The Final Episode: What We Learned Building STR Daily and What’s Next for AI in Hospitality

Okay, welcome back to the final ever STR Daily podcast. So this is going to be an in person one and I wanted to show you what we have been or I've been experimenting with in the last year of Boostly. So what I did is I created a, an AI podcast, a daily AI podcast called the STR Daily. It was solely created and solely produced and put together with the help of AI. And the goal of it was to create a daily news source for the world of short term rentals that would go out every day. I created it selfishly because I love daily podcasts that are under about five minutes. There's a one that SKIFT do that is driven by AI and again, it just gives me daily things that are happening. I wanted to create one that was just around the world of short term rentals and more for a selfish reason. I can listen to it in less than five minutes and just get a update of what is, what is going on. And I thought, well, while I'm creating it, why not document what we're doing as well? And this is the last ever edition of the STI Daily. I've done it for a year. We're closed in on 365 episodes. It's at 36,000 downloads over on Spotify, as you can see here on the screen. And we also created a YouTube channel as well. The views are just see views over the course of all time hitting 5,000. So it's had a lot of views, it's had a lot of traction, but I'm going to be shutting it down because it hasn't generated any revenue. It wasn't there to generate revenue. This is more of a summit I wanted to experiment with, but I wanted to document it and I want to show you all it on how easy it is to put together an AI podcast. So, so what did we do and why did we do it and how did we do it? Well, first and foremost, what I would do every single day and this just took three minutes to do is for the first month I did this and after the first month I showed a member of our team how to do it. So what I would do is I would go onto the SKIFT publication, so the Skift website, which is a fantastic source of information. And, and I then would go and find. I tell you what, actually what I did do is I basically went on my AI and I said, right, find me the best article of the last 24 hours on Skift. So I basically copied all of that and then what I did is I went on to another one, which is called Focus Wire, another really cool publication that I love. And I've basically grabbed the whole of his homepage and said, pick me out one article solely about short term rentals. And then what I did is I went on to perplexity and I just said, right, from the last 24 hours from the worlds of short term rentals, get me the best article. So I got three different sources, came into ChatGPT and we created a GPT special GPT bot that we then put all of the articles into it and said, right, I want for you to put this now into a daily podcast episode. And we gave it the framework. So the framework was always the same. If you've listened to it, you will know, but it always starts off the same and. And it ends the same. And we just said, right, then fill in the gaps with the articles. And we did that. It honestly took me 10 minutes to put together. So the AI would put together the script and I said, I want it to be a standard script that you could just read like an AI reader would read. Then we took it and this is an example of one here. So the actual episode is no more than three minutes. Everyone was like three to four minutes max. You know, if, if there was a lot happening, then what we did is we put it into eleven's lab. So eleven's lab IO it was, I think it's about. You can get away with the free version, but because we're doing it daily, I had to upgrade because as you can see here, you can use certain amount and then the billing, the subscription was 22amonth, so first cost 22amonth. We went into voices and what we did is we paste in the script, have a quick read over it, make sure it all makes sense. Like I said, the first bit here was always the same. Welcome back to the STR Daily Podcast powered by boostly your go to source for the latest news and insights. I wanted to put Boostly in there because then people think, oh, what's Boostly? If you're coming across this podcast for the first time, you'd be like, well, who's Boostly? Go and do a Google search. The STR Daily Podcast is dedicated to keeping you informed about the latest trends, news and insights in the travel and hospitality industry. We aim to provide valuable information to help you stay ahead in this dynamic industry that always stayed the same. Then it went into the news. So one, two, maximum three articles and then it ends with that's all today, the episode of the SDR Daily podcast powered by Boostly. Make sure you check out the Boostly website if you need help outsourcing your bookings. If you'd like a shout out on the podcast, leave a review. We love hearing from our audience and our reviews help us improve the content too. Please make sure to share this podcast with your friends and peers. Yada yada yada. And remember, book direct. That was the same. Then we picked a voice. Now the biggest mistake that I made at the start was I tried to clone my voice. You can see here. I don't know if you'll be able to hear it. Life is what happens while you didn't work, didn't sound like me, didn't work. So what I wanted to do is I wanted to go back and I wanted to pick a nice voice as we are liberated from our I don't know if you can hear that on the live stream, but on the recording you will do. It was this old American sort of newsreader sounding accent that worked really well. At the same time as me starting this podcast Perplexity were doing their daily podcast and they had a very similar sounding voice and I loved it. So that's why we picked Bill and the in the show notes you'll see that we call him Bob and Bob would be there for pretty much 360 episodes. For the first five I tried my voice. It didn't work work. So that would then put together the audio and we would just download the MP3. We would go on to Spotify and then we would upload it here. So when you create the episode and you upload it, we obviously then used AI to then create the text that would go with the with with the audio that we upload. And then when you upload it on here, it then sends it off to Apple Podcasts, obviously Spotify and everywhere else. So instantly we're getting a bit of SEO boost because it boosted was mentioned every day for pretty much a year now when I launched this I mentioned it briefly in a couple of emails and a couple of whatsapps to Boostly peoples and that's obviously gained a bit of traction. But since then all of the players have just come organically and people finding it. When you start doing it, a lot people do discover it. Now we didn't just stop there what we did as well then we took the script and we took the audio and we went to heygen so heygen.com and we created the video to go alongside it. Now again, the first mistake we made is I tried to basically do this as me didn't work, didn't look right. People noticed. Then we started to use these actors and again this was just a bit of fun to part of it. The, the, the subscription is about $30 a month. We were using the $24 a month. So the cost at the moment is just under $50. Spotify is free and it would create that 2 minute, 3 minute video. What we did with the video is we then created a YouTube channel and these YouTube channels would just go off every single day and we would just upload into here. Now again these, these analytics I think I mentioned at the start, 5,000 views over the course of the last year, which has been pretty cool. But we didn't just stop there. We also as well went onto the Boostly website and we've got a podcast page and we would create the content up for the podcast as well. So we said hey, turn this into a blog post. We put the video on there, we put the text, we put the link to the Spotify, put all the little bits on here as well, including the audio. Now we've built over 360 extra articles. Obviously we, we have our podcast page that we've been doing as well and you know, obviously continue to do so. But by doing this we've, we've got over 800 blog posts that are now sat in total probably with the podcast as well over a thousand blogs that are now on the Boostly website. So that 10 minute piece of work has spun off and obviously we're posting the videos on the, on the boostly LinkedIn page as well. And it's created all of this content for less than $50 a month, less than 10 minutes. After the, after the first 30 days of me doing it, I then passed on to a member of our team and they've been doing it for the last year. Like I said, now we're running to a year in 365 episodes in this is the last one. This is what we've done. And again it's, it's been, it's been an interesting sort of task, an interesting little project that we have been running here. But it just goes to show to me now that there are no excuses not to be running a daily podcast in some way, shape or form. Anybody can do it in any niche and it is super interesting, especially now that podcasts are just getting more and more and more popular. We've done the in person one with Boost Lee. We've done the AI one here and again for less than $50 a month, you know, 36,000 downloads. If if I really wanted to I could really put some time and attention into this and we could maybe turn this into a money generator, sponsorships etc but it is not the core mission of Boostly. It's not the core product of what we've done here. So again this is the last episode. I'm putting this in there as episode 365 just to finish this all out. Again, super, super interesting exercise. If if you've done anything similar please let me know in the comments. But thank you so much. If you've been one of the people that have tuned into all of these episodes over the last year it's been a fascinating exercise that we've done. 36,000 downloads is nothing to be sniffed at and again we've hit 365 episodes. So thank you for tuning in. And if you want to find out more about Boostly then you know where to go look for us.