He Built a Startup using AI That Prints Money (Full Tutorial)

what do you want to talk about today today I want to talk about how the marketing funnel is like the entirely wrong way to think about marketing modern marketing um I think it's a very just deceptive way to to kind of hide what's actually happening and uh yeah I want to I want to propose this new way to think about this I call digital gravity and like break that down what that actually means and then talk about like this you know the high level Theory and strategy and then what are the tax iCal ways to

do this both for B2B and then also for Consumer so okay and before you do that could you let us know what liquid you have in your coffee M this is beer this is Modello I am sipping Modello they're out of limes though man I I don't know about the hospitality is that a type of uh like Colombian roast or I think it's uh from Waka no cool all right digital gravity the [Music] start yeah um so marketing funnel right we all know it all talked about it it's like this thing that people enter in

and they come out the bottom and they buy a product that's not how people actually buy [ __ ] whatsoever people actually buy things is they like interact with the brand and then they get away from the brand and then they somehow get sucked back in and they do like three rotations around it and then they finally touch down and so this is just a different way to visualize like how to build Brands um I've used the same strategy for like music artist right like my friend Colby aov like this is literally how we got

him signed with Sony like at rup of Health this is I I was Employee six there this is like how we took the company to a you know multi hundred million dollar exit um was the same same playbooks and like all the stuff that we're doing and like I feel like even you like this is like a version of this um but it's just a way to describe so like digital gravity in my mind is actually how you build a brand or how you build a company what you're doing is like you're building Mass digital

Mass on the internet and The more mass you have the more influence you have within the niche or the sphere that you're in and so how you build that mass is through content and through really just like marketing everywhere that your customer is showing up there in some form and content is typically the vehicle for that and so when you're a small company when you're just starting out like get this convers I have this conversation a lot with startups like where should I market and there's like two different paths like if you're bootstrapped it's like

okay you everybody has resources time Mony money mental energy and the resources that you have are depend you know they're different depending on if you're funded or if you're not if you're funded you have a ton of money you have a ton of time and you have a ton of resources so you when they ask that question like where should I be it's like everywhere you should be everywhere that is why you raise money that's the whole point of this your bootstrapping is totally different you probably have a lot of time you probably have no

money and you probably have a lot of mental energy and then like as the companies evolve and they scale up all those resources change but to get back to like building out the actual brand like how do you make a brand famous in 12 months to the target audience it's by building again this Mass when you're starting out you're the small spec and like imagine like a comet is a customer and they're flying by right like you have no influence on them flying by right but the bigger you get the more mass you build and

like this can be applied at the local business level this can be applied at the B2B level this can be applied at the consumer level what happens is you get more people that get sucked into that orbit of that that planet that you're building and they get in rotation and as they get in rotation then you have more touchdowns that occur when they touch down that turns into Revenue it creates this growth flywheel where you build more mass through the revenue that you generated because you reinvest back into the growth of the company and again

I think that this is a better way to think about how we you know portray how people actually make purchasing decisions it's not this like they enter the funnel and they come out the end of it like nobody actually buys things like that right well I think it's what you're saying is people don't like the problem with funnel is people leave the funnel totally yeah they go out of it and then they come back and maybe they shop around I mean how many times have you like not thought about something for six weeks and then

you come back and you buy that thing but yeah you probably saw three ads you touched a newsletter that had an ad in it and then maybe you saw a billboard you know and a friend talked about it through Word of Mouth it could be years later it could be years later depending on like how big the purchasing decision like you know the product is and typically like it's a longer cycle for how much money is going to be deployed with that purchase so I I worked in the the manufacturing industry at one point like

doing marketing for like doors and windows and like those types of companies like we're talking about like you know a hotel group buying 2,000 shower bases for a hotel they're building right like that purchasing decision is a 5year period like how are you influencing them over that entire like like cycle and I think that this is the way to think about it where I mean that's not a funnel that's not how this is working like you're you're you're creating it's almost this like one to many relationship but you have to do that over a long

cycle and then how do you do that at scale how do you actually um you know make it so that it's consistent and I think the other component of this is like when you think about a funnel like think about it like a lot of marketing is thought about as a campaign which is actually a hold over from like the war right like the all these dudes came back from World War II and they were like they had campaigns where you started an action and then you ended it that was that's campaign that that word

literally defeated the enemy yes exactly and like that is where that comes from that idea it stems from that they brought it into like advertising right that's not how the world works anymore you don't start in stop you you're not you didn't do marketing you're marketing like you're you're constantly doing marketing and I think that if you think about it in that way then that requires you to think about okay well if I'm constantly making things that are adding Mass to this object or this company that I'm building like it shifts your mindset of of

how we actually Market companies I don't start and stop a thing I'm continuously running ads and testing what ads are getting the cheapest CPC that is going to create the most impact you know the most signups the most conversion events for whatever the thing is that I'm building in marketing it's kind of how I see building a website or an app it's not like you hit publish and you're done you know it's a living and breathing entity th% I think it has to be thought like that and like that's the whole point the only thing

that isn't like this is really email and digital quick break in the Pod to tell you a little bit about startup Empire so startup Empire is my private membership where it's a bunch of people like me like you who want to build out their startup ideas now they're looking for content to help accelerate that they're looking for potential co-founders they're looking for uh tutorials from people like me to come in and tell them how do you do email marketing how do you build an audience how do you go viral on Twitter all these different things

that's exactly what startup Empire is and it's for people who want to start a startup but are looking for ideas or it's for people who have a startup but just they're not seeing the traction uh that they need so you can check out the link to Startup empire.co in the description it is like the only thing that once you hit send you can't take back everything else pretty malleable you can always adjust it email is the only thing like we and we have you know internal processes where it's like our rule is three people have

to touch the copy before it it's sent like three three people have to proof it basically so that we get like a you know is this just checks right because we can't take that back but that's one of the few things that you can't you you know you can't take back in this digital realm so with that in mind it's like okay well how do I do more and I think that's the game that's happening like you look at short form social right now this is the game like I just got off a call with

like a Tik Tock shop agency owner and she's like yeah like literally all we're thinking about is volume like the best Affiliates that we're working with they're doing like you know 10 next videos that the the lower performing Affiliates are because it's just a surface area game like if I do you know thinking about it as a batting average like if if I hit 300 right which is like decent and I go up to the plate but I only swing once like strong likelihood I don't even touch the ball but if I swing 10 times

I get on base right and it's the same idea with the amount of content the amount of you know stuff that we're doing and I think that there's this even in the digital space a shift that's like starting to happen in people's like if you talk to older brands they're like no we only only have one instagram account it's like dude that's old school at this point that is like an old way to think about how this should actually be done like we publish you know a blog post a week like are you kidding me

what's a blog post it's crazy man so yeah anyway so can we I'm sure people are listening to this and they're like okay I buy that but like tactically how do you do it how do you do it yeah totally you want to start with B2B or consumer I want I want to start with B2B but you know what also has a bee in it is beer and I don't know if you have an empty mug in there no I have stuff in here still shockingly that is shockingly okay well if you do need more

beer we have one ice cold right there for you amazing I appreciate you uh yeah so let's start with B2B um so how do you grow a B2B company um framework that I use is pretty straightforward um and it's evolving always but this is like you know the tactical things that you can try to do so first off smaller target audience um so it's a lot of the times it's like 50,000 people that you're trying to get in front of so first thing go scrape every one of their emails and uh you can use tools

you know there's thousands of these out I mean you can just use LinkedIn if you really want to you can go use something like apollo.io um I think it's like $99 a month to extract like 10,000 emails out of it it's absolutely crazy you can do the filtering that you need for the industry once you have those emails at that point you you've identified really your customer so now it's like how do I get in front of them every place they spend like you know Time online and also in the physical space so I'm just

going to like run through all the things that I've seen work in the past and people can pull out the different plays from this Playbook that Al all add to the same idea of like how do I like make this company famous within this category so you take those emails I would first go and I would import them into Google ads I would import them into Facebook ads LinkedIn ads any of the places that people are spending time online you do a custom match list it's going to find it depends on the the um the

channel but like Facebook ads as an example you're going to find probably like 30 to 40% of those emails get matched so it's not the whole list that you pulled but it's still a percentage of them um so then you go you can run ads to those people so you turn on ads they're running indefinitely in the background at this point I would do ugc AI Avatar ads that's like talking to the pain points that they're experiencing how do you do that like what tools do you use yeah yeah yeah so the tools that we're

using right now is hey gen just because the quality is the best I personally as like the founder go make a version of yourself that's showing up in these ads because you're going to make yourself famous through these ads to your target audience right and so like make a ver digital clone of yourself so haen as the Avatar use 11 Labs as the voice that's just what we're seeing be the best currently and then do like 100 different variations of this ad so talking you know different hooks uh different settings different backgrounds uh different content

different pain points that you're hitting you run All Those ads against each other and then based off of what is the best performing so you know the lowest CPC typ typically you're going to then allocate all of your ad budget there right so say 80% goes to those best performing 20% is always running in the background doing testing as soon as you find a better performing variant you put that into the better to the to the campaign that has 80% um so this is just like a classic like Alpha Beta like campaign is what they

would call structure where you're having something that's always in testing and the majority of that uh that spend is going to that that best performer so what if you don't want to be famous yeah I mean that's fine right I think you can still run ads um that are going to be effective without that if you're a Founder though and like you raise money like that's the game you're playing right like you're you just you just signed on for this and if you're not like about that probably not the right game personally this my opinion

right it means nothing take it all with a grain of salt but um I think that that is what it's coming down to and there's totally different ways to do this like you move silence and everybody has their own their own their own play but like you want to raise more money you want to make your next round way easier like make yourself famous just all comes down to I mean this is like a Playbook that we ran when we were at Rupa we're like cool we're going to like grow the Instagram account of the

CEO and also like the company and then use that as a leverage point because all of the people that were in like you know investing in healthtech were like like they literally were like inbounding like how are you doing this and it's like you know behind the scenes it's to degenerates like running Instagram only ads with a call to action to follow this account to like for more content like this I mean also if it's yourself as the founder doing the ads you can say like I'm the founder of XYZ right so this there's a

story there people buy from people not Brands 100% you want to get your first whatever 100 customers first thousand customers it's a great leverage Point like it that you just a lever you can pull down on it beats hey I'm an AI Avatar let me tell you about my business totally the AI Avatar it's like the angle you have to come from it with that is like problem solution orientation with storytelling format so it's like paino like I was experiencing I mean all you're doing is just the Hero Journey cycle right like I had this

problem and then I discovered you know I went on this discovery journey and I ended up here now and I'm better like it's it's we're just telling the same story over and over again in different places but that's the first layer of this build these ads the same emails you're then going to go and you're going to cold email every one of them so you're going to use a tool right now um what we're seeing be successful is something like mail Reef um basically what they do is they spin up a a a server that's

um uh it's a AWS server that's specialized for cold email sending um you can send like 4,000 or sorry you can send 50,000 cold emails from one of these servers for about $400 a month right now smart lead account or uh instantly AI about $89 $ so you can get whatever that is about a 50,000 what smart what is a smart lead yeah yeah so smart lead is a cold email sending software basically how it functions is you can have multiple uh email accounts that are um put into smart lead so there's really three types

of email in my opinion um everybody has different views on this there's transactional email so email that's sent from the product there's uh email marketing or newsletter email um so it's like you know basically doing uh uh say for example like product updates or like you know stuff that's happening in an e-commerce it would be like product uh like sales or something like that um and then the other form of email is cold email so cold email is a little bit different than the other two so transactional email typically I would suggest sending from the

core domain of the app um the uh newsletter I would send from its own separate domain while you're doing this is because you're trying to create domain uh isolation so that if the uh one of the domains basically gets uh flagged for yeah compromised whatever that you know because you're sending or being aggressive um then you're not going to affect uh the product NE negatively if you need those transactional emails for example for password resets I see this all the time again with early stage companies where they like are sending from all the same domain

they end up sending from you know cold emails from their it's a classic right and what ends up happening is that they um uh basically like they nuke their core domain and suddenly their transactional emails are going to spam and they can't figure out how to get them out um so what smart me Le does it allows for you to have multiple inboxes that you can send from mail reef is a server that manages those inboxes you can spin those up so for example you can do an infrastructure where I buy uh 30 domains and

then I make five different inboxes uh for those 30 domains those inboxes are all sending from the same name so for example Cody Schneider but it would be uh you know Cody x. uh Cody y.com Cody Schneider y.com uh C Schneider y.com all these different variations um so that whole list that you just scraped you're going to go and you're going to cold email every one of them super simple on the email side um you're just going to talk about the problem solution orientation just like the ad that you did exact same way and you're

going to hit that list both with the cold email side and then also with the ad side right so we're touching them in these two different places simultaneously the cold email uh piece of this like what you'll end up seeing is like you're going to hit this inbox percentage of them are going to respond back more often than not they're going to see these ads three months later they're going to be like oh yeah there's that company I have this problem now they're going to go and they're going to go back to their email they're

going to search in their email they're going to use it as a search engine and click on that and come back as an as a lead so like I am of the opinion that I'm trying to land as much email as possible in an inbox as I can because what it does does is again makes more surface area and you can hit these same leads from different I mean I the the thing that kills me especially with early stage Founders is they're like well I don't want to burn this audience it's like dude they don't

care like they don't care about you at all like you to get to convince somebody to care about you is so hard it is impossible like so you can't really burn them like unless you're doing spam right like but it's like you're not you're you're you're trying to provide value to them right and everybody's like oh like cold emao doesn't work dude it's absolute like [ __ ] it 100% works I got to be honest today we had a conversation like with my executive team and partners and quote unquote cold email doesn't work I believe

it I think a lot of people think that but they're approaching it in a way that doesn't like address the problem that that per like it's the the smaller you get in your audience like if I go and I'm um for example I worked with this company they do uh like it's like dock management for like shipping yards right super small set of controllers but their messaging was so specific like here's this problem that you face on a daily basis doc checkin if we could automate this for you is that interesting dude like one out

of five people responded Yes can we talk to you like that it's just hitting it from the angle that actually like provides value now now there's different spaces like what you guys do like probably it's way more you know it's it's there's a lot more competition yeah I mean like we were talking about you know for example LCA which is like our design agency that only works with like a dozen clients every year and our Target is like CEO of a fortune 250 company right so it's kind of like the way you get in front

of you know the CEO of call it Shopify let's say maybe not cold email totally agree but I've also seen like inbounds happen like that and if it is a pain point in a real problem that they're facing and it's top of mind and this is like the hardest possible it's totally possible you and you hear these stories all the time but as a Founder you you there's only so many bets that you can place right th% th% but I think that like if you're you know want to play at this like game this level

that's like this like higher piece it's like you're doing all of these things simultaneously and then figuring out okay how do I automate or delegate all of this so that somebody is focusing on it and then as soon as that's like focused on I move on to the next thing this is how I think that you actually like grow companies on an exponential level it's like you're layering on growth curve after growth curve right like you can grow linearly really effectively if you're just doing like Facebook ads and cold email but if I later on

hey that to that same email list I'm going to make a podcast where I interview people from the industry about their business and the insights that they have and then I'm going to send it out a newsletter to those same people that I'm doing cold email to oh what and I can also go and clip that up into like shorts that I can put on Instagram that I can put on LinkedIn that I can put on all these other places that we're running ads but I can do an organic version of that as well I'm

also going and following all of those people on all of those accounts I'm you know inviting them for connections when you layer all these pieces it's like how you can basically again take a company from being non-existent to 12 months later they're at an industry conference and people are coming up and being like I love your show like I love what you're doing doing with your company and this isn't a nobody with like five people on their team right so um yeah but yeah to take a step back so doing the cold email piece you're

you've layered that on now Ming moving to the next part of this um how do you build content out that is going to be valuable to your industry to your audience just talk to your customers and record it like you're already having these customer conversations if you're running your company right you're getting feedback from them you're understanding you know their pain points their problem take those make it a little bit of a more formal setting record it and you just turn that into a podcast that you then send out to that entire list so that

email list that you just scraped you go and you sequence that into an email sending service um I mean you can basically do this with any of them but you just import 200 a day have the subject line be podcast whatever the name of the episode is hey name the newest episode of XYZ podcast is live one paragraph summary five key takeaways uh we've done this for countless companies and which tools do you use to yeah so um mailer light um is one that we use we also use beehive um we've also used in the

past um uh like srid like any they're all they're all kind of function in the same way um but what we found is that you can when it's this content is industry specific to them then it's providing value to them and they look at it as educational content right and it's way more approachable than doing that cold email that's very transactional like if I can do X for you do you like is that valuable in contrast it's like this top of funnel thing and what this allows for you to do is you can build yourself

into a media company which is it creates this leverage Point within the industry so like at Rupa this is something that we did because we saw that we were a small startup right we wanted to go and negotiate with these huge lab companies they wouldn't even talk to us right we made a podcast it got 180,000 downloads a month after 6 months it was top 20 Medical podcasts in the US I don't even know where it is now I think it's in like top 100 for health which is an insane category right so at that

point they were inbounding be like yo can we come on the show and it's like actually we want to do a deal with you we'll give you these Media Kit like placements if you do it at these price points we negotiated down the percentages that we were going to have to pay them on fees because we had owned media that we could use as leverage Point un unbelievable so that's the first piece of it on this podcast size you build this whole media arm out of the company the other side of it is that you

can go and monetize that same audience and so it turns it from a cost center into a profit Center so same thing did this while we were at Rupa we then took that and we went to companies that were in the health space and sold ad placements for the podcast and also within the newsletter athletic greens was one of the companies that we worked with it was subsidizing the entire growth team's cost okay it was basically making it so so you're talking about a fast like 20% month-over-month growth compounding startup that is subsidizing their cost

of their growth off of the media that they're producing basically so you want to talk about like yeah what is it the negative CAC like this is literally the playbook for it how much does that fire you up I right like I I mean you can see me I'm over here like well I see like your you know your you know your main artery just exploding I'm like is this guy going to get you know into a cardiac arrest right now H not yet not with these [Laughter] downers I mean to be honest it fires

me up too right like the idea of um you're getting it it almost feels too good to be true sounds too to be true but this works like it's like I've done this with now with like multiple companies with in multiple Industries in multiple spaces again like the same same tactics like use this to make a a music artist like famous right that's crazy when you think about it like that like you like the fact that you can just do these things these activities and it can like make a person famous or make a company

famous and it just makes you realize like how Flex you know how much you can bend the world like B the reality and it's the classic quote that I feel like is going viral right now like you can just do stuff MH but um you can do you can just do stuff and it's and I feel like everyone basically in let's talk about B2B should be creating a media business 100% And it's not new right so this company is called Aero Electronics $6 billion do market cap huge nobody talks about okay they own basically every

electronics blog magazine anything you can imagine related to this they resell Electronics components I don't even know what you're talking about right now exactly it's like we're talking about like you know the tiny little like cameras that go you whatever whatever sensors exactly yeah doesn't matter so their whole play how are they that big of a companies because they have this huge media arm that is functioning in the background Red Bull is actually a media company you know who else is also a media company why combinator th% nobody talks about it they're Med crazy me

that every VC doesn't have a podcast YC is a media company that sells Venture Capital th% th% that's why they're doubling down so much on YouTube have you seen this 100% they're going all in yeah it's obvious like I mean it's why they did like cone and all of this right so it's going to be weekly talks about AI all it is is derivatives of what the founders are saying from the front lines I think that's what's hilarious like they're but they're just like talking to their like their customers Founders they're talking to their founders

and they're reiterating and regurgitating what they're hearing from the people that are actually doing this I think they're doing a great job they're doing an unbelievable job I it's some of the best content on the internet right now that actually feels like oh this is applicable and really insightful so um yeah anyways so you built a podcast that's running uh you're growing it and now suddenly you're like oh I have all this video podcast I can turn it into literally everything else that I need for my business so I can extract all of the pain

points that my customer is talking about I can talk I can uh turn that take that show I turn it into a transcript I uh make uh blog posts from it I make white papers what do what what software do you use to do that yeah yeah yeah so we built a software that does this called swell AI that was like the whole point behind it because I was doing this for companies and we saw the AI move like progress that was happening we're like oh like I used to need a team of five people

to accomplish this I can now do this you know one person who's cracked can handle this right just a VA over the top of this can do this so you upload it makes Clips uh writes your show notes does all of the media assets that you would need or make you take those you go and you schedule them out across all the platforms that all of your customers spending time online at so whether that's LinkedIn or Instagram whatever that is and you then can grow those media accounts and so again same thing bunch of tactical

stuff you can do Greg actually has a great video on this on like what the opportunities on LinkedIn right now um short form content is just blowing up if you just take shorts that we're working on like Tik Tok or Instagram reals and put them on LinkedIn it will go viral by the way I have a great video on it based on the Insight that you gave me no so now you had your own take I thought it was like really insightful um but the so that's a piece of it um other tactical things that

you can do on Instagram you can run Instagram only ads with a call to action in the caption to follow this account for more content like this follow like at this account like literally put the ad in there um so when you do that what it looks like from an ad standpoint when it shows up on Instagram and you do it for Impressions so you're just going for as much reach as possible um we've done this where we did like basically us-based targeting if the content resonates with the person a certain percentage of them clicks

the at they then go to the profile and they follow certain percentage follows the profile so like this is how we grew this like musicians Instagram is entirely through that process we're getting followers at one point at like 30 cents a piece and so this is just this way where you can work back into the number like oh I want to hit 100,000 you know followers on Instagram we need to spend x amount of money literally exactly what we did at Rupa same strategy grew that to 100,000 why would you do that why what's the

point of this why would I grow any of the any of these other assets I getting free Impressions on those platforms the larger the account is right and this is all changing with short form social we'll probably talk about that in consumer and what's happening there but the same idea applies we're just trying to get something that we normally would have to pay for in the ad we're trying to get it for free and the closer your ad is to content on the platform the the less you're going to have to pay for it and

like that is going to be the overarching theme throughout all of this like why do we try a 100 different variations of the ad we're we're we're we're trying those 100 different variations because we're trying to ident ify the piece of content that doesn't feel like like an ad it feels like content but it still accomplishes the goal that we're trying to get to happen which is revenue in some form you know or some leading indicator of Revenue in the future um so you you build all these channels out and suddenly you know 12 months

pass let's break down what you've just done there you've got this massive ad remarketing that's happening from everybody that touched the website you also have top of funnel of those people coming in you know that're your target C customer you now have every one of those on an email list that you send out on a weekly basis because you're hosting the podcast you're running ads on the podcast that's promoting the show you're negotiating better deals because you have this media on the podcast you also have all of these all of these social channels posting on

a daily basis across all the platforms showing up in the lives of your customer day after day right so combine all those things together and like it's done how many it's it's it's crazy how few companies do what you're talking about I think it's just it's it's it's just a lot of different things that are happening simultaneously I left out a cold email in there that that part of it is actually critical so like I want to throw that back but the the challenge is like there's just so many components that are going on um

but in reality it's like this isn't hard stuff it's just grindy stuff right and like for most companies like they don't want to like they can't sit down and invest 12 months into this right like and this is a CH like you know we do podcasting as a service that's like one of our things and like the first 90 days nothing looks like it's happening like you're you're just trusting the process man like but then suddenly it's like oh we're at a 15K sub like on our email list and like some I'm feeling a little

bit something there right we're with the company right that we did some work we've been doing work for for the last I think we're at like 18 months with them they have a list now of 130,000 okay every send that we do it drives 10,000 clicks to their website we do two cents a week so in a month we drive 40,000 click or sorry is that right yeah no we drive 80,000 clicks to their website from an email newsletter that cost us $450 and and how much is a click Worth to them right a click

a click to them they're in uh they're in the Life Sciences category they're paying $5 a click on into the same audience so 880,000 clicks I mean we'll just round it up to 100,000 right so you're paying $500,000 in clicks what is what you traditionally would pay you're paying $450 for that it's a cent to click is basically what to that's in 18 months 18 months of running this are you kidding me why aren like why why would you be doing anything else this is the game this is the like this is this is the

opportunity and like this is all evolving right all these like tactical things but like all you have to do to be a part of this is just be a practitioner like just do the work and like you're going to find these these arbit also all these people that are in this game they also all share it if they're actually good like I have friends that it's like I'll just get a random call and it's like cool we crack Twitter ads like here's what we're doing and it's like what have you seen like I have multiple

and and it's because there's so few people that are doing this I have a friend right now he's growth hacking basically a Blog for a startup um they're in a traditional category like one of the big 10 software categories think uh you know anything that like Adobe or Microsoft or you know any of these like old traditional software companies are in all right so there's like nobody that he knows that's doing this I don't really know anybody else that's doing versions of this right but they just took their traffic from like and we helped on

the the design of of kind of the what their their whole tactical um like what they were going to do from their content strategy to do this but they took their traffic from a thousand clicks a month up to uh 250,000 clicks a month in uh under six months I mean so the the the opportunities change but it's a lot of the same tricks right it's like a lot of the same like fundamentals that are being applied there and like we didn't even I'm talking about the media stuff we didn't even talk about like the

organic plays that you can do all the social stuff that you can do on YouTube you can layer all of these pieces on but like when you have this long form s like Source material also like your podcast is probably the the the biggest driver of your inbound leads now right like just is it just from like a trust standpoint and the only reason I say this is like if I have somebody sit down with me for an hour week and they listen to me talk for an hour week for two months like they just

spent eight hours with me asynchronously we were uh right before we recorded this we were talking about some wins from the podcast in terms of like like a re Revenue perspective because we don't sell ads on the podcast and we had a lead that came in listens to the podcast Fortune 500 company they wanted to work with LCA and we sent them a $2.2 million proposal they said yes no questions no questions why is it so cheap literally and we did you know incredible work for them and the team is amazing and they you know

they were happy and everything you're not saying the product isn't critical right yeah but like bad product it wins all the time because it has better marketing right so if you have a good product prods and good marketing on top of it like you're going to there's no way you're not going to win yeah and I think it's also like when you when you you know I'm not saying we own this category but I'm saying that when people who listen to this show are like I need to build my ideas who do I think about

they're like oh yeah Greg from the startup ideas podcast you own that mental real estate mental real estate and there's no way that you're they're going to ever like somebody's it's going to be so hard for them to remove you from that part of their mind right like name uh three chapstick brands for me like three like BP balm brands dude to be honest I've never put on ChapStick in my life okay so most people they give like two spaces in their mind Chapman is that one not even dude have you seen these lips these

are could be more moist crusty I'm not saying kiss me or anything but you know no but so most people they only designate so much space in their mind for a brand category right like a lot of the times like two to three brands is all they're going to give so you're fighting over that space right and so that's why like people go and they're like oh we have to why did why did HubSpot invest in inventing a new category inbound marketing why did they call it inbound marketing it's because nobody else is going to

be able to ever unlodge them from this idea they created new mental real estate in the mind but people like yeah yeah I'm going to do that it costs so much money to do that it is so hard what's way easier is find an idea that people already have that's common you attach yourself to it and you cannibalize it you make it evolve into a new thing you can always like you can always morph it into something else but it's it's very hard to make new space in somebody's mind so this is the B2B Playbook

that's the B2B now we got to talk about the B Toc Playbook yeah it's a b Toc but before we do that I got to pee I got a pee too I've been drinking you you you're like I got a p too I I've wet myself all right go for it so consumer consumer yeah so consumer different animal first of all don't go into consumer first of all don't do it I say this and we like know people killing it right now consumer um did you tweet something about that like you're like yeah dude I

had this tweet forever ago it's a it's a running a running tweet is it again Pro tip yeah don't do don't do D Toc no I you have to be unbelievable at marketing to win in consumer um it's just so much more competitive and the the the biology and the the mechanics of it function differently you just but if you win a consumer there's nothing better 100% I mean I think everybody wants it too like I a you know there's this part of me that's like it's like a e trip you know like until you've

done it and like had some success in it like are you even you know Pro like are you like playing pro ball yeah it's like the boss level yeah 100% but um anyway so consumer different animal um the biggest thing and like right now I feel like that it the game has entirely changed um but what we're seeing to be successful uh there's some crossover first thing that you do uh like you need to have a huge Tam right total like you know huge total addressable Market that you can go after that's the only way

that consumer works because you have to make content that is going to be like broad enough that like a large enough part like subset of the population can uh basically be targeted through it so for example like we're doing this app in the women's health space um there like one in three women have this uh this problem and so like we can just Target like all women and you know 30% of them have that issue and uh like what we're seeing with this is like right now we're getting ebook downloads at like 40 cents it's

crazy right and we can work our way back into uh this whole thing and then we upsell into this product but um and you can use AI to create ebook 100% yeah 100% you can write these it's so like but the the challenge is again finding these seams that are uh able to be even like gone after because it's so competitive it's so saturated well I mean you can use AI to write it and then you can use something like Gam uh to publish it totally yeah totally yep um so first I think is like

you have to like build an application like the number one with this this play is like to build an application that uh like people actually want that's like a large enough audience I think there is an opportunity though right now I mean we're seeing this play out with a lot of these like consumer apps like AI is changed kind of the fabric of what we can do with these consumer applications and these apps have like a a single thing that they do and if they do it well that's how people are buying it um a

tactical thing that you can do is charge 7.99 a month or $799 a week which translates into like $29 a month people will buy this as an impulse purchase it turns into three months of revenue for you so if you can come in and even get them at you know a $10 CAC then what that does is you get a you know a 10x payout over the lifetime of that customer but we'll get to that in a second to uh talk through the actual ual like um um kind of marketing process so the first thing

that I would do uh is you go again Facebook ads uh Tik Tok ads probably the two places you're going to do a conversion event on the signup um it'll be a deep link for the actual app install and then some action that is taken within the application typically it's a signup action or um a paid action um and when I say action what I'm talking about is like literally the user doing that thing um so you run those ads um again all these different variations uh you're going to test those against each other um

and what is most effective and like what people are doing more and more is they're creating all these versions of ads with uh influencers so like going and hiring for example uh five ugc creators or 10 ugc creators you can get creators right now where they do like a post a day um it'll cost you about a grand a month they do a video a day and they uh cross post it across all of the accounts so what they're going to do is they're going to basically turn into this like test bed for you of

the types of content that is most likely to go viral on that platform related to the product right A lot of the times it's like hook and then some type of pain point and then the product is the hero within that journey of that like you know that piece of content again when I when I say an ad like what we're trying to do is find an ad that doesn't feel like an ad that feels like content it feels like it's it's it's providing this like greater value it's like entertaining people and that's that cross-section

of like entertainment and education that's like actually how you sell people in my mind um but so you're you're running these ads um you're also doing the ugc side of this um the other strategies that you can do and that people are crushing it on right now is you go and you spend up 10 different Tik Tok accounts and you create variations of the best performing ugc content that the creators B made for you um you take those You remix those with AI use chat gbt to change the scripts hey Jen to do the videos

you do use 11 labs to do the the audio and then chop those in up into uh basically shorts right you can do uh like cap cut to do a green screen removal background of uh the AI Avatar put whatever the app is behind it they're now talking over this and you've got basically um your first uh kind of like top of funnel touch of the product so a lot of the times when people see these what they'll do is they go and Google the thing right so critical pick a name that nobody else has

it's like a huge piece of this so that you're not competing on the front page of Google with all these other companies that are this similar names when they touch that website um what you're going to do is you're going to go and pixel them so pixel what that means is basically you can install the Facebook pixel the LinkedIn pixel or you know any of these other apps it's again because it's consumer is probably going to be Facebook and it's going to be Tik Tok and maybe Google those are the only three places that they're

probably going to spend Time online when they touch the website and they get pixeled what that allows for you to do is you can run ads to them indefinitely anytime that they're on those platforms in the future so again you're just building this kind of uh funnel yeah in a way right but in a I I think that it's it's when you think about it growing though the f word yeah exactly but I think that a funnel feels like it's like this like this finite thing like what the more people that touch the site bigger

that audience gets and then it creates like again that like a larger mass that has more influence the larger the audience is the more likely it is that I can do a customer match list to that same audience that's touching the website that's doing the install that's like actually like you know putting the product on their phone um on that website have a way for them to sign up um or install the application um a lot of the times people will put like an email uh there as well so that you can do an email

nurture layer on that email nurture that's just like upselling them into the product um and those are going to be kind of like the things that you can do internally the next thing that we do see done is basically like influ influencer Outreach at scale to like how do I basically create some type of affiliate play um it's a classic Playbook that I've seen uh um like other companies run especially when it's like prosumer applications you can go and scrape all of like go uh YouTube search uh keyword that's in within your category you can

find all the channels all the creators that are uh specific uh to that category you can scrape all of their emails from YouTube okay what yes um so they have in their bio there's emails and you can just scrape them all um you go and then you do cold email like we talked about actually I said what but then I realized damn I I think we have like on our YouTube totally an email it's a contact email right to reach out yeah so you can use that um go and scrape them all uh and then

you can do cold Outreach to them ask them what their pricing is they're going to come back and they're going to be like hey my pricing is X um a percentage of them are going to come back yeah percentage of them we'll say whatever 10% 20% come back they say my pricing is X and then what you'll do is start to look at like a average views versus the cost that they're suggesting and then um you're going to be able to build a table where you're going to find discrepancies within the pricing of the market

it's going to be a market that is not liid like it's it's it's not not perfect an imperfect Market it's an imperfect market and what that allows for is for you to find Arbitrage when you find that Arbitrage you go and you work with those creators um typically the structure of the deal that we see be successful is you go and you buy like a three video package with them one doesn't make sense often from an impact standpoint um what we found is like three to be kind of that sweet spot where it's like Their

audience starts to trust you enough because you've like talked about it enough and then you do an affiliate commission with them um so it's like 30% so you're paying them on a per video basis so I'm going to buy a three pack of videos for $1,500 and then I'm going to also give you an affiliate Commission on the um uh uh whatever you bring in the door through uh for us on a recurring uh uh a commission payout what that does is creates the stickiness because naturally when they talk about this what you're going to

see is competitors will go and clone the product and then it turns into this whole game um but if they have you know on a monthly basis 45 Grand or whatever that ends up being like seen this with with some friends companies where it's like these creators that they're partners with they're making so much money from them that it's like if if a competitor comes in they almost have to buy them out of that contract in a way um so it creates this moat uh around the media and the relationship that you have with this

Creator um so that same strategy you can also take that you can go to Instagram as an example um you can use a tool like IG leads. um you can go and you can scrape uh people that are in specific hashtags or categories um or have specific keywords in their their titles you can scrape the emails from those accounts again do the same like bulk Reach Out same thing on Tik Tok same thing on any of these others um and so that is like kind of the core fundamentals of the flywheel um just as a

data point by the way uh had the founders of in two separate pods uh Cal AI come and Riz GPT come come and do an interview and I asked them how much do they pay per CPM like what what is successful for them so they basically acquire I mean they're doing like a million dollars a month Mr I think and they pay $5 CPM like that that's that's their number 100% And so just for context to uh the average CPM on Tik Tok is about $10 if you're buying through so this is the Arbitrage that

exists here why would you even go and you know muck around with all of these like creators like why would you even go through that process it's because you're paying a 50% you know discount basically for that for that CPM it's all this game is right it's like how do I get as many eyballs on this thing for as cheap you know as possible um so I think then the other strategy depending on the category that you're in is you can go and you can do programmatic SEO um for the product um so like Cal

like if I was them I would all day long be looking at like Diet you know plans nutrition plans um you know uh how to lose weight calorie counts there's thousands of these hundreds of thousands of these keywords um so the strategy there is you basically like as the app starts to get domain Authority so domain Authority is basically the trust that a a website has on the internet um how that's measured by Google like how that's that's basically factored in is the backlinks from other websites that are trusted going to your site right what

is a backlink it's literally like when you click a link on one website and you end up on another website that is a backlink and there's different types of backlinks on uh the two core ones are no follow and do follow do follow are what you want no follow are typically Social Links do follows are more valuable no follows you can kind of do some things with them but we won't get into you know this but as the site though naturally starts to get more and more traction it's just going to naturally build backlinks as

soon as you get to a you know a domain authority of 40ish plus a lot of the times you can start to rank for a lot of these longtail keywords that are low lower lower keyword difficulty um which means that they're just like less competitive um process super straightforward go scrape what's ranking on page one for that Target keyword that's related to your product you then take that all you know all the content all that is ranking on page one scrape it put it into a context window create a blog post outline for the Target

keyword based off of that context use one of these AI uh like tools to to basically write that blog post what we do is we have it write an outline and then we write it section by section we find that to be the best quality it also like best readability and um also from a uh like if you do that like what I just described like it's all those like AI humanizer it's going to pass every single one those are all [ __ ] so funny to me um but anyways uh or sorry not the

humanizer the the like AI yeah the checkers or whatever the humanizer kind of makes sense um so what we do you go and you publish you know whatever say for example 10,000 articles like doing this process um human doesn't touch them in the beginning um if you're doing doing being very aggressive and doing this growth hack like growth hacky way that's like you're if you're more comfortable with risk um this is the way to do it if you're not have a human then go in and do edits on top of this before they go live

on the site but if you publish 10,000 of them um strategy basically is go uh once the page gets traffic that as soon as you get you know one session then a human comes in and they do the edits we have a SEO specialist for example or content writing special list that is on staff their whole job is they're basically rewriting anything that's get got seen by humans so there's two factors of getting content rank in my experience it's like what Google wants to rank and then like is the human actually reading this and consuming

this content and so you have to find that cross-section between the two of them um when you find that cross-section um that's when you get like a page to basically stay on page one so on that page so they search you know we'll say whatever again um how to lose weight or all these like longtail variations um they land on that page uh you then have uh call to action after the first paragraph uh that's like sign up for the app for free um every uh you know frame you want at least a call out

uh one call out to be seen uh within every frame of that scroll so on mobile or on uh uh desktop and then also have a popup that occurs with the same call to action but that just like takes over the whole screen um that uh occurs at like a 25 to a 50% scroll rate um so as they scroll down that page it like gets in their face creates that sign of action to happen this also does is when they touch your website again you're pixeling all them so you're already gotten you you know

that they have an interest in this thing they go into your remarketing funnel and that's how you can layer that on um so yeah those are kind of the the plays that I'm seeing be effective right now just for you know Ki I mean there's a great episode literally breaking down exactly what they're doing um on the the organic social side I have a friend that's building this app that's like uh it's a it's a basically a sober tracking app um one of the most insane growth trajectories I've ever seen on consumer it's like they

built in like an AI uh the app's called sunflower sober um and they built in a AI uh basically like sponsor and it the engagement with it is unbelievable like crazy and their entire acquisition strategy is like through Facebook at a price that actually makes sense right and not just Facebook that you know I think they're running ads like basically everywhere um but it's funny like everybody's obsessed with short form social right now there's still so like there's still so much opportunity and these traditional ad channels for these it's just figuring out you know like

what is that new thing that people are looking for so anyway yeah dude these are this is this is gold you're an angel serve live the serve thank you as always dud thank thank you thank you this is this is going to change some lives so thank you for uh lay laying it out for people yeah if they have questions let me know reach out I'm happy to help however I can so Cody Schneider XX yeah yeah that's it all right we we we we'll throw that in the show notes cool appreciate it I'll see

you in a bit hell yeah [Music]