345: Escape 9-to-5 and Go Full-Time on YouTube! Deep Dive w/ Matt Wolfe

Hey, before we jump into the show, I wanted to give you a heads up that my free YouTube strategy class is available right now on demand@thinkmasterclass.com on the class, I reveal the one YouTube strategy we use at Think Media to generate over 330,000 views every single day. So if you're new to YouTube, this will help you start right and avoid mistakes. And if you're a YouTube pro, this training will help you multiply your your growth. This class is 100% free and you can watch it now on demand@thinkmasterclass.com now let's jump into today's show. So how are full time YouTubers making over $100,000 per year? In this episode of the Think Media podcast, we're going to be talking about some of the changes that have been happening on YouTube and even the strategy and the pacing and different things that are happening with video editing and some of the advice that just doesn't work anymore. We're also going to be talking about why smart creators are building websites and strategic email newsletters. Plus, we'll get into some tactical advice around SEO, the new thumbnail split testing tool, how to find your niche. And I'm super excited because our guest is really an AI expert, AI guru and is going to be sharing some of the content creation tools that will save you time and give you an unfair advantage as well as even just practical questions like should you change titles and thumbnails on old videos? Is that worth doing? So this is really gonna be a masterclass for anyone that wants to do YouTube part time or full time and really turn it into a profitable, profitable business that's also high impact, adding value to people's lives and changing lives. Now, my guest today is Matt Wolf. He is crushing it across multiple different platforms. His main YouTube channel's got 635,000 subscribers running like 1.3 million views a month. But he also has a website that curates AI tools, FutureTools IO. He's the co host of the Next Wave podcast and also just has a long history in content creation in media, in podcasting. So this one's going to be rich, my friends. Lots of nutrients in the soil of this conversation. Matt, welcome to the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks for the intro. I'm excited to talk about this stuff.

Well, let's kick off the conversation first, from perspective. How is YouTube changing?

That's a good question. So I've been, I've been on YouTube since 2009, but I've only really started to gain Some real traction over the past 3ish years. So from what I've seen on YouTube, I've noticed just from my own experience that the more like raw videos seem to be doing better. Right. Like, for a while you had the real, like polished, real Mr. Beast and the Casey Neistatz and the like, high production quality videos were really doing well. And now I feel like it's sort of shifted where you're seeing the like, you know, Penguin Z zeros and the Ludwigs and the Sam Solicks and, you know, stuff like that are really what's taking off. I feel like what's happened is there's been this sort of like, pivot towards people wanting to relate to the creators. Right. They want to see real people, they want to feel like they're somebody they can have a beer with. Right. Somebody that they can sit down and hang out with in real life. And that's what I feel I've noticed over the last, like several years playing around with YouTube is that the higher production value stuff doesn't seem to be as valuable to people as the like. This is just a real dude who I feel like I know because I watch his videos. That seems to be the biggest change in my opinion.

And so then how has that practically shown up in your content? How are you applying that?

Well, I don't know if I would say I've, you know, methodically applied that. I would say that's kind of the style of content I've always done for the last, like 15 years. But since that sort of change started to take effect and we started to see that, that transition on YouTube, my channel sort of algorithmically fell into that loop where it started to get more attention. Right. You know, I can't give all the credit to that. Right. AI had a, a big part of it. Right. Like I. My channel's mostly around AI. I was talking about a lot of this kind of stuff before anybody else was talking about it. Back at the end of 2022, AI got really, really popular. So good timing, good luck. There's a lot of that involved with my channel, but I think because I've sort of always taken that approach of like, I just turn on the camera and talk, do a little bit of minimal editing and throw it out there. That style, when it started to pick up steam, that was how my videos already were.

Okay, so right now when you are planning your next video, what type of strategies go into your process?

Lately I've been really focused on like just AI news. That's the sort of Bread and butter of what my channel does. And so I'm pretty much working on the video that I release every Friday throughout the entire week. So my process starts on Monday. I get up every single day, I review all the news going on in the tech world. I literally spend about 50% of my day, every day, just researching the latest AI news, reading the latest AI research papers that came out, just sort of acclimating myself on a daily basis with what's going on in the world of AI and what I'm going to talk about. And I'm sort of stacking that stuff throughout the week. So come Friday, when it comes time to release the. Here's the breakdown of AI news for the week. I've literally got the video all, you know, laid out and ready for Friday. All I do is I open up all the tabs of everything I'm going to talk about and just one at a time, I start going through each piece. And usually I record way more news than I actually end up sharing. I sort of record like a two hour video on Friday of like, here's everything across the AI world. And then when I go back and review my video, I kind of go, now that was boring. That's not going to be interesting to people. And I start chopping stuff out. So my two hours ends up being, you know, 25 minutes.

That's interesting. And then what do you do with the other 50% of your day, as in your current role of operating your channel and everything else you're doing?

Yeah, so I've got the. I'm basically doing a lot of research. I'm on a lot of phone calls, right? I'm talking to a lot of the developers of the AI tools that are out there. I'm going on a lot of podcasts, I'm doing interviews. I have the Next Wave podcast where we're interviewing a lot of other people in the AI world. So I've got that going on on a daily basis. I've got the Future Tools website where I share all the AI tools that I find interesting. So I'm actually looking at and experimenting with tools throughout the day to see if they make a good fit to go on the website. I'm on Twitter a lot, probably a little bit too much. I spend a lot of time on Twitter. A lot of the AI tech news seems to kind of drop first on Twitter. So I'm kind of addicted to checking in to see if there's anything that I might be missing out on. So I spend a lot of time browsing Twitter and having conversations there. Lately I've started to experiment with a little bit more YouTube shorts and then also repurposing them over to Instagram reels. So I'm shooting like little 50, 55 second shorts and that sort of thing throughout the week as well. So there's, there's a lot that I'm doing on a daily basis. I pretty much work barely like nine to five. I'm putting in about eight hours a day, but about half that day is research and the other half is just doing the work. Right. Working on the website, working on the newsletter, making little short videos, getting on Twitter, interacting with the community, that sort of stuff.

And so this next question is, when did you start? And I know we were just talking about, I mean, the first YouTube channel I did was from my local church. 2007. You started YouTube in 2009?

Yeah, yeah.

Like this is the OG meetup. You know, been on YouTube for a while, but maybe you, you could touch on your, your history and your background. But when did you start in regards to, if you will, this media business you're running right now?

Yeah. So I actually started creating online content in 2007 while I was still working in my day job. Right. So 2007, I started a blog. In fact, I think you recently chatted with Joe Fear, one of my, my buddies. I used to co host a podcast with him. Him and I actually started a business together in 2007 where we started blogging on personal finance and health. Right. We had two different blogs. I ran the personal finance blog, he ran the health blog, and we grew those blogs. So that was like my entry into content marketing was 2007. I launched my YouTube channel in 2009. Initially, when I started the YouTube channel, it was mostly focused around digital marketing. I was learning SEO, I was learning copywriting, how to build landing pages. I got into Facebook ads and Google Ads and I studied all of the stuff in the digital marketing world. So the YouTube channel actually started out talking about that stuff. I've always kind of been like this tools guy. I like finding the latest tools to sort of systematize and automate things. And so that's what the channel was about in the beginning was here's a cool tool to automate this thing in your marketing or in your business. And then over time, you know, the, the latest and greatest Automation tools were AI tools. So around 2022, when a lot of the AI stuff started to bubble up, I already had content out there around AI related marketing tools. Right. So it's always been focused around the tool stuff, but it wasn't until I started talking about AI that the channel just sort of went exponential.

What advice would you give to people on this question of, should I pivot my channel? How big would you say the channel grew pre2022? How you're 635,000 subscribers plus what was it at in 2022 when you kind of went all in on AI?

So I had. At the beginning of 2022, I had 1200 subscribers. At the end of 2023, I think I passed 300,000. So in 2020, 3,002, 1,200. So in 2023, it grew by 300,000. And then so far this year, it's grown by about another 330,000.

Yikes.

That.

Man, this is a cool story because so. So you know, what, 10 years or almost a decade to get to 1,200 subscribers, but then all of a sudden, boom. Right time, right place, right history, right intersection of your study and your passion and. And the timing in the world. And it's a good. That's a good lesson for listeners too. It's like, man, you don't want to give up before the breakthrough. And there's something about and that. And it might be a lot longer than you think, but if you're positioned, if you're ready. But what. I'm also interested, I guess, In a way, 1200 subscribers isn't like, a lot to pivot from someone who's like, why are you no longer digital marketing SEO? But I'm curious your advice, because people ask that a lot. Like, I want to change niches. I can see the connection of the evolution from tools to tools and then going to AI. But would you. What advice would you have to somebody else who's like, man, I'm thinking about pivoting my YouTube channel. It's going in one direction. Should I make a drastic change and go in a different direction?

Yeah, I mean, if you're not interested in the topic you were talking about, I don't think there's any point in continuing to try to create content that you're not passionate about anymore. For me, I've always been excited about tools, and when AI came along, that was just like another level excitement. And so the advice that I would give is, I. When the AI stuff really worked, I just decided to double down. Right. Like, my goal when I started making AI content was wasn't to sort of pivot to be an AI channel. My goal was to keep on making videos about cool Tools and cool workflows and cool systems that I'd come across online. But the thing is, I made one AI video about I think Mid Journey, right? That video was my first video to pass like 50,000 views. And I went, oh, people like this AI stuff. So I made another video about Mid Journey. That one did well. Chat Chat GPT came out. I made a video the day Chat GPT came out explaining what it was. That video went and did a million views, right? That was the first video that I ever made where I published the video at like 10 o' clock at night before going to bed one night, woke up the next morning, opened my phone to look at my YouTube stats and it had broken a hundred thousand views just literally overnight in the time that I was asleep. That was the first video I ever had that broke a hundred thousand views. First video I have that ever broke seven figures in views. And so I went, okay, people are really, really liking these AI related videos. I just going to keep doubling down on AI. So when that happened, I made like three videos in three days that just kept on compounding, getting bigger and bigger. I went, all right, I'm going to do this every single day until I run out of ideas. So for about, I think 38 or 40 days straight, I published a new video to YouTube every single day about some other AI tool or some other AI process that I'd come across just to see what was going to work, what people were going to gravitate towards. And the stuff that worked, I just kept on doubling down on and making more of that content. And the stuff that didn't work, I just went, okay, that concept isn't working, I'm not going to do those videos anymore. So for me it was all about just finding what worked and then continuing to double down and seeing if I can make it work again and again and again.

Now I'm curious, when did you go full time? And that's maybe kind of a weird question because you've had different businesses in evolution of being in content marketing for a while. So you mentioned full time job back in 2007 and kind of the side hustle of a blog, personal finance and health and getting into digital marketing. When did you, when were you able to leave your 9 to 5 job? And then what would you consider you could define it yourself full time as Matt Wolf right now, what you're doing, right?

So I actually quit my day job back in 2009. So 2007 was when I started getting into content marketing. 2009 was when I Went, all right, I, I just need to sort of burn the ships and go all in on this. So I wasn't making enough money to go full time in 2009. What I did, I would not recommend to anybody. I was making, I don't know, 500 bucks a month off my content marketing business with Joe. And I went, well, if I quit my job and go full time, maybe I can really ramp this up and make a lot more money. So. And that's what I did. It took another good, like, six months or so. Right. I was, you know, I was married at the time. My wife had a decent job. So for about six months, I was living off my wife's paycheck a little bit. But yeah, it, it, it didn't overnight skyrocket my income, that's for sure. But what I did early on was I. So Joe and I, we had these blogs that were making a few hundred bucks a month, and it was working out well.

And so I had a marketing Affiliate offers or what?

Yeah, so we had affiliate offers. We were at the time they had what was called text link ads, where companies would come and, like, pay you to put a link on, on their site. Eventually, Google stopped allowing it. It was like a little SEO hack that people would do. They would go buy backlinks on other people's sites. So people would buy backlinks on our sites. And then we also did, you know, Google AdSense banners and things like that on our site. So it was making a few hundred bucks a month. And when I quit my job, I went, I'm going to go and teach how I was making a couple hundred bucks a month. You know, people would probably love to just have a little side hustle where they can make 2 or 300 extra bucks a month, pay their car payment or whatever through having a little side blog that they spend, you know, a couple hours a week on. So I went and created a course called the WordPress Classroom, which took me a good like six months or so to build. And when I launched that course, that's when I actually started making money that replaced my day job money. That took me about six months or so before I got to a point where that course was selling to a point where I can actually replace the day job money. And then, you know, over, over. Between 2019 and 2022, Joe and I were just trying everything, right? We had, we had an agency where we built funnels for people. We had an agency where we did video marketing for people. We did a lot of affiliate marketing. We bought Google Ads to landing pages that promoted affiliate offers. You name it, we tried it. We tried E commerce stores. We were playing around with every, you know, we bought like every course that was out there about different marketing strategies. We hung out on the Warrior forum to see what people were talking about on that site and we were just going, all right, let's, let's see what business model we can make stick. And it wasn't until 2022 that I really found the thing that I was like, all right, this is, this is sort of what I was put here to do.

And so 2019 to 2022, was it just kind of tight? You're full time still, but like, kind of like a little money here, a little money. They're trying to kind of get your solid ground of like, what's the brand, what's the future?

Yeah, it was, it was definitely up and down, right? We had, we had months with our agency where we were just really, really crushing it and doing really well. And then we had months where we had no clients and we were begging some of our old clients to come back and work with us again. We built these affiliate sites that we've got really good at running Google Ads. We had a friend who's just like an expert at Google Ads and he showed us how to run Google Ads. And so we started building these affiliate sites that promoted affiliate products and then running Google Ads to these affiliate sites. And we had like a two year stretch where those just really, really, really like crushed it and then they fell off and stopped working. I don't know if it was algorithm changes or you know, people's taste changing or what, but they, you know, they had, we had years and months where stuff was working well and then years and months where it wasn't working well. Luckily it sort of all averaged out. Me and Joe were never really super dumb with our money. So when the, when stuff wasn't working out, we luckily had some savings and stuff was working out. We were banking money. We've always been pretty good about that sort of thing. But yeah, there was definitely some, some rough stretches in there.

Do you remember your first six figure year? And I guess, you know, if you're comfortable sharing, you could share generically. You know, there's a difference between top line and bottom line. So if we're saying, you know, how content creators and people in the creator economy are earning a hundred thousand dollars a year, making over a hundred thousand dollars a year. Well in some cases, and it might be like, and at the end of the year they're negative 22 because you know, like you're do a lot of stuff. An agency, like there's a totally difference between gross income, of course and net. So I guess, however you'd want to define it, like when you really felt like, whoa, you know, I hit six, six figures. When was that?

Yeah, so the first year that I ever did over six figures was I believe 2013, 2014, something like that. I don't remember the exact year, but the, the course that I was selling, the WordPress classroom, I actually rebranded it to Learn to blog because know WordPress is a trademark. I got some advice that maybe you shouldn't have a trademark as part of your own brand name. So I rebranded it to learn to blog.com that's a good tip by the way, for listeners. So I rebladded it, branded it to learn to blog.com had a business partner working on that with me. And my business partner went and hired somebody to run Facebook ads for us. He found just like a genius agency that was really good at Facebook ads and they started running Facebook ads for learn to blog.com and when he started running Facebook ads, the business jumped to where it was doing about 60,000amonth in sales. But that was on the back of about $30,000 a month in ad spend. So just keep that in mind. But yeah, the first time I ever did that was with Learn to Blog. I actually ended up selling that business in 2015, which sort of also gave me some of that Runway. I had to do some more experience experimenting.

Man, I love that story. And so then that kind of brings us to 2022. And once once that fast growth started, it became clear, is that what you're saying? That then it was like, okay, I, I just hit that flywheel or that, that takeoff moment and now the kind of views you're pulling, the size of your channel, you grew 300,000 subscribers approximately in 2023. Another 300,000 this year plus. And so what is the pie chart percentagely of your income streams for today's business?

I would say right now 50 to 60% is from sponsorship revenue. Sponsorship is definitely the biggest chunk. I like to go after long term sponsors. So most of the time it's either 6 to 12 months contracts with the sponsors. So I can really learn the product, really understand it and really do right by the sponsor. But also, you know, I want to, I want to be very consistent with the audience. If I like a product and I talk to a sponsor about having that product, I want to make sure that it's a product that I feel like is a good fit for the audience. And also I know I can work with long term. The sponsorships are one of the biggest chunks of it. YouTube ad revenue has gotten pretty significant as well. YouTube ad revenue generates in the five figures a month for me every month now. Affiliate marketing would probably be the third. I'm having a hard time with the percentages. Probably 55, 60% sponsorships. Another 25% would be AdSense revenue and then affiliate marketing from Future Tools. Mostly I don't do any affiliate marketing on the YouTube channel really, but Future Tools is an affiliate play. And then I've got some equity in some companies as well, but that's more like long term exit strategy for down the road. So I, I have a few companies that I advise for in the AI space that basically brought me on board because they know I keep my finger on the pulse of like the latest AI news and tools and what's out there. So I get on a once a month call with them and they're like, all right, just give us the lay of the land. Once a month I give them the lay of the land and I earn equity as, as a result of that. Those are really the big things. I do some speaking here and there, so. But the speaking is, you know, fairly rare. I'll do two or three speaking gigs a year that some of them are paid, most of them aren't. And yeah, I think that that pretty much covers it all. Yeah, I don't do any courses anymore. I kind of, I, I sort of lost interest in making the courses. Not that I don't think it's a great business model. It was just more work on my plate than I was willing to take on with all of the other stuff I had going.

When you're powerfully positioned because of your AI brand and knowledge and immersion for this equity advisor opportunity because if you were to kind of paint a big picture, some people are calling, you know, this AI revolution as significant as the industrial revolution. Do you believe that?

I do, yeah, I absolutely do. I think, I think a lot of people's timelines might be a little optimistic on how, you know, how soon we're going to get to some of the predictions they're making. But yeah, I definitely think, you know, 10 years from now is going to look completely, completely different than what the world looks like today.

You found your niche. I'm actually want to kind of take it back to your story and just maybe putting some context around the lessons of your journey. Because again, Goldman Sachs said that the creator economy is going to be, it's going to double in the next three years from about a $250 billion industry to a half a trillion dollar industry. However they're measuring that that includes creator startups. I'm sure AI startups are included in there. Adobe Tools, Opus Clip, you know, these kinds of companies and of YouTube itself and creator economy being much bigger than YouTube. But there's this massive growth in the space and there's real opportunity, it's real practical. But when we also really look at your story, this is not get rich quick nor is it overnight success. So in the pursuit of, for that person, that's like, man, I want to, I want to, you know, build a six figure income. I want to go full time, whatever six figures, you might be broke if you're living in Manhattan, you know, downtown versus that. Also 56k a year could be life changing depending on where you're at and could create freedom. So what do you think is just kind of the mindset that is necessary when pursuing earning money full time from media, from a YouTube channel and things like that?

You know, for me, I'm probably going to sound fairly cliche here, right? But for me, I was always just sort of chasing the thing that was exciting to me, right? Like I never wanted to be that guy that went, oh, the golf niche is making a lot of money. Maybe I should make videos about golf. I don't even play golf, but there's money there, right? So like I never wanted to be that. So for me it was always, always chasing that thing that excited me. In the early days. When I, when I left my job in 2009, it was the digital marketing stuff. I was obsessed with SEO and Google Ads and Facebook ads and copywriting and all of that sort of stuff. Like I just, I was obsessed with learning it and trying to understand the human psychology to make my product sell better. I was just obsessed with that stuff. You know, Fast forward to 2022 and I started to bubble up on the scene and I started coming across more of these tools and some of these founders started showing me some of these tools behind the scenes that, you know, weren't released to the public yet. And that was just like another level of excitement for me of like this, this is amazing. I am nerding out over this stuff. This is like my new favorite thing in the world. And so for me it's always been about creating the content that I get excited about. And a lot of the feedback I get in, you know, comments when, when they're not the, you know, the trolley negative comments, the good comments are usually like, we love your excitement, we love how passionate you get about this stuff. You know, we can feel that you genuinely love what you're talking about. And for me, that's, that's what it's all been about is just like, I, I am super excited about this and to be honest, like, if I wasn't super excited about it, like I wouldn't be doing it anymore. So hold on, I got to, I got to like think through how I want to say this. Like, I was making videos on YouTube for 10ish years with a hundred views per video and not even being monetized on YouTube, right? So I was making these videos about these things I was excited about without ever making a penny and without any expectation of making a penny from it, right? And when I was doing that without any expectation of this becoming a career for me, it accidentally became a career for me.

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People sort of discovered the videos, saw how passionate I was about them, started sharing them with friends. Next thing I know, this is what I do full time, is fully make these YouTube videos. So it's, you know, for me it's just been that, that, that passion that's really kept on driving me and if I didn't have that passion, I, you know, I would have never gotten to the point where it actually was monetizable.

I love that obsession and passion and finding something that you were genuinely curious about fueled you for 10 years getting about 100 views a video. But also your persistence and consistency paid off because then it became right time, right place. And now in the last couple years your growth has been incredible. You have though, studied digital marketing and business and it would seem that you've had been very intentional of building a media brand and a media strategy around the growth of your YouTube channel. Can you break down how you think about your website, your newsletter, and how those all integrate together? And this is a model. People are doing it differently, but there's success leaves clues. And in the creator economy, we see different creators doing similar models. What is that? Media strategy. Explain how you're doing that.

Yeah, so I, I mean that was actually one of the more methodical things that I sort of went into was I do. I needed to have a mailing list, right? If you study anything about digital marketing at all, literally the number one piece of advice any digital marketer is going to give you. Grow a mailing list. You need to have that owned audience. YouTube could shut you down anytime. Facebook can shut you down anytime. I knew from the very beginning I need to focus on growing a mailing list no matter what. The other thing I wanted to do is I wanted to make sure I had some sort of useful tool, some sort of useful resource that people can go and use that wasn't necessarily just my content. And the reason for that is I needed something that in the future is potentially sellable. The Matt Wolf YouTube channel is never going to sell. That's never a business that I can exit from someday and let somebody take over and run for me. It's too tied to me personally. Right. So I had this sort of three pronged approach. What I started was I want my content to be the sort of main marketing channel that people discover me from. I want the newsletter to be the way that I can send people back to my content. And then I wanted a useful resource for people to be able to go and use and share with other people and that would they would find valuable. So I created the Future Tools website, the Future Tools newsletter, and then the Matt Wolf YouTube channel. And all three of them feed each other, right? Like the YouTube channel tells people to subscribe to the newsletter and it tells people to check out Future Tools. Future Tools drives people to the YouTube channel, drives people to the newsletter. Newsletter drives people back to both of those platforms. So all three of them are like super symbiotic, where they're all sort of driving traffic between each other. And what ended up happening was the Future Tools website became insanely, well, SEO optimized. It was one of the first sites that was sort of organizing and filtering these AI tools to where it got to this point where if you were to search for any AI tool, maybe the tool itself would be the number one ranked thing in Google. The number two ranked site would be the Future Tools listing for that product. So the Future Tools website. I launched that in December of 2022 and within three months it was getting a million visitors per month. Right. And most of that was from SEO. I kickstarted it with the YouTube channel. But once the YouTube channel started driving traffic to it, the, you know, the Google search algorithm picked it up and now Google is driving most of the traffic to it. So now Google's driving the traffic to the Future Tools website. The Future Tools website is capturing leads, putting them on my newsletter, and now my newsletter is driving people back to my YouTube channel. So no matter which way you sort of find me, you're finding the other things that I'm doing.

How did you build that website yourself? Did you hire a developer?

Yeah. So that, that is an interesting story. On it was literally a Saturday and my son, my nine year old son was sitting next to me, like right here in my office and I just started putting together a website. I found, I found this tool called webflow, which is like a no code website builder. And I had this like Google spreadsheet of all of these AI tools that I've been coming across, right. I started making more YouTube videos about tools. So I started keeping a spreadsheet of like, oh, that's a cool tool. Maybe I'll make a video about that someday. That's a cool tool. Maybe I'll make a video about that. So I started keeping a Google sheet spreadsheet of all of these tools that I would come across. And it got to a point where this spreadsheet had 80, 90 tools in it. And I was like, what was that one tool I was looking at the other day? I don't remember the name of it, I can't find it again, I know it's in the spreadsheet somewhere, but I don't want to click through 90 links to try to remember what that link was. So that's where this sort of idea came from for future tools was literally a tool where I can organize the tools I came across for myself so that I can like come across them again. So the idea was, I need to make a YouTube video today. What am I going to make it about? I'll look at my website real quick and sort of remember the tools that I had come across recently and sort of resurface them. That's how Future tools started. But after it was built and I listed I don't know the first hundred tools on there, what I did was I went to Reddit and there was a subreddit called like I made this or something like that. And it was a site where, you know, indie coders would sort of build in public and share the tools that they made. I went and shared it on that, and it sort of went viral on Reddit, rose to the top of that subreddit, became the number one, like, most read sub read post in that subreddit for, like, that month. Might have even touched, like the Google or the Reddit homepage for a little bit and went really, really well on Reddit. And I went, oh, that's cool. People on Reddit like it. I went over to Twitter at the time. I had 300 followers on Twitter. Like nobody was following me on Twitter yet. I went and went, hey, I made this tool on Twitter, or I made this tool on webflow to help me organize AI tools. I figured it's helpful to me, maybe other people will find it helpful, right? So I shared it on Twitter. Well, it got retweeted by a handful of large AI and tech influencers, right? Like Robert Scoble shared it, and this guy Rowan Chung, who has a large AI following, shared it. And all of these people that had large tech followings started sharing that and retweeting it. And so it went viral on Twitter. And I think to this day, it's one of my most popular posts on Twitter. So it got really popular on Twitter. And then I went to Product Hunt and I posted it on Product Hunt and it went to the number two product of the week on Product Hunt when I shared it there. And so it just started to explode. And I went, all right, I should probably figure out how to turn this into a business. And that's when I started doing, like, featured listings and letting companies come and sort of buy the ability to pin their tool to the top of the website for a week. I started going and swapping out the original links with affiliate links if they had affiliate links available to them. And then I started, you know, it actually started to become a business from there, but it was never, never intended to be a business. It was literally meant to organize the tools for me. And my son and I, we literally just played with webflow on a Saturday and built that site in about four hours.

That is unreal. And is it still on webflow?

It is still on webflow right now, although I am working with a developer who's shifting it off of webflow because webflow has bandwidth limits that I keep exceeding every month.

That makes sense.

So the costs have gotten a little out of control there.

So webflow is a paid tool. But for those that might think, man, I could never have the skills to develop a website. It makes making your own website easy.

Yeah, it's a no code drag and drop builder. If you know what you want it to look like, you just drag and drop it until the site looks the way you want it. Really, really cool platform. But if your site gets really popular, their enterprise plans are pretty insanely expensive.

Well, what's cool is that also you're giving us a model though. I mean, you can start with something like that and as things scale, they might break. But now you're at a place to take it to the next level for future scalability and to probably, with the revenue being generated, hire the developer. And so that's a very inspiring story. It is interesting about how SEO and ranking helped this website get discovered. I'm curious, do you think that this Google AI summaries are ruining Google and ruining SEO?

That's a good question. I think, I mean, I think Google's kind of shooting themselves in the foot with it a little bit. But Google's in a tough spot, honestly. Right, Because Google's in a spot now where you've got tools out there like Perplexity and Claude and ChatGPT and all these other AI platforms and people are going to get their questions answered on those platforms more than they're going to Google now. I mean, you know, people that are more like tech early adopters are going to those places instead of Google. But it's only a matter of time before more mass market starts to shift to that sort of behavioral pattern as well. So Google right now is trying to figure out what to do. They're, they're sort of scrambling, figuring out, all right, how do we stay relevant when everybody wants to go use AI now to get their questions answered. So I think they're doing it out of necessity. But I also think there's going to be some negative implications on SEO. But at the end of the day, I think SEO people are just going to shift. They're going to figure out how do I make my website be the site that they're referencing in the AI response, how do I get it to be my answer? Because when it does give an answer, it usually gives a reference of where they got that answer from. So in the future that'll probably be the most clicked on link as opposed to the number one ranking article on Google. It'll be the one that Google summarized for you that you can click on to get to the site. So I think SEOs are going to just figure out how to optimize for that instead. Over time I've heard it said that.

SEO standing for search engine optimization is now search everywhere optimization and that for any brand this idea of SEO is still alive and well and so strong. On YouTube, of course, the power of ranking videos, it's still alive and well on Google, but things are rapidly changing. But also TikTok is one of the largest, if not the largest search engine for Gen Z. And these other platforms seem to struggle. Meta seems to struggle a little bit in regards to search, but nevertheless, people are searching and looking for local businesses and they are looking for content in the different explore pages and search tabs. And so for any modern media minded creator, business owner, I think the search everywhere optimization is a interesting mindset. Speak into that a little bit. What would be sort of maybe the way you're thinking about the landscape of search and getting discovered and maybe isolate that down for content creators, you know, that want to, you know, be building a media brand like yours.

Yeah, I mean, to be honest, I don't really put a ton of thought into like the search discoverability on Google. It's sort of, it was sort of an accident that my site started to rank well again. It was never really designed that way from the beginning. But I think at the end of the day, just creating stuff that people find valuable, that they want to share with others is still going to always win out no matter what. I know it sounds kind of cliche, but SEO, you know, a very, very oversimplified explanation of how SEO works is if somebody searches something on Google and they, they get a response and they click into that response and they stay on that website. Google goes, okay, good. Pat ourselves on the back. We did a good job. We'll rank that article better. If somebody does a search, they click on the thing, they go to the site, bounce back to Google really quickly. Google goes, okay, that's not what they were looking for. Next time somebody searches for that exact topic, let's show them something else. So what works there is making really, really good content that if somebody searches for your topic, they click the link, they stay on your website because it's exactly what they were looking for. I still think that is the way to get noticed. You know, maybe it'll be more social signals in the future as opposed to like algorithmic ranking signals about the search. I think in the future we're going to see a lot more. Well, if this article is being shared on Reddit a lot, if it's being shared on Twitter a lot, if it's being shared On Facebook a lot that might become more and more of a signal for, for these search engines to like use you as the, you know, the automated AI response. But at the end of the day, if you create good quality content that people actually want to read that they find valuable, that they find helpful, that's always going to be the winning strategy.

Genius advice. I'm excited because coming up we're going to talk about AI tools. I am want to talk a little bit about video podcasting as you are co hosting the Next Wave podcast and even maybe some advice for creators scaling. But getting kind of Tactical here. YouTube has a new thumbnail split testing tool. How does that work and have you been using it and what have you discovered?

Yeah, I use it every single video I put up. So basically what it does is it, it allows you to upload three thumbnails and then it will optimize based on watch time. Right. I think most people think you would watch optimize based on the click through rate, but it's actually looking at the amount of watch time, which I guess theoretically also factors in click through rate because they wouldn't have watched if they didn't click in the first place. Right. But I use it for every video. And I think the one thing that I learned about that is to never assume that I know what's going to work for a thumbnail. Right. It's almost I make three thumbnails for every single video, which has gotten a lot easier because AI makes it a lot easier for me to create thumbnails. Most of my thumbnails, I leverage AI to create them and I will use three thumbnails. And in my mind I always sort of like make a theory of like, I bet this is the one that's going to win. I'm pretty much wrong 90% of the time. Like, the thumbnail I expect to win is almost never the one that wins. Which is why I think everybody should be split testing. Because what you think people are going to click on is often not going to be the case.

One of the things I noticed about your thumbnails and it seems aligned because you're this AI expert and a lot of times you're an AI version of your face versus like a photo or, you know, real version of your face. However, I'm seeing this across channels. I'm seeing a lot of creators who in their thumbnail, they kind of have their AI avatar. What have you learned about that? And then what are the tools and workflow that goes into. You said AI makes it easier to make thumbnails faster. What are some of the tools that go into your thumbnail process?

Yeah, so, I mean, you know, I've done a lot of split tests, and if I don't put my face on the image, I get less views, right? The. The ones without my face, almost. The ones with my face always outperform the ones without my face. And I just think that's because, you know, I've. I've got a subscriber base now. I think people have been looking for that. The very early days where I was using AI to make. To make my. Or the early days when I was making YouTube videos about AI, I was doing that strategy where I was using AI to make my thumbnails. And at the time, I hadn't really seen anybody else doing that. I mean, I'm sure there were people, but they weren't on my radar yet. So I think I was one of the early people to use AI, train my face into AI and then make thumbnails with my own face in the AI. And now I think people are actually looking for that. Like, when they see that with my AI face in it, they're clicking on it because if they're fans or followers or whatever, they recognize them. I've gotten a lot of comments if I don't put my face in the image of, like, oh, I saw that video. It was recommended to me. I didn't click on it because I didn't realize it was you. Right. So I've gotten that kind of feedback. So now I try to always work my face in. Every once in a while, I'll go in and test one of the thumbnails without my face to see if, you know, maybe my assumptions are wrong again or the algorithm's changing or, you know, something that used to work, you know, things change. Right. It's a. It's a moving target on YouTube, in my opinion. But yeah, I found that the faces just tend to work for my channel. I like to do very, very bright, vibrant colors. The very early thumbnails I did, I would go on like mid journey and I would tell it to create like a vibrant, brilliant, RGB colorful paint splash on the wall, right? So that the background would just be rainbows of colors that are like high contrast and popping off the screen. And then I would overlay an AI image of my face over it so the colors just popped off the screen and stood out. And to this day, that's still kind of what works for me, is just really, really colorful and include my face. Right. Like Those are the two things that I sort of shoot for.

And what are the exact tools do you still use midjourney?

Yeah, so I use a lot of different AI image tools. Like right now, today, I'm split testing three thumbnails. One I made in Mid Journey, One I made in a tool called Leonardo, and one I made in a tool called Ideogram. Right. So there's so many AI image generation tools out there now, and they're all kind of good at different things, but bad at other things. So now you might see three thumbnails, and I made them with three totally different processes because I'm playing with all these tools all the time. I would say, like, my main go to process is I use a tool called Leonardo AI to generate my images. I think the colors and the sort of aesthetics of the images that Leonardo generates are really good. Full disclosure, Leonardo is one of the companies I'm an advisor for, but I'm an advisor for them because I actually think they're one of the best out there. But that's the one that I use the most to generate the. The sort of background colorful images that pop. And then to train my face in the AI, I used to use stable diffusion. And there was this long process called Dream Booth where you can train your face into an AI model and then prompt anything you want, and it would generate your face on whatever the character was doing that you asked for. Now there's an easier model to do it. It's called Flux Flux. I actually made a pretty quick tutorial on it on my YouTube channel that shows you how to train your face into flux now. And ever since I made that video, I've been seeing a lot more thumbnails of people putting their face in there because it's. It's a free process to do, and you can do the whole process in 20 minutes. The old process that I use took like a half a day to do to train your face into the model. But, yeah, that's pretty much the process. You, you, you train your face into flux. You generate it. Go like, oh, Matt Wolf with a shocked look on his face, pointing to the right, or whatever. It'll generate that image, and then I'll overlay it with like, a really colorful background image that I made in either Leonardo Midjourney, Ideogram, Flux, like Dolly. There's all these tools that I mess with, and I'm constantly testing different tools to try to get the thumbnail that I'm looking for.

And if I wanted to, if somebody's listening, has A video podcast or something. And they wanted to perhaps use Flux to make two faces themselves. And then the guest. If they could pull some images of the guest, they could do the same there and then maybe spit out that look of both being kind of an AI avatar version of an interview or something. A collab video.

You could, but you'd have to do it as, like, two images and then sort of work them together in, like, Photoshop. Right. One issue that AI image generators have right now is when you ask it to generate two characters in the same scene, it wants to merge those two characters. Right. So if. If I tell it to generate an image of Elon Musk doing, you know, boxing against Mark Zuckerberg, it'll make both of the people look like a sort of a blend between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Right. It'll. It'll look like the love child of the two on both faces.

Yeah. Got you. Okay. Those are some powerful tools right there. As we go a little bit deeper here, have you had any experience changing old titles and thumbnails and boosting video performance? A huge question creators ask is like, should I go back in my library and update any titles and thumbnails? What has been your experience?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think for me, that's been a pretty big game changer for me was going back and updating some thumbnails. I actually had one video. It was the early video that I made about changing or injecting your face into the AI. I put that video up before my channel got popular. It had, like a thousand views or something like that. The thumbnail wasn't very good. I didn't know what I was doing at the time. I just made the video. When the channel started to do well, I started going back through and analyzing some of my old titles and thumbnails. I made a new thumbnail for that video, and then I changed the title. I don't remember what the original title was, but the new title was how to inject your face into AI or something like that. And you can go and look at the chart, and it was just like a straight line. The day that I changed the title, you know, up and to the right. And so I. I've. That. That's become, like, a habit of mine now. A lot of my videos are, like, timely. Like, I make a lot of AI news videos of, like, this is what just happened this week. So a lot of those videos, I don't really bother going back and changing them because they have a very short lifespan. But but anything that I think has evergreen value, like tutorials or I make a lot of videos of like listicle type videos. They're like, here's the 10 best free AI tools, things like that. I'll go back and try new thumbnails and try new titles and you know, try to try to beat the current winner on those all the time. And usually I'm really happy that I did.

And do you usually just go with your gut or do you use any tools for split testing when you do that?

For the most part I go with my gut. I, you know, I've started to kind of get a handle on what sort of titles work well and which ones don't. You know, I'm constantly trying to tow that line of I know this is going to grab attention, but it also, it feels a little clickbaity. So like, how do I, how do I find that balance? That's something that I struggle with. I know almost everybody I talk to on who has YouTube channels struggles with that as well. Of like, I know this is going to get the clicks, but I also know I'm going to get some comments about that title. So I'm constantly trying to balance that. But I will go back and look at old titles and go, okay, I can see why that didn't do well. That's just not an intriguing title. And I feel like it's more of an intuition thing that, that builds up over time once you've been doing it for a while. But there are a few tools that I do really like to use. I do use Vidiq and Tubebuddy and I just got onboarded onto Spotter. Spotter is pretty cool for, for helping with titles and thumbnails. So I'm constantly using some of those kinds of tools to try to come up with new ideas. But to be honest, AI is still pretty bad at coming up with YouTube titles like, like us who make a lot of YouTube videos probably have a better intuition at what's going to work than the AIs do, honestly.

Let's go a little bit deeper on tools. One of the things question number one is I went to your website Future Tools and I clicked or I typed in YouTube. Like what would be related, I think to YouTube or video. And the amount of results that came up like 2,345 or something like that. So I am curious about this idea of like one AI overwhelm, like tools overwhelm for your average creator or your busy creator that's trying to figure out, okay, if I spend Time, you know, I don't even have time to, like, figure weed through all of those. I want to, like, focus on the best of the best.

90% of AI tools you can probably ignore. If you go to, like, the Future Tools website, for instance, I did put a little checkbox on there for Matt's page picks. Right. And I put that there because of that. Right. Like, people go to the site, they might filter it down to, like, what's going to help me with YouTube, see 2000 results on there or whatever, and go, all right, that's not helpful to me. Well, if you check that box. Okay, now there's only three that Matt says he actually uses himself. Right. So there's a lot of tools out there that honestly probably shouldn't be products. And. And I think part of the problem is that, you know, AI makes creating these tools so much easier. AI can help you write code. So now, like, anybody in their basement could go and create a tool that leverages AI that they claim is helpful and try to charge you 20 bucks a month for. Most of them are junk. A lot of them I still will list on future tools, but I list literally 10% of the tools that people submit. I get about between 50 and 100 submissions a day on future tools, depending on the day. Weekends are a little bit less. And out of the hundred, I might pick five to ten of those tools to actually list on the site because most of them now just look like clones of other tools, things like that. So it's definitely an issue. But as far as.

And people can also upvote, it looks like. So if I check the box Matt's picks on your website And I search YouTube, it actually narrows out of 2,907 total tools. It shows 11.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then there's also upvotes. So the community is also able to kind of give you feedback on this stuff.

Yep.

Okay, so 90 AI tools you can ignore. I kind of cut you off there. So we can go in then, to what are some of the tools that are maybe truly helpful to that individual that wants to save time creating content and make better content.

Yeah. So for me, Claude is the number one. Right. You know, Claude is. If you're not familiar with Claude, it's basically a competitor to Chat GPT. If you're on the pro plan, it costs the same amount. It's 20 bucks a month. Just like chat GPT. I find it to be a little bit better at, you know, being creative than Chat GPT is. But one thing you can do inside of Claude. And this is like a fairly recent feature they rolled out is they've got this feature called Projects. And in Projects it's like a folder for like chats that you're going to have. But inside of that folder you can give it custom instructions and you can give it additional information. You can upload PDFs and text files and things like that so that it's got this additional context in it. So what I did in Cloud is I created a project for a new summarizer, for instance, right? And what I can do with my new summarizer that I built inside of Claude is I can take a News article that's 5,000 words long, a giant news article, select all the text, copy that text into my Claude project, and it will give me like five bullet points of like, here's the summary of what this news is, and if you're explaining it on a news video, here's how I would explain it. And then it gives me a single paragraph of like the high level executive notes of like, here's what this tool is, here's what it does. And then I have it give me an analogy as well. So if I need to figure out a way to better explain it, it always gives me an analogy. And the way I did that was inside of that project. I just gave it custom instructions. And the custom instructions say something to the effect of I'm going to copy and paste a news article into the site. When you get that news article, give me a list of five bullets about what that news article is about. Give me a one paragraph summary explaining it in simple terms so anybody can understand and give me a one paragraph analogy so that I could better lock in what this is talking about. So now when I go and make like a news video on, on Facebook Fridays, almost every single piece of news that I come across, I'll just copy that news article, put it into Claude, and then Claude will give me a good way to explain it so that people can understand it. So when it comes to like news type content, that's been super, super helpful because sometimes I understand it logically because I've been playing around with AI for a while, but I'm thinking to myself, how do I explain this so a viewer is going to understand it? And some of the feedback I get is people watch the channel because they like the way I explain things. They think I, I do a good job at simplifying. I mean, I think I am a little bit naturally good at simplifying complex topics, but I also use AI to help me with that too. So Claude is the number one for me. I've also got it generating short scripts for me now too. So some of my favorite shorts creators are Cleo Abram. I. I love her shorts that she puts out. There's a guy, Kane Calloway, he makes really, really good shorts. Roberto Nixon makes really, really good shorts on AI. So what I've done is I've taken a handful of the transcripts from their shorts. You can go on YouTube and look at the transcripts from their shorts. I've taken transcripts from, you know, let's say six different videos that I really, really like the flow of those shorts. And I put them into Claude and, and I'd say I like these six scripts. Can you find a consistent formula that I can follow that will model some of these scripts? And so what it would do is it would break down a step by step, like sort of script formula that I can follow to make similar videos. And then what I did was I took that script formula, moved it into a custom cloud project and said anytime I post news in here, make me a one minute or less short script based on this formula. And so now all of my shorts, I'm literally grabbing a news article, pulling it into this shorts formula generator, and it's writing a script for me. It's not always exactly in the wording I would use, but it does a good job at writing that sort of first rough draft, right. Giving me like a nice flow for this script. And then I'll go and reword it in my own words a little bit. But it's doing 90% of the work of writing the scripts for me for the shorts.

Now, Matt, you're dropping bombs. That whole breakdown is definitely something worth rewinding and listen to again and thinking about how you could set up Claude with systems to make content creation more streamlined and be like a powerful starter for you in regards to short scripts, news summaries. Some of your other favorite tools like that come up when I did your website, Runway Gen 3. Why do you like that?

So that one is a video generator. That one, you could either type in a text prompt and it will generate a 10 second video based on that text prompt that you use, or what I actually like to use it for even more is you can upload an image and then it will actually animate that image. So for example, I made a video about some drama that was happening over at OpenAI and I made a comment about how like it kind of feels like there's a dumpster fire going on over there. So I had Mid Journey generate an image of a dumpster fire. I took that Mid Journey image, pulled it into Runway Gen 3, and it animated the fire that was happening in the dumpster on the image. So as I make that comment, I can throw that B roll up on the screen that Gen 3 generated for me. Another good one is Luma Dream Machine. They both kind of do the same thing. Luma Dream Machine, it lets you set a start frame and an in frame. So for example, if I wanted to make a little video animation of me morphing into a wolf or something like that, right? I can take a start image of just me on camera, take an image that I generated with like Midjourney or Leonardo of a wolf, and put both those images in and it will actually make a little video that figures out how to transition between the two images, right? So you can do stuff like that. And it's really great for making like little 5, 10 second B roll. I mean, when I make videos, I never have B roll on the screen for more than three seconds, right? So like when you get 10 seconds, you just pick the best, like three seconds of it and it makes perfect B roll to overlay on your videos.

How long does something like that take? If you wanted to use those tools to come up with a few clips for a section of one of your videos, just the time of rendering and processing and in most cases, are you gonna have to step into the paid version of these tools to really get the benefit?

A lot of them have free trials. Most of the free trials either give you a certain amount of credits per day. Some of them are a certain amount of credits per month. You could get away with the free trials. I use the paid plans because I use it a lot. I'm often demoing the tools in some cases. Some of these companies have just given me access. Cause they know if they give me access, I'll talk about them on videos. I always disclose that, by the way, if, if somebody gave me access, I'm going to say they gave me access. But I think the paid plan is probably your best bet if you're going to use them often. But if you're going to just test it here and there, the free trials are usually going to be just good enough.

And how long, how long to spit out a clip? If, if you animate a photo, when's it done?

Less than a minute. Less than a minute. You upload the image and I would say 45 seconds later or so you've got a Video animated so you can re roll it. If you don't like it, you press the button again. 45 seconds later it's going to give you an alternate version. And if you've got the paid plan, you can do that five or six times until you have the perfect little animation that you're looking.

Explore AI is another one AI powered search for YouTube videos. Why is that powerful compared to other tools?

So I'm trying to remember what Explore AI was. Honestly that was one I probably came across, went this is really cool and then haven't used it a whole lot since. But I believe that's one where you can do a search and it will help you find YouTube videos on the topic, if I remember correctly. But yeah, that's. That might be one that I haven't actually played with super recently. So I don't, I don't really remember what I was using that one for when I added it.

It's a free and easy to use tool that enables users to quickly search for answers inside thousands of YouTube videos. Filter results, timestamp buttons. Okay, so that's a, that's a research tool and yeah, yeah, research, yeah. Got as one of your Matt's picks. Of course we will be linking to everything in the show, notes and whatnot so people can check out future tools and everything else. Is there any other top of mind you mentioned Claude, that you're a content creator. You want to save time, maybe speak to this, this one you have Listener, which is text to speech. I know 11 Labs is very probably the most leading brand as far as what I could turn. I could create an AI clone of my own voice.

Right.

We've worked with Invideo and talked about that. They're pulling in different tools allowing you to do your own clone voiceover of yourself or somebody else's great sounding voice. What would high quality speech. How's Listener different from some of those things? And what are Your thoughts on 11 Labs or Alternatives?

11 Labs is the best. I think 11 Labs is the industry leader as far as text to voice. Listener is probably pretty close, but I still honestly would probably go to 11 Labs myself most of the time. What's really cool about 11 Labs is that it's like really realistic. Right. If you just need to like if you make a mistake in one of your videos and you don't want to go back and record like an audio clip, you can go and have 11 labs say that for you. Get the audio, splice it in and maybe put B roll over that clip so that you Know, you can take your face off camera, but 11 Labs is really good. 11 Labs will actually do sound effects now. So if you're like, oh, I need a sound of like somebody knocking on a door. I need the sound of a car crashing. I need the sound of horn honking. It will do any of that stuff. You just give it a text prompt. It will actually make sound effects. It will make the audio of your own voice. You can go in and make know voices that don't exist. So if you ever want to make, you know, the, the whole like faceless YouTube channel seems to be like a really popular topic right now. You want to do a faceless YouTube channel. Eleven Labs is what everybody's using for that. They go and create a brand new voice that doesn't exist elsewhere and then plug in their script, get the audio out and then just go and overlay B, roll over that. Right. So it's really, really good for that if you are going to be on camera. One of my favorite tools that I've been playing with a lot lately is hey Gen. I'm not, I'm not sure if you played around with hey Gen yet, but hey Gen is one where it will translate you into any language you want. It'll still use your voice. Then it will also lip sync it to that. So I can go and reskin my entire video in Spanish and it will actually make it look like my lips are speaking in Spanish with my voice. And so that one's really, really good.

For the localized translation as well. So you say, okay, basically make this video Spanish.

Exactly.

It's going to translate what you said and it's going to translate the visual. You don't need closed captions or captions or anything because, you know, the, the English is more quiet and there's a voiceover or something like it just the whole thing and it's pretty clean. Does it have errors? Like what's the.

Yeah. So one of the problems I run into with a lot of these like tools is if you have a beard, sometimes it messes up, right? You might see like the lips sort of overlap the beard a little bit. People that don't have beards, it works perfect for. I have to sometimes do it a couple times until it looks good. That's one of the little issues it. But it works pretty good. In fact, there's somebody I recommend checking out named Varun Maya. He's another YouTuber and you know, Instagrammer and Tiktoker who makes videos about AI and he actually trained himself into hey Gen. So it's, you know, he made a bunch of video clips of him talking to the camera and then trained it into hey Gen. And it will also do it in English. You don't have to do translation. He'll go and get a script written about some sort of new AI advancement, plug that whole script into hey Gen and it will spit out an entire talking head video of him reading that script in his voice. He takes that video, pulls it into, you know, Da Vinci Premiere, whatever he uses to edit, and then starts off with his, you know, AI avatar on screen talking, but then overlays the rest of the video with B roll. So anytime it starts to look a little uncanny or the lip sync doesn't match up perfectly, he just uses those opportunities to throw B roll on the screen. So you're not seeing him anymore. And his channel has absolutely exploded. And 90% of his videos aren't even him on camera. It's his avatar that he created of him speaking on camera. And he's just copying and pasting the script into hey Gen.

So it's also the use case here would be like if I wanted to do a Think Media Spanish channel.

Absolutely.

And, and I already have the content. A tool like this now makes it possible what previously would have maybe been a staff, a voiceover, dub person, etc. And the complexity of all that AI is now. You said something. Things are five to 10 years out. You think this is right now? I mean, people are obviously doing it, but like this, it's good enough to do this right now?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. This is good enough to do right now.

Are you doing it?

I've experimented with a little bit. I've put some videos on my channel where it starts off with me, you know, as the fake video and then it jumps to the real me and I'm like, did you notice that wasn't me? You know, so I've done some stuff like that, but I'm not doing it as like a sort of, I mean.

Are you going to start a Spanish channel or something like that?

Oh, you know, it's something I've thought about doing, but I haven't done it yet. With all the stuff that's on my plate. I need to put some other systems in place first.

Yep, absolutely. Sequencing, having the steps. Well, we, we, we got to do a part two or maybe if, if you're willing, I could see, man, we could talk quarterly. You mean you're talking a lot of people because this such an emerging industry and there's a lot of Cool stuff that you're doing in terms of the AI stuff but also just creator economy and the tool space. And so if people want to. I have one final question for you but if people want to check out what you're doing just as a recap so people can follow you YouTube channel resources newsletter. Just break that down and give any call out so people can stay connected with you.

Yeah, there's, there's really three places. So Future Tools is the website we've been talking about where you can find the tools. My YouTube channel is just YouTube.com Matt Wolf and then I'm, I'm fairly active on Twitter as well. My Twitter handle is Mr. Eflow M R E F L O W. Those are really the three places I spend all my time. So that's really one of the go those, those places you'll find me.

Well, Matt, I appreciate you. I got one final question for you and but I do want to acknowledge just, you know, thank you for sharing your wisdom. We're so grateful. This has been a very rich really masterclass of insights in not just how to go full time scale, our creator businesses, the right mindset to have but then very tactical tools that are present right now that can help us create better content. I kind of just want to land the plane with just a brief convo around advice for more advanced creators that are scaling your scaling now. Yo, I mean you have been but like channels blown up like you said, getting the right team and systems and processes in place. And in the words of the prophet and scholar, notorious Big, you know, mo money, mo problems, more traffic, more views, more challenges, more opportunities coming your way, more, you know. And so what is kind of have you learned about pacing yourself, not burning out, maybe dealing with negative comments or the stress and stress and pressure of trying to get it all done in a week when it comes to this media career that you're building.

Yeah. I mean when it comes to like the negative comments, that was one of the harder things for me to, you know, come to grips with. Right. Like I'd been doing this for 10 years and it was always, you know, my mom and friends who were commenting on my videos. Right. And then out of nowhere my videos started doing well. And that's when the trolls and negative comments started popping up. And like the first month I mentioned I was doing, I did like 38 videos like every day, 38 days straight. And after that I almost wanted to quit from all the negative comments. I was just like, oh, why do people hate me? But sort of what I Realized over time is like, the comments are pretty much the vocal minority for the most part. When I go to conferences and I meet people in person, I get on phone calls. The general consensus from people is not what I see in the comments. Right. Comments are like, you know, when somebody goes to a restaurant and they have a bad experience, they're probably going to leave a negative review. If you go to a restaurant and have a good experience, you're probably not going to go leave a review at all. So the comments are the people that, like that small minority of people that might have had a problem with like one of the things you said in your video. Right. I've gotten to the point now where I actually don't even really read the comments. I have a team member who reads them and says, hey, here's some good ones that you should probably go comment on. Here's like the overall sentiment of the video. But I don't go through and read all the comments anymore. A lot of my videos will get like a thousand comments now too. So it's like, it's just too, too hard in the first place. But the, the comment thing, I think, you know, you build up that, that sort of callus where you. You kind of don't care anymore. After some time, at least I have. So that's. That's sort of asked me now. I'm not too concerned about that. Every once in a while there's one that stings. But for the most part, I don't really deal with that anymore. Hiring a team has been really, really helpful. I brought in an agency who helps with all of my sponsors now. So any sort of biz dev in my business, I don't deal with anymore. If I'm doing speaking, I have another team negotiating it for me. If there's sponsors, I send them to this other team. I always undervalued myself. I would have sponsors coming to me and my videos were getting 200,000 views a couple years ago. And I would say, sure, you can sponsor me for 1500 bucks, right? And I went to this agency and the agency's like, no, you need to be like 10xing that price for your sponsorships with the views you're getting. So the agency now gets to be a bad guy when it comes to the negotiation and the pricing of the sponsorships. So bringing on that was one of the biggest game changers for me and my business. It, you know, 10x my revenue overnight and also took the. I'm not the guy that has to go and, you know, give the news that this is how much it's going to cost, they go and handle all that. For me, bringing on editors has helped. Just putting good team members around me has been absolutely crucial to my sanity because there was a stretch there when I was doing a video every day where I was putting in 12, 15 hour days, going to bed, waking up and just doing it over and over and over again and I'm just like I'm going to keep doubling down until I can't do it anymore. And when I couldn't do it anymore, I started building that team and that's made all the difference.

Well Matt, I thank you for all your wisdom today and Think Media podcast. This has been a banger episode like rate review, share, you know, wherever you watch or listen and my name is Sean Cannell, your guide to building a profitable YouTube channel. We look forward to connecting with you in a future episode.