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- [00:00]
Kevin Hudson
Foreign.
- [00:08]
Host 1 (Marketing Against the Grain)
Show. We're talking with Kevin Hudson from Futurepedia and we're walking through how you actually go from an AI novice to a master workflow builder. We're going to show you some use cases, some examples, and help you understand how to actually move and improve your AI fluency. Stop me if you've heard this before. Your support team opens the queue Monday morning. 200 tickets before the first sip of coffee. They already know what's in there. Password resets, order updates, the same questions over and over. What if that part of the job handled itself? HubSpot's customer agent resolves those repeat tickets. Using your actual CRM data and knowledge base. Your team can focus on the conversations that actually need them and. And your customers can get the answers they need faster. Check out HubSpot.com to learn much more about HubSpot's customer agent. Kevin, welcome to marketing. It's the grain. Thanks for being here.
- [01:04]
Kevin Hudson
Thank you. Very happy to be here.
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Host 1 (Marketing Against the Grain)
I know that there's a bunch of stuff we want to build on today's show, so maybe we kick off really quickly with how to think about where someone is on the AI journey and then let's talk about how we kind of move across.
- [01:16]
Kevin Hudson
Yeah, I can share about a couple little visuals here that may help. I kind of think of this as the seven different levels of AI. Most people start, you know, right on level one, or. Or it's the question asker, basically, where you've just replaced Google with ChatGPT or Claude. Just all the same stuff you used to ask. You're just right in there. So after that you start getting into prompting, you just realize that when you ask things differently, you get a different result. And so when you dive deeper into that, if you start putting in clear instructions, add context, examples and constraints, it just changes everything. So next would be the power user. We've still just kind of focused on prompting there, but each of the tools has so many other features that a lot of people don't go deep enough to find out. Like if we're looking in Claude, for example, just using projects where you can create a little folder where you can bake in all of that context. You can upload custom instructions, upload files. It could be like your brand guidelines, SOPs, anything you could think of, and then it has that baked into every conversation you start. So it's nice just for the organization and keeping all your chats in one place. But then every time you ask, it already knows what you're trying to do and you don't have to reprompt every
- [02:19]
Host 2 (Marketing Against the Grain)
time on this one. Kevin, do you mean, like, would this be equivalent to creating a Claude project? A custom GPT, a gem, like a. A maybe just expand. Why? That's different from what we talked about in the previous level two.
- [02:31]
Kevin Hudson
Yeah. So a project is basically like a folder where you can store all of that. So I have like these custom instructions here where it says what my channel is, what type of content I like to do, what type of voice that I use. It also has the memory up top that in Claude. It adds to that every 24 hours and over time expands on everything you've asked it and things you've critiqued and be like, oh, I didn't like this. It'll just naturally bake that into the memory. So every time I do anything in here, it has all of that context.
- [02:56]
Host 2 (Marketing Against the Grain)
I have a cloud project for every singular kind of project that I'm trying to do. And I think of it as my AI second brain. Like AI is a real strategic partner because it has a second brain and it has the ability to kind of talk through those different projects with you in a really intelligent way. Whereas like level two, you kind of talk to it in a chat and then you move on to another chat and you kind of start all over again.
- [03:16]
Kevin Hudson
Yeah. And then there's, I mean, tons of other features. Like Claude has skills where you. Once you've done something and prompted back and forth, then you can just say, hey, turn that into a skill. And the next time it actually automatically will pull that skill in and just do all of those steps back and forth so you don't have to prompt that at all.
- [03:30]
Host 1 (Marketing Against the Grain)
If somebody hasn't used skills before, like explain a little bit more why, why they should like show an example and then maybe like give us a couple of examples of skills that you use commonly so that people could understand, like the core use case.
- [03:43]
Kevin Hudson
So, so I've got like a bunch of skills. Like in Claude, they're under customize here. And so like this one's a content repurposer, so you can just put in any sort of link to whatever that might be, a News article, a YouTube video, then it will take that. And I have a big list of things not to do that's common in AI writing. So I've kind of like built that into the skill so it doesn't sound like it was written by AI. And this is all like baked in every time the skill gets called. Like everything that I'm going through on the Right. And of course had Claude, help me write all of this. Then it drafts posts for X and for LinkedIn. And yeah, I have I think like four main skills I use when I'm scripting through YouTube videos as well. Those ones I just use a ton.
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Host 2 (Marketing Against the Grain)
Oh, that's super cool.
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Kevin Hudson
Ton of good ideas.
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Host 1 (Marketing Against the Grain)
Well, I think where most people want to get is, is like in that workflow building stage.
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Host 2 (Marketing Against the Grain)
Yeah.
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Host 1 (Marketing Against the Grain)
And we want to spend, I think the rest of the time kind of helping people understand what that looks like, what some of the core use cases and tools are there.
- [04:33]
Kevin Hudson
Most people will kind of just stick with their LLM of choice. But then around here is where you realize there's just so many other tools out there and it can get super overwhelming. So I have like five main tools that I use a lot that are kind of pretty broadly applicable. You know, people are going to have different tools depending on what they do, but there's a few that kind of apply to most people. And then once you really get in depth on going over a couple of different tools and working them all together, most workflows can be cut down by hours.
- [04:59]
Host 1 (Marketing Against the Grain)
We just dropped a free guide that every marketer needs right now. It's called the AI Skill Ladder. This guide gets you past the prompting stage and into the building stage with seven agent tools, a framework and a cheat sheet to take your AI usage to another level. Plus, it's free. Get it right now. Scan the QR code or click the link in the description.
- [05:17]
Kevin Hudson
A few of the main ones like Manus. So Manus is autonomous. It's an AI agent that's really designed to act like a digital employee. So it executes complex multi step tasks all on its own. Sometimes it'll send off like multiple sub agents to go do a bunch of tasks all at once and then just come back with a finished result. It's pretty amazing. It's one of the easiest entries into agents. You just kind of ask it to do whatever that might be and it just figures out, weaves together all the multimodal tools could be generating images, videos, copied PowerPoints, like anything. It just kind of figures out what tools it needs and gets the job done.
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Host 2 (Marketing Against the Grain)
What are some of the, you know, workflows when you use Manage, you think it's just much, much better than a Claude or a ChatGPT or things like that?
- [05:59]
Kevin Hudson
Yeah. So compared to like Claude or ChatGPT, it can just do a lot more. And then as far as the more advanced agents like cloud code or N8N, those are just a lot harder to learn. Like Manus, most people can just jump in, put in a prompt and it'll get it done. So it's like the easiest entry level into that. So I could just start one. I have this where I've got a YouTube video about the seven different AI agent tools and I wanted a PDF resource that goes along with that. That'd be like a lead magnet that just covers everything that's within that video. So it'll have like list of use cases, starter prompts for each of those and have a cover page and then also have our logo and branding for the colors. So I can drop in our logo and some branding and then just send it off. And just from that it should have everything it needs to do the job. So it's going to go out and actually watch that video right on YouTube, then it'll develop all the copy it needs to put into that PDF and they can actually design the whole thing on its own using those colors. I uploaded with all the that unique branding. And this will take a few minutes so I can jump into some other ones that I have in here.
- [07:00]
Host 2 (Marketing Against the Grain)
I think one of the use cases you're showing is super cool. So you kind of give it a YouTube video to go. When you say, is it watching the video, is it going fetching the transcript or actually just going to consume the video and then turn in what it's watched into a PDF.
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Kevin Hudson
Yeah. So it'll utilize the transcript primarily, but it can actually watch the video and find key points in the video using the Gemini model, probably images from the video to use it.
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Host 2 (Marketing Against the Grain)
Yeah, yeah.
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Kevin Hudson
Gemini actually goes and watches the videos. If you've ever dropped those into Gemini, which is the main thing I use Gemini for is just for. Because it's so good with YouTube.
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Host 2 (Marketing Against the Grain)
Yeah, the YouTube connection. Like, I think one of the things you're showing coming back to, like why Manus over some of the other agents like ChatGPT or Claude, I think you're showing one of the core use reasons why, because it can switch between models for whatever task is relevant to that model. So like Claude is not going to go off and do this because it's not going to connect to Gemini and start to correct. Pull all the transcripts from YouTube. Whereas Manus is like, it can just pull in the model that is best suited to that task, which I think is a real advantage for it.
- [07:54]
Kevin Hudson
Yeah, exactly. And then it can, yeah, pull a nano banana to generate images. It can have this Skill to generate PDFs, which is its own other skill. It can do full websites, it can go off. It can actually create like a Google sheet and add a bunch of stuff to that sheet for you. Like, I've had it go off and like find leads and it'll just scour the Internet, find a bunch of different leads based off of your requirements. Then it'll actually create the whole sheet with all their contact information, go to their profiles and do all of that for you. Like 10 minutes later you just have the whole lists done. And I've used this just for research before too. Like while this is working. Oh yeah. It looks like it's extracted everything from the video and then so I identify the tools and now it's going to actually go and research those in addition to what was already in the video. So, yeah, it just kind of comes up with its own plan along the way.
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Host 2 (Marketing Against the Grain)
Like, do you give away PDFs for your audience or something like that?
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Kevin Hudson
Yeah, so we actually did one for this video.
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Host 2 (Marketing Against the Grain)
Okay.
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Kevin Hudson
You know it's free PDF.
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Host 2 (Marketing Against the Grain)
Yep.
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Kevin Hudson
We collected emails, of course, but yes.
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Host 2 (Marketing Against the Grain)
You made that like an offer as part of the video?
- [08:50]
Kevin Hudson
Yeah. And the way we usually do that, we use Lovable on the back end. So once that's downloaded, you just create a quick landing page. In Lovable, you just basically ask it to create it. We have a little template, but it'll create a landing page, have the email collection and just do it all at once. Use prompt for it. Whole thing's there. Then we just embed that onto the site.
- [09:05]
Host 2 (Marketing Against the Grain)
Very cool.
- [09:06]
Kevin Hudson
And then for a one that will show how comprehensive these types of things can look. In Manus, this is one just where I asked it to go and analyze. That's when you're like making a video on something and you can just ask it to go off and do all the research for you. And then it builds it in this interactive way that's just a lot easier to look through. And part of the prompt, I have it to, as it's going, generate things that could. I could potentially use for B roll as well. So it's like doing all the research and I'm reading through it. Then I can go down and be like, oh, this is actually. This is the B roll stuff right here.
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Host 1 (Marketing Against the Grain)
That's a smart idea.
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Host 2 (Marketing Against the Grain)
Yeah.
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Kevin Hudson
So that's all like. Yeah, built in. And I can like click through all of this as I go learn stuff I might not have uncovered in my own research. And then at the bottom, it has like the whole B roll gallery of everything it created that I might want to end up using in the video.
- [09:46]
Host 2 (Marketing Against the Grain)
I think it's a pretty great use case because you can use a bunch of videos that have done well in your vertical and use those as inputs and then come up with a different angle or a differentiated take on that topic. So you can use it. It's a great research tool actually. So I think there's a ton of interesting use cases in kind of given Manus YouTube URLs as inputs and then having it create a bunch of things around that. The other one I would love to do, but it's just too token hungry is like create vertical dashboards for performance of channels. And so you can just input a channel and Manus will create you a dynamic dashboard to show you the performance of that channel over time.
- [10:18]
Kevin Hudson
Yeah. And even this one, like this research I have it, it goes and reads a bunch of different subreddits, finds YouTube comments across all these different videos and isolates pain points from all of those. And that's cool. That's actually really overlooked use cases so
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Host 2 (Marketing Against the Grain)
Manus can grab the comments.
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Kevin Hudson
Yeah, there's like what Reddit is actually saying. It has specific comments from Reddit.
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Host 2 (Marketing Against the Grain)
That's cool.
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Host 1 (Marketing Against the Grain)
That is cool.
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Kevin Hudson
Yeah. And there's like content gaps, like what people didn't cover.
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Host 1 (Marketing Against the Grain)
You're finding where the arbitrage in the market is for what to create. And then you're also using the same tool to kind of repurpose that content once you've built it.
- [10:50]
Kevin Hudson
And what's really cool in Manus, like I mentioned Skills and Claude, so this, I went back and forth. This is the first one I did where I, you know, got the original and then asked it to do some more stuff in it. And then at the end I just say, hey, turn that into a skill. I said, yeah, make the process we used here into a reusable skill with the skill creator. And then now I added that to Skills. And then anytime I want to research a new topic, I just click it from the skills and type in the topic and it goes off and does this entire report for me.
- [11:16]
Host 1 (Marketing Against the Grain)
We'll be right back to today's show, but first I want to tell you about a podcast I love. It's called Nudge. It's hosted by Phil Agnew, it's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. And it's the UK's fastest growing business podcast. What I love about it is that the Nudge listeners love no fluff, no bs, evidence based marketing tactics they get in each episode. You're going to want to listen because this is like an MBA's worth of insight in every single podcast. And entrepreneurs, you're going to love the show because it's filled with repeatable, proven studies, not hearsay, not one off success stories. Marketers, you're going to love it because it discusses the psychology behind great marketing and what marketers are getting wrong. Listen to the nudge wherever you get your podcasts. And do you do the same, Kevin, with like updating skills? Like, if you do that and you don't get a result that you want, you may be, you know, ask some different questions or run some different prompts. Do you then go back and update that skill? Because I think that's part of the challenge with skills is like managing them and keeping them updated too.
- [12:18]
Kevin Hudson
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, anytime it just does something you don't want, you can just ask it right in the chat. Update this part of it. Like, I didn't like how you worded this, especially if it's doing like anything writing related. Yeah, yeah, that sounded pretty AI just change this wording and yeah, it'll just update the whole scale and not do that in the future.
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Host 2 (Marketing Against the Grain)
What do you think is the core difference that you need to have moving into this layer versus the previous layer to kind of build in real agentic workflows like this?
- [12:44]
Kevin Hudson
Really, most of it is just curiosity and the willingness to do it.
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Host 2 (Marketing Against the Grain)
Yeah.
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Kevin Hudson
None of this stuff is really that hard to learn. You could learn any of these tools in a weekend. Yeah, it's just really going out and
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Host 2 (Marketing Against the Grain)
doing the thing you mentioned you had Manus, and then there was another tool you mentioned.
- [12:59]
Kevin Hudson
Yeah. So like this. Actually this whole PDF was already done that from that prompt that we sent off. So I can download this. And something we'll do is use Lovable.
- [13:08]
Host 2 (Marketing Against the Grain)
Yeah.
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Kevin Hudson
Where you can just generate all sorts of apps, landing pages, anything like that. Just vibe coding in general. There's just so much cool stuff you can do. If I have this prompt here to generate a landing page, and then I can drop in that PDF that Manus just created and you can see this is a pretty simple prompt. It might take just a minute in
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Host 2 (Marketing Against the Grain)
level, but you're creating a landing page to host that offer as a giveaway?
- [13:33]
Kevin Hudson
Yes. Yeah. So it'll host the offer and then, you know, standard landing page where it'll give you an overview of what's within that offer and then just have a button you can clink, have a little modal pop up to enter your email, and then it'll take you to a like thank you page and download It.
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Host 2 (Marketing Against the Grain)
And how do you collect the email addresses? You have this connected into your backend.
- [13:49]
Kevin Hudson
Yeah. So this prompt will just kind of show the landing page and then you have to input your, like, Beehive or HubSpot API to actually get it to collect directly into there. You have to collect, you know, connects to whatever tools. But Level can do all of that. This is what we actually use.
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Host 2 (Marketing Against the Grain)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Kevin Hudson
And just vibe coding in general. You can just create such incredible stuff so easily. It actually just. Yeah, it blows my mind. I can show like a different one that I made. I use Google AI Studio a lot, partially because it's. You can do a lot just for free. Yeah, it's like most people, you can just go in and create any sort of internal tool completely for free and, like never pay for it when you're giving stuff out as resources, then they give you $300 in free credits when you sign up. And I've not even come close to that. So that's why I kind of recommend Google AI Studio. If you're just dabbling. This is one I did where I was talking about, like, how to reduce hallucinations when you're prompting. And it had a bunch of different prompts as part of that. And when you click on it, it has each of the prompts. And then sometimes there's a field you need to fill out and as you do that, it will just fill it in in the box right below. Then you just click Copy copy prompt and it's ready to go copy to your clipboard and you can go use that. And again, it's that same thing. You can just. Yeah. Give stuff like that. That out for free.
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Host 2 (Marketing Against the Grain)
Yeah. That's so much easier to kind of just give away, like coded apps, not in the way that we used to give away coded content.
- [15:02]
Kevin Hudson
You can even get more advanced than this. You have out a full piece of software just as a lead magnet.
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Host 1 (Marketing Against the Grain)
Yeah, yeah. Software code is essentially becoming disposable. Like, you know, you can give something away, don't have to maintain it, don't have to do all of the old software work that you used to have to do. It's pretty incredible. It's a good reminder of like the show don't tell. Like, if you can give somebody an app and show them what the value you can deliver versus, like telling them in a PDF or a slide deck, you're going to be at a better point of advantage.
- [15:27]
Kevin Hudson
Yeah. I'm actually just constantly amazed, like, what you can actually build. So I had a video where I wanted to compare all the different AI video tools. There was like nine different tools. And I wanted to do it like as a tier list, but I wanted to be able to actually play the videos live as I was doing all of that, which there's just no software that exists.
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Host 1 (Marketing Against the Grain)
That's true.
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Kevin Hudson
And so I would have had to do that like in Premiere Pro after the fact, but it wouldn't have been live. I was like this, I'm just like not gonna be able to do it. Like, wait a second, let's ask Google AI Studio and see if it works. And it literally just created this whole app.
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Host 1 (Marketing Against the Grain)
Pretty awesome actually.
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Kevin Hudson
Yeah. And when I actually did this in the video, this is like a full like infinite canvas. I had like 150 videos playing all at once on here. And each time you just click batch media. Then you can drag a video into each of these boxes. Then it like pops them up on the side.
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Host 1 (Marketing Against the Grain)
That's super cool.
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Kevin Hudson
Yeah, they would just pop down onto the canvas. Then you can like just drag everything around. And then this one, you would just like spawn logos. One of those things. I was like, there's, there's no way it can do this. Right? And even if it does, that has to break by the end of this video. When I'm comparing this across like 50, 15 different prompts. And this was like zoomed out all the way. Full 150 playing all at once. And like nothing broke. Just the fact that you can create a tool like that just out of nowhere is. Yeah, blows my mind. It's super remarkable no matter how many times I do it.
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Host 1 (Marketing Against the Grain)
And I think that's the right example of like how to think about it. You're going from interacting with these kind of assistants and augmenting largely text output for a lot of people, some multimedia output to go building like full blown web applications or doing multi step workflows using skills multi model agents like Manus. And then you can just like have an idea of like, hey, I want to visualize and show this thing and build a custom way to do that in a way that just wasn't previously possible. To me it just completely changes the storytelling and how you actually bring stories to life. Which was a big takeaway from the conversation today. Kieran, anything for Kevin before we sign off today.
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Host 2 (Marketing Against the Grain)
I think the Manus use case you showed was great. So like if you were watching this and you wanted to kind of move into layer four, I think using Manus as a kind of research tool to go look at these YouTube videos and then you kind of layered in. Hey, like go look at the video, go research these other places, like Reddit, all of these other places and that topic they covered, what are other things people are saying about that topic? What are other things that are trending about that topic? And tell me how I could create something about that in a really differentiated way. And I'm sure it could actually create a pretty good script for you as well. And, and so I think that is a good first use case to go from like the kind of layer three into the layer four, the workflow weaver, and maybe go try out Manus and start to use it as a great content research tool.
- [18:02]
Kevin Hudson
Yeah, definitely. And you know, everyone can kind of customize that to exactly what their use case is like. Once you see the power of it, pretty much anything you want to do, you just add in a little bit of context and it'll just go off and get it done for you.
- [18:13]
Host 2 (Marketing Against the Grain)
Cool.
- [18:13]
Host 1 (Marketing Against the Grain)
Awesome. Well, Kevin, thank you so much for joining us today. We appreciate you and we'll see everybody next time on Marketing against the Grain. Thanks.
- [18:21]
HubSpot Ad Voice
This data is wrong every freaking time.
- [18:23]
Kevin Hudson
Have you heard of HubSpot?
- [18:25]
Host 1 (Marketing Against the Grain)
HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.
- [18:29]
HubSpot Ad Voice
Whoa. I can see the client's whole history. Calls, support tickets, emails. And here's a test from three days ago. I totally missed HubSpot.
- [18:38]
Kevin Hudson
Grow better.
- [18:40]
Host 1 (Marketing Against the Grain)
Hey everyone. You know, Kieran and I have been doing the podcast for a while now. We've been at this for a couple years. We love it. We could not be happier to be doing this, but we wanted to take things to the next level. We want to level up the impact we're having with marketing. It's the grain. So the next step of our journey is something we're really, really excited about. We're going to launch the Marketing against the Grain newsletter. And Marketing against the Grain newsletter is going to be amazing. If you are a marketing leader practitioner, you're in the trenches doing marketing every day. This is for you. We're going to deliver right to your email inbox and you're going to get all the behind the scenes frameworks, practices, tutorials from us, from guests we have on the show, and from people even beyond the podcast that we think are going to be helpful and really have an impact on your day to day, week to week doing marketing. You're going to love it. It is something we've been talking about for a while. We're really excited to have it out in the world. We've already got a hundred thousand marketers who are on this newsletter, please join. It's completely free. We'd love to have you as part of the Marketing against the Grain community. And it's easy. You can click the link in the description below, or you can head to marketing against the grain.com subscribe.