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Creator Science with Jay Clouse
#303: Riley Brown — The AI Content Creator Who Doesn’t Write With AI
00:55:47
Riley Brown has 1.5 million followers across his accounts.
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A
May is a great time to join our membership community the Lab and let me tell you why. Number one, we're doing a new round of Mastermind matching beginning on May 18th. We will hand curate a group of six to eight other members with similar businesses to help push you further. Number two, we have three special events this a community wide mastermind on May 20, a workshop to learn the business of speaking with Jay Acunzo on May 21 and a community roundtable for members using Circle on May 27. If you're around London, we even have an in person meetup on May 22nd. Finally, and maybe most importantly, the Lab offline powered by circle is happening June 8th through 9th. It's not too late to join the Lab and punch your ticket to join us there in Boise. There will be 50 of us hanging out in person for two days. It's always a great time to join the Lab, but May is especially great. You can learn more and join us at creatorscience.com lab that's creatorscience.com lab hope to see you inside. Study and Play Come together on a Windows 11 PC and for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more@windows.com studentoffer while supplies last ends June 30th terms at aka mscollegepc.
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Your vehicle doesn't just get you from here to there. It's a bridge to the people and places that matter most.
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It's how you show up for your
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family, your community and everyone else that depends on you. That's why for 125 years, Firestone has
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been building tires with one thing in
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to deliver products that are as reliable as you are. Firestone always dependable since 1900, the first video on TikTok about ChatGPT was my video. It got 20 million views. I went from 0 to like 200k followers in 2 weeks.
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That's Riley Brown. Riley has built an audience of 1.5 million followers, raised $9 million to start a vibe coding company in San Francisco, and developed a content strategy so systematic that a single viral video gets reposted across seven accounts every for the rest of the year. In this episode, you'll learn Riley's unique strategy for creating free content.
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Find what people are paying for, do it and make it free.
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Why? Using AI to write your Scripts is a mistake.
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The more you use AI for writing your scripts, the more you're going to sound like AI. And in the long run, sounding like AI is suicide.
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And stick around to the end to learn the one content strategy he's using right now that's tripled his company's revenue in two months. Thank you to one of ten for sponsoring this video.
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B
Three years ago I started making content. Actually, A little over three years ago, before ChatGPT came out, I decided that I was going to fully make content on AI. This was honestly a means for me to explore my curiosities. So I was in this Discord channel where people were starting to use Midjourney. I'm sure a lot of the audience has heard of Midjourney, which is just like an AI image generator. And AI image generation seems trivial now because, like, so many tools allow for this and everyone has used it. Whether it's Nano banana or within ChatGPT, you can just generate images. But at the time I thought it was the coolest thing in the world and it basically opened up all of these curiosities. Then I ended up in a Discord group for what was going to become ChatGPT. It was called GPT3 at the time and people didn't even converse with it, like a chatbot. Anyway, it became just a massive obsession for me and I, and I just decided I'm going to dedicate my time to making TikTok videos about this and then eventually I'll find some sort of. Then I'll figure out how to make a living around it. And I quickly blew up to like 500,000 followers on TikTok. Talking about AI and creating content quickly became a means for me to follow my curiosities. And I was always diving as deep as I can into AI. And I always tried to get to an edge while making content. Like, I wanted to be at the intersection between AI and content creation. And then eventually I found AI and coding, which has become Vibe coding. And I was the first person on long form and short form platforms to start talking about using AI to code despite being fully untechnical. And I fell in love with it. I. I built a massive following on Twitter mostly where I was making videos, building apps with AI and people loved it. People started following me. I created a community, a free community on Circle. And I know you're on Circle as well, I'm pretty sure you're a huge fan of the platform. And we had like 15,000 people in this free community and we didn't really know what to do with it. Eventually, I started running into problems and this guy reached out to me on Twitter. He said, hey, I can help you out. I can help you create a backend for the apps that you're building. And so he ended up helping me. His name was on. And I was like, dude, this was super helpful. Let's make a video about this together. We ended up doing Riverside like we are now. We filmed a video of him, of us making an app without writing a single line of code and adding Firebase as a backend. And this video ended up blowing up. And I ended up reaching out to Ange again. I said, dude, this video was awesome. Why don't we work together? And then we basically spent the next six months together hacking away at different things and making content. And eventually he was just like, dude, I'm pretty sure we can make a mobile app that builds mobile apps. And then that's when our company formed and we moved to San Francisco. We raised a bunch of money. I have a massive audience that's super interested in AI encoding. And so, sorry, this is a long winded answer to say that, like, I've been using AI to ex, or I've been using content creation to just push the boundaries of my curiosities. And that ended up leading to a company, and we ended up raising $9 million to start a company here in San Francisco. And we're one of the faster growing, like, Vibe coding startups in all of San Francisco right now. And content is basically at the center, and I have two separate teams of remote editors and we just make content again on what we find interesting within the Vibe coding space. And we basically have unlimited content. Because I genuinely love, like, the Vibe coding space and I think. I think just AI agents building software is really cool. And so, yeah, we just do it at scale and I can hop into the details if that's interesting to you.
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A
It is. I want to. I want to take a step back real quick because the speed at which you started growing on TikTok and then X was very, very fast. Faster than most people would experience if they started creating under a new account on a new platform. And it, it seems from the outside, you know, a couple years removed now, that it was practically immediate. But did it. Was it really that fast? Did you really, like, hit something and it just worked and you started getting eyeballs to your. Your content immediately.
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B
So I was. There was a period of time on TikTok where I was the only person making content on ChatGPT for like 2 weeks. Wild and you can imagine, yeah, people didn't really know what it was. And I had been in this discord learning about what GPT3 was before anyone. And most people who are interested in ChatGPT were kind of nerds. They were, you know, people in the trenches of, of this technology. And most of those people couldn't really articulate it enough to actually make videos on social media. I recognized this the day ChatGPT came out, I put out a video. The day ChatGPT came out, the first video on TikTok about ChatGPT was my video. It got 20 million views. And so I basically told all my friends and immediate family, like, this is all I'm going to do for the next six months and I'm going to see what happens. I think this is the biggest opportunity that I'll ever have. And yeah, I went from 0 to like 200k followers on TikTok in two weeks.
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A
Crazy.
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B
And, you know, it wasn't because of my skill of making content. It was the fact that I was the only person or one of the only people who were making videos about the most like, transformational technology of, of our generation. So that's kind of what I can attribute it to. And then I ended up, over time, pushing that audience to Instagram. And then I started building a following on, on Twitter and then on YouTube. And I did a decent job, like pushing my audience from one platform to the other. And now between all of the platforms, I have close to 1.5 million followers. And I still talk about AI, still. I still love it. Still interesting. I just have a company now.
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A
It seems like there's a lesson here about the value of first mover advantage, because I would guess, Well, I feel 100% confident that you understand content much more deeply and intricately now than you did when you started. But I think a lot of people when they're getting started, they're like, okay, I hear that a hook is important and I gotta have B roll. And they get so bogged down in the minutiae of what makes a good video that they downplay some other aspects, like, what is this video about? What do I have to say? And in a situation where your first mover, it seems like it kind of takes a lot of that out of the picture. It matters far less. Do you agree?
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100% agree. I especially think now in the current landscape, just because of AI generated content, anyone can just kind of get AI to create a basic script, but to genuinely have knowledge about something that not many people have knowledge about. Is I think, 90% of the game. And I think it's incredibly important to just like become obsessed and interested in obscure things, because I just really think AI is coming for a lot of content creators who just talk about the same things people have been talking about for years. And I think there's never been a better time to be in the edge of some sort of. Because all of technology is changing which impacts content creation. And I'm sure that you think about how AI is going to impact content over time. And so I would just find some niche intersection and get really knowledgeable and be able to talk about that subject without thinking about a hook. I do think hooks are important. And the way that I film my videos is I take an interesting idea or we're going to build something, because most of my videos are screen share, where we're actually building something and we'll film the whole video and then afterwards I'll just do the hook and intro. And then that is the acquired skill of actually getting really good at a. Capturing attention immediately and then framing the video so that people know what to expect. They know exactly what value they're going to get out of the video. And mostly you want to make sure that they know that they're not going to waste their time watching your video, which I've gotten really good at. And as you said, yeah, the more reps you do of that, the better you. You just naturally get.
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A
This is a hard question to articulate, but I'm going to try because I've never quite asked it this way. I know from my lived experience, I wake up every day and there's typically some thought or pattern of thoughts that's driving me forward. You strike me as a very ambitious person. So you clearly have a plan and things that you want to accomplish each day. And I'm curious what your inner monologue is related to. Content when you get up in the morning.
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B
You know, before I started my company, it was way different. I would literally wake up and I would just kind of. I would go to coffee and I would just bring my phone and I would scroll Twitter and there was enough interesting things going on where I would just scroll until I found something interesting. Whether it was 11 Labs new voice model or some new that I could put into an app that I build. Like, I would just literally find something I'm interested in and then make a video on it. Like, that was my day. And then once I picked the video, I'm like, okay, I'm tuning out everything except for making the video and I'm just going to make this really good. And, you know, whether if I had, I used to do a lot more paid sponsorship, so that would always influence it a little bit. But, like, that was basically my process. I'm like, find something I'm interested in where I'm gonna be super passionate. My content, where I'm really passionate in the thing, is way better than content where I'm not passionate about it. And so I would always make sure that I'm deeply interested in it. And then I would make a video.
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A
And real quick, before you say, like, what it's like today in that world where your process was, go through Twitter, find something I'm interested in, make a video. What was the inner monologue behind that? Was it like? I'm asking because some days I feel almost panicked that I have this looming deadline of I need to create something today. And I don't think that actually leads to the best energy of what I need to create. And I'm just so curious, somebody that's as prolific as you are, what your relationship to pressure, if it exists, or whether you're operating from a place of no stress, no pressure.
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B
Mm, that's a good question. Yeah, I feel like if I was ever giving my. Giving myself pressure to make content, my content would always be worse. And I've talked to a lot of people who are seasoned in the content game, a lot of people who are in the newsletter game. You know, they've built up these newsletters that have hundreds of thousands of people, and they turn their content engine into this kind of like, structured business almost where you have like, predictable revenue streams. The more structured I tried to get, the worse I started to perform in my content. And the more I was just playing, the better I was. Like, the more I would grow, ironically, like, the more results I would get from a. From the paid sponsorship shot, like, everything would get better when I was playing versus when I had this like, rigid structure. And I knew that I wasn't. My DNA is not in the boring business, whether it's newsletters, courses, communities, I've tried all of them. I think they're wonderful businesses and they can super high cash flow. They can impact a lot of people and help a lot of people. It's just not for me. The only business I saw myself starting is something on the edge. You know, I talked about how I love being on the edge. I love talking about cutting edge technology and AI specifically. And so I had to start a company in that spot for me to really capitalize on, like, what I've done so far. And that's why I went the route of moving to San Francisco and doing an actual startup. Because I think in order to create an AI startup that can truly scale to nine plus figures, you need to be on the edge and I think you do need to raise money.
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A
Cool.
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B
Okay.
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A
Well, it sounds like you had a much healthier relationship to content than I currently do, which is great.
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B
I'm curious, like, what's like, are you running into some like mental barriers with content right now? I'm curious.
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A
I think in some ways a lot of this changed when we had our daughter and like time has just constricted because I had built a machine. I think of my business as kind of a machine, to be honest. And it's like I know that certain inputs lead to certain outputs and if I need to change the outputs, I need to change the inputs or I need to change the design of the machine. The machine that I had built really demanded and consumed all of my time before having a child. And then in a post child world I had less time, but of course wanted the same or better outputs. So I've had a really rough go of it over the last year and a half figuring out what does this mean for the future of the machine and my content because it's just not sustainable. I think that's come through at times in the last year in my content that it was feeling a little bit more like a job than it was this place of play that it previously had been. And now with the changes that are happening in the landscape, I feel more pressure to adapt and fix this machine that I already felt pressure to fix in a more time strapped world. So it's been a challenge for me over the last call it six to 12 months.
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B
Interesting. Yeah, yeah, I think I would always run into like every six, seven, six months I would run into like I felt the format that I was doing was getting stale. I wanted to move and try different platforms, which for a lot of creators actually creates more problems than it does harm. Like the best thing to do might just be to like literally create rigidity and, and stay consistent because I've seen what consistency can do for content creators. It's hard to deal with that. And yeah, I'm sure when I have kids I'll run into the same time constraints. So yeah, I guess I haven't dealt with that before.
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A
Oh good. So today you said that was your process, that was how things felt pre company. So now today, what is your relationship to content?
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My relationship to content has Changed a lot. Startups need to grow and so eight months ago we started our company and we, it was me and two other co founders. We just moved to San Francisco. We were in a WeWork and we were trying to build the product and so half of my time, way more actually, probably like 70% of my time is dealing with like stuff that isn't content. Whether it's helping figure out how to build the product, hiring developers. Our team right now is, it's me, one other person who runs the studio and then six developers and we basically just build the product all day and I make content. Now the benefit of starting a company and raising $9 million like we did is I can outsource a lot of things without really thinking about the cost. You know, obviously we, we take price into consideration. But I have like two very high quality agencies overseas who edit my videos. It did take a lot of time to a train them and just hire them in general. But like once you get that down, it's incredible leverage to be able to just film a video and just send it off and I don't really think about it and then it just gets done correctly and so that's incredibly high leverage. That means all I really need to do is have two spare hours and to film the video and I just film something I'm passionate about, send it off to the editor and everything else gets done. I don't think about the thumbnail or the title, but these are all things that take a lot of time because I had to train the team to
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A
do that real quick. What's the turnaround on that? You film a video for an hour or two and then you ship it off to this agency. How quickly does a finished video get
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back to you ready to post one of the agencies? It's ready in 10 hours. So the next day, one agency, three days. The one that takes longer is a little bit higher quality. And so we have, I have a gauge on whether, whether or not it needs to be highly polished. Some things I want to get out sooner, whether or not, whether it's like a product demo that I, I just want to align with one of our announcements or if it's like AI News, I'll, I, I, I'd rather have it out earlier than be more polished later. I just think like certain things need to get out quick and so I'll kind of decide. But both of them are pretty quick. I think a three day turnaround for a highly polished edited video is actually pretty solid and so I can't complain.
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A
Do they do short form as well.
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That's one thing that I'm actually currently struggling with is figuring out how to short form cut my videos. My videos are very much screen share and usually it's like a screen share for an extended period of time. So like taking a clip of a tutorials. Way tougher than clipping something like this where it's just me talking about something or it's, it's less clippable. So I film my short form content separately. They're kind of like separate videos and I have my whole process for doing that. It's very quick. Probably takes me 30 minutes end to end to make a short form video. And usually they're pretty good. And it's usually me like building an app quickly or talking about an update. I send it off to one of my editor teams and they'll send it back the next morning with multiple variations. So it's pretty streamlined on that part.
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A
In this hiring of these agencies, I'm sure you talk to a bunch of them. If somebody's listening to this and they're like, that sounds great. I just want to go out and hire a team that can handle this video cutting end to end for me. How would you ballpark what they should expect to spend for that level of quality and turnaround time for high end editors?
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B
I think $1,000 per video is on the high end. Um, but if you're a big company, I think that's actually somewhat reasonable. If you have an existing YouTube audience, um, you can expect to pay like 800 to 1200 per episode. The most important thing for me for an editor is actually not like technical abilities like in Premiere Pro or After Effects. It's domain understanding or expertise. So like they're able to realize what's important about a video. I think that's really important to an editor. I'm sure you've run into that. I, I used to, I really admire your videos. When you have things pop up on screen while someone's talking, like maybe you'll have like a T chart that pops up. And I think a well timed T chart, very simple. No animations are, can be so much more valuable than the super, you know, like animated type of intros that we're really in in like I would say like 2024, they got super animated. But we optimized for education obviously. We like to make things look polished, but we optimize for education. And so like as we continue to build out our content team, I will focus more on adding relevant charts. Like if I'm talking about some concept that's not on screen. I want a pop up to come up that like assists that point getting across. I think that's incredibly important.
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A
Yeah. And I'm guessing those prices do not encapsulate thumbnail as well.
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B
It doesn't. We have a separate thumbnail designer who actually used to work for Matt Wolf. For those who follow the AI space. He's one of the biggest, if not the biggest. And so yeah, I hired him. He is his old thumbnail designer and he's great. Very quick turnaround. Like one day turnaround for thumbnails.
- [22:21]
A
Let me show you how easy it is to use one of Ten's thumbnail generator to make YouTube ready thumbnails. I'm working on a solo video where I share a life update about having a second child in the fall. I'm both excited and nervous and I want to try to make a Thumbnail here in 1 of 10. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm actually going to sketch this out because I have kind of a rough idea of what I'm going for. I'm going to take a photo of this now I'm going to come back over to one of 10 and I'm going to type in the video description. I'm going to upload my reference images. I'm going to upload my sketch and let's see what happens. Okay, we got these back. I'm going to edit this one with AI. Okay. Wow. I could actually throw this directly into an AB test and see how it does. It's pretty crazy what 1 of 10 can do with their thumbnail generator. I recommend giving it a shot yourself. You can learn more at the link in the description. I love your style of videos because I do love that most of the time it's like a demonstration. That's kind of how I'm architecting this and thinking about this in my mind and where I think there's actually some opportunity for folks on YouTube today is a lot of videos. Now the advice for a long time was create a curiosity loop. And I think it's still true. But if I can actually just close that loop by asking Gemini the answer to whatever the loop was. I'm not going to watch the whole video if I'm not interested in the video. I just have this itchy feeling that I want to know the answer to this question. But for folks like you and Greg Eisenberg is doing a really good job of this. When I can watch a full demonstration of how this person does this thing. I'm still watching that at regular speed all the way through. I think it's a big opportunity and sometimes you have like a presentation in Canva and I'm just thinking, man, how much planning went into thinking through the linear education of this video and. Or the creation of this deck in Canva.
- [24:18]
B
Yeah. So I think the video that I think you're referring to is there was a video that I did where it's like the Complete guide to AI where I literally laid out every AI tool that I've ever learned. I divided them into three chunks and made this Canva whiteboard and I just kind of went through them. Surprisingly enough, way less planning went into the probably three hours of prep and then I just turned on my camera and filmed for four and a half hours. I remember that video took me four and a half hours. I cut it down to two. Um, but I think most of my prep comes from me just tinkering with the tools. What people don't see are the hundreds of hours I've spent using the tools. So I don't need to like prep for the video as much as just laying out what I want to talk about and what I want to say to, to the audience watching. If you are someone who understands a niche skill, especially on a computer, I genuinely believe there's so much room in the market for high quality screen share style videos and I would encourage you to simplify it as much as possible. I would use a tool like excalidraw or Canva, some whiteboard tool and this is how I would structure my videos. To start, I would put up the logo of whatever it is you're talking about. Just make sure it's big. For me, it's Claude code. Like you put Claude code up on the screen and then put a stick figure on the screen and put an arrow from like where you are now to where you'll be at the end of the video. This is just an idea, but like literally say today or just say something like, this is your hook. Claude code is actually insane. You can and then point at the little character. You can build an app in 20 minutes and just say that in this video. I'm going to show you that you can do that. We're going to be using this tool, this tool and this tool. Let's not waste any more time, let's dive in and you can use a tool like descript or tela to do screen recordings. I think both are pretty good. I like TELA as a, as a tool. Because you can film it in chunks. If you've ever used Capcut, they have this like multi clip feature where you can film something and if you mess up on just one of those chunks, you can delete it. So you can do a lot of the editing while you're filming the video, right? You can film a chunk and if you mess up on the chunk, you can just hit restart and you can go back to the start of that chunk and you can film the video in chunks. And by the time you're done, you just have all of your good chunks and then all you have to do is a little bit of cutting at the end. That's how I started. You know, I think it was a little over a year ago. I still, I had like an editor that I would use sometimes, but I was editing my own videos and I was just filming stuff I was interested in. Some of my videos were getting over a hundred thousand views. People love to over complicate content and it annoys me because there's some people that are so smart and so talented and can just use a computer in a way that would blow people's mind, that would give them value. Just do that. And so all you need is a one minute at the beginning of your video that explains what you're about to do and then do it. And then at the end just say subscribe. That is literally all I would do to start until you hit 50k subs, then worry about optimizing other things. If you want to go down this type of content route.
- [27:29]
A
I love that. And also huge proponent of tela. I'll put a link in the show notes because we're an affiliate and hey, what an opportunity. I use TELA to record courses, paid courses. And I think paid courses are going the way of the dinosaur in the near future as well. And I think it's actually an opportunity. If you're not afraid of this as a creator, if you have had paid courses in the past, we're going to redesign the slide decks that I used in my membership course, which I think is my best course. And maybe instead of selling it, I just record that and put it on YouTube. Like I feel like that might actually be the highest leverage use of that asset and say if you enjoyed this and you want to learn with other creators, join the lab.
- [28:12]
B
I think that's a wonderful strategy and I agree with you. I think online courses are going away and what's funny is I will actually search the Internet and find the highest grossing paid courses that are in my domain. Of expertise. And I'll go in and get the syllabus for this course and then I'll just make the full video and put it on YouTube and I'll do it in three hours. I find where I think Alex Hormozy talks about this a lot. He's just like, find what people are paying for, do it and make it free. Like, that is the best way that you could grow a following. Which is another way of saying, find things that people think are valuable and put it on the Internet for free. And I don't think people realize what good can come from this. Like, this is the only reason I've been able to start a company and raise a ton of money. And we're doing very well as a company. And it came from me making a ton of content without expecting anything in return. I just threw out a ton of value. I was getting views, I was getting paid a little bit. But I knew that, like building the brand of being someone in a niche, making valuable content is just. It is so valuable to your audience and you will just. You will come up with a way to monetize it later. So I would just encourage people to just start putting out free value on the Internet.
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A
There does seem to be something unique about you in that you seem inherently just unafraid of making and posting. I think a lot of people who are getting started, there's some self censorship, there's kind of a stop start experience, There's a lot of editing and agonizing over things. But it really feels like from the beginning you've been like, I'm going to make something and I'm going to let it rip. And then you do that multiple times per day. Is that innate? Did you have to learn that?
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B
Yeah, I think a lot of people have a bunch of analogies to explain this. I think Greg Eisenberg talks about the cringe mountain. You have to cross cringe mountain at the very beginning of your journey. I don't know if you've ever. Have you seen this before?
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A
Well, I recently had Yoni Smolyar on the show and he said the same thing.
- [30:18]
B
I love Yoni. He's one of my good friends. But I think that, yeah, when you start, you're worried about all of the people you've met in the past judging you for making content when you have no followers. Right. You have to be the. The weird person making content on the Internet who has no followers for a little bit of time. And you just need to get past that. For me, I started making videos And I did obviously feel cringe. I was not natural at talking to a camera at first. I did pick it up pretty quickly, but I did blow up really early and then all of it went away and I wasn't afraid to say anything. And then once you make enough videos, I don't overthink any content now. Like, even if I put out something absolutely terrible, like I'm like, no one will see it. That's the cool thing about the algorithm now. It's like you people don't realize that if your videos suck, no one will see. Like literally no one will see it. And you think like your old friends are going to stalk you and see that you're making a video and be like, oh, haha, he had 50 views on his video. It's like they don't care. So stop pretending that people care about you and just make videos. It'll pay off. And it is easier said than done. Like I do empathize with, with, with people who are struggling not being authentic on camera because it is hard at
- [31:27]
A
this point because you've had so much success. Do you have hopes and expectations, hopes or expectations for any single piece of content that you put out?
- [31:36]
B
Yeah, obviously I do. I mean our success of a company now, which is eight people, is dependent on my ability to market the product, you know, at least in part. And obviously I want to make content, grow our company and then continue to make better and better content. Um, so. But I don't really do it at an individual level.
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A
I ha.
- [31:57]
B
I do this thing on Sundays where I just do weekly recap and I'll look at my videos and, and just think about like what I can improve. Should I even be making those types of videos? Because I'm, I've reached the point between all my platforms like, like I could make 20 different types of content. And so it's basically just choosing where I want to allocate my time and effort and then how I can delegate those. It's really hard to delegate in content. Like the creative side of content. It's almost, it's not impossible, but it's very difficult to like outsource that. So I know that I have limited amount of time and now I am more selective about what I do. And I've found that right now, currently long form is just the way to go. Because long form is doing really well on X. People don't realize this. Twitter is first of all, X is my favorite controversial take, my favorite platform by far to be a consumer on. And it's also becoming A great platform for long form video. People do bookmark it. Maybe they only watch a little bit of it, but like, it's a great way to like go super viral on X is to post a really high quality video, have really good timestamps. You can put timestamps in your tweet and they operate the same way they do on, on YouTube. And my videos crush it. And what people don't realize about Twitter, which is actually kind of my secret sauce right now, which I happy to share, is I have seven accounts on X. They're all about vibe coding and combined over 200,000 followers. You can just repost the same videos over and over and over again and the viral videos will go viral again.
- [33:27]
A
Oh, you mean so like account one, you post it. It does. Well, account two, you post the same video natively from that account. You're not reposting yourself on Twitter.
- [33:37]
B
There's a difference between quoting, quote, tweeting a post with a video and reposting a video. Are you familiar with the difference between the two?
- [33:45]
A
I mean, barely.
- [33:47]
B
Okay, yes. If you on the Twitter app, you can hold a video down and you can hit repost a video. What it does is you can basically just add a new caption to the video and it just shows the video and then below the video it says who it's from. So it's like a way of reposting a video without reposting the whole post. You're just reposting the video. I learned this because a lot of these bot accounts from other countries started reposting my videos over and over and over again. And they were going viral and they do this. I don't know if you've seen the this guy literally on X, there's like a plague of accounts that all they do is say this guy literally does X. And so they're reposting my videos. And I saw that they were going viral my videos, the same videos over and over again. And I just immediately thought, I'm like, I should not let them be doing this. I should be doing this from our owned accounts. And so that like we gain those followers, it's just too easy not to do it. And so we just started doing it. And so every week we look at the performance of the videos of the previous week and they're like, okay, let's schedule some video. So I like to keep them like a week apart. But yeah, like, if I get a viral video that will be posted every week for the rest of the year, I don't see a reason not to do it.
- [34:59]
A
And the nice thing is because it is your face. Like, even if another account that is not your accounts is sharing it, like, there's still massive benefit to your brand and what you're doing, but 100%, but
- [35:09]
B
it's still better to own the accounts than to let other people do it, you know?
- [35:13]
A
So are you stopping other people from doing it? Is there a way to stop people from posting it?
- [35:16]
B
Oh, I'll let them do it as much as they want. I just, you know, like, I'd rather it be my accounts and then I'll mix in a bunch of other content. And so, like, I'm starting to build out our content team and they'll be posting other accounts in between reposting my videos so that the account in and of itself is valuable. We're going to. Basically, our product is a vibe coding tool, right? You can build mobile apps, you can build web apps, and now you can build agents. And so each account is actually going to have one narrow focus. I just think this is kind of, you notice, kind of like Barstool does this, where they have a network of accounts, or you've seen Polymarket and Kalshi have niche accounts for one brand. And that's how I'm going to build out our Twitter and Instagram over the next six months, is just take parts of the product and make your own account for it. I do need to hire probably like two or three people to manage all this, though.
- [36:13]
A
Yeah, say more about that because I'm listening to this, I'm like, okay, not only are you operating on practically every content platform that's out there, but now you're talking about multiple accounts per platform. How is this managed right now? What type of like internal benchmarks or requirements do you have for these different platforms?
- [36:31]
B
You know, we're. We're actually in the middle of like tracking everything. There's no tracking. There's very little method to the madness other than pure instincts. You know, like I. We use what's called tightfully, I don't know if you've ever heard of. Tightly, it allows you to schedule posts on Twitter and it allows you to just like, you know, you can create drafts, you can schedule posts, and you can also set up comment campaigns. So you automatically DM anyone who comments on a Twitter post. Yeah, I mean, the method is again, on Sundays, I do like a. This Sunday is all about kind of looking at the previous week and then, you know, deciding all the videos I'm going to make the next week. But then Also reposting all the videos that did well from the previous time. So on tightfully it lets you. It's hilarious. My typefully has nine accounts. I not only do I have all the ones that I own for our company, but I have my co founders, Twitter and our, our first engineering hire. His Twitter's in there. So I'll just tweet from their account sometimes. But yeah, I basically like take all the posts that have done well and I'll just like draft up a bunch of posts and then for the videos that we haven't made yet, you can actually tag them and I'll say like video about blah blah, blah. So I know what videos I need to make and then I'll just schedule when I'm filming those videos through that week. So I have gotten a lot more scheduled as time goes on just because out of necessity, because I'm also in other meetings as well. And so that's kind of how I think about. I think about it in weeks and every week I just try to get better. And I think so much about social media is about whatever's working in the moment. You know, Gary Vee talks about day trading attention and I think that is very important. If you find an opportunity, you need to be able to just drop everything and just pour all of your energy into that. And this Twitter strategy is currently that thing that I've been doing, it is starting to taper off so I don't get emotionally attached to it. But like it literally caused our company's revenue to triple in two months.
- [38:25]
A
Wow.
- [38:26]
B
So that was pretty cool.
- [38:28]
A
How many assets do you think you're creating to publish each week? And I'm saying assets because like it could be long form, could be short form, could be a text based post just to give a sense for folks watching the volume that you're doing. How would you estimate this?
- [38:44]
B
I used to go for more quantity, but now that I can. Now that I'm realizing you can repost the same content over and over again, we're going for quality because if you get one really high quality viral video that you can post every week, that's 52 posts in one. Not to mention you can post them multiple times on other platforms which you haven't set up yet. We're just doing it on X, we're going to start doing it on Instagram. So I've gone for more quality as of late. So I would say I try to do four short form videos, like high quality short form videos that are educational, how to use Vibe code And then two other posts about whatever I'm interested in. Like, I made one about cloudbot last week and it went pretty viral across all platforms. A lot of it is when something is cool, I'll make a video about it. You know, it's, it's really hard to make content that's good if you don't have something good to talk about. And so some weeks so much happens that I'll just like, I've been doing this thing, actually don't know if I have it. I don't have it here. I have this little finger. I don't know if you've seen the videos where I have this. Like, I wish I had one on me. There are these little plastic fingers that you can like extend. They're like pointer, pointers. And I'll just film a video of me making something on my phone and, and I'll tap the screen with this pointer and the videos, like, some of them get over a million views and they're pure educational and they convert to our product. And so I found, I think short form, super underrated. Just holding your phone and like showing something happening, especially if you add a little gimmick. Like here, like, I also use, I also bought these giant pencils. I've seen this in the video. Yes.
- [40:21]
A
Yeah.
- [40:21]
B
And so, like, I'll like point at it with these pencils and the retention just goes up. So I just film, film something cool. You know, I have. The value of the video is my unique perspective that's probably above 99% of people because I'm deep in the niche. Once you do that, you don't need to overthink everything else. You can just show the cool stuff, find a little gimmick, put it in there, you know, get the ADHD points and call it a day.
- [40:47]
A
So when cloudbot hit, I got on that actually pretty early, earlier than I get on most things. Um, and I noticed that you lagged behind me a couple days on that. And I actually took that as a point of legitimacy for you because I have to think that your incentive is to be so on top of everything that happens in the AI space that you are once again like a first mover, sharing things. But as time has gone on, you've built a brand that has a lot of trust within it. How do you, how do you think about that? Because if you're just going for speed, it's really easy to not have full consideration around something for sure.
- [41:28]
B
We, we, we think about it. And I don't really think about being early like I don't try to be first now that I've built such a big brand. Like, I think if I were to make a really, really good video three days after it becomes a big thing, that is a win versus, like trying to be first. Trying to be first, first is, is. Was my very early strategy. But not anymore. I don't need to do that anymore. The reason I was late to cloudbot was just I saw a lot of red flags in the people talking about it. A lot of people interested in crypto were the loudest people talking about claudebot and just from the last five years studying how the media landscape works. Anytime you have any topic where a lot of crypto people are talking about it, you're going to end up with 90% nonsense. It's unfortunate. I have nothing against crypto. I think bitcoin's cool, whatever. But like, I saw a lot of people just making absurd videos. I thought it was entertainment. I said that in my Tweet. I said it's 98% are entertainment, 2% utility. I've realized it is more useful, but I think the content being made on it is still pretty bad. And people aren't actually talking about the tangible, tangible utility around claudebot. And in fact, an hour after this podcast, I'm going to get a Mac Mini and I'm going to make a cloudbot that is chief marketing officer of our company. And I'm going to make it super as boring as possible. Everyone else is doing these flashy things with it. I'm going to show people exactly how I'm going to use an AI agent to run a lot of boring parts of my company because that's where I think claudebot. And again, I have no affinity to cloudbot. I think agents in general, like, not enough people are paying attention to Manus, which was purchased by Meta. These agents are really cool and they can be really practical, but they, the people aren't really talking about how they're practical. And so that was why I was late to that.
- [43:21]
A
This is Meta. But you create content about AI. Do you use AI to create content about AI?
- [43:30]
B
I have never used like AI avatars except for I early in my content days I had a character named George that I would talk to like that. People actually always tell me to bring back George, the people who've been following me forever. But I use AI all day to just explore my curiosities. I. I don't understand how people aren't always trying to learn stuff with AI. Like my rate of learning has increased so much. You know, I'll go to Claude and I'll be like, okay, I just learned about Claudebot. Please look into the GitHub repo, tell me everything about, explain it in simple language and lay it out in a presentation. I've been doing this thing where every day I try to print something off. I go to FedEx, which is right next door, and I'll print something off and I'll just sit there without my phone and read it. And I'll usually have AI like print off a PDF and I'll just use AI to learn like crazy so that making the video authentically is super easy. Right? I can just speak about it and people will find it interesting. And I find using AI heavily in content has provided no real benefit. You know, I've tried the avatar stuff. Like, I don't even know how people are using it for content. I don't think people follow me for that reason. You know, I don't know if. Do you use AI in your content at all?
- [44:44]
A
One of the first use cases anytime I'm playing around with an AI tool is like, hey, here's an essay I wrote. Try to make some short form out of this. And I've like, tried to get better at prompting it and giving it parameters and showing it what successful short form looks like, but it either doesn't sound like me or just like, it doesn't feel right. Something about it doesn't feel right. I just can't, I can't pull the trigger on posting that stuff. And I just don't know why. I don't know if it's a quality thing, I don't know if it's an integrity thing, but it feels like we're in a moment where there is like an arbitrage opportunity of simulating volume using tools like this. I just can't bring myself to do it.
- [45:21]
B
There is, but like, the more you use AI for writing your scripts, the more you're going to sound like AI. And in the long run, sounding like AI is suicide. I, I tell people that, like, with content like you, you gotta go all in on AI, because I know the people running content farms, I've met them. I don't think people realize, you know, bring up Gary Vee again. Gary Vee has this viral clip. We're going around saying, like, AI avatars are gonna be huge. And he says, like, Sally, Sally's going to be making content of her AI avatar, Richard, and it's going to get 100,000 views. And I just don't think that's going to be the case. I think we're going to see massive content farms that basically just have a ton of Mac minis that are going to algorithmically crank out this content and flood the feeds. I think AI generated content will be the same as will it will be viewed the same as the way people view Instagram bot comments. You know, like you see the Instagram bot comments, go to one of, maybe it's gotten a little bit better, but like three months ago you could go to one of like Alex Hormozy's videos and it's all just financial scams, just complete slop that's coming to a video. These models are getting cheaper to create avatar content. They're getting more believable. There's a new model coming out of China, Seed Dance that is absurd. Like it's so good. Like they made a video of this like 10 year old girl playing one on one with LeBron. LeBron looked completely realistic. The girl was dunking. It was so entertaining. And so people are going to be like, oh, you can hop in and be creative. The algorithm, the algorithms are just going to pump out content and it's going to be impossible to compete manually. You're going to have to use AI to create it at scale. Sorry, this is a really long winded way of saying I would avoid trying to sound like AI or use AI to write your content. You want to sound very human. Because I think those are going to be the creators who end up staying on top when AI is just cheap to flick out, you know.
- [47:26]
A
Yeah, it's going to be really interesting to see because there's a world where the platforms themselves churn out content that they think will perform. And the hope, like I think, I think they'll absolutely test that. I think that's part of what like SORA was meant to test. But in that world, it's all going to come down to advertising dollars for them. Are we keeping enough eyeballs on the platform to increase ad revenue? And if not, they're going to find ways to kind of fight that back for the more human content. So we'll have to see. I think every human would say I would rather watch human content, but we're going to get big data to tell us if that is true or not. Because I agree with you, the feeds are going to get absolutely slammed with options and competing in that world feels very daunting even if you are being just a genuine person.
- [48:23]
B
Yeah, 100%. And that's when I get into a more of a philosophical Conversation, whether or not, like what people want versus what people end up doing are completely different, you know, and that's just the nature of these algorithms. You know, AI has been running our society for a lot longer than ChatGPT has been around. I mean, these AI algorithms that run Instagram, TikTok and, and YouTube have been around much longer and they're getting really powerful. And so if you pair their curation AI abilities with a creation, right, YouTube has Veo Meta, is building their own video model. TikTok has Seed Dance. That is where we get into kind of this dystopian thing where these platforms just make content for you, like whatever you might theoretically want to see. There you go, you can see it. That's when it gets weird and we're not that far away from it. And I try not to even predict what I think is going to be the result. I think that there is a chance. There's this massive revolt thing where people are just like fed up with AI content and it's almost like cigarettes, where like people like, like people are just fed up with being addicted. Oh, we've been lied to about what content is and they just leave the platforms and go somewhere else. I think that's a realistic possibility, but I also think it's a possibility that people just passively go along until everyone's watching AI brain rot.
- [49:43]
A
I think we will 100% refer to social media as phone cigarettes at some point. It's like already there. And not to say that everyone who's creating short form content is contributing to this problem, but I think it is a problem.
- [49:57]
B
You know, it's the classic, I'm not saying anyone's wrong, the incentives are such that you should contribute to this problem. You know, it's like simultaneously, it's like the cigarettes, but it's also simultaneously the best way to build your brand. It's the best way to make money. It's the best. Creating short form content is one of the best ways to secure your future as, as, like a, as sad as that might sound, it is. It has been way more impactful for me than my college degree for making short form content. But you can hold both beliefs as true. You can think that it's bad for society, but also what you should do. Maybe that's a difficult thing for people to hold in their head. It's kind of sad, but it is true.
- [50:36]
A
It is the exact cognitive dissonance that I felt in this season.
- [50:40]
B
It's a huge dilemma. It's, it's the, it's the algorithmic pole to making brain rot. And I've had to brain rotify my content to make it go viral. And I will do it shamelessly because it helps my business and I want my business to grow.
- [50:53]
A
When we talked about these platforms, we've pretty much exclusively talked about video. So it's pretty clear to me that like video is your focus when it comes to creating content.
- [51:03]
B
Somewhat. I think the where my brand is the strongest is on X and, and that comes from me just ripping posts. Twitter's the one platform, like my main Twitter account is the one platform that I don't think about in terms of like volume or anything. I just, anytime I have an idea, I just tweet it. It's super fun and beneficial and it's my favorite one to make content on because it's so low friction.
- [51:24]
A
Do you have any data or concerns about proximity of posts on X? Like if you just posted something 20 minutes ago and you have something you
- [51:33]
B
want to rip, do you.
- [51:34]
A
Does that stop you?
- [51:35]
B
I don't think about the algorithm at all. I found that the more youth people think about the algorithm, the more it just stops them from making content. I'll post 20 times in 10 minutes. I just think of it like a group chat with the Internet. Obviously I'm in a niche like Twitter is the best place to learn about AI by far. Like you have data scientists working at XAI and OpenAI and Anthropic, they post their stuff on X because they don't have time to make a video. They just fling it up on X and they'll just post a PDF that they they're working on and they'll just post it and it'll resurface and it's like the most valuable place to share stuff. So if you're in the right niche, usually tech type stuff does really well. And one thing I do on X, for those of you who actually want to give X a try, I know it has. If you only use threads or Instagram, you might have certain. You might feel a type away about X. I would just go in and relentlessly mute words. You can mute specific words. So every political word that you can possibly think of is just muted. I don't see them on my feed. You can click not interested in this post. When I scroll slowly on X every post I'm not interested. I press the three dots and pressed and press not interested. And now when I scroll my feed, it's all the stuff I want to see, stuff I want to make content on, stuff that's valuable for our team. Heavily manually curate on X and you will have a way better experience.
- [52:59]
A
My last question would be, given that you are so active on so many platforms, trying to put aside the bias of your favorite platforms, how would you rank them by where you see the most opportunity for somebody starting today or wanting to like really double down on some platform today.
- [53:18]
B
I think if you're interested in like more consumer things and you want to end up, you know, making money through consumer, you know, selling sunscreen or something like that, like I would go TikTok or Instagram. I'm most interested in actively hiring people who are developers who want to make content. We're actually building out kind of a developer content team so I can make videos sitting across from them in the studio. But I really think the most opportunity right now is if you're smart is to do what I was explaining earlier on YouTube and you can also post these on X where you just make educational video on your computer. You can even use your webcam. Start out using your webcam. I would get, I use this Hollyland mic. I would just get like a simple wireless mic, maybe a hundred bucks and film videos about things that you're interested in and you can go to Google Trends and see if they're like trending and you can find ways to make it more about a topic that's more trending. But I would just turn on your computer one minute hook like this tool is actually insane. You can just say that overtly. In this video I'm going to show you how to do X and then you can do a little bit more outlining. Let's dive into the video and then immediately hop into the value of the video. Just start going through and teach people how to use a computer. Think, think. Teach people how to create a framework for running their business with AI. Think about. And you know, obviously I'm biased towards AI, but just show people how to do it because a bonus if it's unique to you because that's not in the AI training data and the more passionate you are about a topic, the better you'll do. And so that, that is my format. Educational videos, screen share on YouTube. I think a massive opportunity and I've seen people crush it in that niche. And you'll get paid sponsorships from these AI companies. Right? We're not the only company raising millions of dollars. Like these AI companies are still raising a ton of money when they do paid sponsorships. Like you can make a lot of money in educational content. A ton. So that, that would be my advice to get started. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have
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A
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B
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A
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