I Run a 6-Figure Agency with ZERO Employees (AI Only) | Barbara Jovanovic

Summary

Marketing Against The Grain: Episode Summary

Episode Title: I Run a 6-Figure Agency with ZERO Employees (AI Only) | Barbara Jovanovic
Host/Author: HubSpot Podcast Network
Release Date: March 6, 2025

In this enlightening episode of Marketing Against The Grain, Kipp Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan delve into the innovative journey of Barbara Jovanovic, the founder of Startup Cookie—a thriving content marketing agency powered entirely by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Barbara shares her transformative approach to building a successful six-figure business solo, leveraging AI tools to streamline operations, enhance content creation, and maximize efficiency. This summary captures the essence of their discussion, highlighting key strategies, insights, and practical advice for aspiring AI-driven entrepreneurs.

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1. Introducing Barbara Jovanovic and Startup Cookie

[01:20] Barbara:
"My name is Barbara. I'm the founder of Startup Cookie. We are a content marketing agency, a full stack marketing agency powered by AI. I am a solo founder, so it's just me and all of the AI agents."

Barbara opens the conversation by introducing herself and detailing the unique structure of her agency, Startup Cookie. Unlike traditional marketing agencies that rely heavily on human teams, Barbara has harnessed AI to handle all aspects of her business, enabling her to operate efficiently as a solo entrepreneur.

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2. The Genesis of an AI-Driven Agency

[02:30] Barbara:
"When I saw what AI could do, even in the early stages, if you prompted correctly, I was like, wait, what if I can just do this myself without hiring anyone?"

Barbara recounts her transition from managing a content team at a YC startup to founding Startup Cookie. Frustrated by the inefficiencies and high costs of managing multiple human employees, she explored AI's potential to automate content creation. This pivotal realization led her to establish an agency that operates solely with AI, drastically reducing overhead costs and increasing scalability.

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3. Essential AI Tools and Workflow

Barbara outlines the comprehensive suite of AI tools that form the backbone of her agency's operations:

• ChatGPT & Claude: For generating and refining content.
• Granola: Facilitates interaction with meeting transcripts.
• Riverside, Midjourney, Descript, Super Whisper: For recording, transcribing, and editing content.
• OpenAI: Powers various AI functionalities within the workflow.

[12:20] Barbara:
"This is basically the whole list of people that we needed. And you know, copywriter, marketing, designer, all of these different roles that you either need full time or you need to get freelancers. But instead you just have that team and AI."

By integrating these tools, Barbara has effectively replaced multiple human roles with AI agents, streamlining tasks from content creation to data analysis. This integration not only reduces costs but also enhances the agility and responsiveness of her agency.

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4. Content Creation Strategies Using AI

Barbara emphasizes the importance of context in AI-driven content creation. She explains how leveraging existing transcripts and authentic insights significantly improves the quality of AI-generated content.

[06:06] Barbara:
"I never start with just like prompting AI just by itself to do anything, even a simplest social media post, we always have something to start with, whether it's a transcript from a webinar, a podcast episode, kind of like this, just download the transcript and use that."

By utilizing transcripts from webinars, podcasts, and interviews, Barbara ensures that the content generated by AI is rich, authentic, and aligned with the client's voice and messaging. This method contrasts starkly with the often subpar results from AI when used without substantial input, highlighting the necessity of providing AI with detailed context.

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5. Cost Efficiency and Scaling with AI

One of the standout benefits Barbara discusses is the cost efficiency achieved through AI. Traditional agencies necessitate substantial investment in salaries and managing human teams, but Startup Cookie operates on a fraction of that cost.

[15:54] Barbara:
"And then you have to commit and that's a bit difficult when you're just kind of trying to test different channels and test what content works for you."

By eliminating the need for multiple freelancers and full-time employees, Barbara has reduced her agency's operational costs to under $1,000 annually, excluding taxes. This drastic reduction allows for greater flexibility in testing diverse content strategies without significant financial risk.

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6. Overcoming Challenges and Ensuring Quality

Barbara acknowledges that while AI offers immense potential, it also presents challenges, particularly in maintaining content quality and relevance.

[19:56] Kip:
"Is there any kind of like, prompting or anything you're doing to extract?"

[20:20] Barbara:
"It's like focus mode. Just because you're prompting AI doesn't mean that you're now focusing on what is actually going to produce an interesting, whether it's a tweet or an email or a blog post."

To combat issues like AI-generated hallucinations and maintaining a consistent voice, Barbara employs meticulous prompting techniques and maintains a critical eye on AI outputs. She iteratively refines prompts, ensuring that AI-generated content aligns with the desired tone and factual accuracy.

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7. Advanced Prompting Techniques

Barbara shares her power prompts—structured instructions that guide AI in creating high-quality content tailored to specific needs.

[24:44] Barbara:
"Write in a direct, no nonsense style. Use clear, simple language, short sentences. Focus on concrete details or abstract concepts. Skip the startup buzzwords."

These prompts instruct the AI to adhere to specific stylistic guidelines, avoid clichés, and maintain authenticity. Barbara emphasizes the importance of being direct and detailed in prompts to extract the most relevant and insightful content from AI.

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8. Leveraging AI for Workflow Optimization

Barbara discusses how AI not only handles content creation but also optimizes internal workflows, such as agency management and data analysis.

[34:29] Barbara:
"If you're someone who's just starting out with this, not just ChatGPT, but using it for work, you don't have to create each prompt by yourself. All of our prompts that I use for agency management... I tell ChatGPT what I need and then it writes the prompt for me."

By automating routine tasks and continuously refining workflows, Barbara ensures that her agency remains agile and can rapidly adapt to new challenges and opportunities.

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9. Future Prospects and Continuous Improvement

Looking ahead, Barbara is optimistic about the evolving capabilities of AI and its potential to further transform agency operations.

[29:22] Tom Boyd:
"It is very important, you never start with a blank page. If you're someone who's just starting out with this, not just ChatGPT, but using it for work, you don't have to create each prompt by yourself."

Barbara anticipates improvements in AI functionalities, particularly with features like projects and tasks, which will enhance scalability and reduce current limitations in prompt execution.

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10. Advice for Aspiring AI Entrepreneurs

As the conversation wraps up, Barbara offers valuable advice for those looking to emulate her AI-driven success:

[34:29] Barbara:
"Just tell it what you needed to do and it will create the prompt for you. And that's probably more powerful than you, like scavenging Twitter or X for different prompts."

Barbara encourages entrepreneurs to start with existing context, utilize AI to its full potential, and continuously iterate on their processes. She highlights the importance of integrating AI deeply into workflows rather than treating it as a supplementary tool.

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Conclusion

Barbara Jovanovic's journey with Startup Cookie serves as a compelling blueprint for leveraging AI to build a successful solo agency. By meticulously integrating AI tools, optimizing workflows, and maintaining a relentless focus on quality and efficiency, Barbara has demonstrated that it's possible to run a lucrative marketing agency with zero human employees. Her insights offer a masterclass in harnessing AI for entrepreneurial success, inspiring marketers and business owners to explore innovative, AI-driven strategies for growth and scalability.

Notable Quotes:

• Barbara [01:20]:
  "We are a content marketing agency, a full stack marketing agency powered by AI. I am a solo founder, so it's just me and all of the AI agents."

• Barbara [02:30]:
  "When I saw what AI could do... I was like, wait, what if I can just do this myself without hiring anyone?"

• Barbara [06:06]:
  "I never start with just like prompting AI just by itself to do anything... we always have something to start with, whether it's a transcript from a webinar, a podcast episode."

• Barbara [15:54]:
  "When you introduce SEO copywriters, video editors, audio editors, they're all very expensive and... it's difficult when you're just trying to test different channels."

• Barbara [24:44]:
  "Write in a direct, no nonsense style. Use clear, simple language, short sentences. Focus on concrete details or abstract concepts."

• Barbara [34:29]:
  "You don't have to create each prompt by yourself. All of our prompts... I tell ChatGPT what I need and then it writes the prompt for me."

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This episode not only showcases the potential of AI in transforming traditional business models but also provides actionable strategies for marketers and entrepreneurs aiming to harness AI's power to achieve remarkable efficiency and scalability.

Transcript

[Tom Boyd]

Hey everyone. I just had an incredibly mind blowing experience. I just had a solo entrepreneur who's running a six figure business by themselves with AI. Walk me through exactly what they did, the tools they use, their workflow, their exact prompts, and they're sharing it all with you. If you're looking for inspiration for starting an AI business, this is the perfect show for you. We've got an amazing guest. Barbara from Startup Cookie is going to walk us through everything. Let's get to today's show. Here's a quick message from HubSpot. This isn't your typical marketing software ad because HubSpot isn't typical. It's marketing made easy. Turn one piece of content into assets for every channel, convert leads in no time and get a crystal clear view of your campaign performance. HubSpot can do all that and get you results fast. Like double your leads at 12 months fast. See, I told you this wasn't a typical Software ad. Visit HubSpot.com marketers to get started for free.

[Barbara]

My name is Barbara. I'm the founder of Startup Cookie. We are a content marketing agency, a full stack marketing agency powered by AI. I am a solo founder, so it's just me and all of the AI agents.

[Kip]

I love that.

[Tom Boyd]

Well, I think what's interesting about the agency model is historically marketing agencies specifically have run on really tight margins. They've required a lot of people doing a lot of manual work to actually scale results for clients. Right. And so you're out there, you're, you're building a different kind of agency, Startup Cookie, where you have yourself and only yourself and AI as your employees, which gives you some leverage of margin and cost and lets you do things differently. And I think being in your position is probably an unfair advantage because it's much harder to be an incumbent with a bunch of humans trying to figure this out and scaling that across all of them versus being kind of yourself and having the flexibility and autonomy. So I guess to just kick us off, like where do you get started? Like if you're somebody out there and you're like, hey, I think I want to run a solo business with AI, like how do you even get started doing that? And like where do you start from? Like a tooling and process perspective.

[Barbara]

I mean, honestly, if you're anyone right now who's working in tech, you're probably very familiar with at least ChatGPT and how to use it in your work. So that's kind of a great start. Like when I started this agency, we just got ChatGPT it just launched and, and I was working for a YC startup as a head of content and I've been kind of struggling for a few years, just kind of managing an entire team of people just in order to sustain like honestly a pretty mid content schedule. Just like your average once a week blog post, social media posts, you know, it's like creating all of that different resources. I wasn't doing any of the content creation, I was just managing people, communicating with people and then kind of like taking that to the execution. And it cost a lot of money, it took a lot of time and it wasn't the most fun work, it was just managing a lot of people. And when I saw what AI could do, even in the early stages, if you prompted correctly, I was like, wait, what if I can just do this myself without hiring anyone? Started off pretty small, but already with our first client I realized that this is completely doable. And now when you just like look at the last three months and the improvements and like different things, that OpenAI launch and everything that's kind of progressing in the AI world, you're realizing that you can effectively scale your agency exponentially just by using these tools. So every single update, every single new feature just means that my job gets easier and more enjoyable, which is fantastic. That's a very great way to start a business knowing that you have that available to you. And like you said, the margins, they're non existent. I mean, what chatgpt is $20 a month, 200 if you want to get the Pro, which I think I will. I don't think it's necessary, but I just kind of want to play with it.

[Kip]

We have it.

[Tom Boyd]

Yeah, we can give you the Pro download. We're users.

[Barbara]

Ooh, nice, nice. Because I'm like, I don't think I need it, but I won't try it.

[Tom Boyd]

You do need it. I'll tell you why I love that.

[Kip]

You started the company because you had the realization that managing people is really horrible. Horrible thing to do.

[Barbara]

It is because it takes a lot of time.

[Tom Boyd]

It does.

[Barbara]

You obviously have to sensitive about it. You have to like, you know, have a. It's messy, it's messy. You know now I go into Chad GPT and when it doesn't do what I say, I just like turn my caps lock on and just absolutely smash my keyboard.

[Kip]

Yeah, exactly. You don't have all of the messiness that comes with managing humans. The only thing that might be worse is your holiday parties. Might be a bit odd with just you and a bunch of agents.

[Barbara]

They're great. It's just me here in the hot tub, like in the mountain. It's fantastic.

[Tom Boyd]

That sounds pretty good.

[Kip]

Marc Andreessen was on Lex Friedman's podcast. He's like, really excited to see when we have the first kind of companies e where the CEO is just managing a bunch of agents, or the agent is managing a bunch of agents and the human is supporting those agents. Your version is like, hey, I'm going to create a company and just have all of these agents to do these use cases. And actually one of the interesting things is Sequoia had a report out recently and it showed the stark differences in AI usage if it's built into services versus AI usage if it's a consumer app. It's actually been much more successful in services businesses. What was the very first use case content like thing you did that worked really well? What was the very first content agent you built that you were like, this is actually better than a human? Because I feel most people's experience of content in AI is the opposite, where it's like, this is much worse than the human. And I actually think that comes down to being able to prompt intelligently versus actually the AI capabilities.

[Barbara]

Yeah, so hot take incoming here. I worked with a lot of freelance writers while I was working for startups full time. And unfortunately, most startups just don't have the budget to pay the actually exceptional writers that I would still fully pay today. Most of them are just around 200, $300 per article. And my experience was giving someone a brief, extensive detail context to write a piece. That piece would come back to me and I would essentially have to rewrite 60, 70% of it. And that was just kind of the process. And we called that efficient because we weren't willing to pay for each piece like that. Like, if you're trying to sustain a certain schedule, it's difficult to set up like 100k a year for just like your blog to be active. But it was a lot of work on my end and it didn't feel creative in any way. It didn't feel innovative. It was just kind of, you know, the best that I could kind of get out of that quality of writer. And then as soon as I tried ChatGPT, I was like, not only is this better than the usual draft I get delivered, I can work with it and I don't have to wait two, three weeks for it to be delivered to me. So I can just kind of unfortunately cut out that part of waiting and communicating and putting all of this work Ahead, but not getting a result that I'm remotely happy with. And like you mentioned, it's all about the prompt. So the first time it clicked to me is when I started using our webinar recordings, transcripts. I started using that for blog posts. So I was like, let me see what kind of blog post we get if I have this transcript and if I, you know, explain our brand guidelines, any, like, writing styles, what happens when I do that? And it was exponentially better because you had a genuine piece of content and insights and knowledge that you first gathered and then used to create a piece. Instead of just going into ChatGPT and prompting it, write an article on this topic. Like, we all kind of know that that just doesn't work anymore. So that was the first time that it clicked to me is like, okay, if I have something to work with, I can just repurpose this across different channels. Social media, blog, email, we can try new growth channels like this pretty easily. So it's kind of endless if you have that good starting piece. And honestly, that's still what I do today. We never start with just like prompting AI just by itself to do anything, even a simplest social media post, we always have something to start with, whether it's a transcript from a webinar, a podcast episode, kind of like this, just download the transcript and use that. Or I actually started my agency with a co founder, so now he's here only to interview founders and CEOs, because if they don't have a podcast, if they don't have a webinar series, he just gets on a call with them and just talks about different things that they're excited about, what are they building, what are their views on. You know, AI is popular right now, but like anything, anything that I want to talk about, personal views, hot takes anything they want to communicate, but just can't do it themselves. And then we basically manage their personal accounts as well, but we always start with that transcript. So we have someone's actual insights and actual knowledge. And we also have like, you know, the tone of voice, the writing style, the phrasing to work with. So that's what you kind of need in order for the actual result to be in any way good. And then of course, you have to kind of fiddle with it and play with it to get it to the quality that you want. It's difficult if you're starting without that. But as an agency, that means that that's very scalable for us. You know, each founder gets one interview a month. It's an hour, that's totally fine. And then other companies have webinars and such that we use. So that was the first time that it, like, clicked to me that I was like, oh, this is actually not only providing great results, it's fun to do for both us and the companies. And the founders. The founders love it. They're like, oh, my God, this was like a therapy session for us, like a monthly one. They get to explore different topics that sometimes they don't get to explore in, like, product meetings. Because sometimes you just need to through different concepts instead of just like kind of telling your team what to do and what the next steps are. You just need someone to kind of listen to you and kind of get that concept and get that product messaging out and test it and just see how it performs. So that's kind of what we help them with. And it's been working really great so far. And as AI is getting better, it's just getting easier and easier. But having that as a starting point is what I found right in the beginning and honestly just has taken me through the whole agency so far. We are almost two years old now.

[Kip]

Very cool. So I think that step is like, if you were going to suggest how people could follow that, it's really get context.

[Barbara]

Yeah.

[Kip]

And the context really matters. And one of the things Kip and I were just slacking on is actually having someone interview people is a pretty good way to get additional context. It's not available elsewhere because you get all the median transcripts.

[Barbara]

Yeah. And especially if you work with a company for quite a while. Our average client has stayed with us for a year and a half already. So we have a lot of content already and we have teams kind of reaching out, being like, especially for busy founders, you can't go and ask your founders, like, hey, what's your take on this social media thing that's going around right now? And we want to, like, create messaging around it. So they often send us a message and they're like, what do you think he would say to this? And what would be his phrasing? And then basically I just put in, you know, 1020 transcript that we have from him. And I just asked Chad, gpd. I'm like, did he mention this? Did we talk about this topic at all? And yeah, then we just work with a team as well. So it's very interesting. It's like kind of creating a Persona of someone and having that available in your ChatGPT.

[Tom Boyd]

Yeah, we do that both in, like, Claude and ChatGPT, where you can just have a project have all that context and you can kind of just interact with that project to get that clarity Right. That you're looking for. And so if step one is getting the context and that's either publicly available transcripts or doing those conversations and recording them like you talked about, then step two is doing stuff with it and prompting and engaging with that. And we were hoping maybe you could show us some prompts, like walk us through some of how you're actually doing this so that somebody who's at home, their marketer, they're running an agency, they're like, hey, what do I do?

[Barbara]

Absolutely. This is an interesting one. Okay, so I created this a while ago just to have an overview for myself. So the before is basically everyone that I had to hire. When I was working as a head of content full time, I made a calculation how much that would be per year based on different salaries. Right now, full time freelancer, obviously you don't need, you know, five writers full time working for you, but it's more money at the end of the year than you expect. It's always one of those things like, oh, we always have reviews, we always have another request for the writer and then it all adds up. And then when you introduce SEO copywriters, video editors, audio editors, they're all very expensive and all of their contract periods are at least six months. So you're kind of, you have to commit and that's a bit difficult when you're just kind of trying to test different channels and test what content works for you. If you have like a proven channel, then it's worth obviously, obviously investing in it. But when you're still testing like as a startup, I've only been working for startups, so I'm just, my mindset is very like scrappy. I'm like, how can we test this as fast as possible in good quality without like spending a bunch of budget on it? So this is basically the whole list of people that we needed. And you know, copywriter, marketing, designer, all of these like different roles that you either need full time or you need to get freelancers. But then you need someone like me who is a head of content. But instead of creating content, I'm just managing all of these people and it's not very efficient. So basically now I just have that team and AI. I put my entire tool stack here just because it's usually useful for people to see this during events, but none of them are unheard of. People usually don't know about granola. Granola is Very excellent for meeting transcripts. And you get to chat with the meeting transcript afterwards. So instead of uploading that transcript into ChatGPT and getting it to tell you things, you can immediately be like, wait, what was talked about? What did he mention there? And you can just do your read there. And it works really, really well. And then, yeah, Riverside midjourney Descript, Super Whisper OpenAI Claude that basically replaces all of these roles, even some kind of more technical ones, like a data analyst, like obviously for marketing, you'll be fine. You can get away with just like your social media analytics, like go to Buffer, but for a lot of roles. I remember we had like a data analyst on the team and it was just like this guy who knew how to work tableau, like that was his only thing. He was just working full time for us, just looking at tableau. And then you're like, hey, can you give me these numbers? And then he does. But yeah, it's just like a full role just for that. And you need them full time. So now you just have AI stuff for that. One of our clients actually built a data analytics and visualization tool that lets you upload your data set. And just like you have in ChatGPT, you have a chat for it and you just ask your data set anything that you need to know. You're like, okay, tell me these DAX numbers for this quarter and how does that compare to like the last year or whatever? And I'm like, wow, this is amazing. Like non technical people couldn't do this before. I couldn't do this before. So you just have everything now in AI, which I feel like is a really sick overview. And it can cost you less than 1k per year. Like that's my cost of running an agency. That's crazy. Well, if you don't count all the tax people and stuff. But it's a sensitive topic.

[Tom Boyd]

What you really have here is a stack to go from idea to like final piece of content. Like you still don't have an email service provider or any costs you're paying to distribute the content, ads or anything like that. But this is, you know, 400x cheaper. Yeah, way to do. Hey, I have an idea and I need to get that idea to a finished piece of content, which is pretty wild, right?

[Barbara]

Yeah, yeah. And sometimes you need to get through all of this in order to test a new channel like email. So that was kind of the issue and the biggest friction that I felt when I was working with teams before AI is that just to test something, you know, you get that energy, you get an idea and you're like, oh, my God, let's see how that performs. Let's test it out. And then when you actually delegate that, it's like two months after that, you're actually testing it. Yeah, it's not ideal. And you also, you know, you spend money to test an idea that's potentially going to fully flop. It's a bit of an investment, and I feel like it prevented us testing different channels in a lot of companies that I work with just because of lack of budget or lack of resources in terms of, like, people. But, yeah, I have a full, like, just our workflow with AI, just what we were talking about a few minutes ago. So you start with obtaining authentic insights. Once you have that unique insight, whether it's from a webinar podcast episode, your founder and I often tell other founders, I'm like, if you don't have the money to be paying an agency for my own content, I often just turn on Super Whisper and I record myself talking. I don't need someone to interview me. So that's how I create my own content. So it's like, you don't necessarily need to have someone interviewing you. If you're like a founder that's just starting out, you don't have anything. Nobody's inviting you on podcasts and stuff. Like, you can also do this yourself. So just talk about what happened during the week. Talk about what you learned this month, how the team is doing, how's the product doing? Do you have any challenges? How did you overcome them? And then you just use that transcript so it doesn't have to be an interview. I will also link later all of my prompts in a sheet so that you can link in under the episode. I feel like people love kind of going in and just copy pasting, and they can just use that. It's always public. But yeah, our first prompts are usually just extract all of the insightful topics that we covered in this conversation. Because it's an hour, I often, you know, sometimes I sit through it, and if it's like an interesting founder, I'm like, okay, let me listen to this like a podcast. But the reality is you just don't really have time to do that each time. So you just need to ask ChatGPT to tell you about what topics were actually discussed. Like, lump them in, which ones were interesting, which ones were, like, fully covered and fleshed out. It just gives you a list. And then you can ask it for timestamps, and then you just go to that part of the conversation, I still often manually just listen in a little bit. Because no matter how much you work with AI, sometimes it just misses. I don't know, that part of the conversation where you were like, oh, actually, that was a great zinger. That was great. I see a lot of personality there. I still haven't gotten it to give me each and every one of those kind of talking points. So you have to work with it a little bit. You have to be present. If you're just trying to prompt AI and, you know, not trying to, like, kind of be involved and actually think about a content piece, it's probably not the best strategy. And then once we have a list of these insights, I just go one by one and I tell it to summarize it. I tell it to look at the entire transcript and basically fill in any gaps, add context, make sure that it's only taking information from the transcript. This is important because sometimes it starts pulling things online that are just kind of relevant but weren't really set, which is difficult. When a founder is talking about a product, you kind of need to be accurate and you need to use their own phrasing because they have, like, different features, they have their own branding. And then I basically just instruct it to create a social media post from it.

[Kip]

Is there any kind of like, prompting or anything you're doing to extract? I know you can add the timestamps and you can say, like, what are some of the most interesting takeaways? But for example, one of the things that I played around with is figuring out what types of content perform well on different platforms and then templatizing them and then asking it to look for talking points that map to one of those templates. I'm curious, like, how did you have it understand what are interests and takeaways?

[Barbara]

Yeah, so it kind of depends on what they want to talk about online in general and what their kind of Persona is. We kind of help them in terms of branding a little bit to just, like, have some of the topics that we regularly come back to. But it's all about prompting AI and not expecting it to deliver a full list if you just ask it one question. One thing that has really helped me is I very Rarely type into ChatGPT. I only use Super Whisper. So I use just my voice. I talk to it. And the results, for whatever reason, are infinitely better because I add more context the way that I wouldn't when I'm writing. I kind of tend to make it shorter, make it more concise. You're thinking about the senses that you're writing, but when you're just talking, you add more context than necessary. ChatGPT performs much better when you give it as much context as possible. So I can kind of go in and be like, okay, so this founder wanted us to talk a little bit more about the product. Their product is xyz. We want to find something interesting for this particular target group, extract any insights that they shared in this particular transcripts of that. And then I see that, and then I kind of just read through it and see what kind of looks good. An unfortunate part of, well, not unfortunate, but a part of prompting and creating content with AI is having good judgment and having a sense of what a quality piece of content is. And that's a little bit more difficult to cultivate and explain and put into a prompt. It's like focus mode. Just because you're prompting AI doesn't mean that you're now focusing on what is actually going to produce an interesting, whether it's a tweet or an email or a blog post. So you have to be present and you have to kind of look at that list and think critically. Does this sound interesting? Does this sound like something that can be turned into a bigger piece? If not, let's move on to the next one. And, you know, sometimes from these transcripts I get like one or two insights that's just unfortunately what happened that month. And then other times it's like, oh, my God, they're really like in the flow. They shared a lot. There's a lot of knowledge here to be kind of taken and turned into different social media posts. So, you know, sometimes we just end up with a little list of social media posts, but other times we're like, oh my God, this can be a much bigger resource. This can be a full email, like, newsletter series that we can just turn. So it's like sometimes we get more and sometimes we get less. But you just have to kind of work with it and be a bit strategic and also harsh. You know, sometimes I'm like, okay, that's not really interesting. You know, it's been said before, let's move on. Let's not use it just because it was discussed in the transcript. So I prompted a lot. It's not one long prompt, it's several smaller ones. So I'm basically just having a conversation with ChatGPT. But I highly recommend people, especially when they're starting out, to try to talk to ChatGPT instead of write, especially if they're creating a bigger Piece like blog posts works much better.

[Tom Boyd]

Let me tell you about a great podcast. It's called Creators of Brands. It's hosted by Tom Boyd. It's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. Creators of Brands explores how storytellers are building brands online. From the mindsets to the tactics to the business side. They break down what's working so you can apply that to your own goals. Tom just did a great episode about social media growth called 3K to 45K on Instagram in one year, selling digital products and quitting his job to go full time creator with Gannon Mayer. Listen to creators or brands wherever you get your podcast. I love it. So what I love is you'd mentioned that you were going to share the link in the description in the comments below to this spreadsheet so that people who want to use these prompts can go and use them directly. But maybe take us through a couple of your core like power prompts for co creating content with AI. So we're going to assume we've gone through the workflow you just outlined. We've got great context from our subject matter expert and now we're going to use these to bring it to life. Right?

[Barbara]

Awesome. So when you take a unique piece of content and download a transcript for it, or whatever you have, it can be written content as well. It doesn't have to be, well, transcript is written content. It doesn't have to be from an event. You can also have like maybe a resource guide, like a huge one that you wrote, so you can use that as well. And then this is the starting prompt that I'm using. So the text below is a transcript from a conversation. Your job is to do the following and you basically are asking it to list the main ideas from the conversation that I can repurpose into an insightful blog post. Doesn't have to be a blog post, can be anything else. Focus on the most unique and insightful topics and insights shared. It should capture the real meat of the information, not a vague, useless summary. You can be a little mean in your prompts. That's okay.

[Tom Boyd]

You can be a little mean. We'll call it direct. You want to be very direct with what you're looking for, right?

[Barbara]

Exactly. And that's how you start. And then once you see that full list, just think about it in a very critical and honest way. Like if you saw this on social media, if you saw this as a blog post, would you read it? Would you click on it? Would you interact with it? If not, might not. Be worth creating. I feel like people often fall into this rabbit hole of like, oh, I can now make a lot of content very easily, so therefore I'm going to do that. But I think we can use AI to really zero in on the most unique and interesting and insightful types of content instead of just going for the. For the quantity, which I'm sure we've all been seeing on gosh, especially LinkedIn. It's rough out there.

[Tom Boyd]

It is rough out there.

[Barbara]

It is rough out there. I was looking at the LinkedIn comments in one of my recent posts and I'm like, these are all AI generated. 100%.

[Tom Boyd]

Totally.

[Barbara]

Yeah. And then once you find an idea that you like, tell it to focus on that. You have to go one by one. If you just tell it, take the whole list and make me social media posts from it, it gets very messy. It's difficult to then figure out what part it hallucinated.

[Tom Boyd]

Yeah.

[Barbara]

Which it does much less. Now that was a bigger issue before, but it is a little difficult to kind of figure out where it was pulling the information from. But you essentially take one idea and tell it to craft an engaging, insightful social media boast based on that topic. It should use the full transcript. So not just that part of the conversation. Because oftentimes when you're having a discussion about something, especially when it's product related, you kind of talk about it through different points in the conversation. You might be coming back to it. You might like have a realization later on. You don't want to miss those things. You want to kind of connect everything. And that's, that's why I love using ChatGPT for it, because it has much better pattern recognition than me. So it can kind of connect those points in a conversation better than I could if I was just sitting there listening in on the conversation. Use the information from the entire transcript, not just one point. Craft together a narrative about this particular topic. Make sure that it's following a format of a social media post. Instructing it to be punchy still seems to be one of the main ones that perform great works. Better than concise, works better than to the point. So I would recommend using these exact words that I used here, like punchy, tringing, gauging, because they have worked really great consistently for me. And then I usually instruct it not to use metaphors, catchphrases, jargon, because it kind of makes it cringe. I even often write in caps lock, just don't be cringe, don't be cliche. And that works Great, Honestly. And then I usually keep this list of words updated. Don't use the word unsure. Don't use. In the realm of. Don't use question sentence as a segue. It does that a lot. It's like the goal question mark. And then it writes the rest like, okay, this is all terrible. And it's. We all know that it's AI, so if you just prompt that from the start, you can remove a few steps for yourself down the road. And another thing that I found really helpful with one of the recent updates is the projects thing. We have basically a project for each client and for each of their deliverables. So, like blog posts, social media, it's slightly different content, so I prefer to have different projects for it. But maybe later on the prompts are going to get kind of better and it's going to get better at using the instructions and project files. Right now it like, misses about 50% of the time, which is not great since that's kind of the main functionality of it. But when the projects came out, everyone was like, oh, yeah, that's a neat feature. And I was like, you guys don't understand.

[Tom Boyd]

No, it's critical.

[Barbara]

I can scale my agency because of this even further. It's fantastic. So, for example, for one of our clients, we write weekly blog posts for them. So in the project files, I have literally a Google Doc that I downloaded with writing style samples to base voice and tone from. So I asked the founder, what are some of his favorite writers, what are the blogs that he reads on a regular basis, whose style does he like? And then I just added all of that in here. And when we create a piece that he's like, that was great. Love that, love that style that you established. I also just put it in here.

[Tom Boyd]

Yeah, makes sense.

[Barbara]

And then general information about anything about the company, anything about the product, anything discussed. So that we basically have this huge document of everything that you could possibly need to know about the product that instead of prompting, it just has it right here. So once we start writing something, it already has a lot of context on the product and then in the instructions. This is arguably more important than the documents. You just instructed, how you want it to behave every single time. I still find that I have to instruct it in the chat to make sure that it is following instructions of this project, which is a bit annoying because I'm like, it's right there. But, you know, we might be a week away from that just being what it does all the time. So I don't want to Complain too much. But this is the prompt that I kind of found that it works the best for basically any kind of blog post, social media post. You just change it depending on the content piece. Write in a direct, no nonsense style. Use clear, simple language, short sentences. Focus on concrete details or abstract concepts. Skip the startup buzzwords. It loves to use those a lot. I don't know why. Cultural references, keep it brief. I always love to tell it to stay honest. Let's be real here. Don't remove parts of the transcript that talk about challenges or anything personal. Sometimes it tends to not include that which is interesting. Share specific examples, data points when relevant. And then this is probably the most important part of it. Never use questions as transitions between topics. It does that a lot. Avoid any sentence structures that negate expectations. You know, this isn't just about. It's a very standard one that AI does. And then just list any words that you don't want it to use. This is a great one that works for me. Sometimes I have to instruct it further. You know, it's like if you instruct it to use these instructions and then you kind of go through a series of iterations, you kind of have to start repeating yourself essentially. But you know, you can do that in caps lock and you can really just let all of that frustration out. So yeah, it works good. Very excited about the projects tasks too. I have a task for every single morning to get a list of the latest news. For example, tech. Most of our clients are in fintech and health tech, so I have an each one for that as well. Just so I can say up to date without scrolling Twitter endlessly. Because before I did that I was like, well, I have to be on X every day because it's my job to know. It's low key, ruining my mental health. But I have to do it now. I don't. Especially now that we have Grok and you can also search within X. So yeah, that's kind of my favorite use cases right now. Apart from just the other prompts.

[Tom Boyd]

Okay, that's amazing. And first of all, thank you in advance for sharing the prompts with everyone. And so I want to kind of recap what you have taught everybody. You've taught essentially a masterclass on how you go from having a big coordinated content team to a smaller agile content operation. You're doing it as an agency, but you could certainly do it inside a company in anything you might want to do. And the first thing you did that I think was really important is that you have very clear Workflow. Like, you know the steps of your workflow and you have that documented and you kind of know what tools and what process you have at each step there. And what you're also doing is you're really using the native functionality of those tools very, very deeply. You're using way more of ChatGPT than the average person. And that's where a lot of people are falling down right now, is they're not getting deep enough in the tools that they are using. And you're doing the exact opposite. You're really deep in not just the features, but even the prompting and the language you're using with the models to make sure that you're getting this really remarkable output. And I think the key insight here is like, you're like, I never start from a blank page. I always have context. Context is everything. I need to either take existing context or go and have a conversation and get that to. In order to have a great starting point. I guess as we close out the show, if you were giving advice to people who are like, who were looking to make this transition, who really want to automate how they create content, share stories online, anything, we haven't covered anything, you're like, you should go start here to go and do that today.

[Barbara]

I think it's very important, what you just said, you never start with a blank page. If you're someone who's just starting out with this, not just ChatGPT, but using it for work, you don't have to create each prompt by yourself. All of our prompts that I use for agency management, which is also in the sheet, so we kind of have the content one and then the agency management, I don't write them. I tell ChatGPT what I need and then it writes the prompt for me. It's much easier, it provides better results. I often cross reference it with Claude. But it's sometimes easier for you to sit down, especially if it's a workflow, if it's a task that you do often that you want to outsource, automate, whatever you need, sit down, record yourself talking through what your process is currently and where you want it to be. Because sometimes you don't even have a process for something, which is why AI is great. It kind of makes you reassess your processes on a very regular basis because you have these prompts that you're using, so you get to think through what you're actually doing day to day. Which before AI, I feel like I had an established process and then I used to just follow that until it breaks. Until I realized that, like, oh, I literally don't have time for this. So now I have to kind of reassess what I'm doing. Whereas now I feel like I can just revisit that every week. If something takes long, I just sit down and kind of like regurgitate that into ChatGPT and tell us, like, okay, tell me where I can be more efficient. Tell me where what I can outsource. Tell me what integration I can set up with, like, either Zapier or something that makes this easier. And then it just creates that workflow and it creates that prompt for you so you don't have to do it yourself. I think people are often kind of like, I need to go and find a prompt. Like, just tell it what you needed to do and it will create the prompt for you. And that's probably more powerful than you, like scavenging Twitter or X. Sorry. For different prompts and something that has worked for someone else, because you might be able to create something that works uniquely well. But just in your unique case, I.

[Tom Boyd]

Love that it goes back to the point of being really deep in the tools you have. You don't need more tools. You need to use the tools you're using much deeper. And having Chat, GPT, Claude, whoever do prompts. Like we mentioned the start of the show, I'm a Pro user of ChatGPT and Zero1Pro writes amazing prompts. I just did a show where O1Pro wrote a prompt, operator went and executed the prompt, and then I came came back in 01 Pro and it wrote the code and everything necessary to do that. And it's something that somebody would have taken hours previously. We did in like 10 minutes. You know, it's a wild transformation. Well, Barbara, I really appreciate you joining us on Marketing Instagram today. Thank you so much for sharing the behind the scenes of how you've done all this. And thank you so much for joining us.

[Barbara]

Thanks for having me.

[Tom Boyd]

All right, see everybody next time.