A Secret Growth Hack to Steal Free Customers

Welcome to the Kerner office. I had a friend on the pod today. His name is Edward Sturm. And I met this guy because he made a video about me on TikTok like three years ago. I had never heard of him and his video went viral, which put him on my radar and we've been friends ever since. Edward is a viral growth marketing genius. He first went viral by playing a prank in New York City that got viewed over 100 million times. So he talks about what goes into doing something like that, but we also chatted about business ideas because that's what we do here. And Edward brought up a brilliant idea to take over abandoned meetup groups, some of these that have thousands or tens of thousands of members. When the organizer abandons the group, meetups wants someone to keep paying for it. So they will let anyone in the group take it over for 50 to 100 bucks, giving you thousands or tens of thousands of free leads and or customers. So we talk about that, we talk about the curious learner bias, and we talk about unbundling large SaaS tools and how to use AI to point to the features that are the most in demand. This is a great pod. You're going to love it. Please share it with a friend and we'll see you next time. So we have Edward Sturm here. And Edward, I found him accidentally because I posted Twitter years ago about my story with Heartland Bread, which I haven't talked about a lot, and he made a TikTok about it. I wasn't even on TikTok and it went viral and I didn't have a TikTok account for him to point to. And that kind of put him on my radar. And we've been friends ever since. And so, Edward, who are you? Introduce yourself. Welcome.

Oh, man, I'm so hyped. Actually, I'll tell you what happened. So I was an early viral video producer on YouTube from like 2009 to 2014. This was before people knew that, like, you could make a crazy career off YouTube. And we were just kids playing with YouTube and we were going viral all the time, but we had no idea. And actually we almost got a TV show from this. And we thought the hustle was was going from YouTube to TV. And we did get the TV show and then we were demoralized and then we stopped.

What year was this?

12. Yeah, 2012. We had our first viral video in 2009. We went really viral in 2012. We went on Good Morning America, the Today Show, 2020. Flown out to LA from New York Because I'm from Brooklyn. We were flown out to LA to be on the Jeff Probe show.

Where did you go viral for?

We gotta hear that video called fake Celebrity Pranks nyc. And we. So one morning I have this friend, his name is Brett Cohen, one of my in the world. Now he's executive producer. But we met in 2009 or 2008 as interns at WABC, which is new York City's local ABC station. And then it was 2012 and we were video chatting over breakfast one time. And the thing about Brett is Brett was one of the first podcasters ever. You should get Brett on the podcast. He is great. Brett was coming up with amazing schemes to get a list celebrities on his blog Talk Live podcast as a 17 year old kid. He was a 17 year old kid interviewing Paris Hilton on his podcast and Jimmy Fallon on his podcast and Kim Kardashian on his podcast. He is a brilliant marketer. You know Brett, he had this podcast and he sounded in. He sounds and looks like someone who should be famous. And I told him that when I met him, I thought he was actually like, I thought he was actually famous. This is in 2012. Now lots of people have copied us after. I'm like, Brett, what if we go on Craigslist and we just try to get like a bunch of people to disguise, to play paparazzi, to pretend that they are paparazzi. And we walk through Times Square with all these fake paparazzi following you and taking photos. Do you think we could convince people that you were famous? And he's like, he's like, I'll do you one better. And like five minutes later, he had a post out on Craigslist for. For bodyguards. And he's like, we're not going to pay you, but it's a cool idea. And so we got all these fake paparazzi. Two real bodyguards. Yeah. For free. Who just thought it was a fun idea. Two real bodyguards, a fake publicist and a fake assistant. And it almost actually, what's crazy is the whole video, everything almost fell apart. And Brett didn't tell me until after because he knew it would stress me out and I would freak out. But like 99% of our fake paparazzi just decided not to come right before the shoot. But then one of them brought all of her friends that made up. Yeah. And that made up for all of it. Okay, dude, we got. We got lucky. And so we start the video. We walk out of 30 Rock, 30 Rockefeller center, and I have these fake paparazzi lined up with their cameras ready to take photos. I went to film school, so I have, like, a bunch of, like, film buddies who are filming everything. So we were filming it from several different angles, and they're just doing it for fun. And also this is, like, good for their portfolio. Like, right away, as the paparazzi are standing at the entrance of 30 Rock, people are like, who are they waiting for? So then more people come, and it already starts to pick up steam. And then Brett walk, walks through the entrance of 30 Rock or the exit of 30 Rock, and he has the bodyguards behind him. And then the fake paparazzi start yelling, brett. Brett. They're taking these photos. And everyone starts taking photos too, not knowing who Brett is. And we walk into Times Square and we literally stop traffic because there are so many people trying to take photos with Brett or of Brett. And we are.

No one knows who he is.

No one knows who he is. Nobody knows who he is. And then we didn't include this in the video, but at that same time, there was a Snoop Dogg look alike who was in Times Square. Like, his job is to be a Snoop Dogg look alike. And so Brett and him met just randomly and then went and bought, like, chocolate bars and cvs. And we all thought it was Snoop Dogg until the edit. We realized it wasn't Snoop Dogg.

So you got. You got trolled trolling everyone?

Yeah, we got trolled trolling everyone. Yeah.

That must have been like the most high energy, manic, like, moment of your entire life.

I ended up in the hospital after. So I left him. He went to the subway to go take the lir back to Long Island. And I turn around and there's scaffolding behind me. So high up, the excitement and the scaffolding slams into my face. Or I slam my face into it and my eye busts open. So, you know, I said, we went really viral. We ended up on all these TV shows. That video got hundreds of millions of views. And on YouTube, it has, like, almost 7 million. But then it was shared on Facebook several times where it got hundreds of millions. And because it was on the biggest TV shows in the world, International news shows, huge American shows, hundreds of millions of views. But how did that even pop off in the first place? Man, this is a crazy story. I haven't told this one in a long time. So we edit the video and we put it on YouTube. And now, like, you know, YouTube in 2012 didn't push out videos for you. Like, I come from the age where you have to do distribution yourself for your Content. And, and so I'm like, how am I going to make this go viral? And it was really up to me. And so I'm just like, all right, first night, I'm just going to put like, okay, what do I know? Reddit. And I posted it on the, on the video subreddit, one of the biggest subreddits on Reddit. Maybe like the biggest one. And if you don't know what Reddit is, it's like the biggest message board, it's was responsible for some of the biggest memes on the Internet. But I put it on the videos, which is for viral videos subreddit, and it has no views at the time. And then I go out to the club because I got to work. And then like three hours later I'm like, oh yeah, I should check on how our video did. And so I open up Reddit and I'm on some like, rooftop club. There are people surrounding me. I'm there with all of my friends and I see it's at number three on the video subreddit. And I'm like, oh, snap. And I start telling people around, around me because we all know what Reddit is. And people start gathering around, around my phone to see this. And then we watch it over the night crawl from like 3 to 2 to 1. And then it does the same thing on the front page of Reddit. Like there's just like all these people surrounding me and my phone, we're all cheering and it gets to number one on Reddit and then from there, just because I posted it on Reddit and you know, like, I hadn't, I was active on Reddit at the time, so I had an aged account that was a genuine account. I didn't know anything about gaming Reddit. Now I can't really say whether I.

Do or not, but we do.

Yeah. So then it was number one on Reddit and it just, two days later we were on, I think it was Good Morning America. We were on GMA and man, there was huge music star there who we met. It wasn't Beyonce. Who was it? I can't remember. Maybe it was Beyonce. I don't, I don't know. It was a long time ago and, and yeah, and then just from that Reddit post, it took on a life of its own. And then it got super copied. All these people did like fake Barack Obama walks through Times Square, fake Justin Bieber walks through Times Square. Someone literally did another fake celebrity, like Pranks nyc. It just got super copied. And that was this like super viral Video that still sometimes goes viral today.

That's amazing. Did anything come from that?

We almost got a TV show. And, like, if I knew what I know now, I would have just figured out, what do these TV executives want to hear? And then I would have told them that. I would have written it down and told them that, but I didn't know that. And so we just tried to come up with these really crazy creative ideas, which was not what they wanted. Maybe we could have pulled them off once we got the TV show, but we didn't get the TV show. And then we were demoralized and, you know, we were dumb kids. We had, like, no idea. But I mean, I learned a lot. I learned a lot about the Internet and about making things go viral. So that was cool.

It's funny how some of those things change based on algorithms and a lot of the other. More first principle things stay the same, right? Based on human nature.

Yeah. Oh, for sure. We had a. We have. We had, like, a good hook. We did this, like, one minute introduction in the video where Brett walks with. Where Brett, like, talks about being a normal dude. Maybe it's like even like 30 seconds. And Brett's like, look, I'm just a normal dude. And I. I've. All my life I've wanted to be famous. Here's how I'm gonna pull it off. And then, like, next thing you know, he's walking out the entrance. Oh, I didn't tell you. I forgot the story. My gosh, I can't believe I forgot this story. We put it on YouTube. I put it on Reddit. It's climbing on Reddit, and then it gets flagged and taken down off of YouTube because it's using. It's using a copyrighted song. Hollywood Swinging. Do you know this song?

I don't think so.

We use that song for the video, but it's copyrighted and it gets taken down off YouTube. And Brett is a master. This is why Brett is head of events at Forbes, because he does things like this. And he calls the record label and he gets put in touch with an operator, of course. And he, like, figured out who he needed to. Which executive he needed to speak to. He's like, I need to speak to this person. And the operator was like, he. He can't speak and who are you? And Brett just, like, made something up. Just a complete lie. And Brett, like, knew what to tell these people. I actually got it twisted. No, the operator meant to put him on hold, but click the wrong button, put him right through to the Executive. And so Brett has his chance to speak to the executive. But so now Brett's on the phone with the executive, and he's like, listen, we made this video. We used your song. It's going really viral. Executive thought it was so funny. And Brett's like, can you just, like, message whoever at YouTube and, like, let us put the video up? And the executive's like, all right. And, you know, Brett's this kid at the time. And then the video goes back up on YouTube as it is climbing on Reddit. And if it wasn't for that, like, the video might not have gone viral. And, like, Brett had to hustle in this, like, moment of crisis with not a lot of time. And I didn't find that. I didn't hear about that until, like, days later.

That is so amazing. Like, 99% of people that happens to and they're like, dah, that sucks, man. Dang it. Oh, yeah. All right, well, let's focus on Facebook. You know, they just move on from it and write it off. Now, nowadays, YouTube has tools where you can swap out the music without having to edit the video. Right. But I'm sure that didn't exist back then. No, no, no. There's a story. So, like, he needed a little bit of luck. The operator had to press the wrong button.

We had a lot of luck. Paparazzi. Most of the paparazzi didn't show up, but one brought all of her friends. Yeah. And then the video was taken down. And Brett knows. Brett knew how to talk to the operator so that she wouldn't hang up immediately. But. But, yeah, she meant to click hold and transferred Brett by accident.

That's amazing.

Then what Brett did is, so as we were going on to TV shows, Brett knew how to, like, leak things, to press in ways that sounded official. And Brett was, like, really good at. At understanding that language. And so he would, like, leak news that, like, Brett Cohen is walking out of, like, the TMZ offices or something, and then he would actually get paparazzi waiting for us in front of these offices to take photos of us. That's amazing. Yeah, because we were, like, the hot thing at the time. But, you know, we had, like. We had no idea what to do with that. Too bad.

Fake it till you make it. Yeah, that's the thing, Edward. You. You're an idea guy. Like, I am. So what ideas are you seeing out there?

Dude, I have crazy things to share. One of these is. It's meetups. It's like creating meetups for your industry. But More specifically, and something that I'm especially interested in now is private equity meetups, because private equity is super price insensitive. So did you. You read my newsletter? I think it was called Grayscale. It was white hat link building. Getting backlinks for your website, which increases your SEO domain authority, which allows your website to rank higher in Google. I listened to this podcast on my first million with this guest, Jesse Puji. I think I'm pronouncing his name right. And he was in private equity, and he learned that, like, big PE firms are paying just so much money for very basic digital marketing research and expertise. And like, I heard one of these things, and he's like, yeah, like some private equity firm paid like $50,000 for this SEO analysis that would personally take me 15 minutes. And he's just like, man, they're so price insensitive. But, like, you know, I would be lying if I made it out to be this, like, green field, which is just so easy to get into, because it's not. You really need to have connections in pe. So how do you get these connections? And so a few weeks before hearing about about how price insensitive PE is, especially with, like, digital marketing or research, I had put out this newsletter about white hat, gray hat, and black hat link building, getting links to your website. The white hat one was using the meetup technique. And so the meetup technique is. And you can do this remotely from anywhere, but it would work better if you're in the right city, but you can still do it from anywhere. And so meetup.com, if you want to have your own meetup of over 50 people, you need to pay Meetup. If you have an annual plan, it's like $172 a year. And if you don't have an annual plan, you divide that by 12 and then multiply it by two, and you're paying like a lot per month. And lots of people, they will start meetups, and then like, they get bored of hosting them and running them, and they don't want to pay the meetup fees, and so they abandon their meetups. Chris, you know what happens when a meetup organizer abandons their meetup?

I do, because I read your newsletter. But please tell us what happened.

No, no, tell. I want to hear. I want to hear it because I want to drink.

Meetup. Meetup does not want to lose that juicy MRR or ARR. So they would love for anyone else to take over the group or else they don't get paid anymore, which creates a good Incentive for enterprising entrepreneurs like us.

Exactly. And so. So everyone who's in the group gets an email. The organizer of so and so meetup group is stepping down. Would you like to take it over? And actually, I think I'm not. I'm not certain of this, but there's a chance that with the new, newest version of meetup, you can actually see groups just in your area that are also in need of organizers. But I'm not sure, at the very least, if you are in any meetup group that has lost an organizer, you can take it over. You literally can take it over. All the hard work that somebody spent building a meetup, getting people to this meetup, you can just. It'll be your meetup. And actually, once you take it over, they can't take it back. The original people who started it, they can't take it back. That happened to me once. I took over a meetup and then the group was like, we did this by accident. We didn't mean to step down because it was a meetup in my niche. I got the invitation for meetup and I'm like, I want this. And I copped it. And then they're like, we didn't mean that. And I'm like, listen, let me be an organizer of this and then I'll just give it back to you. And they're like, okay. And then they let me just be like an honorary organizer. And then occasionally I would use that, like for my own purposes to announce events.

Couple questions. Do you have to be in that group to get that notification?

Well, so I'm not sure if the newest. The newest version, you can actually, if you go to meetup.com right now, you might see meetups that are in need of organizers. So many meetups now that I'm not sure if it's just. I'm seeing these notifications on meetup.com because I'm part of that meetup or because they're actually showing it to, like, people who aren't even part of meetups. But it would make sense. Like you said, they want mrr, they want ARR. And so, like, why wouldn't they show meetup groups that are in need of organizers?

Could one idea just to be. Just to auto join hundreds or thousands of meetups and just wait for that email to eventually come.

Yeah, totally. Totally. That's. That's what it is. So.

Because it doesn't cost anything to be a member, right?

Cost. Cost nothing to join a bunch of meetups. Cost nothing to join a. But as far as I know, cost nothing to join a bunch of meetups. So you join as many meetups as you want. For three years. When I started doing SEO and I was like, learning how to get clients in person, I was going to New York City tech and business events every night for like three years. So I had to join a lot of meetups. And then like, I started getting notifications, these organizers are stepping down. Do you want to take this over? And when I started my own meetup group and became comfortable hosting meetups, I'm like, yeah. And I took over all these groups. Oh, man. I didn't even tell the benefits. So many aspects of why this is incredible.

Yeah, I want to know what data you get as the organizer on the members.

So you can message right away. You take over a group and you can message all of the members. You can't see their emails, but when you throw events, you can, like, require an email to join the event. The whole idea is like, you can do this remotely. And anyone who's throwing an event, most of the time, they want extra distribution. They want to make sure enough people are going to come to their event. Now you have this meetup group with several hundred people or a thousand people, where the organizers step down. The people who are throwing the events, they don't know how active your members are. It could be members who aren't even very active. But because you have this meetup group, you kind of look a bit credible and you're just like, hey, listen, I want to co host meetups or events in my niche. Can I be a co host for your event? And I will just send you my members and lots of event organizers, whether it's meetup or luma or whatever, they're gonna say yes because they want more people to come to their events. And then these people, they can make these people part of their events or get their email addresses. And in exchange for this, you ask them to include a blurb about your company and a link back to your site.

And that blurb, like, you're a sponsor of their event, but you don't pay them any money. You're just like sending them your members.

Exactly, Exactly.

Interesting.

Yeah, exactly. And that blurb appears on email to everyone who goes to the event. But a lot of these events have their own landing pages, and plenty of these events use dofollow backlinks versus nofollow backlinks. Nofollow backlinks don't pass link juice. Dofollow backlinks pass like SEO link Juice. So they use do follow backlinks. Many of them do. So you're getting awareness for your company or whatever your brand is. You're getting top line awareness, top of funnel awareness. You can get backlinks through this and you can also share the email list. All the people who go to the event, you can ask to share that because you're sending members to their event. And wherever you are, you can do this with lots of different events in your niche. And so like even as I'm traveling through Europe, when my program comes out, I'm gonna just do this with my own SEO group and just co host a bunch of SEO and digital marketing events in New York City while I'm in Europe. And I'm just gonna have a virtual assistant run all of it. And all the virtual assistant does is we'll use whatever script message meetup hosts or event hosts be like, hey, we have these members in SEO, we'd love to send them to your event. You down. You don't have to give us any money, but we would like a marketing blurb and share of the email list, whatever. And so you can do this in any niche. And how do you combine this with private equity? First, you could join a bunch of PE meetups or finance. Oh, and then also when you join a meetup, you can also rebrand it. So if it is, if it is like in your niche, but it's not the exact same segment of the niche, you can change it from like the AI Curiosity Meetup to the like the New York City AGI Curiosity Meetup to the New York City Generative AI Meetup. You know, you can just change the name. And so you could take, take over a bunch of. Not take over. You could join a bunch of finance meetups, wait for an organizer to step down, take it over, rebrand it to a private equity meetup, and then do the same strategy with PE events. Or you could just start a PE meetup too, which will be harder and that will be more of a slog. But I think joining a PE meetup is like as what you do. And if you're in the right city, like you want to try to meet people face to face. So go to events if you can. But like, look, if you are co hosting, if you take over one of these events and you are co hosting events in your niche for like a year and your company blurb is going out for a year and you have a really, you have really good marketing language that people are seeing, it's going to help you get Your foot in the door.

All right, if you are watching this clip right now, you are watching this on YouTube. And if you are a fan of podcasts, please check out my podcast while you're at it. Because sometimes I have podcasts that aren't on YouTube and sometimes I have YouTubes that aren't on podcasts. So check out the Kerner office on any podcast platform. Or you can go to tkopod.com also my newsletter will throw that in there. There are no ads, it's weekly. It's different content than my podcast and YouTube newsletter.chrisjkerner.com you'll see the link and we'll see you there. Man, you could do this with anything. Like any high ticket product or anything in finance or tech or I mean, even business owners. Like any business owner meetup just by default, that's more high ticket than average. Like if you're selling marketing services or agency services and it doesn't have to be in your city, it could be worldwide, it could be in a different country.

And every time I'm just like looking at my notes for this at any time. As your meetup grows, you can also message directly all the people in your group too. Because meetup, like right away, once you take over a group, you can just message the members.

That's brilliant.

Sometimes they come up with specific business ideas. Like, for the longest time I was obsessed with Formula one because like, I saw how easy it was to grow as a creator. And I'm like, there are no smart creators addressing the Formula One niche. And there's so much money in F1. So like, it's where like all the billionaires go and hang out at F1 events and then you can take that and you can get into so many different things. You can get into sports, you can get into automobiles. Man, what a great niche to be in F1. And actually if you look at F1 on Google Trends, it's growing in a bunch of countries. I think in the US it's growing and I'm like, man, creators are sleeping on F1. And actually just by talking about this enough, I have like a bunch of F1 creators. And by my, one of my close friends is now like pursuing it hard. And so I've stopped talking about it because now I've finally gotten people to do F1 because it's like, if I had time, I would love to grow in F1 and make videos in F1. And oh, there's this other thing that I believe in. I call it the curious learner bias. Have you heard me talk about this?

I don't think so. All right.

The curious learner bias. I heard I've learned about it first from Sean Puri on my first million, but I don't know if he used this language. But basically, you don't have to be an expert to get all of the opportunities and top of mind awareness in your niche. You just have to be the most passionate about it. And when you are learning, you are never so passionate about something when it is new to you and you are learning about it. And so the theory behind the curious learner bias is pick a niche that you want to get into, learn something about it every day, and make a video about what you learn every day. And just as a learner, you will naturally be more excited. And you are also looking through it through a learner's perspective. And so you don't know all the nuances that are going to make a piece of content like Cloudy with all this extra information that doesn't serve the person who doesn't even know anything about this niche. And just by making content every day about what you are learning in this niche, people will see you as the expert, even though you are just the curious learner. And so you get all of these opportunities. And I'm like, anyone can do this with Formula One. Like, they don't have to know anything about Formula One. My friend who's growing on Formula one right now, he doesn't even have a driver's license. He doesn't even care about Formula One. He literally doesn't have a driver's license. He's never seen a full Formula one race.

Is it faceless? Is it a faceless channel?

No, he's using his face. Good. He's using this face. Yeah. And so the curious learner bias, he's just learning every day about it making. He's. Dude, he is crazy. He just decided to go full time on this. So he's putting up like five videos a day. He has like two editors now.

It's funny because I'm thinking about a guy that a friend I have that's learning cold emailing and email marketing. He's learning all the skills. He's like, all right, I'm gonna take a year. Maybe I'll start an agency. Maybe I'll. Maybe I'll just start a company that grows with cold emails. But he's learning, and I've been helping him, and he's learning, learning, learning. And I thought, based on what you just said, I'm thinking, how interesting would it Be if he just like made a 60 second video every day, like, all right. And maybe what he's saying is super basic. Right. I just learned that subjects really matter. I just, then the next day I just learned that a shorter subject line is better. And like, to people like me and you, it's like, this is so basic. But that doesn't matter because the algorithm is going to find people that are on his level or below it and then they'll watch him like come up and.

No, it's not even that. It'll even be advanced people who want to be reminded of the fundamentals. Actually, when you said like a shorter subject line does better, I'm like, oh yeah, I should make a video about that.

It does. Yeah, yeah. Every time.

It's true. It's basic. It's true, it's basic. And it's, it's like, even experts like to be reminded of the basics. And then by the time he's ready to take on clients, like you said, he will have done all these videos and he'll have an audience.

They're gonna trust him. Yeah. Even if he has an audience of a thousand people, they're gonna. It's a thousand people that trust him implicitly and know exactly what he's about.

Yes, yes. And the crazy thing, and just like, as someone who's very good at SEO and makes a lot of SEO content, I will see people watch my videos, put their spins on my video, not understanding it, and they put out content that's wrong, but they'll have a better hook and their videos will get like hundreds of thousands of views. Whereas like my video got tens of thousands just because they had a better hook on it. And then like people, even if their information is wrong, lots of people don't know and then they get lots of views. And so what I'm trying to say is like, when you are learning about something, Sean Puri said, it's about energy transference. And when you are learning about something, if you transfer good energy and you have a good hook and the subject matter is interesting. I'm not advocating putting out misinformation, but the truth is you might think you know something, you make a video about it, it goes viral, six months later you realize it was wrong, but it still went viral. And people are looking at you as an expert in that. And it's just like, put out, share what you are learning.

The less accurate you are, maybe the greater likelihood of it going viral because nothing goes viral without half of people thinking you're an idiot. Period.

That's kind of true, unfortunately.

You gotta get over it.

I don't delete haters in my comments. I actually, when I get haters, I'm like, great. Like, like, like, it's kind of funny to me. People will leave me such nasty comments on my videos, not realizing that they're making my videos. Get more views. Yeah.

Sometimes I troll them and I, I reply to them and I say, thank you for the engagement. Thank you for doing your part. Thank you.

I've been tempted, I've been tempted to do that. I like, man, sometimes my comments just get so nasty, I can't even look at them.

I know. It gets bad.

It's. It's crazy. Like, why do you want to put so all these people?

I just want to tell them, like, hey, I can, I can see this. I'm here. I can read this. I have feelings.

You're just like, hey, what's wrong? Let's figure this out.

Who hurt you?

Yeah, who hurt you?

So abandoned meetup groups. Love it. I'm really excited about that.

Here's. Okay, here's something else that I wish I had more time for, man. And Chris, it kills me that I don't have time for this because I see Riley Brown, who maybe, you know, he's like the AI influencer. He actually did the same thing he did the curious learner bias. He said when, when ChatGPT came out, he made like a viral ChatGPT video about something he was learning. And he just said, I'm gonna keep learning about this and make videos about what I'm learning. And now he's like the number one viral. Now he's a number one AI influencer. RileyBrown AI. So Riley Brown lately has been putting out really great tutorials on YouTube and X, but especially YouTube, about how to build applications using AI. And if you don't know, you can build pretty basic but monetizable applications using Cursor, Claude and Replit. Cursor is an AI powered code editor. So it like, uses AI to write your code and you basically give it prompts and then it writes your code and it uses CLAUDE to like, improve its functionality and write better code. Claude is just an advanced AI model from Anthropic. And then Replit is a development environment and it like, basically as you generate the code. I haven't done this, so, but like, I've seen this in a bunch of videos and rep, like, and I've researched it a ton and I just, I don't have time to do everything this.

Is one of these things that I.

Wish I had time to do. And then repl it. As you're like making the code, it will actually make previews for you right there. And you can test out the app that you are building and then you can make changes on the phone on the fly. And so like there's a video of some guy using these three tools together. He makes a background removal chrome extension in 20 minutes, 20 minutes he makes a chrome extension to remove a background from anything and put like, put in extra images. You can also use no code apps like Bubble. In fact, Jason Levin, I talked about him recently, he's like huge into meme marketing and he just came out with a SaaS with the software as a service that first it tells you like the hottest memes to use every day in your marketing and then it gives you a tool for how to like put those memes together. But he made that tool in Bubble, which is a no code app, like app editor. First of all, these AI tools are only improving and they are improving at a crazy rate. So if I had more time, I would just spend like the next five weeks going deep on how to use these AI tools. Riley Brown, he has no coding experience and he's making all these applications using these AI tools. Zero coding experience, no development experience. So this is what I would do. I would just unbundle a feature from a big application. Like I've seen that work and I've done that myself with other companies. You just take a feature and you unbundle it and then you make, you can either do. I love SEO. So I would do bottom of funnel search engine optimization, which means creating landing pages for addressing problems that people are trying to solve. So people will have a problem, they google the solution that they are looking for. They know what they want, but they don't know the company that's going to give it to them. They are at the bottom of the funnel. They know exactly what they want. If they see a landing page that tells them exactly their cash in hand. If they see a landing page, it tells them like hey, this is, this is what we made. And it uses a language that they are searching, they're going to convert. And even for me sometimes like actually I needed a solution to embed my Instagram feed on my website and I googled embed Instagram feed on website. That's a bottom of funnel keyword. And I found a company that offered that you could do it for free, but if you did it for free, they would include their logo on the embed. So I paid $60 for an annual plan so that I could have it branded to my website. And I converted right there. I was cash in hand. I just wanted the solution. I was ready to pay because I knew what I wanted. I didn't know the brand that was gonna give it to. I didn't know the brand that was gonna give it to me. And so I would unbundle a feature and then just make mass amounts. I wouldn't use AI to do it. Cause I don't like using AI text. Sometimes it works, but eventually Google catches you, and I've seen that so many times. And I would just write bottom of funnel SEO landing pages. They could be like anywhere from 400 to 600 words and you can reuse sections. And I would just do bottom of funnel SEO for this unbundled tool that I built in like two days with AI. And then as I had more people reaching out, wanting to use it, eventually what happens is people tell you what features and functionality they want, and then you build it listening to what your customers and what your users are saying. And then it gets better. And as you have in these, as you build this SEO funnel, now you have more daily users to play with and you can figure out different growth hacks to actually build into the tool. And I would just do that with AI and the whole time also getting better at building with AI. So that's something that I would use my time with. Man, I wish I had time to do that because like, I'm a builder, I like to build, but it's like I can't do everything.

A lot of thoughts running through my head. So first of all, just the fact that anyone's gonna be able to build basically anything here soon, if not already, is going to make marketing so much more valuable and important. And distribution, which I'm so grateful for because I'm just this degenerate marketer and I don't know how to code. So marketing skills are gonna be in high demand, I believe.

Yes, yes.

I'm thinking, how many, how many background removal Chrome extensions are there? Endless, right? Endless.

Yeah.

He who can distribute it the best will win. So there's a thought. The second thought is I just tweeted about this idea where it would be like a zoom app or a zoom plugin called Stop Talking, where if you're on a sales call and there's a meter on the screen that shows the salesperson only how much they're talking as a percentage versus the other person, and it's just Like a little tool to make sure that they're doing more listening than talking. And I tweeted about it and a few people were like, oh, this app called Fathom already does that. And I look up Fathom and Fathom has like a zillion features, and that's one of them. And it works really well. And so it's like, okay, great, they validated the market. Let's unbundle that now. That doesn't scare me away. In fact, that's quite good. Right? And then I was thinking as you were talking is what frameworks could you use to find those features that are prime time for unbundling? And what if you went to Capterra and you just scraped, like, you took a software, like a massive software like HubSpot or something, or a Pipedrive, and you scrape all of the reviews, you run them in chat GPT and tell me, like, what features do people really love, like, obsess over? Because a lot of these softwares are, you know, $200 a month, and they have this one off feature that everyone uses it for. They're not using it for the CRM, they're using it for this one little widget. And so what is that one little thing that you could peel off? There's got to be a systematic way of finding those things to unbundle.

You know, the thing is, though, like, I actually don't even think it. Like, that's a great idea, but I don't even think it matters much because I'm so big with like. Like I've talked about now before, like, just sticking with something and developing it and growing it, that I think, like, anything can be grown into something huge as long as the right marketers and, like, right. Operators are behind it.

You'd rather have a bigger tidal wave than a smaller. Right?

Yeah, for sure. For sure. That's a really good idea. I didn't even thought. I didn't even think of that. So, yeah, like, what. What would be a good system for finding the best idea to start with? And yeah, seeing a feature that everyone in, like, HubSpot uses, that makes a lot of sense. That's really cool.

I mean, HubSpot's obvious, it's a $20 billion company, but any random tool that has more than one feature, you could do this with. You know, I think a lot of times companies, feature creep happens and they release all these little features and they think that certain ones are going to be the best, the most in demand. And. And then that one off thing that took an Hour to develop is what everyone actually pays $20 a month for. And I'm very interested in peeling that one off.

You want to hear a story?

Yeah.

So there's this website, it's called stagetimer IO Beautiful web app. It is literally just a timer app, but it's beautiful, looks nice. It can be used in a variety of ways. The. The guy who makes it, this guy Lucas, he's an indie hacker, really cares about making it just cool. He even has like up. He has a notion. I thought it was trello, but it's notion. And it's just like features that I decided not to work on, features that I've completed, features that are upcoming, features that I'm currently working on. So he shows what's coming. He cares about this thing. When you look at the footer, you can tell he cares about it. But at the end of the day, it's a freaking online time wrap. Literally you can Google like 3 minute timer and Google will make that timer for you.

And that's how I use timers.

I use Siri. I say, I tell, I say, hey, Siri. Timer, five hours. Siri actually just did it right now. But there's all these other online time wraps. There's one website, it's called onlinetimer.com there's all these online time wraps. And if you actually go to the middle of his page, he created all of these bottom of funnel SEO landing pages and it says online timer for.

Esports, online studios, education, gyms.

And dude, he has tens of thousands of dollars Mrr. From the strategy.

So many lessons to be learned here. But to me it's just like this guy goes to a meetup and tells his friend about what he's building and they're like, are you kidding me? Everyone does that for free. Why would you build that? And it just doesn't matter. It doesn't matter, right? Like Google Calendar came out with a calendly. Killer calendly. They're going to be fine. They have different.

So you still use calendly?

Yeah, they don't want to switch. People are embedded with it. They don't want to switch. There's like, they're still growing. Like there's so much room out there for everyone, for every.

That's it. That's it. Yeah. People like, I can't stand it when people think that the pie is small because the pie is huge.

Yeah, the pie was small before the Internet. I agree. But now there's, you know, you could sell to 8 billion people.

Yeah, these people Search and you can take this SEO strategy. You can do it in a bunch of different languages and English is the most competitive language too. So you can literally just do it in a bunch of like.

That's a good point.

Bottom of funnel SEO. Like, okay, so that's what my product is about. I was gonna say my product. Compactkeywords.com if you want to learn about all, you want to learn all about bottom funnel SEO. Literally the landing page is designed not to be a sales page, but to be an educational page about what bottom of funnel SEO is. You might understand it right away and you don't even need to get the program. But yeah, bottom funnel SEO is the best SEO. And every niche works in every niche. In every niche there are people who want something but they don't know the brand that is going to give it to them and they are going to Google trying to figure that out. And these keywords, the thing about these keywords, top of funnel SEO is competitive right now. The SEO world was like flipped on its head because Google decided to give all the top of funnel queries. What is, how is like how does a microphone work? Who was Abraham linking Mary to? Why did he get shot? All those things like recipes, a lot of these keywords, these top of funnel keywords that don't have any transaction intent behind them, these went to Reddit and to Quora and to other user generated content sites. And the reason for this is because lots of webmasters were loading their websites with AI generated gibberish and just bs. And Google is like, okay, we can't trust websites anymore. But Reddit like has this voting system and this commenting system and same with Quora. And it makes us a lot more likely to actually like source good information for the users of Google. So Google was like, Reddit has all of this and makes it all a lot more likely. And so now Google is prioritizing user generated content in search. In fact, Reddit last year ranked like 70 to 80 in terms of like market share for clicks on Google and now it's number three. It is the third most visited site from Google on the Internet. It's like the third most clicks. Yeah. And because Google is sending like all this traffic to Reddit now because it's prioritizing user generated content, it's so crazy that people are even putting in their own forums on their websites because Google likes user generated content. It's the same thing. This is something that I wanted to talk about. YouTube shorts, really easy to rank on Google for keywords using YouTube shorts. Take your keyword and actually top of funnel keywords work with YouTube shorts because YouTube shorts are user generated content and it has some sort of like voting mechanism which, which Google wants to see. And it has comments, it has, has thumbs up and, and thumbs down. Take your keyword, like the thing that people search into Google, that's a keyword. Take that, put it at the beginning of your YouTube short in the title and at the beginning of the description. Take whatever the transcript is for your YouTube short and then make that also the description for it. And now you can rank for keywords in like literally a day, which I do every week with YouTube shorts. You can rank for keywords in a day with YouTube shorts. Actually what you can do is like let's say you have a brand and you're trying to figure out how to get customers to it and you have a bunch of competitors. Just do this, here's your keyword competitor plus the word alternative, competitor plus alternative. And you just pump out a bunch of YouTube shorts about like how your, how your brand is an alternative to all these different competitors. And then these YouTube shorts rank for these keywords.

Yeah. And people think to do that with blog articles but not with YouTube shorts.

Yeah, exactly. And it actually also works really well with blog content, but it's more competitive just because written content is more competitive and Google is so highly prioritizing user generated content right now.

Yeah, man. All right, you brought the heat, Edward. Thank you.

I have a crazy list of things.

I know I usually go to like 40 minutes. So this has been good. This has been packed with meat and value. So where can everyone find you?

Edward builds on Instagram and I am. If you use TikTok instead, I am buildin public, I'm buildinpublic on YouTube as well. If you wanna learn about bottom of funnel SEO. If you don't know about anything about SEO, I have an article. It's a free article. You don't need to give it your email to get it. It's just edwardsturm.com articles. You can also Google Pareto SEO, Edward Sturm and and it is the 20% of things that you have to do in SEO to get 80% of the results because so many digital marketers and SEO will give you bs like focus on schema markup or use Google page speed insights or use this code.

Okay, perfect.

Well, yeah. Thank you.

Thanks man.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah. Gotta have you back, dude.

My voice is going hoarse. This was fun.

All right, well thanks man. I appreciate your time.

Thank you. All right.

See ya. All right. Thanks for joining us. Please share this with a friend. We'll have Edward on again soon.