AI vs Human When Generating Content | With Expert Kate Bradley

So it's been almost, you know, 7 years now since you've co-founded Lately as a CEO, uh, you know, built that initial spreadsheet, you know, companies like Walmart have used it. Um, so you mentioned you got $50,000 from, from some angel investors. Your co-founder also invested the $25K. Was there any other cost involved to launching? Or were you like an agency using that spreadsheet with Walmart and then you actually built the SaaS after that?

Yeah, it was after that. So even when Steve built the wireframes, I didn't understand what we were doing. And so what he did was he brought in Jason, who's one of my other co-founders, and Jason built the wireframes with Steve. And they'd been working together for like 25 years off and on. And so Jason and I went out and raised the money. It took us about 7 months, and we did it on an idea. I mean, I don't think we even showed anyone the wireframes. And because Steve's world was venture, we met with venture first, not angels. So I got punched in the face hard for about 6 months, but raised the money anyways, and mostly from professional angels. Not really— there were some friends and family, but most of it was professional angels. And a big fan of mine, Bob McCausland, was a— we was a big fan of mine at XM, which was really lucky. And goes to show you how important it is to just make connections with fans, you know, make customers evangelists. Big difference between a listener and a fan, right?

Definitely.

And, you know, when we were raising that money, I still didn't know what I was doing. And in fact, the way we talked about Lately then was nothing like today. Then we didn't even know about AI. We weren't focused on content creation at all, 'cause we didn't see that was the pain point. we thought the pain point was organization, which it is also part of it, but it's, that's not a sexy sell, right? It took us a little while to figure that out. And when we built the initial platform of Lately, we were just taking each spreadsheet that I had. So, so a spreadsheet comes in the form of multiple worksheets, right? So we built each worksheet as a feature. And then we saw our customers totally go to this one feature. It was all they wanted to do. But all the features work together. They were all, they didn't know that they were all sort of contingent on this one, but they were. And so we learned to flip the entire pitch and the way that we talked about the company. And we're still really bad at it, to be honest with you. It's really hard to tell people what we do. And can I break it down a little more? So like—

Sure.

So if you have a blog or a podcast, like just like this one, for example, you upload it into Lately, you push a button, we instantly atomize it into hundreds of mini movie trailers. So we take apart the coolest things that you and I say here, We transcribe the text, we look through the text, through all the best quotes, and then we match each quote up with the video or the audio of me and you saying that quote, right? But what's happening behind the scenes is the AI is pre-testing every single quote it picks to be the ones it knows your audience is going to have the highest engagement with, right? So it's actually looking at the— literally the words you and I say and testing those words, the writing, With your audience to find out what they want to hear, watch, or read.

Who is it testing against? Like, what dataset is that against? Like, general web and see what's engaging, or just on your profile?

Yeah, so out right now, the product is looking at your profile and it's looking at all of your analytics that you give us access to, right? Behind the scenes, we've built another beast which is able to actually look at the data across all of our customers, right? So that's coming soon.

That's the real value, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Exactly. But I mean, you know, right now it gets customers like Gary Vee a 12,000% increase in engagement. So it ain't too shabby.

Right, right. That's not too bad. And how, like, so how accurate or how, how, you know, how much better is that versus, you know, being managed by humans, right? Most people do that. You have like a copywriter, social media manager, or like media producer kind of doing that behind the scenes. Cause that's what, Like we have a producer, takes this stuff, repurposes it, thinks what looks good, and then publish it. Have you guys done some kind of test to compare?

Yeah, for sure. So I mean, with Gary Vee's team, for example, the AI, the stuff that it pulls out is 80% correct to what the human would pull out. And it takes, you know, it takes the human like 8 hours to go through a whole hour-long video or 2 hours basically and do all the writing. And it takes Lately about 10 minutes.

Okay, so it's like, yeah, it's a cost-benefit analysis.

Yeah, it's a cost-benefit. Yeah, yeah. I mean, what's interesting too, by the way, is the— so for some companies, the sell is replace humans, right? And for others, it's more like start me at third base, which is really what it does. Like, it's— we're not— we didn't design it to replace humans. We designed it to work with the humans. So Lately's job is to start you at third base, which is That's hard to get to third base, by the way, people, right? So we start you there and then we give the human multiple opportunities to collaborate with the AI, to teach it, to help it learn. And we really insist that you do because we've learned that the difference is you can just hang out on third base. And for most people, that's kind of fine because they suck so bad at writing anyways and they're automating the whole thing. But if you get to home plate, then you're Gary Vee, right?

Mm-hmm.

And so what does that effort take? So it's sort of like a 4-to-1 ratio as you would do with any kind of content creation. I say it's 4 parts editing, One part vomiting, right? So you let the AI vomit and then you, the human, need to come in and do some quick editing, put your human touch on there and you're off to the races.

Sure. Saves you a lot of time though. Yeah. Yeah.

And better engagement, right? That's the most important thing.

Yeah, exactly. Cool. So I wanna talk about like your most recent incredible growth in MRR, which we talked about at the beginning. So you went from $25K in MRR to about $74K in MRR. I don't know where you guys are at right now. What were, can you share with us what were the growth strategies you guys implemented? So that's 196% growth in just 10 months.

Yeah. So we ended up at 77, by the way. So that was great. So 204%. And we did a couple of things. So we put a line in the sand, Akeel, and we decided, you know, let's just dogfood our own medicine here.

Right.

And do nothing else. So we stopped all paid ads. And we stopped cold calls and cold emails because we hate that shit, right?

Mm-hmm.

And it wasn't working for us time and again. And so what am I good at? I'm good at social organic. I mean, I've been creating fans out of listeners for a dozen years. You know, I know how to build that trust and what that community looks like. And so I decided to take what I had learned in radio and apply it to our own marketing at Lately and use it to fuel the AI brain at the same time. So I do podcasts like this all the time because I'm interesting. Woman, rock and roll DJ, AI tech. I got a lot to say. I don't shut up. You can tell. I'm going to ask you for this file and hopefully you'll give it to me. And then I will get, you know, 40, 50 social posts out of it. And I will then also broadcast those posts a couple times a week for the next 20 or 30 weeks because now everything is after-the-fact marketing. You don't get butts in seats. It's not worth it. The exponential value of the after-the-fact view. is where you want to be. That's actually been the way for 10 years. I've been— since Walmart, I've been promoting this. But so we only do this, right? So I just do a ton of these. We stockpile our whole calendar with what I do. And then we look at any customer that likes, comments, or shares our work— this was advice from Gary Vee, by the way— as a warm lead, because they are, right? And then we have conversations. It's usually about 7 or 8 touches, not sell and not sell, and then getting into the DM and then getting into the demo. So the demo, as we noted before, has a 98% conversion. It does sell itself. I've seen a lot of people fuck up my demo. But it doesn't matter because people do lean forward and go, holy crap, but we got to get them in there. But because of, on top of that, they, they already know us. So the social proof is really working for us, right? Because they feel warm, all those things. And then we, we have built an advocacy flywheel as well. So we work really hard to know all 388 customers. I follow them on social, my brand follows them on social, my team does. We reshare their work. We have a Slack channel just for them where we help each other. We give free writing courses every week to all of them, to the public actually. And we really— they see us as a part of their team and we see them as a part of ours. So it's, and I've, this is by the way, why my team didn't balk about getting paid for 2 years. Because the community that we built internally at Lately with my employees is the same community that we built with the people we target and the people that we bring in as customers, right? So again, fans, evangelists.

Very cool. So you guys did paid marketing, you did, you tried to do all the outreach sales engine. Didn't work or you didn't enjoy doing it and then went to social media and it seems to have worked for you guys.

Organic.

Organic. So can we talk a little bit about—

This is hard, by the way, Akeel. This is the hard way. Like we're automating it with Alayli and AI, but there's human effort has to go into it and nobody wants to do that.