It's Marketing's Fault

Welcome to its marketing's fault, the podcast where we discuss how to do marketing the right way.

I'm your host, Eric Rutherford, and I am thrilled today, because I have with me Cody Schneider.

He is an entrepreneur.

He's a digital marketer.

Just for over a decade, man, he has helped grow multiple software and SaaS startups, always focused on marketing automation, content production.

And he is now the founder.

of swell AI, which we're going to do a deep dive into today.

So Cody, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

Super excited to be here.

I appreciate it.

Oh, it's my pleasure.

I was pumped as I started looking and do it and researching swell AI.

I'm like, this is going to be a fascinating conversation.

So I am excited.

So before we get to swell AI, what is something about repurposing content that most people think is true, but that you disagree with?

Yeah, I think for a lot of times, uh, what we see is that people don't go to industry experts, um, for that content as the source material, right?

So it doesn't matter if you're doing all this repurposing, if the original content is terrible, right?

It's garbage in garbage out.

It's classic saying same idea here.

Uh, you have to create stuff that, uh, has, you know, like already some type of it factor to it.

And then all you're doing is just taking that and repackaging it into all of these different.

Uh, platform native pieces of content.

Right.

So for example, this podcast, you make clips, you make tweets, you make LinkedIn posts, et cetera, each of those channels, um, or like, you know, for the clip side, it's YouTube shorts, tick tock, Instagram reels, each of those channels, they have a different type of media that's going to be most likely to get more reach on each of those platforms.

So with content repurposing, it's really that it's like meeting it's, you know, creating, taking that source material and then transforming it into what you know is going to be most receptive on that platform where your target customer is spending time online.

So we can pick that apart and go way deeper, but that's kind of the high level that I think for a lot of people, like as soon as they connect those dots, it's just like when you're a marketer, it's like light bulb immediately.

You realize, okay, here's the power of this, especially when you're in a B2B world.

So Yeah, let's just go deeper.

Is that something where you see people sort of like missing the unique sort of voice and nature of each platform where they're trying to do the same thing everywhere or?

that's a component for sure.

I think, um, so like they're trying to force what they want to be on that platform.

We see, I used to work at a, uh, a digital marketing agency that would, like a B2B digital marketing agency, we specialize working with, uh, clients that were, um, in the manufacturing space.

So think like windows, wood products, bathtubs, you know, like, I mean, these are massive fortune 500 companies, billions of dollars of, uh, you know, of value.

But.

they would always try to be like, hey, we want to push this onto YouTube.

And then it would get like, you know, three views, right?

And that's not how the platform works.

Like you have to meet the user of the platform where they are and make content that's specific to each of those channels.

So I think that's one component.

The other side of it is like a lot of the times they just go very sales, like way too far on that side of the spectrum.

Sales should be like 20% of that content, right?

Rather than 80%.

80% should just be pure educational material.

And then peppered throughout that is like soft selling.

You're really doing demand generation, really focused on that.

Um, you know, that side of, uh, like account based marketing, right?

Where it's like, I'm just educating my target customer and trying to be in their life every day, everywhere they are providing some type of value.

Um, so that I just take over more and more of that mental real estate over.

So then it sounds like then, because what you mentioned earlier, this idea of you, you want to start with, with quality content first and then take that and then repurpose it in a, in a platform specific way.

Is that where you're seeing like issues where the content they're creating?

It's like, it's all a sales pitch or they're just like listing features and.

Totally.

There's no benefits.

Like, I mean, we see this all the time, right?

Where it's like, it feels like you're just being preached at, like this, you know, like by this thing.

And that's not how people buy things.

Like how people buy things is through storytelling.

Like you're in this place.

Like we can get you to this, like you want to be in this place and we can get you to that place.

Right.

Like, so they get to insert themselves into that, that journey, that hero's journey.

And with content, like especially in the B2B world, like this is very easy to do, but people overcomplicate it.

They're like, okay, we don't know what to talk about.

Like, how do we do ideation?

Like what, what is our customer most interested in?

In reality, like your customer, like they just want to hear from industry experts about what they're seeing on the front lines.

What are they thinking about?

What are they excited about?

It's really just industry news.

Right.

And so when you do like fireside chats or video podcasts or even webinars where an expert comes on and talks about something they're working on currently that turns into perfect content for you to then go and distribute to your audience.

And your audience is going to be receptive to it because one, they want that content.

And then what that does to provide value for your brand is you basically then get to bridge that gap where you're like, Hey, I'm the one that's providing you all of this insight, all of this value.

And they're going to relate, you know, that experts knowledge.

They're going to relate that to your brand.

And then that creates inbound pipeline and demand generation and all those, those benefits.

And so I think that's like a huge component of this.

I like, I'm not talking about replacing sales.

Like, you know, I talked to the companies all the time and they're like, you know, we want to like, that's not the goal is the goal is, is like, I want everybody in my target audience to know that we exist.

So that when a salesperson does cold outbound, whether that's a LinkedIn DM or a cold email or a cold call, et cetera.

that person at that company already has some trust that they've built up with us.

So there are, you know, a way warmer lead in comparison to just a cold email that gets sent out.

And so that's the difference that we're trying to do here with creating this type of media and repurposing all this media for all these different channels that our target customer exists on.

As you're talking with these companies, it sounds then like it's a very, it's very much an educational conversation that you're having with them in a lot of cases where you're like, okay, you're trying to gently tell them or maybe not so gently depending on the situation, like, this is how to think of it and how to approach it.

I think for a lot of people, they just get hung up on like, oh, I need to be everywhere.

And like, it's like overwhelming, right?

Like it's going to a Chinese takeout spot and there's like 250 different items to order from.

And you're like, I need to be doing all this.

Like how, you know, so I think number one, start off, start doing two things.

Like pick two things that look like the most, you know, the most impactful for your company from a marketing standpoint.

Do those two things, build the processes out so that it's like daily, weekly, monthly, you're improving on those.

And then you can start to layer on these pieces, but now with like AI, right?

Like that, that was like my traditional suggestion to most companies, but now with AI it's like, okay, cool.

Like I can just make a single long form piece of media and I can chop that up super easily and repurpose that into every place I need to be, whether that's blog posts or LinkedIn posts or Twitter threads.

or clips for, you know, LinkedIn or YouTube or whatever.

Right.

Um, I can make those way easier than I did previously.

So I can be across all these channels, a, you know, like I couldn't before I used to have, I have a team of 20 people, right?

So I worked at this company called Rupa health.

Um, we ended up taking them from like $20 million valuation to $110 million valuation in about six months.

And that company, like one of our focuses was like, Hey, we need to build a media arm.

It, we were servicing like medical practitioners.

You know, traditionally the hardest people in the world to market to because they have super high networks.

So they're getting bombarded with advertisements constantly.

Right.

So for us, what we did is we made a podcast that just interviewed their peers on like, how are you running your business?

Like, what are you seeing trend wise?

Like, how are you thinking about XYZ medical thing?

You know, blah, blah.

We kind of had this list, this playbook that we'd go hit from those conversations.

We would get all the clips we'd need.

We'd get all the quotes we'd need for social.

We'd get newsletter content.

We would get blog post content.

We would also just send that podcast out to our target customers.

And we saw open rates on this of like 40% plus and click through rates of 5% because people don't think that this is marketing yet.

Like they don't, like a podcast in people's mind isn't marketing.

So the receptive, they think it's still an educational piece.

And because it's kind of hard and it's very like messy, like, as you know, as a podcast, I was like, all of the data related to podcast metrics is the most fuzzy existing data that exists, like that's out there.

You have no sourcing.

You have no way to actually track anybody.

So it's like, you're just basically, it's kind of this black box and you know, it works, but you don't know like how exactly it works.

You kind of have some outside insights.

But basically what I'm trying to get at is like, for most companies, it's just showing up and doing like one thing or a couple things consistently over a 12 month period.

I mean, that's how I've taken, you know, I've helped take companies from like zero to a million ARR in 18 months just by doing that.

Right.

And this is the kind of power that exists when you, when you focus on this type of this kind of, you know, content repurposing, content production and distribution to that target customer.

So.

Wow.

And I love I love how you talk like some of those content pieces like podcasts, or other things they don't.

I like how you said they don't feel like marketing.

Because it's just this educational it's like this almost like this Trojan horse going in and suddenly, like they're learning and they build that trust and then it's like, Oh, wow, like we want to buy from this guy.

And it's like especially when it's the CEO.

Like, so I'm all right.

I, my friend owns this company is called Exceder.

Uh, they're in the biotech space.

They lease, uh, scientific equipment, equipment to early stage biotech companies.

So I helped them make a podcast.

It's called the biotech startups podcast.

It's now a top 10, uh, life sciences podcast in the U S is the top 200, um, uh, science podcast in the U S and literally all they do.

is just interview their target ICP, right?

Like he talks to the people that they want to get in relationship with that they want to sell equipment to.

So what happens with this?

Two things or really three things are going on.

So first, he has an excuse to reach out to his target customer, be like, hey, you know, Sam, I want to interview you on the podcast.

You come in, sit down for three hours.

We have an email list of 25,000 people.

There's tons of VCs on it.

There's tons of other biotech founders on it.

Um, we're going to distribute it out there.

We'll also make clips for you so that you can share on share on social, which grows their own personal brand as a founder.

And then they also, uh, we'll do like, you know, promotional distribution across all of their channels, all their social channels, et cetera.

So I'm a founder and I get that inbound.

Like you're offering me like thousands of dollars of value for free.

Of course I'm going to come on this podcast, right?

It's a no brainer.

So.

One, that happens.

Number two, you suddenly get in relationship with this founder where you're like, yo, what's your phone number?

Let me text you this link or whatever.

There's all these ways that you can basically start to become friends with these people and do sales.

Again, but that's not the goal with this.

You're trying to just build these relationships because you know that they're gonna nurture into these business relationships or business partnerships later on.

And then the third component of this, is because you have this whole back catalog of media that you're producing, you become a thought leaders in your space.

And you also have the ability to basically go and mine that whole back catalog at any point in the future.

So that, I mean, you could stop the podcast at any point, right?

I wouldn't suggest it to anybody.

I would just say, keep doing this.

Cause it's like, I mean, for, uh, when you're the, like, again, for John is the name of my friend.

He's the founder of this company for him.

It's like, he sits down two hours a week.

And his focus is on that.

His team around him is doing all of the like scheduling, all of the prep, all of the post-production, all of the editing, all of the content repurposing, et cetera.

But for him, it's just two hours of mental energy that produces so much impact for the brand.

Right.

And so for them, like they've already seen it where it's like, they basically have, there's these other knock on effects where like there's companies that are now trying to sponsor their podcast.

That like, if I said their name, like you wouldn't recognize them as one of the the major five banks and they're because they like the people that listen to that show, like it's not a ton of people, right?

Like it's only like 20,000 to 25,000 people a month.

But the people that listen to that show have so much capital to deploy those banks, of course want to be like they're high value individuals.

So of course they want to be sponsoring that.

So what will happen there is that the company that ends up sponsoring this podcast.

They're going to subsidize the cost of the podcast production.

They're also going to subsidize the growth of that, which creates more inbound for the company.

So suddenly you just turned your marketing, you know, like center from a cost center into a, uh, profit center for the business, right?

So again, same thing.

We use the same playbook.

When I was at Roopa health, we were like, Hey, let's make this huge, uh, from the, like within the healthcare, you know, healthcare arena.

And then we went out and we found companies that were sponsoring other health related podcasts and we got them to sponsor our podcasts.

And it basically took our entire growth department, which was like all the marketers, salespeople, everybody, it paid all of their salaries.

So the media was basically subsidizing the cost of growing the company because we turned that again from a, and this isn't a new playbook, right?

Like what is, like, this is all that, you know, aero electronics does this incredibly well.

Like Red Bull, you know, is way more mainstream.

They do this incredibly well.

Like they're thinking about it in the same way, but now instead of having to have, you know, 200 different creatives that you're working with, you can have a team of three to four people that are just really good marketers and you give them these AI tools and suddenly like they're entirely augmented by like these tools and can do the work of this massive team that was previously necessary.

So happy to unpack any of that.

Yeah, I love how just the that flywheel effect that generates because it like it starts and then it just expands and then it's relationships.

And then because it starts with very much like you were describing.

It's like I am giving you this opportunity.

I am giving you this, as you said, thousand dollars of promotional value.

And so it becomes a no brainer and then it builds relationships.

this slow, steady, ongoing process that suddenly you are now the expert and people look to you and so your value increases as you are helping other people become known.

And then you then you send it everywhere.

And then let me, let's go ahead and jump into swell AI because as you said, you know, with the AI tools that are in, you know, available now that you guys are creating.

You're going from what was a team of 20 to like a team of three or four.

So let's, what is swell AI?

Okay.

really.

Like if you have a 10X marketer, like AI makes them a 100X marketer.

Right.

So if, if they're like, and it's the same thing with like, we see this in develop like pro like, you know, software engineering all the time as well.

Like as soon as a really good software engineer adopts some type of AI within their programming stack, like they turn into a hundred X engineer.

Like my co-founder, a great example, like we needed to create a PHP, uh, extension so that we could send content from swell AI to WordPress.

He doesn't write PHP.

He's never written PHP.

PHP is a programming language for the uninitiated.

Um, it's a language that's super hard to understand and know in two app.

Like we had a request from a customer to do this in two hours.

He had AI write the code.

He then had shipped, we had shipped it public and it was live within five hours.

And they were using that piece of, but because he conceptually knew how to describe like what he was trying to do.

Or, I mean, the other way that people are doing this is like they go, they write Python, right?

And then they're like, cool, now change this into PHP.

And suddenly they have like this, like application.

So what I'm trying to say is that like really good people already that start to use these tools within their workflows.

Like that's the, that's the opportunity.

That's the arbitrage, the marketing arbitrage that exists right now is just even small uses of this, like 10% of your workflow, 20% of your workflow.

It's going to create so much impact for your business, but Yeah, happy to, I know you, you had a question, so I didn't mean to cut you off, but I, it was super critical.

I think they kind of talk about that.

So.

I appreciate that.

I like how you talk about it can really, it can take a 10X marketer or a 10X programmer or a 10X somebody and it's not just, it's not just like making them like twice as fast.

It's like at an exponential level in terms of their effectiveness.

100%.

I mean, a great example of this too, is like mid journey is one of these AI, like image generators, like it's a team of 10 people, right?

They're all writing code purely just like AI power written code.

So when we think about that, like you're talking about like a hundred million dollar a year billion dollar valuation companies with 10 people, like this isn't going to be some like uncommon thing that happens anymore.

Like this is going to be the standard.

You're just going to not meet, need as much staff.

that you did previously.

And like, I'm talking about software, but like just to give an example, that's way more concrete to the bell curve of the average of most business owners.

So I have a friend that does, he does call it AI automation consulting.

And like all he does is he goes and he talks to like real estate companies.

And for majority of those companies, it's just paper pushing, right?

And so he's like, cool.

Like first thing he does is he comes in and he audits their workflows.

And then he's like, okay.

I can, uh, like automate these sections of your company's workflows.

A lot of the times it's 60% of whatever they're doing from like a time consumption standpoint, automates that entirely away.

He just saved that company 60%.

And now the humans are more focused on the thing that only they can do, which is all of the, you know, the, the face to face sales, part of the real estate piece.

So.

Like when we think about that, like.

That is a great example of how people can think about the deployment of AI within their companies.

It's just another tool within the tool belt.

Like it's not like change your whole company.

I see this all the time where they're like, they do this, like, we're going to do a massive overhaul.

And it's like, no, no.

Like take a step back, like look at what you're doing currently and just like automate as much of that process as possible, or just go to your team and be like, hey, what do you hate doing?

And, you know, Sherry's like, I hate doing X.

And it's like, cool, like we're going to figure out how to automate X right.

By using these tools.

And so suddenly like, I have a happier workforce.

I just cut down on my costs.

And a lot of the times it creates greater throughput.

Like we have clients that use swell where we like, you know, reduce their costs by 60% or reduce their time necessary by like 60% and you know, in relationship to costs, but the bigger thing that it allowed for is that freed up time.

Their team members can now work on more clients.

So they didn't even increase head count.

but they're now having like 20% greater throughput, right?

So you're telling me that I decreased costs and increased my total like revenues, my top line revenues.

Like of course, like if I'm a business owner, of course I'm gonna do that.

Like it's a no brainer.

I'll do that until the cows come home, so.

I know it's just like, okay, if you can do that, how do I pay you?

How do I pay you?

Because that's like you're working on both sides of the major problem.

So tell me about Swell.

What is Swell?

Yeah, so Swell, we talk about it as content repurposing powered by AI.

So you basically upload an audio or video file and that's going to turn that into newsletters, blog posts, LinkedIn posts, podcast show notes, anything that you can imagine it can write or create media around.

So it does auto clipping, auto cropping.

So for example, say you have a landscape video, it'll turn it into portrait.

So it'll actually like do facial recognition to like stack those people.

You can build templates within that of like, here's how I want my captions to be structured for each of those video types.

Um, and then it also does like viral clip identification.

So we basically look for hooks within the transcripts and we pull out any of those viral moments that have like a hook and then an insight, and then it basically just helps your team, uh, kind of speed up that, that video production side.

So, you know, traditionally, like right now where the product is at You would have to have like a content writer that's writing all of this content and extracting all the insights and, you know, going through it.

Hour long transcript.

I mean, it's mind numbing work.

AI is incredibly good at this.

And so that's like how it's used on the content writing side.

Um, on the, uh, like clip making side, we take those video files and instead of having to like, know how to use Adobe after effects or any of these other tools that are pretty complicated to understand, you can just go and highlight a section within the transcript.

You hit create clip and it just made that clip for you.

And so imagine like I can just skim through a 45 minute transcript.

I find the sections that I want to clip out.

I just hit clip.

Cool.

The clips are now made.

I want to change those clips from being landscape into portrait AI just like did that change for us, like doing that facial recognition thing that I talked about.

And suddenly, you know, with a couple hours of work, I just made, you know, a week's worth of content and it's scat.

I can go and schedule that through all of my platforms.

So.

That's really how we see marketing teams using it.

We started out just focusing on podcasters.

That was kind of our wedge into the market.

But as we start to work more and more with like B2B marketing teams in particular that are doing like demand generation or augmenting sales teams to do like account based marketing, this is how we're seeing them use the, uh, using swell AI.

Wow, I love that.

That is powerful.

And so as you mentioned earlier, this idea of starting with a long form piece of content that you can then break down into smaller pieces.

It sounds then like either like a audio podcast or a video podcast or a webinar or something.

That's really the long form that you can start with and then just really let it, it explodes into all these other pieces.

Exactly.

And so when you think about it from like a creator standpoint, like there's kind of a couple of different target customers that we work with.

Like when you're a solo creator, it's like, Oh, I used to have an offshore team that was doing all this.

Now I record in Riverside.

I, uh, clip the, uh, I like put it into the script and I, uh, clip out the ums and ahs, I shorten the word gaps and I turn on studio sound.

I now have like 90% studio level quality, uh, like editing done.

I upload that into Swell and all of my content is written, all of my clips are made.

I then schedule those out to social and that whole process just took, you know, three hours.

Now let's think about that when we put a marketing team on top of it.

So you could be doing this podcasting piece, but what we're starting to see people do that's really like interesting in my opinion, is they're going in their interviewing, like team members within their, their company.

So like they're basically acting like a journalist and they're like, Hey CEO, like Can I interview you?

I want to interview you once a week or sorry, every week for 20 minutes.

And we're just going to rattle through some questions based off of what we're seeing like happen in the market.

The questions that customers have about the product, about the industry, about what, you know, what we're seeing in sales calls based off of the transcripts we're seeing in sales calls, they go and interview those industry, like those internal experts, and then they turn that into blog posts.

They turn that into LinkedIn posts.

They turn that into clips for all their social channels.

So it's basically just like.

create these long form raw audio files, like where it's almost ad hoc, there's not a lot of like structure, and then using the AI to take that unstructured content and then structure it into whatever that is.

So, and this is, you know, what I really tell people, like is the biggest benefit of all these tools, is it takes, it's really good at taking unstructured data and then turning it into structured data.

Another example of this would be like, hey, I wanna write a, a blog post about best, you know, or what are the top strategies for like hotel marketing or like top strategies for, we'll say like building materials marketing.

So I could go find interviews with the top experts from like conferences and stuff.

I pull out those transcripts.

I put that into a context window and then I'm like, okay, I want to write a blog, like write me a blog post outline based on the source material for this target keyword.

And it goes and it creates that outline based off of that random data that you provided, right?

So then I go, okay, now write me an extremely detailed blog post based on this outline, based on that source material.

And it just one shot writes a 2000 word blog post with industry insights based off of what experts said.

You could also just go interview those people in the same way.

And like, this is how we see all content going.

Like if, if AI like it's cheaper than ever to write content, right.

Like traditionally it's like a hundred dollars an article to get like decent content if you were trying to like write something.

So if I wanted to write a thousand articles, that's a hundred grand that I would have to spend.

I can write an article now for like seven cents, you know, we'll just say 50 cents to make the numbers easy.

So 50 cents a piece, I can write those articles.

I can write 500, you know, I can write a hundred articles, sorry, a thousand articles for $500.

So my costs have basically gone to zero, but you're only writing to the general knowledge of the LLM.

When you.

Give the LLM source material, or the large language model source material that like this gated wall, like this gated garden it has to work in from its information.

What that does is you get outputs that are in that top percentile, right?

Like it's a lot of the times when people say, hey, like, oh, it sounds like AI, it sounds like it's, you know, it's just generic, blah, blah.

What they're doing is they're like trying to be like, write a blog post about, you know, like how to, you know, best strategies for B2B you know, whatever marketing, they just like, it's writing from the general knowledge of the internet, the general knowledge of the internet is pretty terrible.

Like when we think about like what the internet is, right?

So, but if I limit it to experts in my field, if I give constraints to what it can report on, then the output quality that I get is going to be in that top 10%.

Like you're going to be some of the best, like it's, it's going to be at a human level, if not better, especially when you layer on, Hey AI, here's my brand voice.

So like just how people have style guides.

Like what we're seeing people companies do now is they're like, this is the style guide for the AI, like what we prompt it basically to create outputs that are consistent and that are on brand and that sound like us and what that does is then you can have multiple team members that are all making content simultaneously written content simultaneously.

But the output always feels like it's a part of the brand.

It always feels like it has that brand voice.

And so that's kind of the ways that we're seeing these companies do this.

And also just telling companies like, yo, this is the best way to create tons of content at scale for your, for your target customer.

So.

And it sounds like too then it's part of it is the person using the AI So it's part of it is the prompts part of it is the way you phrase it, but in some ways having sort of that Knowledge of how it works without the AI Makes it go so much smoother once you're using the AI Is that would have you it would Have you seen that?

Yeah, I think, I think for a lot of people, they get hung up on prompting and like half the time with prompting, it's just ask the AI, like, I'm trying to do this, what questions should I ask you to do this?

And it's going to give you five questions that then you can go and like use as prompts, basically to create the outputs that you're looking for.

Um, another thing that we see people do really often is they try to like, do this really complex prompt.

But if you just break that down into small steps, like just like you would, if you were handing this off to a junior team member.

What you're going to see is that the output quality improves like tenfold.

Right?

So an example of this is like, say I'm writing that blog post.

So you would create what we call a prompt chain.

So a prompt chain is basically like just how you have a chat with like chat GPT or one of these AI tools where it's like, I give a prompt and then it gives a response and then I prompt it again.

And it gives a response and a prompts.

And I give a response.

We call that a prompt chain.

So a prompt chain, you can save that as a, uh, template.

And so then whenever I provide the raw materials, it's just going to go and produce that content output that I'm looking for.

So again, use this blog post example.

Say I'm trying to write this detailed blog post that's in my tone of voice.

I could have the first prompt be, okay.

Uh, so I upload.

So for example, we have people do this with swell.

They upload an MP4 into swell.

It creates a transcript and we put that transcript into the context window.

Then there's a prompt chain that the first prompt is, okay.

Uh, created extremely detailed blog post outline based off of this transcript.

It makes that outline.

And then we say, okay, now create an extra or now write an extremely detailed blog post based on this outline.

The transcript, all those prompts and responses are still in that context window above it, so it still understands that like what it did previously.

So then it writes that blog post outline.

And then we say, okay, now turn it into this brand's tone style invoice.

Here's the brand's tone style invoice.

And then it transforms that blog post into the tone, style, and voice of the brand.

So that whole thing that I just talked about can be saved as a template so that all I have to do is just provide raw materials.

And then I get that output consistently every time in the future.

Right.

And traditionally, like I wanted to go write that article, like that's five hours of work.

All this takes now is literally three minutes, right?

Like from uploading to transcribing to the prompt chain running to having that output.

That's three minutes.

And so then your team's job, all they have to focus on is now just going in and doing the final touches, that last 10% making it more human, maybe adding some better call to actions throughout it, et cetera.

Um, but this is like, the analogy I've been using is, is we like, think about it as we're taking crude oil and we're turning it into plastics, we're turning it into aggregate, we're turning it into diesel, we're turning it into all these different output types that you can create out of that raw material.

Our raw material is video content.

And then we're taking that raw material and we're turning it into all these different pieces.

So when companies like start to wrap their minds around this of like, Oh my God, like you're telling me like we can just record an hour long video on a weekly basis and that's all my company's content for the entire week.

I mean, it's no, like it's, it's just a, it's, it's an unlock.

This is the marketing arbitrage that exists right now.

So.

It is.

It's like this massive, in some ways it's like once you, if a business implements something like Salesforce reporting, anything like that where you were bringing data together and suddenly it's accessible, where you're not having to go to spreadsheets, where you're not having to go to all of these siloed sources where all of a sudden it's just boom and it happens.

It just, it changes the game completely.

And I think the big thing is again, like we're not trying to change the workflows of people, right?

Like people are already doing this.

And again, I'm just going to, I keep harping on this and like all these conversations that I'm having.

It's like, don't reinvent the wheel.

Just take what you're doing and try to like find tools that, that automate what you're doing.

Like that's the whole point of all of this, right?

Like why do we build software?

Why did we use Excel for anything?

Like, why are we doing, like, why do we build like SOPs and processes?

Like we're trying to create these standardized things and the AI can be used as the vehicle for that standardization and doing all that heavy lifting work that before was just very time consuming.

So, and I totally agree with you.

I agree with what you've been saying.

I am gonna ask sort of the flip side of that because I know there are people out there who are like, you know, I don't know if the AI generated content, if it counts, if it's real content, how would you respond to them?

Yeah, I think the big thing is like, again, when it's your source material, like you're guiding where it's going.

Right?

Like you're basically saying like, here's this, you know, like walled garden that you can work within.

And that's way different than just like, you know, for example, we, we created an internal tool to do programmatic SEO.

And what we would do is we went and found every target keyword for our brand.

And then I took all of those keywords and I wrote a piece of software that basically would go and write it.

2000 word article for every one of those target keywords and then it would publish it to the website.

So like talk about scale of this, like you like write to like 20,000 articles and publish them to your website.

And like, I think we did it in 24 hours.

So what happened to that?

Like this was an aged website.

And what happened to this is like, we saw that the daily clicks went from about 800 to about 3,000 in 90 days.

Right.

So.

Like that is this thing that's happening.

Google is not happy about it, but people are reading the content.

I think that's the thing that they're having trouble with is like, they're like actually consuming it and like for that, that brand, like it's my brother's company that we did this for.

Um, we like saw that they're inbound leads just like skyrocketed, right?

Like way more PDF downloads, all of this other stuff that was happening.

Um, so, but with, with that in mind, like that is again, using the general knowledge of the large language model.

We're in like a moment of time where you can, there's this arbitrage that you can seize, like that's not going to exist forever.

Like it's a land grab that's happening currently, but what is not going to go away is people that have more knowledge than other people getting interviewed.

And then that knowledge being disseminated like throughout the industry, right?

Like that has been happening since the beginning of time within this, you know, within business, within the history of business in the United States, it's not going to go away.

All we're saying is trying to figure out like, okay, how do I use these AI tools to do what my team members were doing?

Or how do I get my team members to almost guide these AI's?

We call it prompt jockeying, which is kind of hilarious, but like, we like thinking about it as like, I'm trying to like court, like guide these tools to create these outputs.

Um, and then that process that I just defined, I'm trying to save that as like a template that I can use over and over again, as an automation.

by providing that raw material.

And again, when I provide it stuff that is, you know, original content from original sources, that isn't from the general knowledge of the AI, the outputs that you're going to get are going to be so much more valuable to your target customer.

So I think that's again, like, just to say this as well, like I would, I would estimate that 80% of the content that you're seeing or consuming at this point, like if you're listening to this is AI generated.

Like podcasts are one of the few places that this is gonna be extremely hard because it's so free flowing to do this.

But written text, even video content, like all of that.

Like if you were watching YouTube shorts or TikTok, like probably every other video that you're seeing is created by AI, especially if it's educational content.

Like if you see any of these that are like World War II history or like history of the Roman Empire, like any of these things.

there's almost a 90% guarantee that is in some way created by AI, whether that's script writing, whether that's like image generation, et cetera.

So this is coming.

It's on the horizon.

It's a hundred percent happening.

I think it's figuring out, okay, how do I adopt it?

So that serves my brand.

And then again, thinking about like, how do I make the AI do the work that I'm doing currently, but do more of it more consistently at a cheaper cost?

And that's You know, again, it's just another tool within our tool belt, just like everything else that we use within our marketing stack.

I agree and I like how you're emphasizing efficiency, which it does.

And I like how you could talk about that walled content because that, I think people don't realize that, where it's like, oh, I'm just taking what exists, those conversations I've already had, and I'm just sort of, I'm just spitting them out in a different way.

It's sort of like, you know, a very old example would be, you know, you're not going to create a website.

you know, programming in HTML, you know, why do that when you can have a tool where you can drag and drop and do all these other things you're doing the designing anyway, right?

There's there's no need to do it by hand, so to speak.

100%.

Again, it's like, it's not, all we're trying to do is take the things that like, another example is like journalism, right?

Like what do journalists do?

They go and they interview a bunch of people and they try to get as many angles about the story as possible.

And then they organize that information.

Like even like people that write books, like how they wrote, how to influence or I, uh, how to win friends and influence, influence people or whatever the name of it is, the junk art.

Like all he did was he had a team of writers go interview people.

And then they organize all the information.

And then they wrote the first manuscript.

He layered in his own takes on all of this information.

And then it's one of the best-selling business books of all time.

It's been around for whatever, how many years now?

I think we're coming up on 100, if it's not more.

And what I'm saying is it's that same process.

Nothing has changed.

Just the tools to execute that same thing.

And again, you can get AI to sound like you.

Just by saying, here's...

our brands, like here's our brand voice.

Like just by providing that within the outputs, you're going to get so much closer to what you're actually trying to do.

And there's even further ways that you can take this is called fine tuning.

You basically give it examples of all pre like, you know, tons of examples of previous writing.

And then you can tune that LLM so that it writes and sounds like it's in your voice.

And then you think about it as almost this child LLM that exists in this larger one.

And then, then I can say, okay, LLM here's source material.

write a blog post outline, write a blog post, and it's gonna be tuned to be in your company's voice.

And we're seeing like more sophisticated companies doing this.

Right now the cost is just expensive, so it doesn't make sense for the majority of companies.

Just defining that tone style voice and then having it right in that is gonna get you 80% of the way there.

So until it becomes cheaper, that's kind of where everybody's stuck at the moment.

So.

And I love it.

So as we're wrapping up here, one takeaway you would like to leave the listeners with anything from something we've covered something you haven't mentioned any takeaways.

Yeah, I think the thing that I'm thinking about is like a lot right now is like how this changes the workforce, both from like hiring global talent and also the need for talent, right?

So more and more like experts in your company are going to become more valuable than they were ever before.

So we're seeing this like an example of this is this company called Klarna, where they just like basically automated 700 of their customer service representatives jobs, right?

So how did they do this?

They created this like knowledge base of information, and then they train this chat bot based on it.

And so then people can go like ask this chat bot questions.

And majority of the questions are just repeated information that's already documented.

That that's like how, you know, they can go find it.

So now their team is just people that are looking for the tails.

So what does that mean?

They're just looking for the questions that haven't been asked previously.

And then as soon as they get asked, they go find the information, they answer that question.

And then they add it to the knowledge base.

And so this next time the AI is going to come back and like have that knowledge because that's now based in, you know, it's in its knowledge base.

So I think that that's like one piece of like how we're seeing companies do this.

The other thing that like, and we do this personally is like, you can hire offshore talent now and they can be like pretty good, but when you augment them with AI, like, okay, cool.

Like here's the grammar that you need to use.

Like here's the tone style voice for responses.

Like here's this again, like.

database that you can query against for knowledge about the product.

Like suddenly I can just like, I hire a customer service rep that's in the Philippines as an example, and I can throw them to the fire a week later and they can be up to speed on the customer service side, providing a good experience.

Even though they're like not like perfect, right?

But that AI can take them to that last step.

So I think it's kind of counterintuitive to everything I've said previously of like, Oh, like doing, you know, Think about them doing the heavy lifting that 80% and then you just spoke the human just focus on that last that last 20% We're in contrast.

This is the opposite where it's like, okay They're like you're basically there 80% there all the way like as an employee like from a from a perfect tire And we're just taking that last 20% and we're like we're getting them to that hundred percent by using these tools to basically Get them to be at that a player level, right?

So again, just the things that I'm seeing and as a as a business owner, like I'm thinking about Like how does that change the landscape of all of this?

Um, especially when it's becoming harder and harder to hire, uh, locally, like we see this especially for like service-based companies or, um, you know, anybody that's providing customer support or any of this, it's just, it's, it's way harder than it was previously to do this.

So this is how we're seeing companies do it currently.

I love it.

That is brilliant.

And so Cody, as we are wrapping up, if people want to know more about you, they want to know more about Swell.AI, where would you like them to go?

Yeah, great question.

Um, so swoleye.com, uh, you can sign up for free, uh, gets free credits.

If you just reach out to me, um, or just say in the chat, reference this podcast and we'll throw some extra credits on your account.

Um, and again, you can make clips, write newsletters, blog posts, et cetera.

And then to find me, I'm most active on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Um, you can reach out there, follow me there to see what we're learning.

And I just talked about everything that we're learning and kind of doing in public and both of those places.

So.

Awesome.

Well, if you're listening, I would encourage you check out Swell.ai.

Reach out to Cody, get some more information, get familiar with these tools because it's here and there are a lot of opportunities.

You can't just, you can't just bury your head in the sand.

So, uh, Cody, this has been a blast.

I have learned a ton.

So thankful that you join me today.

Thank you for having me.

I really appreciate it getting super valuable for me as well, just to connect to the dots and kind of synthesize stuff.

So every time I come on one of these, I'm always like, this is some of my best time spent, so I appreciate it.

Oh, it is my pleasure.