A (5:17)

Thinking and Sabrina, do you come from a technical background? And how hard do you think it is to get started on Vibe coding without a technical background and to actually build something that is, you know, robust and usable?

C (5:29)

Yeah, so my background's computer science and physics from Berkeley. And right out of college I actually started, yeah, I started an AI company right out of college in 2013 and sold that actually to Pegasus, which is for a long time down the street from you guys in Boston. And so, yeah, I do have a technical background, but you know, I, I have a. For example, I have a women community of builders and many of them don't have a technical background and have started Vibe coding. And I think like, your success is all about what you're starting with. So if you have a huge scope for the product you want to build, like, usually I see people fail, unfortunately. Cause it's a little too much to bite off on your very first try. But something like a lead magnet is fairly simple and absolutely feasible today without any technical experience. So you could literally copy paste this prompt yourself, plug it into Lovable, and then just keep iterating with it to get it to the quality that you.

A (6:20)

Want and just for people following along. Lead magnets are like little small apps you use to acquire traffic, but then send that traffic to the main thing you want someone to buy. So like they're, you know, related to your core product or service, but they're kind of like usually a single use case, a small little use case that you can get attraction for and then send some of those folks to your product or service.

C (6:41)

Yeah, exactly. And so here, so Lovable is already ready to kind of implement the back end. So it's going to ask you for permission to actually like control the backend. So it'll set up your database storage. For a lead magnet, you typically don't need authentication. So we're Going to skip that. You can also do things like add a ChatGPT call to your app without having to set up API keys and fiddle around with all of that. So they've really made it much easier. So just go ahead and click Allow when Lovable prompts you, and then it's going to finish all of that backend setup.

A (7:10)

They also give you risk assessments, and so they can tell you when you've exposed your keys, which is a big thing that Vibe coders do, expose their ABI keys and you can just go get them on GitHub. And so I think that's pretty cool there. They can tell people like, here's a risk, we found some critical risk, and you can just click a button and Lovable will actually solve some of those security risks.

C (7:28)

Oh, I love that. Yeah, that's really awesome. I know that's been a big pain point and criticism of Vibe coding tools today. And so you can see here it's thought process. And I do encourage everyone to kind of just read through what it's doing. So what Cloud enables is a database to store your quiz responses. And you can see here it's actually modifying your database in real time. And now it's editing your CSS files, which are your style files. And again, this initial prompt will take about five minutes to complete running because it's building your entire lead magnet micro Vibe coded app completely from scratch. So scaffolding the design, understanding what it is you're trying to do, thinking the questions right for this lead magnet, what should these questions be for this ROI report, and then designing what that final ROI report actually looks like.

B (8:11)

And Sabrina, why it's doing a little bit of work here. I did have a question for you. You're somebody who's obviously done a good job. Bit of Vibe coding. You have created a bunch of micro apps, and we've seen the success you've had there. Can you tell people kind of what the learning curve is like? You know, I imagine the first time you're doing it, you're like, oh, it's a lot of back and forth. It's hours and hours, but maybe the second time it's an hour. How do you get better at it and how fast can it be once you're actually pretty proficient?

C (8:38)

Yeah. So the typical curve that I see is people are surprised, even their very first time using it, how far they can get. It feels like they've gotten 70% into building their app, but then that remaining 30%, like the actual complex parts of your app that make it Unique and different and your vision that ends up taking 99% of your time. And one of the things that really differentiates successful products that I've seen, like going from Vibe coding start to finish, is how they approach building it incrementally. So rather than like a massive PRD that you start with with all the features laid out and described and everything, start with thing like really, really simple, like this lead magnet calculator, and then add one thing at a time, very small, incrementally, and also read what it's doing. I actually commented, I think on Kiran's LinkedIn post earlier today. This is related to AI and content marketing. But I see the same with Vibe coding. The people who really succeed use AI to go deeper into the process and learn what's actually happening, understand it, question it, push back and like keep iterating and learning. Whereas the people who tend to get stuck are using AI to distance themselves from the process. They're not really understanding like what's going on, not willing to challenge it, don't ever want to open up anything and see what's going on. And so they're two very different mindsets and one tends to succeed much more often than the other because all of.

A (10:02)

These tools, whether you're crafting content, imagery, video code, where it starts to get harder is when you need to make edits and changes. And that's where you need actually some skill on how to work with the AI assistant.

C (10:14)

Yeah, exactly.

B (10:18)

Alright. Sabrina is giving you her exact workflow she uses to repurpose content across multiple platforms. This is the exact process she has used to build her own audience. You'll get her complete automation system and a guide on how to multiply your distribution so you can post once and automatically distribute it everywhere. Get it right now, scan the QR code or click the link in the description. Now let's get back to the show.

C (10:43)

Yeah, and so, you know, for Vibe coding, I really do recommend just start by keeping it as simple as possible. Like, I know everybody wants to build a really fancy mvp, but even for my app Blotato, I Vibe coded the original product 100% with cursor AI and I filmed it, documented it and it's embarrassingly simple. Like you could rebuild my MVP in three hours. Honestly, with Vibe coding tools today, one year later, because they've significantly advanced. But that's just the starting point. I try to emphasize this as well for people who are new to building product, but building your first version and getting it out there is just the starting point of product. Development, it's not the end. So here you have our AI readiness calculator here. So you'll see a preview just like this. And so it's going to ask us 15 questions. So let's just go through this and see what it came up with. So what industry does your business operate in? So let's just say tech. Let's say one to ten employees. Familiarity. Let's say three a little bit, maybe chatgpt. This one probably most businesses struggle with quality and organization of data, for sure. Hours per week, repetitive tasks. Probably more than we'd like to admit. So let's say 20 customer inquiries. Manually. Yes, for the most part. Emails. Right. Support emails, data analysis and reporting. Let's say almost no time with that. Does your team create content? Yes. Okay. How ready is your infrastructure for automation? Probably a 3 monthly budget for AI implementation? Let's say 1 to 15. Willing to learn new AI tools. Also tough. Let's say this is a 3. This company's in rough shape, but we know it's important, so we know this is innate. Biggest operational challenge. I think maybe slope. I would choose between this or scaling difficulties. And when do you want to implement? Everyone wants it as fast as possible and the ROI as fast as possible. And then here is our email capture. So we'll just click this. And here's our AI readiness report. Right. So 50% readiness score, annual savings, projected 80,000 yearly and recommended next steps. Now, of course, for your actual lead magnet, you'll probably want to tweak the questions, the possible responses, even the scoring. Right. So it makes sense given your expertise, given your client base, given your niche. But literally in five minutes, we went from nothing to this interactive lead magnet that you can now iterate on and make it awesome for your use.

B (13:10)

Iterate on it, then publish it to the web and start collecting emails, which is pretty powerful. But I think the last comment you made, Sabrina, was really important. I think the best apps in general are ones that come from a person or a team with a strong point of view. So you want to take your expertise and your perspective and translate it to the instructions and into the app itself, Right?

C (13:30)

Exactly. So use this as a starting point. And this is what I try to emphasize in all my AI content. Like, even if you see me posting ChatGPT prompts, like that's just a starting point for you to have a conversation and go deeper. It's not the end state. Like, the point isn't copy paste this prompt and then just launch this as is. It's really to Think about, like, what do you want your before and after experience for the customer to be when they interact with your lead magnets and then code your expertise into this app and then deliver your expertise at scale in a way that wasn't really possible before without a lot of investment to build something like this out.

A (14:02)

Yeah, traditionally marketers would have built a report, like a PDF report and give that away. And now you can actually build these kind of cool code powered experiences, these interactive tools and that's really how you have to get attention today on the web. Right. Code has become the new content relief marketers and how they actually attract people to the website, their products and services.

C (14:23)

You can even personalize this lead magnet, like if you allow them to input their company website. You can then like let's call perplexity and research everything we can about this customer so we can personalize the report even further. And it already captures email, so if I go to cloud database, so this is the database it automatically created. Right. So it's just refreshing here. But here's the email it captured. So you don't even have to set up a separate tool like you traditionally would just to capture emails. You can integrate this with an email API like Resend if you want to use this for email marketing and send them the report via email. So it's incredible what you can do today. And I'm most excited about Vibe coding for people who have domain expertise but not traditional technical expertise.

A (15:05)

Yeah, exactly. Same here. I think that it's an unlock for people who want to bring their domain expertise to life through code.

B (15:12)

Okay, so we got the app. Now let's talk marketing. This is marketing against the grain. We've showed you how to build what we call basic lead magnet. So something that's valuable enough to get somebody's attention, but maybe not valuable enough that they'd pay money, but they'll give you some information exchange. Sabrina, you've learned a lot this last year in terms of distribution and marketing with AI and the ability to get apps out there. Could you maybe break down for us the top lessons you've learned over the last year here?

C (15:41)

Yeah, I think number one is many people misunderstand how I use AI. Like I mentioned earlier, I use AI to go deeper into content creation, to challenge me as a sparring partner to point out blind spots. I don't expect AI to fully automate high quality original content for my personal brand. So that's the number one learning and kind of confusion that I'd love to clarify. Number two, from what I'VE seen the easiest low hanging fruit for creators and businesses is to repurpose their existing content. Because you already wrote it in your voice and your style and now it's just a matter of like repackaging it so it fits the format of each social platform. So the automation I was going to walk through today is something that's literally helped me grow Instagram from 0 to 418,000 followers in the past year in a completely automated autopilot fashion, just through repurposing my TikTok videos, which is where I focus on creating high quality original content. And I would say the third learning is that it's, it's incredible how much automation and AI can scale you, but at the end of the day it's, it's a lever and like the function I think about is like skill times clarity equals the leverage I get out of AI. So even when it comes to vibe coding, if you have a technical background, you will get more mileage out of vibe coding tools because you can understand what's happening and you can direct AI appropriately. You can stop it from going down a rabbit hole. That doesn't make sense. And then clarity, like are you able to communicate what it is you want to build step by step so that AI can actually follow those instructions? To the extent you have skill and clarity, that's how much leverage you get. That's literally the formula I think about whenever I think think about applying AI to different activities.

A (17:24)

So this is 8N. Do you think that that is a harder tool to learn than like a lovable or a vibe coding tool if someone wants to start to replicate this as well?

C (17:34)

Yeah, I do think N8N is a bit harder to learn. There are other workflow automation tools that honestly are much easier to learn. I do like N8N because it's self hosted and open source. So I literally host this in my closet in the server. So it's costs zero dollars to me and normally the amount of workflows I'm running would cost like thousands of dollars per month. I don't necessarily recommend anydent for beginners, but you can build basically the same thing in zapier or make.com which are much easier for beginners.

B (18:05)

Cool.

A (18:05)

This looks like a cool workflow.

C (18:07)

Yeah, yeah. So I'm happy to walk through it. So basically what it does is every time I post a TikTok video it has this RSS feed so it'll literally be alerted of my new TikTok video. It'll download it without a watermark and then this uploads it to Google Drive just so I can have it for, for future reference in case I want to repurpose it in the future. And then this next step is where all the repurposing magic happens. So this is actually my app Blotato. So it has a social media API as well as a content generation API. So you can create carousels, you can create faceless videos, et cetera. This option is just to repost the video as is to Instagram. This one is really neat. We'll hopefully dive into this. This will repurpose that TikTok video into an Instagram carousel. And so completely different media format, but same content and message. And then this one, Repost post to YouTube Shorts, repost to Facebook. This is a sample human in the loop because I don't want like all my TikTok videos reposted to LinkedIn three times a day, right? Like some are not appropriate for LinkedIn. So this is showcasing what a human in the loop approval step might look like. And then this last section Here takes the TikTok video and rewrites it into a long form thread for Twitter threads and Blue Sky. And then this last one is to repost to Pinterest as well. But yeah, I'm just showing like a couple different examples of how you can repurpose and remix your original high quality content into just different formats that appeal to slightly different audiences on each of the platforms. And so yeah, we'll dive into this one, turning it into an Instagram carousel. So basically this AI agents will take the TikTok video and this is a super long kind of like writing prompt here. But the most important thing is it outputs a set of carousel quote cards based on the topic. So what I'm going to do is actually just execute all this. So if you're not familiar with any to n, I'm just going to run this create carousel and it's actually going to start executing the entire workflow from the beginning up until it creates this carousel over here.

A (20:02)

I've done a lot with content and AI in many different forms actually never a complex workflow like this really kind of through building tools and apps. One of the things I find is it's really hard regardless of like if you use your own content or someone else's content, it still outputs like pretty AI centric content. It's easy to tell that the AI has generated that. Do you still kind of edit it and make sure it sounds like you before you post it? Does that? Does the AI auto post it Yeah.

C (20:31)

I think it depends on the type of content. So AI avatar videos, for example, I don't post those as is without me reviewing and ensuring quality. The reason for that is it's hard to get the pronunciation correct and sounding natural. And so I have prompts for that. But. So, for example, if you're not familiar with making avatar videos, every piece of punctuation tells the avatar when to pause. So if you have a period, it's going to actually be a longer pause than a comma. If you have a dash, that's another type of pause. If you have like a colon, that's another type of pause. And so, yeah, that's difficult to get right. So I do recommend, like a human in the loop step for, for that. But like other types of content, like, if it's just text, then like, I do think AI can get it right if you're giving it lots of examples of your own writing. And then the original source content is also based on your own voice. So this is one, for example, three ways to grow faster on Instagram. So this is an example of like a carousel that was created with my automation. So the title here, three Ways to Grow faster. You can put your CTA and your bio here, your profile picture here, and it'll make it look just like this, like, be generous experiment, and the CTA here. And then you can obviously post this to Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and then TikTok slideshows as well. And there's lots of different formats you can choose from. So, like, that's just one format. But if you want to do this kind of like popular Twitter code card carousel, this is another format that you can do and then just automatically post it to social media.

A (21:59)

So in that flow you're showing us, it's like it's taken your YouTube video, then it's uploading that video, then is it stripping out the transcript?

C (22:08)

I tend to write really long captions, so this particular flow is just basing it off the captions that I'm writing. But you can definitely add a separate step to call OpenAI whisper and get the transcript for your video. Especially if it's a short video, like a TikTok, it won't cost that much in terms of credits.

A (22:23)

And so when you create the carousel, how does it know what style to use? Does it just choose the style itself or do you kind of tell it at some point? Do you like, tell it what style to choose?

C (22:34)

Yeah. So if you open this note, for example, create carousel, this list templates, you have A lot of options here for different templates and styles here. And so within this app, you can choose different styles and, like, preview what they look like. So this is the tweet quote card style. This is like a tutorial style here. So this is tutorial carousel with mono color background. The previous one was quote card with minimal style and just like different styles here. And one of the things I'm working on right now is actually allowing users to create their own templates. Right. So if you're an agency and you want to create custom carousel or video templates for your clients, then you'd be able to choose it here from this dropdown menu.

A (23:11)

Like, one of the ways that could work is each of those styles is like a little agent, and then another agent decides what style to use based upon, you know, what's been used in the past or data. Is there any of that going on where you have a agent trying to decide what style to use? Or is it still very much the human choosing the style each time a post is made?

C (23:28)

Yeah, you can definitely do that. I actually have a sample automation that shows that. So let's see. I think it's, yeah, Automate Instagram carousels with AI chat. So here you actually chat with this AI agent and you just like, finalize the quotes and then the agents will decide which carousel to use here. And by the way, this one finally finished running. So this is based on actually my last TikTok video I posted before this meeting. So over here. So harsh truths about learning AI that nobody talks about. Okay, so it pulled that video and then made this carousel out of it. That's a longer video. So it just took a little bit longer to make that carousel. So here it is. And again, it's a very simple example, but it's really powerful because you can automate or semi automate this and just have like a human in the loop step for that final approval. Like, this last step would just be to fetch the carousel and then post it to Instagram. But you could imagine feeding it into Airtable or Google Sheets. You know, wait until someone's approved it and then push it out and publish it.

A (24:25)

That's awesome.

C (24:26)

And then this last section will just like write it into a Twitter thread. Right? So it's. It's very similar to the first one. It's just the output looks a little bit different because you want that initial first tweet and then your additional tweets after that.

B (24:38)

Maybe something that would help everybody understand because if you're not a complete marketing, dork like myself for you or Karen, you spend all of your time on the original content side on TikTok, right. And how many videos are you posting a day on TikTok?

C (24:54)

I'm posting three a day.

B (24:55)

You're posting three a day and you have I think 600 and some thousand followers on TikTok, is that right?

C (25:03)

I think so, yeah. 6:37.

B (25:04)

Okay, 637. But you have over a million followers across all of your channels, right?

C (25:11)

Yeah, right. Under 1.4. So I'm on every channel plus email newsletter through substack.

B (25:16)

Yeah. So what I'm trying to break down is this workflow is kind of like more than doubled your followers, right? Because if you're just out there and a smart person just doing TikToks, you would have done really well. Right. And you have done very well. But you essentially took the time to build something that basically more than doubled the value and output of the work. Obviously that's normalized across channels and there's, you know, if you were really breaking it down, but at the most foundational level, you doubled your distribution through a workflow that does a good job of repurposing like your best and highest quality content.

C (25:53)

Yeah, exactly. And on that note, like there are ways you can customize this to check the performance of your top three videos, let's say Reels or TikToks, in the past 24 hours, and only take the best performing one. You can even scrape the comments to see what people are discussing and then convert that into another piece of content. And so this is the basis of a repurposing engine that I believe every intermediate creator or business should have. It's really powerful what you can do with AI and automation applied in this way.

A (26:23)

Like when you look at this, this, it's kind of incredible in that you've basically built yourself a social media team of sorts, right? Like you've built yourself a basically a little social media agency. And if you were a listener watching this or you were on YouTube watching this, and you're not as technical as you, because you're incredibly skilled at AI, but you're also quite technical. And you can kind of see that in the tools you're using, what would you suggest they use? One of the lessons seems to be like, start with one anchor channel, like what is your primary channel? And then like, you know, start to like maybe automate a little bit about what would you recommend to kind of get started. If I'm like, wow, I need to do this, how can I get started with this.

C (27:04)

So my advice for beginners, to be completely honest, is to ignore AI and automation, which I know sounds, which I know sounds backwards. But having seen so many people like start and stop, stop their content creation journey, I really believe that consistency and developing the habit of creating content is the number one most important thing. In the early days. So many people, I can't tell you, they just start. I'm sure you guys have seen it too. They just start, they're super excited, incredible momentum. Three weeks in, absolutely nothing. Maybe they revisit it again three weeks later, but not quite serious and they fall off the bandwagon again. So in having observed that, I don't want AI to be another shiny distraction and I don't want beginners to treat it as like the cure all panacea. Because I'm using AI, I'm definitely going to succeed. At the end of the day, it's like about you as a human, your creative, your thought process, your thought leadership. What is the brand you want to build, what is the voice you want to have and what is the education you want to share with people? Those are the things you figure out in your first 100 days of posting content on a consistent basis. Once you've developed the habit, you're going to stick to it. And how you know that is it feels weird to not post content on a day. When I started, I just had a streaks habit app and I was just like, I just have to post one thing a day, then I'm done. Like that is, that is my goal. Once it becomes weird to not post anything, then I would start looking at, okay, how can AI help me scale what I'm doing? That's already working. Maybe I can use it just for brainstorming different ideas, brainstorming hooks, right? And then I would look at automation. Maybe six months or so into the journey, when you've like really figured out this is going to be my core platform where I produce high quality original content. For me, that's YouTube for long form, TikTok for short form, and that's it. Everything else is repurposed from those two original sources.

A (28:54)

You're saying something very important. I want to make sure people watching this understand, which is first start with having real domain expertise, right? You need to actually be good at something for AI to be truly impactful. And so you actually have to be good at content. Really put the hours and learn how to do that. But let's say you were a seasoned content creator. Like I'm watching this, I create a lot of content. Like, I wish I had this flow, right. And I think one of the things that AI works really well is when you have a recognizable pattern that works and AI can replicate that. So if I have a bunch of hooks that work, if I have a bunch of like post types that work, then I can actually start to train the AI to maybe help me do that for that channel. Then I can basically train it to actually do that maybe for one other channel. Like maybe I would take my LinkedIn content and I would use hey Jim. And create an avatar for Instagram. That's probably actually an experiment I'm going to actually start to do, which is why that one came to mind because I don't do anything Instagram. And I think that would be kind of a cool test. But like go piecemeal by piecemeal. But you actually don't start with, wow, this AI and automation is really good. I'm not very good at content, so I'll just start like put some stuff in it and then like spraying it out everywhere and just create a bunch of noise. It's like, no, you like don't do that. Domain expertise and then find a pattern that you can teach AI and then AI can help start to replicate that in other places.

C (30:12)

Yeah, exactly. That's how I think about all content creation. It's like reduce the time to finding your repeatable viral format and that looks a little different for everybody. And it also looks a little different per platform. But once you find that, then you can scale it and replicate it with AI to other platforms and it'll still involve experimentation, like sometimes reposting your TikTok exactly as is to Instagram works in many cases, it doesn't work that well and you'll have better performance with carousels, which Instagram is pushing really hard right now. Right. And so but to your point, yeah, have a basis of like high quality content that you're working off of, which ultimately comes from like your, your experience, your background, your industry knowledge and know how.

A (30:52)

Yeah. By the way, your substack is awesome. I subscribed while we were actually doing this as well. You've got tons of great tutorials there. You built an app, you sold it for a bunch of money. You could do a bunch of stuff. Why did you want to become a teacher? Like, the teaching thing is like interesting. It's not like make a hundred million dollars, it's like teach 10 million people. You'll probably still will make a hundred million dollars if you do that. But like, I'm just curious about why you started with that as your goal.

C (31:15)

Yeah, I mean, so I don't live in a tech bubble anymore, so I do think that was a big part of it. So moving out of Silicon Valley to where I live now in the Salt Lake City area. I love it here, by the way. But, you know, AI chat, GPT. Most people are not aware of what they. What's possible today. And I kind of had that light bulb moment when I started creating educational content about a year and a half ago. Maybe a year ago, my family visited. They saw midjourney canvas art on our wall in our home. And they were like, wait, what is that? How do you make that? And I sat there showing them how to use midjourney. And for hours, my mom was like, trying to make the perfect image of a scene from her childhood in the Philippines of, like, a specific island, a specific sunset, and gradients of colors. And she was just, like, having so much fun and creative and just. Just a big smile on her face. And I was like, wow, like, I can teach other people how to do this. I don't think there's actually that much knowledge in the mainstream about what AI is capable of today. That's kind of one thing that was pushing me. The second one is just viewing the AI literacy gap again, because I'm not in a tech bubble anymore. It is kind of concerning to me how few people know about what's possible with AI today. And then there's kind of like everybody else not aware of it or being left out of that conversation and some of the critical decisions we have to make as a society when it comes to how AI should be used, where does it make sense not to be used, all of these different aspects.

A (32:37)

I really love that. I agree. I think that's a cool mission to not teach the folks in Silicon Valley how to extract more revenue from AI, but teach everyone else how to be empowered with AI. I love that.

B (32:48)

Okay, well, Sabrina, this has been an awesome show because I think what you have been able to do today is show anyone who has a strong point of view, has some expertise in making and teaching how they can actually do that at scale in a really productive way in a way to make money for their business or just a way to have an impact about something they care about. Right. And you're choosing to do that with AI, which is incredible. And thank you for coming on the show and doing this. We will link up your app, we'll link up substack and everything below. So please check that out if you have any questions about how any of this happened. Drop comments below, hit like and subscribe, and we'll see you real soon. On Marketing against the Grain I want to tell you about a podcast I love. It's called Creators are Brands, hosted by Tom Boyd. It's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Creators are Brands. Explore 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 mission. They just did a great episode called why your Perfect Content isn't Working. Do this instead with Courtney Johnson. It's a great show. Listen to Creators Are Brands wherever you get your podcast.