Unleashing the Power of AI in Content Creation with Ramon Berrios

We were solving our own operations. We were paying agencies thousands of dollars to create LinkedIn stuff, to create tweets, and essentially to repurpose the audio of the podcast into marketing collateral. And so, you know, my company got acquired at the time Lane, who is my co host of DTC Pod, he was also a founder. And so naturally we built a product to solve our own problem then. And so Blaine said, let me just try it out and start selling it out to other people. And that worked.

All right. It is Q1 of 2024. That means new goals, more growth and upgrading your day to day workflow. That's why I want to talk to you today about the HubSpot Sales Hub. This thing is basically an all in one platform to help you get out of that muck of scheduling everything, manually digging through data, tracking down leads, probably not following up with things. Sales Hub will flip everything on its head. This thing's an easy to use suite of powerful tools. It's gonna help you convert contacts into customers quicker, accelerate sales with smart sequences, manage deals with simple and powerful tools, and help you forecast a lot smarter. It actually uses this new AI powered app called Chat Spot. Combines ChatGPT with HubSpot Smart CRM. Basically, you can ask this thing to create more revenue for you and deliver it as well. So you can ask it to track down contacts, competitors, summarize sales, and actually draft emails for you. So now's the time to close more deals and get on track. Make Q1 your best yet. Explore the new HubSpot Sales Hub and AI tools like Chat Spot at HubSpot.com sales hey, what's happening, Joe Fear here? Another episode where we're going to dive into specifically, this one is the most asked about tool I get often. And you know, how do you save so much time cranking out a lot of content? How do you, how do you keep your team synced up in, in writing in kind of a similar voice or at least keeping the messaging kind of consistent? How do you show up on all the platforms? We're on all the different social media platforms. Podcast is cranking out two times a week. There's emails, there's other, other types of content we're spinning out for partners and things. Well, there's a single tool that I use that we use collectively as a team to save us probably a good 20 hours a week. And it's not only our podcast, but other clients and partners we work with. This is the tool that I make everyone get and then everyone quickly thanks us. And it's called Cast Magic. You may or may not have heard of it. I highly recommend you if you're creating any form of content or even if you're thinking about it, even if you're just doing zoom calls, this can be a way to now take a zoom call. Maybe you're doing with a friend, a client, a business partner, and you're just talking about things. Well, you can actually turn that into content. And this is why I brought the co founder of CastMagic onto this show. His name is Ramon Barrios. He's also a podcaster himself. He's also on the HubSpot Podcast network. He'll tell you about it and he's going to break down why and how they made castmagic From a business side. You're gonna learn a lot of cool stuff because they're growing this like crazy. They bootstrapped it. But also how you can now take this tool, basically upload your content one time, audio, video, whatever. And now it spits out all these different forms of content you can use everywhere. I'm gonna leave it at that and just say that I also arranged a sweet deal with Ramon to give you one month free on the hobby plan of castmagic. So. So make sure to pause this really quick. Save this in your browser, go to hustleandflowchart.com castmagic that's C A S T M A g I c. So hustleandflowchart.com castmagic and once you go through and select the hobby plan, you'll be able to see a promo code that you can enter. Put in hustle 100.

That's.

That's hustle 100. Go to that link and that's gonna score you one month free of the hobby plan. So you can then be actionable with what you're about to learn from Ramon. This is the man. He gives you a ton of workflows. I'm also going to create a video that walks through a lot more visually of what we talked about, but also some other ways that we use castmagic for the Hustle and flowchart podcast and other partners of ours as well. So check that link out in the show notes or in the description. Wherever you're watching this thing, you're going to love it. You're going to enjoy this interview. Let's go. Ramon, I'm stoked that you made some time here with me today again, because I got to thank you. You showed up live at this Mastermind I held at PodFest in Orlando a couple weeks Back or so it was probably like a month, but either way, you rocked it, man. Everybody was stoked. Cast Magic as a tool. I mean, I'm just going to say it right now. Everybody who has a business, who creates content, get Cast Magic. You're wasting your time and your money if you don't use it. Like, swear to God, saving my team and everybody around me, like, at least 10 to 20 hours a week if you're actually, you know, using the thing and pumping out content. Not to just start off with like a pitch to Cast Magic, but, like, literally, it's like, it's my favorite tool. And I know you have like a little coupon code, that's all, so we'll. We'll shout that out too.

Fuck it.

I'll just say it right now. CastMagic IO sign up and then like, use hustle 100. You get a. A month free there. So appreciate you for doing that, but.

Dude, yeah, no, for sure. Thank you for having me. The mastermind was awesome. Being able to share all this is awesome. You know, I think it's an interesting point in time where AI is just really not. Not, you know, disrupting isn't necessarily the right word, but augmenting all things that previously were impossible. And it's just top of mind for anyone who creates content. So always, always glad to be able to answer questions around it in terms of where things are going, etc. But, you know, you've been such a great advocate for us as well. We, you know, you're in our Slack community. We've been chatting since day one, back and forth, one on one. We do our best to stay as close as possible to. To the people that are actually, you know, turning their content into their business.

That's it, man. And that's kind of the big idea that I have whenever I. I think a Cast Magic and, and your community too. It's like it's extending the. The expression whatever content we're putting out there as a business. You know, there's. There's a. We want to connect with as many people as possible that connect with that message. Cast Magic is the way that. To expand, you know, like the. The whole brand community, sales leads, and, and there's like, very specific ways that you could do that with the tool. And I know, like, I want to get back into your background just super briefly before we cut into some of the specific use cases, but, like, you have DTC Pod, which is a podcast that you've had for a while. It's on HubSpot as well. And you've done some other startups. So like give me like the quick and dirty of like what got you to this point and maybe some of the struggles you've, you've had with content as you're growing it.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, we have DTC Pod which is a podcast I started about four years ago. Over 300 episodes there. I think that's how CastMagic was born and just, you know, solving our own problem and us being customer number one besides Cast. Besides uploading. Sorry. Besides DTC Pod, we have Uploading, which is now a new podcast on all things content and just proving, you know, dogfooding our own product and proving that the reason AI is so beneficial, it's not because it, you know, not only does it save time, but it allows you to create more output. And so that's why we started another podcast over there. But yeah, DTCpod was started previous with my previous startup Trend IO, which was a content creator, UGC Network. That business got acquired by a company called Suna. In the, in the con, in the photography and content creation space, it was a marketplace. And you know, I've always been in the content space. I grew up in Puerto Rico, grew up with, my father is an entrepreneur, owns a hardware. So I grew up since I was a kid selling inside a store, selling screws, going to homes, you know, sneaking into development projects and trying to sell hardware stuff as like a 15 year old sneaking into hotels. So it's always been in, in sort of my DNA. But content, you know, I never expected the path to go down the route of content and it did because I, I, you know, I always surfed in Puerto Rico. I was shooting content while doing that, started selling that content to W hotels, Four Seasons and that led into building a content creator marketplace which was Trend. And then, you know, big. I think the biggest challenges were growing a business. Initially when I moved from Puerto Rico to United States, I moved at 23 years old when I started Trend. And the biggest challenges was just not having a network, like not having a network to attract any talent, any, any fundraising that we needed for Trend. You know, Cast Magic is a bootstrap business, but you need, you need a network, you need to know people, you need to be able to attract and recruit. I mean at the end of the day you need to sell your network on your mission. And that was the hardest part. And that's what the podcast helped with the most. DTC Pod. That's how we sort of overcame and built a network.

And you're speaking the power of a podcast. And like, you can literally engineer your networking for you through a podcast. And it doesn't have to be a massive one, just. But if you're focused on a specific audience, and I love the fact that the need was bred, like castmagic was bred through, I'm sure, what the expansion of the podcast. Right. Like, were there specific things you were trying to do?

You know what's funny, by the way, one note to what you mentioned, that the podcast can help expand your network. All you need to do is get one degree closer to the people you're trying to get to. And like, the people that you have as guests on your podcast might not be the person, but that person is 2 degrees closer, 1 degree closer. And so that's how this whole thing works. So. But yeah, that is how we ended up with Cast Magic. So we were solving our own operations. We were paying agencies thousands of dollars to create LinkedIn stuff, to create tweets, and essentially to repurpose the audio of the podcast into marketing collateral. And so, you know, my company got acquired at the time. Blaine, who is my co host of DTC Pod, he was also a founder. And so naturally we built a product to solve our own problem. And so Blaine said, let me just try it out and start selling it out to other people. And that worked. You know, it really hit a nerve in the podcasting space. And, you know, from there it expanded into a bunch of other use cases that we can get into. But yeah, that was our goal, was to solve our own challenge of. Of turning this audio long form and be able to repurpose it to create that content. Flywheel.

Yeah, man. And I'm on. I'm on your X page, your Twitter page. And I know you've told this to me like privately, but I see it, it's public here, so I'm just gonna mention it.

Yeah, go for it.

I mean, you said you bootstrap, but like now at least your bio right now. And update me if I'm wrong. 100k mrr. So monthly recurring revenue in just 9 months with castmagic with over 30,000 creators using the tool right now. What, within a year? Ish. Something like that?

Yeah. Less. Yeah. So we actually crossed 40,000 now. So 40,000 users. The MRR has grown since. Since that was written. But yeah, I mean, we didn't expect it to be as big as it has been.

Right timing, right. Just, you know, I think what really helped a lot as well was have us, you know, we weren't the most connected in the podcasting space. But by having a podcast, I think a lot of trust was established early on that, like, hey, this isn't just some people trying to capitalize on the AI wave. These are people that actually solve their own problem. And then after that, the community has been the biggest contributor to what we've done there. You know, Blaine and Greg, they do an amazing job on all things community. Not my strongest suit, but definitely a very strong skill that they have. And we've really been able to ride the wave. Our slack has over 1300 members in it and people are really active. You know, we're drinking feedback from the firehose every day because there's so many people there sharing so much, which is great. But yeah, I think it's been awesome.

It is, man. And yeah, join the Slack community if you're. If you're using Cast Magic or even if you're not, like, dip into there and just try it and then you'll quickly want to. Yeah. And Greg, I got to give a shout out to Greg. He's been on the podcast, but last year and just. He rocks it. So, yeah, everything community. Greg's the man for sure. Yeah, yeah. So remote. Like, talk about. Let's talk about like some. Some hustles. So, like, the actionable stuff that you can do, I'm thinking use cases for Cast Magic, since I'm just going to remind people, like, you could try it out for a month for free. This ain't a sponsored episode or any of that stuff. I'm like, legitimately, I'm like, I just love talking about the stuff I use. So castmagic IO and then use the code hustle100.

Yep, you'll see it in there on the sign up. You just use. Make sure you use that code. But yeah, in terms of use cases, we're still. I mean, we get surprised every day by use cases we see. Because Cast Magic is very customizable in the sense that you can edit the prom. We show you what are the prompts we're using to get these outputs and we allow you to edit those. So really, at the end of the day, it's just to turn any conversation, video, media, file, audio into whatever outputs you're looking to extract from that. And in simpler terms, you know, one of our thesis is most people who are trying to create content think, well, I have to start a podcast or now I need to start a YouTube and I need to do this whole thing for content. No, the content. Every single interaction and conversation you have is content. Just need to find a way to be able to leverage that and extract the insights from those conversations. And that's what castmagic does. And so there's many Personas that we see using this type of stuff, all the way from podcasters to churches to marketers, and then all the way to individual professionals. You know, creating content is one of the best ways for a professional to go from professional to thought leader.

And.

And so, yeah, the. I can speak to specific use cases if you'd like.

Sure, yeah. Because a bunch of listeners here have podcasts. They're creating media on YouTube. There's a lot of coaches and experts, which I know. Like Cast Magic, you could use it for, like, a coaching call. And then now, like, you could throw that in there and, like, you can create a whole course out of it or a landing page, a lead magnet. So, yeah, maybe. Maybe on the podcast front, it's, you know, a couple good ones. And then maybe for the coaches out there, too.

Let me. Yeah, let's start out with the coaches. 1. We've seen courses get created out of podcasts. So Cast Magic allows you to sync your entire RSS feed. So it makes it super easy to find all of your assets. You don't need to upload, you know, you don't need to go back and upload every single podcast that you've published. That's if we're talking about post production. Right. Like this is. That's where stuff that's already been generated and you want to repurpose that into other assets. And then we have pre production, which helps you prepare upcoming. That's more for podcasting. Pre production before you publish it. I didn't buy that.

Pre production.

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah. So in terms of courses we've seen, we have a feature called Pages. So Pages allows you to upload multiple media files to extract a specific insight or create new content out of it. So one of the use cases we've seen there. And you can use this for the podcast as well, it applies to any. You can create a playbook on a specific topic, and it'll source each person that said something about that topic within five different media files that each might be an hour long. And so if you have a course and you want to, you know, create a sub course out of a broader topic and narrow it down, you can literally create. Turn your course into another course that is more niche based on specific keywords. If you upload all of the content from your existing course, again, all the.

Content we're sitting on can just be Rearranged in all these other ways. It's just like literally endless. It's just however you want to create it.

Yeah, for sure. In term. Let's see what our coaching calls. So extracting insights from coaching calls and then using that to come up with like a. Come up with like an index for an upcoming course you want to do. Come up with FAQ of what is it that people are asking in your coaching calls and give you ideas for upcoming courses. The use cases there are pretty much endless.

Hey, I just want to pause this episode really fast and shout out a podcast that's Also on the HubSpot podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals. This one's a podcast that's hosted by someone I followed for years. The name is Donald Miller. Is the whole story, brand, book and all the different stuff online. He hosts the podcast called Business Made Simple. The premise is to basically take the mystery out of growing your business. And, and he recently had on. One of the other guys I follow is Alex Hermosi. And right at the beginning of the year, they're talking about facing uncertainty in your business. And Alex and Donald, they talk about different ways, four different ways to basically shore up your business, to ride the uncertain times that inherently are the ones that we're living in in 2024. So make sure to go check that out. Go listen to Business Made simple, that episode with Alex Hormozi, but also the other ones. Wherever you get your podcast, if you're looking to unlock some more income and time freedom, then I want to tell you about Kartra. It's the ultimate all in one business platform for online success. Now with Kartra, you can create stunning pages and funnels, you can automate your marketing, launch online courses and a bunch more all in one place for one affordable price. Now Kartra has every, every tool you need to scale. It's super easy to use. And right now you can snag a free 30 day trial plus a 20% discount on your first payment when you use this URL. It's www.hustleandflowchart.com Kartra Again, that is hustleandflowchart.com K A, R T R A. All right, so on the, on the podcast front, are people creating media media? Let's go there. Because you mentioned now there's pre production, which I'm not even using it for pre production. I'm just like still focused on the post production side. But I know like, yeah, things are coming out all the time that I'm not even aware of. So I guess, yeah, walk me through this.

Yeah, so for pre production, what I mean, there is, you can use castmagic in order to sort of clean up your transcript and clean up your, your audio. You can't clean up the audio internally, but you can clean up the transcript. And then what you can do as well is extract the show notes, the titles, the keywords, which helps a ton with SEO. So every podcast we record, we push it through Cast Magic before publishing it. And so that way we add as many keywords as possible to the description, which, you know, helps us be a lot more exposed when it comes to SEO. On podcast native platforms like Spotify, Apple, et cetera, we go back and forth in terms of titles. And when I say we go back and forth, I mean that, you know, CastMagic will suggest, say, like 10 titles. And then we interact with MagicChat to try and like, narrow it down further and further. And then we have multiple team members. So Cast Magic allows for multiple team members. So our production people are in there. Our, our operations person that uploads a podcast is in there. And so I'll add some notes and push it for approval with this title and then the newsletter as well. So we'll draft up the newsletter and some of these settings are, you know, our collaboration features are not fully completed yet, but you can hack around it and they'll be completed in the near future. That's where we're going. But. But I mean, we literally prepare. Like, I just sat down yesterday and I think I put together the three upcoming months of DTC POD in an hour. I just pre prepared the newsletters, everything, so I don't have to worry about anything other than recording.

All right, so walk me through just like, very briefly that workflow, because that, that's sparking me in my mind. I'm a big proponent of batch recording. Batch doing everything, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Getting ahead of it, man.

Yeah. Like, you know, one of the most annoying things as a podcaster is being pinged last minute, hey, I forgot the title. And like, you're in between calls, you're driving, you're like coming up with a title and, and messaging a title. The title is so crucial. SEO is so important. Not only SEO, but when, when you pick a title, people get a notification from their RSS or their Apple podcast or Spotify, and, you know, that's the hook. So I wanted to make sure we could be able to put enough time. I want to carve out a creative time of my day in order to come up with all the titles. And so what we do is we pre record a bunch of episodes and then we say, okay, let's upload them all into Castmagic. Castmagic will give me 10 title suggestions for each one. I'm playing with the transcript there, I'm listening and I'm just choosing the titles and rewriting them. And so I batch those out and then I do the same with the newsletter where we turn the podcast into a newsletter and then, you know, we add key takeaways. You know, we've, we've made our newsletter, we've switched our newsletter around a few times. We used to do industry news, etc. We just brought it back to the simplicity of just summarizing what the podcast was about, because industry news, so many newsletters have so many industry news, at the end of the day they're subscribing to learn more about the content you're making.

Yeah, and that's, it's the perfect extension of like you said, if you could batch record the core piece of content and then upload it, then you could start getting super creative. And yeah, you said you have pages so you could do like long form blog posts, combine it around a theme, create a book like a lead magnet around a topic.

So DTC Pod, you know, we interview e commerce brands. Let's say we talk a lot about TikTok marketing. So we'll input five episodes on TikTok and say ask pages, hey, create a 3,000 word playbook on how to go from zero to one with TikTok shop. And so then it'll source every guest we've had and then you can use that as an ad for Legion to get those people into use your newsletter and turn. You could even ask Cast Magic to write the landing page copy for the Playbook. But one of my most recent, you know, sort of novel ways of using Cast Magic that I've been the most excited about has been for preparing for future podcasts. So, you know, we're heavy on SEO. We do a lot of content. So you can actually.

You know how I mentioned earlier the title is so important you can reverse engineer to decide who do you want to have as a guest and what top topics you want to cover based on what articles and pieces you want to write for SEO. So if I know that my keywords for the upcoming quarter on SEO are these based on search volume and this is what I want to target, well now who can we have as a guest for each topic? And then let's Drive the conversation around that and publish that with the YouTube embed. Because now it's AI making the content, but it's your context. You know, it's so different than asking something like Jasper or ChatGPT to write a 3,000 word article. This can't get penalized. This literally comes from the context of your media. And not only that, it's now attached to a thought leader or a key influence person. So it's really good for Google. So that's, that's one way we're using it as well.

I dig it. Wait, so like just so my brain is, is clear, so you have a whole bunch of your own recorded content? Of course. And that's, that's left loaded into castmagic so you can mess about transcripts and combine stuff. How do you add in? Or like, what's the process of finding someone else? Like, obviously you have your keywords, so.

You use your SEO tool. CastMagic is not an SEO tool. We're an operations and workflow platform. But let's say you use Ahrefs, Semrush, any of these tools and you know, for these 10 topics, there's the most keyword search volume. This is what I'm going to target. Okay. One of them happens to be on B2B content. Let's just assume B2B content mastery is the keyword we're going after. And so I as castmagic user say, all right, well here's my keywords actually, who is the best person I know a B2B content. Or we could get to talk about this topic. It's Joe. Let's hit up Joe. Okay, let's Joe for this one, Mary for this one. And these are the ideal people to have for each of the topics. Now let's go and hit up Joe and get all these recorded. And then once you have all those recorded, you go into castmagic, you put all those audio files into Cast Magic, you generate the 3000 long word blog posts, you publish it, you include the video, the embed, etc on your page. So what CastMagic is helping with is, you know, organizing all the audio files and turning them into the actual content that has your context.

That makes a lot of sense. Okay. And you just made, let's see, I think it's called Speak Pipe. Yeah. So have you ever used Speak Pipe before?

No.

So check that out because you can, with the strategy you're talking about is you can essentially like come up with these names and maybe get like a gang of like 10 people and like Collaborate around a specific topic. And then you could use speak pipe to have them capture the audio on their own terms. Like you don't even have to record.

Oh, that's cool.

You know what I mean? And then upload that into castmagic. So now you have all that stuff in one spot and then you can generate your bigger episode content, whatever it is.

I mean, look, an example of that could be ask the same question to 20 different people and then turn that into an article. So 20 different thought leaders opinions on this specific topic. And so Cast Magic pages will help you distill that. I mean, voice at the end of the day is data. All we're doing is trying to process that data and trying to extract the key nuggets that sit within that data.

Bingo. Yeah. Cool, man. All right, sweet. That's a, that's a perfect framework. Thanks for sharing. And I'm going to swipe it and anyone can. That's the thing like, and you talk about you don't even need much of an audience, but now you can start, if you have a podcast, you can start connecting with all these different people, featuring them and then boom, you start to have this network that shares around, you know. Yeah. So, all right, when someone gets in there, are there any best practices to start with just as like the onboarding? Because I know there's a lot to it, you know.

Yeah. I mean one of my favorite features to use if it's your first time using CastMagic is to upload a YouTube URL. That is just the easiest way to, for you to not have to think of what file to use. Etc, you know, you get a free month, so don't stress about which file. And at the end of the day, you know what you want to do is just get familiar with it. And so uploading either syncing your RSS or uploading a YouTube link, literally you just copy paste the link in there and it'll process it all.

And so those are the two easiest ways. RSS super easy as well. The other thing I recommend is it doesn't have to be your own media file. I use Castlegic every single day for other people's media. And the reason I use it is because in my Twitter I have, for example, I have a bunch of drafted tweets that are just half baked thoughts. And then as I consume content, I tie it to an idea I had or a concept I had in my head. I just didn't know how to structure it. And so then I'll run someone else's podcast that I'm like, oh, that's like very well explained. This thing that, you know, I had thought about xyz and so then I use Cast Magic and say, knowing what you know about X and adding this complete, like a tweet thread or whatever. So my whole point there is you don't need to use it. If you don't have a podcast, if you don't have any content, any media, that's totally fine. You can leverage. I mean, at the end of the day, a lot of the content game is just repackaging, right? It's all original ideas and thesis that get repackaged. Especially the iOS app.

Oh, yeah, the iOS app is pretty good.

Yeah.

All right.

Yeah. So when you log in, you can scan with your phone to get the castmatic iOS app, which is a point of capture. And so what that allows you to do is it's like I remember. You remember back in the day, like Shazam. Where you would just like tap it. Yeah, exactly. So this is the, the Shazam for capturing your voice. Or all you have to do is just tap once, talk into it, ramble your thoughts, go for a walk, clear your head. I do it when I'm driving, just, you know, and. And then I get home and my entire tweet threat library is filled up because it syncs instantly and so it just distills your thoughts and structures them.

Dude, I love it and I love to ramble and you're like, exactly on a walk. Like when you're away from all the other distractions, all the thoughts come in, so you might as well capture them. You got, you got your phone, you always got it, so. And now it can actually make you look coherent and you know, and then you can go home and be like, boom, I'm ready to post a whole thread that would have taken an hour otherwise, you know, so there you go, man. All right, Ramon, let's cut it off there. I'm sure we'll do another round sometime because you guys keep pumping out new features. I didn't even cover half of them that I wanted to talk about. And it's all good, so appreciate you, man, so much. And keep doing what you're doing. Any other shout outs where you want people to follow you along or anything else before we.

Yeah, I mean, we're pretty. We're. We're on LinkedIn. We're on Twitter, Cast Magic. Find us on LinkedIn @CastMagic. I myself, I'm pretty active on Twitter. Ramon G. Barrios. And then ramon barrios on LinkedIn if you have any content workflows that you're still trying to figure out, feel free to reach out to me. I love jumping on with people and trying to figure out their workflow and how to optimize it. So yeah, all right.

Appreciate you so much, man. Have a good one.

You too.

Sa.