kind of wild. Like literally, like I’m really like smoking hookah. He’s telling
0:12:23 me this crazy idea. And then a year or two later, like I see the thing like, “Oh, Google’s bought
0:12:27 them for like a few hundred million.” But so most of the stuff we were talking about was like kind
0:12:32 of, you know, the stuff I would do. So what would you do? Like if you were creating a business today?
0:12:36 I do want to add one more like idea to what we were just talking about.
0:12:42 Because like a lot of ideas have been done already, right? Especially since like AI has become a lot
0:12:48 more prolific and a lot of coders are able to use it. We’re seeing just like almost like this spamming
0:12:54 of SaaS companies, right? Like I run the Future Tools website. I have a submission form where
0:12:59 people can submit their new tools. I get like a hundred new tools a day submitted. I only accept
0:13:03 about 1% of them because most of them are just like clones of tools that already exist because
0:13:09 everything’s so easy to make. So the other thing that I would add into the mix of what we were
0:13:15 talking about there is I would go and try to find the products that already exist that are somewhat
0:13:19 close to the idea that we’re talking about because there’s probably something out there
0:13:24 that’s already fairly close to like almost every idea you could come up with. But then what I would
0:13:30 do is I would go to like Reddit and I would search out that software on Reddit. I would search out
0:13:35 that software on Trustpilot. I would search it out on, oh, what’s the other? There’s all those sites
0:13:42 that are like sort of like peer reviewing websites and software that exist out there, right? I would
0:13:46 go to all of those different sites and I would copy and paste all of the comments, all of the
0:13:52 reviews, all of that kind of stuff in the cloud. And then I would get like a sentiment analysis of
0:13:59 like, what do people love about this product? What do people hate about this product? What is the
0:14:04 feedback that this product has gotten? And then I would use that feedback to make sure that I make
0:14:09 my product better than the one that exists out there. That’s a good idea. I always just think
0:14:12 I would probably just look at similar web and see if it was like trending up or down like the
0:14:19 website. Yeah, yeah. But you can always do that sentiment analysis. This is a tactic that a lot
0:14:25 of Amazon sellers use, right? Because on Amazon, every product has like 30 competing products
0:14:30 because everybody just orders them off alibaba.com and sells the same crap, right? So what people do
0:14:36 on Amazon is they go and look at the reviews of the products that exist already and then sort of
0:14:40 get the sentiment analysis of what people do and don’t like about that product and then make sure
0:14:45 that when they go sell their version of the product, they’re fixing the things that people don’t
0:14:50 like and they’re sort of leaning into the things that people do like in the marketing, right? So
0:14:55 like if a lot of people say like, for this software, I love X feature, I love that they added this
0:15:00 feature, you want to make sure that that features in yours, right? Or if you look at the software,
0:15:04 or if you look at the reviews for those various software companies and they say like,
0:15:08 I really, really hate that they haven’t added this feature. It seems so easy for them to add. Why
0:15:13 don’t they add this feature? And there’s like this overwhelming thought that like this functionality
0:15:18 should be in this tool, but it’s not. Well, make sure you add that functionality, right? So that
0:15:23 way you’re making sure that whatever you go and build, you know, you used AI to sort of analyze
0:15:28 what are the features that should be in my MVP and which features should I exclude?
0:15:32 Okay, cool. So Matt, what would you do like if you were starting over today?
0:15:38 So I would likely still go down the route of being really focused heavily on content creation.
0:15:45 I love content creation. I also think content creation is somewhat future proof, right? I do
0:15:51 think like there are tools that make content a lot easier for anybody to create, right? You’ve
0:15:56 got the like, Hey, Jen tool where you can make a digital clone of yourself and now anybody can
0:16:00 just crank out videos of themselves talking, right? You’ve got notebook LM, which will create
0:16:06 really actually good podcasts that people will listen to, right? So I say it’ll feature proof
0:16:13 me to some degree, but I also feel like a lot of people as AI gets more and more prolific,
0:16:18 right? As it’s just sort of everywhere and people are inundated with AI all the time,
0:16:22 they’re going to look for real humans, right? They’re going to look for that like real voice,
0:16:27 that real person that they can trust that they know there’s an actual human being behind it who’s
0:16:31 not just looking to like make affiliate commissions or whatever, right? And so I still think there’s
0:16:40 a lot of value to being a not a faceless content creator, but a face full content. What’s the
0:16:46 word for that? Not faceless, but face full, having a face, having a face, be a face in
0:16:54 content creation, a face channel. So I still think there’s a lot of, I still think there’s a lot
0:17:01 of room to grow and build in that space and leverage AI to make your life a lot easier to
0:17:09 do it, right? So I would probably pick a fairly niche topic that I can, that I’m really excited
0:17:16 about and passionate about, and I can talk about myself, right? And then I would use AI to help me
0:17:22 with the ideation, right? Right now I use perplexity and Claude constantly. And when I am using
0:17:27 perplexity, I have the pro version and I have it set to use Claude when I’m using perplexity.
0:17:32 So like perplexity and Claude are like my AI stack that I’m mostly using right now, right?
0:17:38 But like I would use those tools to research what are people searching for in this niche right now?
0:17:42 What type of content are they looking for? What are things that people are struggling with that
0:17:48 they need help with? And I would go and create as much content around those topics as possible.
0:17:53 And the content is so much easier to create as well, because you can have tools like Claude
0:18:01 go and outline the concepts for you. Like I can say, I want to make a video about how to
0:18:11 make 3D walkthroughs of houses for the real estate niche, right? I can go and go to Claude and say,
0:18:17 hey, this is the video I want to make. What are the things that I need to make sure are included
0:18:22 in this video? What is the flow of this video? How can I make it so it holds people’s attention
0:18:26 throughout the whole video? And it will actually generate an outline for me and I can follow the
0:18:32 outline and make sure I hit all the beats that it recommends I hit, right? Like one of the biggest
0:18:36 questions is what kind of camera am I going to need? So make sure you talk about the type of
0:18:42 camera you’re going to need. How long do I need to set the camera down in each location of the house?
0:18:46 All right, I need to make sure that gets into my video, right? So I can use AI to really,
0:18:50 really help with the outlining process of the content that I would create.
0:18:55 Where would you start first? You’ve mentioned like video, I think you mentioned newsletter,
0:18:59 Twitter, things like that. Where would you start if you were starting a new media brand today?
0:19:06 I would simultaneously work on a newsletter and probably short form video. Now,
0:19:14 long form video is my main game, right? Long form video on YouTube is actually where I make the most
0:19:20 of my money. That’s where most of the sponsorships lie. Adsense revenue is more significant on
0:19:25 long form videos. However, short form videos, I’ve actually started doing quite a bit of
0:19:29 short form videos as well. I’m putting out about three short form videos a week right now.
0:19:37 Short form videos are so much faster to produce, right? I’m making like a 59 second script. I’m
0:19:41 not reading the script exactly anymore. I was for a little bit, but it kind of got too obvious.
0:19:45 Like you can see my eyes are in the script and I’m like, all right, I need to basically like
0:19:49 memorize what I’m going to talk about and get all the points. And so now what I’m doing is I’ll like
0:19:53 speak out a paragraph and then look down at my script and then speak out a paragraph. So it’s
0:20:01 not word for word anymore, but the short form videos, I can, I can batch record three or four
0:20:06 short form videos in a half hour, right? Just like, here’s one, here’s another, here’s another,
0:20:12 here’s another. And then I can either pass them to an editor or I can use a tool. I use a tool
0:20:18 called Timebolt to edit mine, which is basically like an automated tool that will go through and
0:20:22 find all the gaps and silence and remove them automatically. And it tries to find some of the
0:20:28 mistakes and it tries to take out some of the ums and stuff like that. So I can just feed my sort
0:20:35 of rough video into that tool and then it’ll spit out the sort of one minute version for me.
0:20:40 And then I would go in and, you know, add B role and stuff like that, the old fashioned way using
0:20:45 DaVinci Resolve or Adobe Premiere. Now I would pass it to an editor. I have an editor that helps
0:20:50 me with short form, but I would go and I would batch record a bunch of them. At this point,
0:20:55 pass them all to my editor. The editor would go and add the visual effects to them. And the reason
0:21:01 I like short form is because in the content world, the majority of the income that I earn
0:21:07 doesn’t come from the YouTube AdSense revenue. It comes from sponsorships, right? And
0:21:13 all the sponsors care about is how much reach is this video going to get, right? They don’t care
0:21:19 if it’s a 10 minute video or a 45 second video. They want to get the views on their product. They
0:21:26 want to get the views on their brand, right? So the people that are making these 60 second shorts
0:21:31 are making the same amount of money off their sponsorships as I’m making by putting out 20
0:21:37 minute long videos that take multiple days to dial in. Yeah, from a sponsorship perspective,
0:21:42 ad revenue is crap on short form videos, right? Like I can get, you can get a million views on
0:21:48 a short form video and it’ll make you like 60 bucks. It’s really dumb. But from a sponsorship
0:21:54 perspective, I can basically charge the same amount to a sponsor for a short form that might get
0:22:00 100,000 views as I can for a long form that might get 100,000 views. So it’s, you know,
0:22:08 a lot less effort for creating the content. I can crank out a lot more of it and the sponsors
0:22:13 will still come knocking as long as the videos get views, right? So I would probably go that route.
0:22:16 And you would use your face. So you wouldn’t do faceless.
0:22:20 I wouldn’t do faceless. I would use my face on those. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you could use something
0:22:26 like Hey, Jen and train your face into it. And then it also learns your voice using 11 labs. And
0:22:30 then you can copy and paste a script. And I know people that are doing that. Rowan Chung is doing
0:22:36 that. Varun Maya is doing that. Those guys are doing really, really well with it. Like it’s
0:22:43 actually their face, but it’s an AI avatar version of their face. And those work. But I do think
0:22:47 they work for them right now because they’re like the pioneers. Like they’re the ones that are like
0:22:53 the first ones out there doing this stuff and being seen. But there’s going to hit a saturation
0:22:58 point where half your short form content that you see is these like AI generated avatars and
0:23:03 you start to get sick of them, right? Yeah. So I think that’s where being a real human is still
0:23:09 going to be important, you know, going to conferences and, you know, as they say, shaking
0:23:14 hands and kissing babies, right? Like that’s that type of thing. People build the relationship,
0:23:18 they build a bond with you. They realize you’re a real person that they can trust that, you know,
0:23:22 they can get to know personally that they could, they feel like they want to go have a beer with,
0:23:26 right? Like building up that I think is really, really important. And I think it’s only going
0:23:30 to get more and more important as we’re seeing more and more AI generated content.
0:23:35 Yeah. And it’s going to get easier too, right? I think that’s all Peter levels, the, you know,
0:23:39 famous indie hacker. He peeped out something yesterday showing you where you can just generate
0:23:44 an avatar of like this beautiful woman. And all of a sudden she’s like a seen in anchor
0:23:48 talking about whatever and literally like, you literally like copy and paste in seeing in like
0:23:53 a news story into like, you know, chat to PT or whatever and have it produce the script and then
0:23:58 you just feed that into the system and it does all of it. So I mean, you know, I think it’s
0:24:01 kind of thing where that kind of stuff is probably a decent tactic though, like for like the next
0:24:06 year or maybe even two, but at some point there’s like everyone’s going to be doing it and like
0:24:11 you’re going to know, okay, that’s another one of those. And it’s going to start to be associated
0:24:16 with low effort content, right? In the same way, like when I want, when I, when I click on a YouTube
0:24:21 video and let’s say it’s like a 10 minute video and I immediately hear like an AI voiceover on the
0:24:25 video, I click away. It turns me off like immediately. Like I’m just like, I don’t want to
0:24:29 listen to an AI voice for the next 10 minutes. I almost immediately click off because I just
0:24:34 assumed this was low effort content that somebody just slapped together through on YouTube to try
0:24:39 to get quick views. That’s what I associate with that. I, you know, I don’t know if that’s good or
0:24:43 bad, but that’s what my brain associates with it. Like I hear the AI voice. I go, this is obviously
0:24:49 an AI voice. I’m out moving on to the next video. I want to hear a human explain the thing to me.
0:24:54 Right? So, I mean, at some point you might not be able to tell though. That’s the next thing though.
0:24:58 I agree. Yeah, I agree. I think at some point we won’t be able to tell, but I also think
0:25:03 those AI generated avatars, it’s going to be a similar thing. Right now I actually like watching
0:25:10 Varunmai and I like watching Rowan’s videos where they’re doing it that way, but it’s not
0:25:14 really a shortcut. Like those guys put a lot of effort still into making a lot of those videos
0:25:18 and finding the right B role and cutting it at the right time. So it’s harder to tell this
0:25:25 an AI generated video, that kind of stuff. There’s more effort into it than I think they actually
0:25:30 let on it, like to let people believe, right? But there is sort of a part two to what I would
0:25:38 do. So like I did mention, I would simultaneously create an email list while also doing content.
0:25:43 I would probably do a mix of both long and short form, but I’d probably make short form the main
0:25:50 and make long form a little less frequent just because of the pace that I can put out
0:25:54 short form videos. I could put out a lot more of them. But like a newsletter,
0:26:01 there’s never been an easier time to grow on. We talked about this on stage on the HubSpot creator
0:26:08 stage when we’re at inbound is like when it comes to creating a newsletter, like the newsletter could
0:26:15 mostly be outlined and edited using AI, right? Like you could have AI write an outline for you
0:26:20 and then you go in with your own words and write it out, or you can have AI flesh it out, write
0:26:25 the whole thing for you, or you can write it yourself and have AI go back and fix it for editing
0:26:29 and grammar and spelling and all that kind of stuff so that it reads a little bit better.
0:26:34 Like writing the newsletter should be nobody’s excuse anymore, right? It’s easier than ever to
0:26:38 actually create the newsletter. You have perplexity that can do the research. Let’s say you’re
0:26:43 making a newsletter on their real estate niche and let’s say it’s a daily newsletter. You can go
0:26:48 to perplexity every morning and say, “What are the top 10 most interesting things happening in the
0:26:53 world of real estate?” And perplexity will give you a breakdown of like based on the news we found,
0:26:57 here’s the top 10 things happening in the world of real estate today. Okay, cool. Take that list
0:27:02 of 10 things, jump over to Claude and say, “Here’s 10 things that are happening in the real estate
0:27:08 world today. Write me a newsletter around these 10 things and break it all down.” Boom, I got that
0:27:14 newsletter written. You can use make.com and probably make like a API flow where every day you
0:27:18 just press a button and it goes right to the newsletter for you following that formula. Like
0:27:24 it’s so easy to create the newsletter now, right? And then I would leverage the short form content
0:27:27 with a call to action to join the newsletter, right? So at the end of every single video,
0:27:34 you’d have like a two second call to action get on the daily newsletter to be the most
0:27:40 in the no person in real estate in your area, right? Like if you’re not on this newsletter,
0:27:44 your competition probably is, so make sure you’re on it, right? You do those kinds of calls to action
0:27:50 at the end of your short form videos and you grow the newsletter that way, right? And what I love
0:27:57 about the sort of blend of having a newsletter and having a sort of content machine is that
0:28:02 now you can sell sponsorships in a completely different way. Like one question I get asked
0:28:09 a lot when I’m at these events is like, you know, what’s the CPM? What CPM do I charge sponsors
0:28:14 for my YouTube videos, right? Other YouTubers are like, all right, so per thousand CPM is how
0:28:21 much you make per thousand views, right? So let’s say on average, somebody might charge $40 CPM.
0:28:27 So for every thousand views a video makes, they make $40 on it, a video that gets 100,000 views
0:28:34 might make what is that for for grand, right? Yeah. So, but people will ask me like, what’s the CPM?
0:28:39 And I’m like, I don’t play the CPM game. I play the bundling game. I’ve got the future
0:28:44 tools website where I can put sponsors at the top of the website. I’ve got my YouTube channel
0:28:48 where I can integrate sponsors in the middle of the video. I’ve got shorts where I can make
0:28:53 sponsored shorts for companies and I’ve got my newsletter and people can sponsor the newsletter.
0:28:59 So I don’t sell CPM at all. I go to these companies and say, here’s a bundle. You can get
0:29:04 a featured listing on future tools for one week. I’ll integrate your ad read into one video and
0:29:09 you can sponsor two newsletters over the next month. So it’s more of this like package deal
0:29:16 where you’re being seen on all of these platforms, right? And now I get out of that CPM game and I
0:29:21 sort of elevate, elevate above it and I’m charging way more than some other YouTubers would charge
0:29:25 because you’re now getting access to the newsletter, the YouTube channel, the YouTube shorts, maybe
0:29:31 Instagram, maybe Twitter, maybe my LinkedIn, maybe my Discord community and the, you know,
0:29:36 the future tools website, all of that, right? Like all of that can be sort of worked into
0:29:40 some sort of bundle deal. So that’s the game that I play now with my content.
0:29:46 Yeah. You told me that in the taxi in Boston. We were heading back and that was one of the main
0:29:51 things. Like when I got back, I told chat to BT like, remember this. So that was one of my notes.
0:29:55 Like I did like a decompression like after Boston, like what’s all this stuff I learned or whatever
0:29:59 that I want to remember. That was one of my big notes. I’m like, remember this. This is smart
0:30:04 because not only does that help you like better monetize your media properties, but also they
0:30:08 help grow each other. So it’s like, it’s amazing. It’s like amazing for growth and monetization.
0:30:12 I do feel like with newsletters, it’s going to be similar to like the faceless YouTube channels
0:30:18 where it’s easier than ever to create them. So the ones that are really like, yeah, you can have
0:30:22 newsletters right now where you literally just copy and paste up in and say, Hey, give people
0:30:26 these bullet points. Just like just summarize. And there have been like newsletters that are
0:30:30 really successful that are just like purely summarization kind of newsletters. I feel like
0:30:33 those are going to be challenging longterm though, right? Cause like, yeah, people are going to use
0:30:38 perplexity or whatever else to have their own personalized summarization. So I think, I think
0:30:43 if you’re doing it, like make sure that you have a unique voice and have something to say, I think
0:30:47 longterm is going to be important because people are going to want to have that real person and
0:30:53 learn from that real person and hear what they have to say versus just here’s a such an AI summary
0:30:58 of what happened anywhere. Yeah, you know, uh, Peter Diamandis, right? He’s got a newsletter
0:31:04 called future loop and future loop is completely automated with AI. I don’t think he touches it.
0:31:11 I think it like he, he’s created some sort of app that watches the sort of tech emerging tech news
0:31:16 for him writes the newsletter and sends it. Like I literally think it’s completely hands off. It’s
0:31:21 just on a daily basis. It runs through this process and blast out the newsletter without like a human
0:31:26 really even touching it saying that out of, I subscribed to it out of all the newsletters I
0:31:32 read. I sort of have like a priority of like, I always read this one, like Rowan Chung’s run down
0:31:37 is probably my favorite. I always read that one. Ben’s bites is really good with Ben Tossel, right?
0:31:42 There’s a handful that I’m like, these are my must reads every day, right? And I look at future
0:31:46 loop, which is like the one that’s automated with AI. It’s the lowest on my priority list, right?
0:31:50 Like if I’m like rushed for time and I’m just like, all right, give me the really quick news.
0:31:55 I only read two or three newsletters and that one doesn’t make the cut, right? Because I know
0:31:59 it’s automated. I know it’s AI. Sometimes it finds news articles that are like two months old and I’m
0:32:03 like, what did, why did that make it into this one? Probably because automation screwed up and
0:32:10 put the wrong article in somehow, right? So I do think that there is like a sort of limited window
0:32:16 where you can do this and over time, there’ll be so many just junk newsletters that is not effective
0:32:20 anymore. But if you can be that person that has a voice, that it makes a difference.
0:32:23 Yeah. It could be a good short-term strategy. I mean, you could do that and then
0:32:29 once it becomes obvious that it’s no longer working, like, oh, pivot. Now I’m writing the
0:32:31 newsletter. Here’s the new format. You know, sir.
0:32:35 I’m writing, at least as far as you know, I’m writing the newsletter now.
0:32:37 Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I’m writing it. Yeah.
0:32:42 By the way, this is not what I do with my newsletter. I actually like work with a team
0:32:46 and I’ve got an editor and some people that help me with writing. It’s actually still humans behind
0:32:50 my newsletter. So I just want to say that if anybody’s listening going, oh, man,
0:32:55 that’s automating the whole thing. I’m not. But I’m just pointing out how easy it is to
0:33:01 create a newsletter and that the amount of time that goes into that really shouldn’t be a factor.
0:33:07 Yeah. So basically you’re saying that it’s easier than ever to create YouTube shorts and a newsletter.
0:33:11 And so if you were starting over, that’s what you would do. You’d use all these AI tools.
0:33:17 What do you think? So this all works today in like five years from now. Do you think it’ll be
0:33:19 similar or do you think it’s all going to be different?
0:33:26 Yeah, I think timing is a big factor. When it comes to my success on YouTube,
0:33:31 I got insanely lucky with the timing. I started making YouTube content around AI
0:33:39 about six months before AI hit the mainstream consciousness. I was making videos about AI
0:33:45 and cool technology. And then the rest of the world caught up because of the chat GPT launch.
0:33:52 And I had already been making videos on that topic. So I think the earlier you get in and
0:33:56 like this sort of more brand reputation you build earlier on, the better you’re going to be
0:34:03 down the line. I think a lot of people are going and creating AI related YouTube channels now.
0:34:08 And they’re just sort of floundering because there’s already a handful of really, really
0:34:12 big channels that most people already follow. And the smaller channels kind of are starting
0:34:16 to feel like me too channels like, oh, they’re looking at the analytics and going that work
0:34:19 for them. I’m going to try to do the same thing, but it doesn’t really work because
0:34:24 there’s already sort of some established names in that space. I think it’s going to be the same
0:34:30 thing. But I also think when it comes to like what niche you’re going to go into and talk about,
0:34:36 there’s unlimited potential niches, right? Like maybe just think of a sub niche of the niche,
0:34:40 right? Like real estate is honestly probably too broad of a niche. But if you can think of like a
0:34:45 sub niche of that niche, you could probably own it, right? Like it’s the Japanese gardening or
0:34:52 the ocean strategy versus the red ocean strategy, right? Like if there’s a billion content creators
0:34:57 talking about this niche, you know, niche down even further until you’re in a blue ocean where
0:35:03 you’re the only one talking about that specific portion of the niche. I think one other interesting
0:35:10 thing that you told me in Boston was how you were using Proplexity’s API to fill out future
0:35:14 tools. I mean, I’ve been thinking about that a lot. I’m like, God, there’s probably so many
0:35:19 directories you could build using stuff like this, you know? And I’ve got lore.com like,
0:35:23 “Damn, should I be using this? Should lore.com be something else? Should lore.com be like a,
0:35:28 you know, like every single fantasy thing or every game or whatever? Like a page is filled
0:35:33 out and it’s like, I just like, you know, just really game SEO on that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I
0:35:39 don’t know. I mean, it’s a great domain name, but I, yeah, I’m not sure. But yeah, with like the
0:35:44 Perplexity API, it’s been, the problem with the API is you can’t, it wasn’t, maybe there’s a way
0:35:50 to do it, but I wasn’t able to pick like Sonnet or chat GPT. It lets you pick like from an open
0:35:57 source model. So I’m actually using Llama 3.1 paired up with Claude right now or with Perplexity
0:36:04 right now. But basically, the way I used to run the Future Tools website was whenever I came across
0:36:10 a new tool that I liked, I would add it to a spreadsheet, then it would go to make.com. It
0:36:14 would use a tool called scraping bee. It would scrape all the copy off the website. It would take
0:36:20 the copy that it just scraped. It would put it into chat GPT and say summarize this tool for me,
0:36:24 and then it would take that summary. And that would be the sort of content of the listing on
0:36:31 Future Tools. The problem with that method was that sometimes the page that I would plug in would
0:36:36 just have like a YouTube video embedded, and so it wouldn’t find anything to scrape. Or it would be
0:36:40 like a page that’s just full of images and not a lot of text, and it couldn’t figure out what the
0:36:47 tool was about by scraping it. Or they had some sort of like like blocker on it that would block
0:36:51 any sort of scraping tool from actually scraping it. And it would say we couldn’t find any data on
0:36:56 this. Things like that would happen. So what I started doing instead is now when I add that URL
0:37:03 inside of a Google Sheet cell, instead of it scraping the website, it actually takes that URL,
0:37:11 goes to Perplexity and says, tell me what the tool at this URL is about. And why that works is because
0:37:16 Perplexity can go and look at that website and essentially like scrape what’s on it for you.
0:37:21 But if there’s nothing on the website for it to scrape, it goes and finds other sources on the
0:37:25 internet that talk about that tool. So if that tool is listed on Product Hunt, if somebody’s
0:37:29 talked about it on Reddit, if somebody’s written an article about it on TechCrunch or something like
0:37:35 that, it’s going to go still figure out what that tool is about, because it’s going and actually
0:37:40 like searching for information about it, as opposed to just sort of scraping the sales page.
0:37:44 The flow after that’s the same, right? It figures out what the tool is about and then
0:37:50 goes over to like a GPT 3.5 API, I think it says summarize this for me down into like a
0:37:54 single paragraph, and then it sends it to Webflow and populates the website.
0:38:01 But that Perplexity API has made the listings on future tools 10 times more accurate.
0:38:06 Yeah, I wonder how the Google is going to deal with all this. I keep being worried for Google.
0:38:13 I don’t know like this new age, like not everyone’s figured this out yet. Like there’s
0:38:16 going to be like, you can make so many directories with stuff like this. Like
0:38:20 someone who had resources could make like a hundred directories and just like totally
0:38:25 game everything. Yeah, yeah. I mean, using something like Webflow, like Webflow is a
0:38:31 drag and drop no code website builder. Yeah, you know, you can design a website in a matter of
0:38:38 hours using Webflow and then use either make.com or Zapier and link it up to Perplexity and Claude
0:38:42 and some of these AI tools. And the next thing you know, you’ve got it, like you can turn it on
0:38:47 Total Autopilot. I still want to review every tool before it goes on the site. So I pick which
0:38:52 tools go into that spreadsheet and make the site. But you can totally make a tool that’s just like
0:38:58 watching the internet for you. And whenever a new AI tool pops up, it just scrapes the website and
0:39:03 puts the tool on your website. And it’s just automated building up the website for you. And
0:39:09 every day you log in and there’s 40 new tools on the website. You can totally do that. I just think
0:39:15 that when it comes to curation, the value of future tools isn’t just having a site with
0:39:20 the most tools listed. The value of the site is my curation of the tools. Like if I think it’s a
0:39:25 dog crap tool, it’s not going to make the website. And so that’s why I feel like the website is still
0:39:29 valuable to people is that I’m kind of curating the tools and all the tools that are just sort of
0:39:35 like cheap knockoffs or money grabs or feel a little scammy aren’t going to make the website.
0:39:41 But somebody who doesn’t have morals could just. If you don’t have morals, there’s a great business
0:39:47 there. Yeah, just don’t put your face on it. Use a faceless channel for that one, to promote that
0:39:53 one, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, I even think that concept has gotten so saturated, right? Like there’s
0:39:58 so many like AI tool listing websites that do the same thing as future tools now that I think
0:40:03 if somebody went and tried to create the same concept, it’s just not going to work, right?
0:40:08 But if you go and fight a different niche, it’ll work really, really well, right?
0:40:12 Cool. I don’t know. Is there anything else we want to talk about today?
0:40:19 I feel like we covered a lot of ground in this one. I mean, you know, I know what you would do
0:40:23 if you were starting over. I know what you are going to do with a new business that you’re planning.
0:40:28 You know, I talked about how I would do it if I was to start over. I also told you exactly what
0:40:33 I’m doing right now today. So I feel like people listening to this have the strategies we would
0:40:39 do, the strategies we are doing, and hopefully they can fill in the gaps for how can this work
0:40:44 in my business? How can this work in my niche? How can I leverage these ideas? I think there’s
0:40:49 a lot to go off of. I also name dropped a ton of potential tools that you can use to do this stuff,
0:40:56 tools to validate ideas for products, tools to actually create the content for you. I think
0:41:00 there’s a lot here that people should be able to take away and run with and
0:41:06 ideally go and build a business that leverages these AI tools. I think we might be moving into
0:41:12 this future where less and less people work for big companies. Big companies need less and less
0:41:17 people. So I think it’s really smart to learn this stuff and figure out what kind of businesses
0:41:23 could I be building right now because it might become a necessity really soon for a lot of people.
0:41:30 Depend on yourself more versus a company.
0:41:44 [Music]
Episode 29: Are you ready to dive into the world of AI-driven newsletter creation and content strategy? Matt Wolfe (https://x.com/mreflow) and Nathan Lands (https://x.com/NathanLands) discuss the tools, techniques, and insider secrets to building a successful AI-powered business from scratch.
In this episode, they explore AI’s role in streamlining newsletter creation, bundling media properties for better monetization, and maintaining the crucial human touch for quality and engagement. Plus, they share their personal experiences and strategies for leveraging AI tools like Perplexity, Claude, Mixo, and many more to validate business ideas and enhance content production.
Check out The Next Wave YouTube Channel if you want to see Matt and Nathan on screen: https://lnk.to/thenextwavepd
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Show Notes:
- (00:00) Leverage AI tools, don’t start AI businesses.
- (03:43) Mixo creates instant landing pages using prompts.
- (09:23) Firebase, Replit, and AI simplify business startup.
- (12:54) Amazon sellers use sentiment analysis to improve products.
- (14:14) Focus on human-centric content creation amid AI.
- (18:17) Mix of memorization and automated video editing.
- (22:12) AI-generated avatars as news anchors increasing.
- (24:48) AI simplifies newsletter creation with writing, editing.
- (28:50) Newsletters need unique voices for long-term success.
- (32:01) Timing was crucial for YouTube success.
- (34:49) Automated tool summary solution using Perplexity.
- (38:56) Covered strategies, tools, and ideas for businesses.
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Mentions:
- Mixo: https://www.mixo.io/
- Perplexity: https://www.perplexity.ai/
- Claude: https://claude.ai/
- Futureloop: https://www.diamandis.com/futureloop
- Timebolt: https://www.timebolt.io/
- Firebase: https://firebase.google.com/
- Cursor: https://www.cursor.com/
- Webflow: https://webflow.com/
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Check Out Matt’s Stuff:
• Future Tools – https://futuretools.beehiiv.com/
• Blog – https://www.mattwolfe.com/
• YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/@mreflow
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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