Founder’s Guide to AI: Creating Effective Content with AI

We have an amazing topic, an amazing speaker today. This is the first event in what we're calling the Founder's Guide to AI Workshop. Uh, and something that we've seen here at Founder Institute a lot is that most of the founders that we work with, they all know that they should be using AI more in their processes. Yes, a lot of them will have ChatGPT up and it'll help them maybe, you know, improve an email or something like that, right? But they really haven't figured out a lot of ways to get it into their workflows as much as possible to kind of augment what they're doing, help them move faster, which as we know as a startup is critical. So I was really delighted and pleased when Trevor, who's— I'll bring on here in a second, he's one of the highest rated of the 36,000+ mentors that we have here at the Founder Institute. Honestly, he's a mentor that really embodies what great startup mentors do, right? And that is kind of paying it forward, you know, trying to provide as much value as possible. Uh, Trevor, you know, approached us and said, hey, you know, I have an idea for a workshop. You know, he was kind of seeing a lot of the same thing. What if we can kind of go through, you know, in a structured way, uh, to explain to, uh, entrepreneurs and founders, you know, within the context of their day-to-day processes, things that they're actually doing, how they can start to bring AI into that to make themselves that much more powerful as an entrepreneur. So that's what spawned this. This is the first, um, of these sessions in this workshop. There'll be 4 sessions over the next 4 weeks, uh, same day and time over the next 4 weeks. Uh, and this first one today, we're going to be kicking off with creating effective content with AI. Um, so if you haven't seen the other ones, next week we'll be building an MVP with no coding skills.

I'm sure that's going to be a super popular one as well.

Um, using AI to increase productivity will be the third one. And then the last one will be using Agentic workflows to kind of automate repetitive tasks and just help you do a lot more with less. So with that being said, Trevor, welcome. I will— I'm going to take myself off the screen here, let Trevor take it away. Trevor's also a very modest person, and so I will just, you know, give him a couple more accolades here as well. CrowdTamers, if any of you are looking for help on your go-to-market and building marketing engines, kind of figuring out what the right messaging is, right, what the right ICP is, and how to actually build an engine to get you to revenue quickly. Crowdtamers.com is Trevor's company, and he does a lot of great work there, has helped countless FI companies achieve really, really fast growth. Okay, so Trevor, why don't you, uh, I'll take myself off the screen here. I'll let you take it away. Uh, anybody, if you do have questions, please throw them into the chat, throw them into the Q&A, and we will get to them after, uh, after the talk here.

Awesome, thank you so much, Jonathan. Appreciate the, uh, the warm intro in here. Uh, we are here today, we are talking about how to really level up your content game with AI. And I'm bringing this not as a theoretical thing. Uh, right now my business is making, I have to tote it up, but probably $20,000 a month, maybe $18,000, maybe $22,000, somewhere in there a month using almost exactly and only the things I'm going to talk to you about today. Now, $20K a month is not a whole lot in the great scheme of things. but to be able to share with you, I know this works. This has worked for dozens of clients, for tens of clients right now. Like, this is a system that's functional, and I'm going to give you basically all the notes for how we do it at Crowdtamers, because the best way I know of to help founders succeed is to share with them what I'm doing and empower you to go do it, right? So this, everything here is not theoretical. Everything here is practical. It's all stuff that I'm using. Right now. I have redone this presentation 6 times since back in March when Jonathan and I first talked about it because stuff keeps changing. So this is, uh, up to date as of yesterday when I finished the presentation. By next week it may change. If you are watching a recording of this stream and you're watching it, I know, sometime after December, some of this information will be out of date, but a lot of the processes I'm going to talk about are going to be true. So as you're going through this, keep in mind AI space moves super fast. Recommendations for tools to use and exact, like, tactical things will change, but the core ideas you're solving here are going to remain true regardless through here. So we're going to talk through a few different things here today. And the, the number one problem I think we have to solve is just, I think everyone kind of knows why content work, but let's, let's drill into why and then talk about how to prep for content, talk about what type of content is effective, talk about how to make all this content and how to use AI throughout every step of the process to shorten the amount of prep time it takes. Then once you meet the production side of content, how do you make something that is representative of your brand voice and your vision and how you wanna be? How do you make sure it's all put out there. And then I'll give you some examples of exact things I've been doing with clients in the last 5 months that I have seen work and how they worked. So you can see content marketing isn't part of— it's not— doesn't stand all on its own. Ideally, ideally, content marketing is part of an all-bound marketing system and a complete go-to-market engine. But we'll start with this. We'll talk about this.

Okay.

Uh, briefly go a bit into me, into what I've done. Uh, I have scaled a lot of companies up from zero to a couple of million, some up to north of $15-20 million. Uh, I've helped launch a tremendous number of startups. I've mentored— I think I just did my 71st cohort with Founder Institute. Been around a while. And, uh, specifically in the AI space, I co-founded, launched, exited an AI startup in '22 with a 2-year lockup, so I couldn't do any more AI stuff. And now the 2-year lockup on non-compete has ended, so I've got something I'm launching like now as well in the space. Like, I am here in the middle of the AI space in addition to my, uh, marketing agency. So like, I'm, I'm living the same fight every founder is going through right now. So, and the best way I know of To get people aware of me and to get them paying attention to what I have to say rests heavily on content. If any of you have checked me out on LinkedIn since I started to talk about, hey, doing this event with Founder Institute, and since FI have been promoting it, there's a video coming from me almost every single day. If there's not a video post, there's a text post coming almost every single day. And, oh man, a year and a half ago now, really. I was on this chart. I was spending— I write annoyingly quickly. It's the downside of being a child of two English professors, is my, like, I'm able to create content very fast. But even at the crazy speed I was writing, probably 2 hours to think of something worth talking about and then write it. And if you're trying to post every day, that's a quarter, or let's be honest, on Founder's Lifestyle, maybe an eighth of a full workday. And to say, hey, I've got to put that time in every day is more than most people can do. So if you go scroll way back in my timeline to, you know, I guess early 2024, I'm not posting every day. I may be posting twice a week as I'm finding time to do it. And that means most people who are on LinkedIn or X or Meta or YouTube On the date I'm not posting, have zero chance to see me. So I'm totally missing a bunch of my opportunities at bat. And I was like most founders, probably like most of you here in the call. The hundreds of you here in this call are probably producing somewhere between 1 to 4 pieces of content a month, which means you're missing most of your opportunity. For the people who you want to have see you, even know you exist. This is particularly important because in the B2B space where I work and where a whole lot of FI startups work, it takes a lot of visibility to generate a qualified marketing lead. It takes a lot of visibility to close a sale. The old standard, they say, is it takes 7 touchpoints to get someone to even be willing to check you out. Right, if you have 700 impressions to get one person to begin their buyer's journey, it can be a lot of work if you're doing ads or if you're doing email or if you're doing PR or if you're doing events, a tremendous amount of work. And if you're doing content once a week, it might take a year for your content to generate any findable volume of MQL because you're posting so rarely. So that's the problem. That's what we're trying to address here. And there's a lot of ways that AI solves it. And most of the ways that AI solved it is really bad. Right? If you are, and I'm not going to try to point out anybody on the internet who I've seen recently, but if you are one of those people whose content is super obviously ChatGPT generated, or if your comments are all, you know, 6-word engagement spam that's just very obviously AI slop. And indeed, LinkedIn now, for reasons that baffle me, automatically suggests AI slop for you to reply to people with. You don't even have to think, you can just click a button. But there's a problem, which is your content needs to showcase you and your brand and how you are unique. And unless you are very careful with it, unless you give all the right information to make it work, what you're going to end up with is content that sounds just like everybody else's. And then at that point, you aren't competing on something that you can win. No one will go, oh yeah, I remember that business because they said something interesting to me. They'll see something that looks just like everything else that everyone else says when they don't put the work in. And so as a founder, you might go, oh, it's easy, I can put all these posts out. And then I'm shouting into the void. And for some reason, no one seems to bite on them. And I only have, I think, 7,500 followers, something like that on LinkedIn. I am not an influencer. Every month, I'm getting at least one, if not more like four, interested inquiries from my LinkedIn channel with no ads boosting it, with no PR agency behind it, with nothing else, just the content that's being put out. People will see, and it is unique and distinctive, so they remember it. And that's got to be what you're trying to do, is not add noise, come up with a voice and a way to talk about you that is unique, and then build from there, because what you're really trying to get is a way for people to understand that you are different than the 27 competitors that you have. You were able to communicate it clearly, and you're not talking about you. Every founder I think I've worked with at FI, and there's— we're coming up on like 3,000 or so— every single one of them, when they're beginning talking about their pitch, Talking about their product, talking about what they do. They're talking about themselves, right? I have built an app that does this thing and this thing and this thing. And one of the truisms of both marketing and sales is if you want to sell to me, don't tell me about you. Tell me about me. And the way you build trust at scale is not by saying, hey, we have this feature and we have this feature. And if you have this problem, we solve this problem. And me, me, me, me. The way you're going to build this trust at scale is by identifying the problems that the person who buys from you has and communicating that you understand them, that you know how to solve them, that you're innovating in the space, that you have an opinion on how to solve them. As you're able to do all of those things, then they will begin to trust you. Not everybody, but you don't want everybody to trust you. You want the people who your unique approach is going to work for. You want them to trust you and your positioning here. What you say, how you say it, how often you say it, the repeatability of the thing you say over and over again, that establishes who you are for the audience you care about. If you're Jeff Bezos, you don't get to control who knows about you, but no one on this call— I'm pretty sure, Jonathan, let me know if Jeff Bezos is here— no one on this call is Jeff Bezos. As a result, that means you get to pick what people think about you and who knows about you. And so this positioning control, the story you tell, the way you tell it, means you are out there talking about you more than anybody else is. And because you're filling up the space of your brand with you, other people don't have as much capacity to take control away from you. And then I'll talk about this a bit more. I'm discussing case studies and actual use cases here of how content really performs, but When you have content out there regularly, it shortens your sales cycle somewhere between 12% to 33% shortening of your sales cycle when people see you constantly. Because I can send you a bump via email. We've all gotten those just bubbling up to the top of your inbox. Shoot me, that's a terrible email. I didn't want to think about you. You gave me nothing new and just made my day a little bit worse. No, I'm not going to reply. But content from you that actually discusses the problem I have and reminds me that you exist and, oh, that's a good way to think about the problem I'm grappling with right now, that boosts trust, makes me see you as a better solution to the problems I have, and brought you back to my mind again. So it shortens that sales cycle because it's another one of those touchpoints you need to close a deal. But you didn't have to go, you know, call somebody or DM somebody or email somebody and interrupt them. They saw your content and they got value out of it instead. And then finally, once you have a business that's going, what you say and when you're visible online all the time, it actually tells people who you are when they're looking to come work for you too, looking to come invest in you too. Just seeing that you posted every day for a year shows a repeatability, a systems thinking, a dependability, a forethought that already separates you out from most founders who can't do that. So all this combines to mean that content is way more valuable than just, did I get likes? Did someone comment? I posted on the internet, did people love me enough today? I don't really care about likes and shares. I care about Does this accomplish the other things I want to see my content do? And the good news is it might take you 6 months or a year to build the kind of audience where every time you say something, the audience engages. Particularly as everybody changes their algorithms all the time, it can be really hard to keep up with the engagement flywheel. But if you're able to look at the other metrics that matter to you, and see that those are working for you, then your content might work in 2 months, 3 months, instead of 6 months or a year. So if you're using AI to write your first draft, you've already failed. You didn't do it right. Stop. AI shows up long before you go, write me a blog post about the importance of the newest fashion colors in interior paint. Nothing about that is the right way to start this. You begin by understanding about the things you want to talk about. And I don't know how the McKinseys and the PricewaterhouseCoopers of the world these days are feeling, but I can pay Grok $7 a month or ChatGPT, $20 a month, and tell it to do a deep research report for me and get 5, 10, 20 pages of heavily annotated, deeply researched thought about any problem, any space, anything I'm looking at, and use that as the beginnings of, okay, what do I want to say now? So my first recommendation, and we'll talk more about the specific ways you apply it, is before you do any writing, you start with, I've got to put stuff in my head so I can say interesting things back out. Now AI can do a bunch of the lift. You get a 15, 20-page research report and you might go, I don't want to read that much. Yeah, that's fair. Then you tell AI to summarize the research report. It just made you and now you've got one page. That's much easier to go through, right? Then you use AI to improve what you've made. Most people are by definition mediocre writers. That's kind of how a bell curve works. But AI writes, well, the upper, upper side of that mediocre, right? A little better than average. And particularly once you start to give it better prompting, it can really refine how you write. It can refine how you talk, it can refine how you think about addressing a problem. Then once you have content in one form or another, AI can take the content that you have largely made and transform it into something that is more digestible and more reusable. And then finally, as you start to think about what is my content, how is it working, what is it doing for me, You can use AI to understand what's working, what's not, and recommend the next steps. And now somewhere in all of this, AI can also help with drafting. But AI isn't the starting point for any of this because you need to be the human in the loop. If you are involved at the beginning and at the end, 10% at the beginning and 10% at the end, and AI takes the 80% in the middle. Then you're using AI properly for your content marketing. If you're involved 5% and let AI take care of it all from there, then you're producing AI slop. That's not what we want to talk about today. That's not what we're going to talk about how you build today. We're going to discuss how we take something that is uniquely you and then use AI to make it perform in the variety of ways I've already discussed. But it's important to think about, you do have to put some time in. Not an hour per piece of content, probably not even half an hour per piece of content, but 5 or 10 minutes per piece of content at the low end, and maybe up to 15-ish minutes per piece of content. Here's something where you can say, hey, give me an hour a week and I can put 4 out of the 5 days and maybe repost one. There's all 5 days. There we go. I've got content every business day of the week. I've already 5x my output and I've reduced the time it took me to make it all. It's got to be putting your critical thinking in there though, because the AI isn't going to be a subject matter on your business or your industry the same way you are. So apparently my slide formatting has reversed the order of the highlight here, but research and prepare. Don't just talk, don't make noise. Noise. Talk about what matters. I'm going to start to do and show you here some examples of how you can start to use this. Now, I've got prompts I am using to make this all work, to showcase everything here, and I'm going to drop in a few minutes a link where you can go and get the prompts. So don't, you know, try and pause the video and frantically copy down the prompts here. I'm not going to be hiding any of this from you. It's all going to be available for you to download so that you can use exactly what my team uses every day to produce the outcomes that we need. When I talk about research and prepare, what you can do, I've already mentioned deep research, right? So I've got OpenAI and Grok here. I'm actually paying OpenAI, Grok, Claude, I think Gemini right now are the ones I'm paying for every month. And I use them all for different things. I do find it really useful if you've got two LLMs that you are paying for, for a lot of the early work here, the beginning work, to pass it through both, because you're going to see some examples of overlap and some examples of differences. And those differences give you some opportunities to think about, oh, okay, what, what do I want to talk about? So as an example, agentic AI gains traction, AI-enabled strategies gain traction. That is clearly between the two. And then we see AI, the canned lion, and then down here, AI cans lions, right? So they've got some similarities here, but Grok found a few other ideas that ChatGPT didn't find as quickly. But there's something else here. This is kind of a garbage prompt. And I want to talk now a bit about how to make prompting that's good. So that you can see, okay, I, I want to get a better outcome than the average person. I want to have better research than the average person. And this is tend to kind of going to start— let me change how I'm sharing my screen here— this is going to tend to start with, uh, there we go, looking up, giving enough context to this engine of yours to be able to give it more precise instructions. So I'm going to grab from here a— am I still sharing my screen correctly or not? I am not. Give me one more moment here. My apologies. I'm going to share my entire screen so you continue to hop around. There we go. This one. So when you are making prompts, and there's a bunch of tools you can use to make this easier, I will give a free shout out to a tool I've used for years called TeamGPT, which is a great way to build collaborative shared workspaces around AI for your whole company, and also build a prompt library. But, uh, from there, like, I pulled this out from my team's TeamGPT instance. This is the exact prompt that we're using right now. And you start by defining a role, giving a task, and then giving some specificities to what you want. Now, in TeamGPT, basically, you— it will prompt you to fill out the stuff in these brackets, but we can also just manually do a find and replace for this. And here is an example of if I wanted to interview somebody, right? And you could, you could interview you, I would note. You could say, okay, well, we're going to interview someone and we want to use this to get some relevant questions for them. So instead of saying, let me go to my LinkedIn here, I will grab my bio from LinkedIn so we're not putting anybody on the spot. There we go. Here, we'll minimize this too while we're at it. You can— there we go— grab from— if you have a CV or anybody who you might want to talk to, you can grab their bio right off of LinkedIn. So I'm going to do this real quick, and I'm going to go over to my ChatGPT tab here. Actually, I've grabbed the wrong thing to start. I'm going to grab all of this, put this in here. I'm going to show you the difference between, uh, come up with a few interesting topics for a B2B, um, marketing agency, use of agencies, social media. This is a bad prompt, right? I've given it not a whole lot of context, and so the results that are going to come out here are— I mean, these are relatively standard, right? But if I instead say, let's come up with a new chat, and we're going to grab the prompt, paste it in, and then I've got some a find and replace to-do here. We're going to ask the subject, we'll say for question number, we'll do 8 questions, 8 questions specifically about, and I'll keep it the same kind of vagueness, although we could of course make for a better list of topics. But we can say these topics are going to be B2B marketing agency agency trends. And then we're going to grab my bio and use that along with this prompt. Also specifically calls out the fact that the AI needs to research what's happening in this space. So when I do that, it's going to actually search the web instead of just using its context. And so by being very specific about the kind of results I want to see out, now we have way less generic questions, right? Okay, that I could probably talk about more interestingly than your ICP isn't who you think it is. That's pretty generic. So when you are doing any Preparation for content creation, you can start by setting up interview questions for yourself. You can throw in more content, you can throw in the, uh, your website text, you can throw in other interviews you've had, anything you think that will give the AI context that's going to make questions that will allow you to say something more interesting. Because like, hey, here we go. This is going to come up in a few moments, right? Most B2B teams are increasing video investments in 2025. If you were to ask me to talk about that, yeah, I've got some things I can say about it. So that's the difference between a generic, like, I don't know anything about comms. I'm probably not even saying the name of the event right. I'm not a big, I don't know, movie, whatever. Golden Lion. I don't care about these things. So this I'd have a hard time talking about, but all the topics that come from my bio and my interests, I could talk about it all day. It's easy, right? And when you're more comfortable talking about it, you will give better responses. So this then is an example of the exact same prompt, right, with a lot more information. I think I was pretending I was interviewing Jonathan Gritchen here, um, pulled his bio out. But regardless, putting this in and making sure that you do a good job with your prompting will give you way better outputs because it lets you, oh no, it lets you, uh, get responses that say things like, and again, the AI did this research. I somehow missed that FI raised a venture fund. So if I was going to interview Jonathan, or if he was going to interview himself for content, this is a recent announcement, something he could talk about. And it will be relevant for him, for anybody on this call. Same thing is true for you. So the first part here is before you ever worry about the writing, you use the AI to do this research. I would also note how fast this was, right? I put this in, I think it spent maybe 8, 10 seconds doing its web search and gave me the result. Now this wasn't a deep search. When you tell ChatGPT to do a deep search, It takes 15 minutes, right? But I have a podcast that I interview guests on every week. It takes me literally 25 seconds to prep for the show. I use this, a slight variation of this prompt where I give it the exact output I want, and then it gives me all the questions to ask the guest. And the guests are like, wow, you really researched me. And I'm like, well, someone did. So. That's the first part. Now, as I've mentioned, you can go and grab from this URL this information and all the other prompts I'll be going through over the course of the rest of my— I think I've got 30-ish minutes left here to talk about how you can take AI and use it to make better content. This is not the only piece. I've even got a $49, $39, $39 gift for anybody who goes there and grabs the download. So you get basically my, uh, $10 million Facebook ads, uh, template pack for free if you go and grab it. I encourage you, if you're interested in this or the other thing I talk about, to go grab that. Uh, it will be there for the foreseeable future, but still good to grab it now while you're thinking about it. So, okay, so you've had this research done and you're like, okay, now I've had a discussion with myself, kind of, right, for my own content with the AI. But I don't have content yet. All I've got is a list of questions, and I don't have anything to do with this yet. And here's the part that gets most founders choked up. You turn the camera on and you look at it and you go, oh no, I have to be perfect. And I don't know about all of you listening here, I perform very poorly when 100% absolute perfection is what I demand of myself. But when you go, oh, this is recorded, oh, I have to, it has to be right, it can be really, really stressful. But what you can do instead is say, hey, you know what, I want to see if the AI can help me turn an unstructured chat into something that is useful. I might go, I've opened up, in this case it's Gemini, but you can use ChatGPT, any of them has a voice model. I can say, we'll start this up. There we go. Hey, Gemini. I am looking to create some content out from a question that I've been asked, which is people are talking about the importance of video in B2B teams. Video is becoming more and more important. 61% of teams show that they are investing more in video in 2025. And I think the big reason for that is when you're trying to stand out from the AI slop that's out there, all the content that's it's just generated in bulk and there's no real originality to it. No one's got a really good video and voice pack yet that looks like a human who cares. And when you make video, I think you stand out more because you're showing your personality and you're ready. And so now it's not just about the visuals, but also the tone of voice and body language. People can tell when you're genuinely passionate. Now it's fine to me. And that builds trust. Plus, And I can take this and say, like, hey, okay, thanks for that feedback. Could you restructure what I just said into a crisp 140 to 280 character post for X? Okay, here's a draft for your X post. Video is key for B2B teams. 61% are boosting video investments by 2025. It cuts through the AI noise and shows real human connection. Stand out with video. So it doesn't have a lot of context around my voice, and we'll talk more about that in a moment. But I gave a kind of unstructured answer to this, and it pulled out the relevant part for what we'll call a logical appeal. Now, there's a number of tools you can use for this. Actually, Gemini on the desktop, which I can't do while I'm doing an Airmeet video here, you can share video. I think you can also do it with Claude on the desktop. Rather Claude Desktop versus just Gemini 2.5 Flash you can run in your browser. You can share video and you can ask it to give you feedback not just on what you're saying and how you're saying it, but the framing and where you're looking and what's happening with the video itself. You can also really easily go— oh yeah, that'll do it— go here and say, hey, I've got a video of me and throw this up and say, hey, I recorded a video. And I can just say, how viral— actually, I think I have— we go back for one of these. No, fine. How viral do you— or how much viral potential, TNTIL, do you think this This video has, has, look at the framing, content, and delivery style to analyze the quality of the social short video. Cool. Now it's going to go through, and Gemini does this, I think ChatGPT will do. I don't believe the other models will actually look through a video. Right. But this is going to analyze my hook, talk about how I structure this, and then I can ask it, be blunt, what do I do better next time? And from this, it'll give me feedback to make a better version of the video. Right? I don't have to have my wife or my coworkers or whatever, look at it and give me feedback. There's 3 immediately actionable pieces of feedback on this video. So you can record anything you think of and get feedback on the vague level or even say, give me line by line feedback. Uh, how do I cut this down to 30 seconds? We'll say, how do I cut this to 30 seconds? And that's going to basically tell me exactly what sentences to cut and which ones to keep. And in a moment, I'll show you how that's useful. There we go. Tabulated data gives you the exact sentence and how long it is. Really handy when you go the next step with this. So you take your video, you record, you can just leave the camera on, record an hour, take chunks of it out. I think Gemini Pro maxes out at 5 minutes, and I think Gemini Max plan might do up to 20. But you can leave your camera running, you can answer any of these questions in depth, and then you can go to Gemini and say, how should I edit this? Right? That's the second point, as I was mentioning, research, and then editing. Now, I don't know about you, but I'm not enough of a pro at Adobe Premiere and similar softwares to be very comfortable going in here and using like these timestamps and trying to figure out how to edit a nonlinear piece of software, you know, with the professional softwares. So instead, what I want to do is think about how do I trim things down to find the absolute best part of this with a tool that's easier to use. And a good way to think about this— everyone knows Pareto's principle: 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your work. And David Ogilvy, back in the ancient history of the Mad Men era of marketing, talking about the same thing. I'm a little more brutalist than this because I think in the modern era it's even more extreme. 95% of people will never read more than the first line of your post. They will never watch more than the first 1.5 seconds of your video. They will never see more than the subject line of your email address. If you don't have a strong open, Give it up. You don't have something that's going to work. Put it aside and try again when you do. Now, I would note Gemini here already said, hey, the hook opens. Good start. Awesome. We're comfortable with that. If it didn't say, this is the perfect hook, or if it said later, this is the right hook, right? You want to really pay attention because that first 1.5, 3 seconds, somewhere in there, it's got to land it. And AI is going to help me bounce back and forth and find the right thing to go with. And then from there, we're going to take this and build it out some. So one of the ways you can ask for really good quality hooks is by telling the AI what I want. And before we go into actually editing this video, I'm going to talk about a great hooks prompting library. So I'm going to drop this in here, and then we're going to talk about, hey, how do I make my, uh, video sound more like this? How do I start my video with a hook that's more like one of these? So if you don't have a strong hook, if it says, You don't have a hook that's great. Uh, it can propose some alternatives to you. Now, I would note personally here, hot take is half of your 1.5-second intro and is valueless, right? Marketing agencies are overrated, coming from a guy who runs an agency. That's a pretty good hook, right? So again, human in the loop. Don't just parrot what they say, but think about what it means. Like, good work from your marketing agency is losing you money. That's actually pretty good. Like, I like that. Right, so it's going through here and coming up with new versions of this hook with, again, the prompt I just gave it. Right, now I have way more actionable feedback for my opening 1.5, 3 seconds to get people in to watch the rest of it. But once we've got this, we still have to be able to do something with the video. So there's some tools I like for video editing. Now this one here is probably not going to be news to a lot of you, but maybe it is. We'll see. Uh, I can take a— in Descript, I'm just going to grab a video of me. I'll grab one of my podcasts. Sure, this one. Um, And this is a back and forth. It's an interview that was probably 40-odd minutes with, uh, somebody from my podcast. I don't think we've released this one yet, but it's in the docket to go. So cool. Uh, what we need to do then is say, hey, we've had this interview. I want to find the best bits. And there's, there's two ways to do it. One is I can use other tools and pass this over to them. Right now we'll talk about this, right? Let's imagine I've got this entire transcript here and I say to Google, we'll make a new one, right? What are the best bits in this transcript? No, no, pay attention to the top 100 books at the end to come up with ideas for what would be a great— apologies— be a great social short. Paste that in. Now, one cool thing about Gemini, and this is different than the other tools out there, is its context window is ridiculously huge. It's, I think, a million tokens. So I can dump in almost an infinite amount of data and use it just in a one-shot prompt to get results back, right? To put in an entire video transcript plus 100 great hooks plus anything else I want to do and it'll be fine, right? So here's a direct quote. Said this is a good social short. Now I haven't talked about the script yet, and I'm not going to go into a full walkthrough of it because it's kind of out of scope of our time here. But the way it works is, as I navigate through the transcript, the video on the other side keeps up. So if I do a search for trash, hey, there we go. There is the quote, right? And I could grab just this bit out and make this into a social short. AI has identified this has got emotionally related language. I'd also note something here. And this is an interviewing tactic. If you are interviewing somebody else to get good content out, I put the words in Taylor's mouth here, right? The Creator collaborations are mostly kind of tolerable. When did you go, this is trash? That's strong emotional language. Taylor wouldn't have used those words if I didn't give them to him. And so when he repeated it, I was like, yes, I knew at that moment this is going to be a good social snippet to share because I made him say something emotionally resonant. And so when you were writing questions that are good hooks, Even if it's for you, pay attention to the part that makes it a good hook and use that to derive your answer so you've got something powerful in what you're saying. So, okay, this hook writer can work either while you're working on answering or after you've recorded a video to give it the right punch to say these are the bits that we want to cut out and share. And using tools like Descript is a great way to set things up. Or you can use, uh, Opus Pro is huge. A lot of people use them. I think they say they've got 10 million founders on the platform— or not founders, companies on the platform, uh, whatever. Like, they have a really good piece of software to take a video and cut it up into neat little interviewed pieces, right? Here's a bunch of social snort shorts from like 2 years ago from my interview here, right? Like, cool. Okay. It lays it out for you. It automatically finds the good moments. It applies the subtitle. Like, if you want to make social shorts at scale, I find that this does a better job than Descript does at finding the good moments. So it's worth spending the, I don't know, $30 or $40 a month for this tool. Because it saves you a couple of hours every single time you make content. And then Descript is just any person in my team, from my copywriter to my, uh, designer to my growth media marketer to like anybody, can if they want to hop in and edit a video here because almost no training is required. This looks like a Google Doc. So if you're going to set up and try to start to use your video natively I recommend those two tools to find those best bits, to get out the parts that have that virality, is the hard human part of this content creation that you're doing, right? You get research and you get questions driven by the AI, and then maybe it's just me, but I find answering these questions is pretty easy, right? Getting a well-structured question that speaks to my interests to answer, I can easily do 5 or 10 or 15 minutes replying. But then going through the transcript, even when Opus suggests like it did here, hey, this bit here, right? Did it find the exact right snip? Do I need to add a couple seconds in the front or cut a couple of seconds from somewhere in the middle to make it tighter? This is where you're going to be pulling out and really tightening things down to the narrowest version of itself that you can make it. And again, you can use AI to help you make the judgment, but in the end, you have to be the arbiter here. And once I've got this and I've got a chunk of text here, then we start to think about, so this is the best bit. I knew it worked well, right? Or I'll go over here to Gemini and pull my video. And say, all right, from this transcript, let me go here and actually say, all right, write me a— what is it— 280-character tweet based on the best bits of this video. But I can now take the parts that we've already identified are the best parts and transform. That's the next use of AI, is I've recorded a video because it's faster to riff ideas, it's faster to toss this out to make the social shorts, even if I go on a 5-minute rant, to cut it down into 2 minutes, not make a short but an actual regular YouTube video. And then also say, but now I'm going to make this, or I can say I want to take what I said and transform this text into something that people are going to want to read and take what I have created, pass it through the system, whether it is real-time video feedback from Gemini, whether it is, uh, me bouncing ideas back and forth on an individual piece of copy, and start to say, all right, I wanna make this where this is going to reflect me in the best way I can. We'll talk a bit about how you make the copy sound better than you with AI in just a moment. So hang out, but let's talk about what you wanna do, whether it's video, whether it's text, whether it's infographics, however it is you're creating your content. As I already mentioned, don't talk about you. Talk about your client. Talk about your buyer. Most of your content is going to be talking about what's happening in the industry and explaining to other people through expertise that you are smart and trustworthy. Occasionally it'll be, hey, check out this thing I wrote on my website. Hey, we had a video on YouTube. People are loving it. Go check it out there. That's acquisition content. And then commercial content is going to be the, hey, you know, There was a huge security breach and what is it, 60 billion passwords leaked. We're a cybersecurity firm. If you want a free audit, check out and we'll let you know if you have any vulnerabilities, right? Like very, very rarely you talk, maybe once, maybe twice a month, you talk about actually something that's driving you money because that doesn't drive trust, right? People who you're acquiring through other means, are we getting you money right now? And all you're doing is telling your— look, I am, uh, I am interesting, trust me, believe in me. I'll turn this off because I had it up so we could hear it as you build out your content mix. So, okay, let's talk about what you want to deliver. And CrowdTamers, we do content marketing for ourselves and for clients, and This, basically any one person trying to be a thought leader should be doing this. If you have 4 thought leaders in your company, they should all be doing this and all making their own content. You shouldn't have one person posting and everybody else resharing, because if I see Steve resharing Tom's content, I don't trust Steve any more than I already did. I might go, Tom is cool, but I also might go, I don't know Tom, doesn't matter to me that you share his content. Uh, getting this kind of thing spun up and working. I mean, there are content agencies out there. I used to do this for clients. We charged $7,000 a month because AI wasn't doing most of the work. It's all done by hand. Now it's more like $2,000, $1,500 a month, whatever it is for people in the space, for crowdtubers when we do it, when anybody does, because so much of this work is being done by the AI. The research happens in a minute. Right? The identifying the best parts of your video happens in a minute. I don't have to watch the whole video. I can just have AI tell me what part of my answer resonated best. So you want to figure 22 pieces of content, one piece every business day. You want to have some text and some video, at least in the beginning. Eventually you're going to find either text or video does better for you, then you'll produce more of that and less of the other as you discover what is better for your audience and for the platforms you work on. But what you really want to do is figure out, even if it's text, right? So video editing with Descript will get you into making your YouTube Shorts, creating all that, but you still got to figure out how do I turn around what I want to say and make it as performative as I can. And that's how you have to quit sounding like AI and begin to sound more like a human. And there's two parts to making this happen. The first part is you have to prompt the AI in general with, hey, you need to not sound like this, you need to sound like this. And everybody knows a couple of the common signs of like, is this AI generated, right? Some of the big ones, uh, you're right if you've used Claude in the last I mean, you're— every time you challenge on anything, it goes, you're right. Uh, a super common— there's a bunch of words that are bad to have. Super common setups, right? It's not just this, it's also this. Or embark on a journey, delve into, a treasure trove. All of these phrases are super emblematic of AI. So the first thing you do, and I actually gathered this together I think at the beginning of the year. I've updated this most recently, is I found the 120 words that are most overrepresented in AI copy versus regular human copy, and then 20 of the top phrases, and then finally went into a bunch of the structural mechanics of what good writing looks like and what AI writing looks like instead. And then this here is actually— I published this I think maybe a decade ago. This is just what good writing is. And then finally, here's like how you fix AI prose, how you make it better, right? This, as well as all the other prompts I've got, is in the download you can get from my website, crowdtamer.com/aiforfounders. But what you're going to do here is we're going to take this whole piece of content here, and I've got a piece of text that I had— oops— Gemini make for me here. And I'm like, okay, rewrite that. If I type well, that would be great. Text bearing in mind my copy you're providing rules below. Let's spell copywriting correctly. That's irony for you. There we go. So there's the first kind of fix, right? You say, hey, I don't want you to sound like AI. This is not fixing a human who's fed up. That's harsh. I'm not fed up, I'm just directive. Anyway, This changes the language. It adds more emotional impact and more variety in sentence length, particularly if you were to start to lay this out in the LinkedIn format of a new line for every sentence, right? This is very ragged edge. This is going to be a little more readable. But the other thing you can do is you can say, look, I don't just want you to not write like AI. I want you to write like a writer who I particularly admire. So we'll think about a couple experts here. One copywriting expert you might look at is me, right? I have opinions. Am I the world's best copywriter? No. But let me show you examples of how much you can make the copy change based off of what you put into it. So I've got a— this is from my Instant Copywriting Mastery templates, which are also in that download link here, right? And if I go into a new chat and I say, write a blog post following a blog post about— what was it? It was, um, The rise of video, you know, in B2B marketing. Do some online research about the topic and then follow the below rules for your style, or your writing style. I'm going to put this in, and I'm also going to grab this as well. Again, Gemini has— this is— Gemini has crazy context window, but I don't think you actually need that much context window. So let me just do this. I'm going to copy this entire prompt into ChatGPT just to show you the difference for the outputs here. There we go.

Here.

And we'll write a new chat. So, all right. This one should sound a bit like me. You've been hearing me talk for an hour. We'll see how close it came to actually sounding like me. There we go. Yeah, okay. That's not terrible. Doesn't read super like AI. If you read a lot of AI text, you'll know how it generally looks. I would note Gemini is not the strongest copywriter though. We end up with still quite regular paragraph sizes. So it's not varying the length of each kind of chunk of thoughts, which is one of those strong signs that this is actually AI written. And in terms of sheer copywriting power, I tend to rate Claude highest out of all of them. So we can go here real quick. I've already got the prompt active and just tell it do this and see how it goes, right? Take a few moments to look it up. Now, I know I fed it information on me. Since the Google Gemini one here is done, let's try something different real quick. We're going to start a new chat, and we're going to, instead of trying to sound like me, we're going to try to sound like Shakespeare, who is an expert writer, if maybe not an expert B2B writer. There's some room maybe for him to improve on his general legibility in what we'll call modern English. But hey, famous writer nonetheless. Let's pass that in and then let's see what happens when you also tell it not to sound like AI. Right. Oh, hey, I missed that. Yep. Yep. Yep. I want the blog post to be about the rise of video in B2B marketing. There we go. Fa. It's going to go to all the questions. One, you can answer this one by one, right? How it shortens sales cycles. This is for SME CDOs. Hang on, I didn't mean to hit that. Yeah, yeah, I know. Leadership. You pick the best keywords. 3, book a sales call with our marketing agency experts. And then 4, go find your own course material. So this again is looking to sound more like me. Now you'll note copy here, right? Much stronger. This is, uh, I think, using Sonnet or Opus. I'm not even sure. This is Sonnet, so it's not even— this is their, this is their best writing model. Opus is better for coding, which is what we're doing here. We'll talk about that next week. But, right, this reads, one, a fair bit like me, and two, not like AI at all. So Gemini is the weakest of them here, but context window is biggest. Let's see what we have here.

There you go.

So this doesn't sound too much like Shakespeare, but I bet you if we put this to Claude instead, Write a blog post about the rise of video for B2B marketers. Let me go grab this. This will come out a whole lot more, change in their style. Ah, see, it's trying to rationalize this out. Like, no, man, write it like Shakespeare would. Let me just stop this here before it goes too far. So in this case, AI needs a little bit of reinforcement. I'm telling it no. There we go. Hey, there you go. Right? And it's discussing the same ideas, but we can definitely tell it take a very different tack. And then finally, I'll give you one other example of somebody I think is a better copywriter than I am. He's a guy whose newsletter I've been subscribed to for a couple of years now. And he's, I think, specifically better at social media content writing than I am. J.K. Molina. Uh, built and sold, I think, Tweet Hunter and had a pretty, uh, effective go of it. And now he runs his own, uh, I forget the name of his website, uh, like St. Cash, maybe something. But his email copywriting is really on point. I've really enjoyed it for years. And if I say, uh, hey, you know, you— I'll let you keep running. I'll go over here and I'll say, write a blog post about B2B about the rise of video in B2B marketing. Follow the below style and copy the copywriting example as best you can. Now, the more content you have for training, like especially in January, the better off you are. I think I only have maybe, I don't know, 3 or 4 emails of JK's in here, just like I only had 3 blog posts, I think 6 of Shakespeare's sonnets. So there's like, if you were to put in more data, it would fit better. But it's not like wildly off here. I can say, write a blog post about the rise of video in B2B marketing. Follow the below style. There you go. So same kind of prompt across all of them, and we'll see what the initial start is. Yeah, there we go. So One of the things that JK is really good at that I don't make much use of is storytelling. He also writes a lot of much shorter sentences than I do. So like this leads with a story to draw you in. It's not how I write. This is what he writes, right? So 3 completely different examples of output based off of what you put in for your input. When you are building your content, whether it's text or whether it's video, right, you put in the style of a writer who you admire, David Ogilvy or Richard Feynman or Trevor Longino or whomever, and use it to start to phrase things that you're going to be able to bounce off of. If the research comes back in someone else's voice, if the questions come back phrased in someone else's voice, or if you ask it, look at the video I recorded and then write me a post in this person's voice. Two things will happen. One is you'll see content, your content, written like the writer you admire, which can be a real ego boost to see, wow, this is what they would have said if they took my words and made them shine. But then also, if you actually read them and don't just go, great, copy-paste, send, read them, it's going to affect your brain. It's going to make you a better writer because now you're playing back and forth with the AI yourself to improve how you write. Now, every blog post, every video, every everything needs support images. All of these are AI-generated, even this one, which might maybe fool you, I don't know, or this one, right? They're all created with either ChatGPT, where you can say— and ChatGPT is great for this— I have all the art for this slide presentation came from asking OpenAI to make me these slides, right? You should be recognizing pretty much all of these slides here. I just began by giving it, hey, there's the colors that my brand has, and then here's the kind of look and feel I want for the art, and away it goes. All these pieces were generated from there. This one, the layout was bad enough that I just redid from scratch, but otherwise, like, cool, this all works. And Uh, it's really easy. You make a thumbnail. If you can actually see— hang on, I did this. Um, I didn't like where the hand was, so I went in, I think on my phone or maybe with my mouse, I forget which, and I drew where I wanted the hand. I didn't quite get it right that try, but then I'm like, hey, look at how I drew it and how the box goes. And it goes, oh, okay. And now you'll note those two Sure do look a lot alike, except this is way more polished, I'd argue, than my little illiterate scroll, right? So you can give feedback in, you can create what you want in any style. You can also do— where did I do, uh, one of these here? It's— yeah, this one. You can get, I'd say, slightly good AI images of yourself. I find them a little bit creepy. This one is the closest, I think, to looking like me, uh, but I'm like, make him smile, and then it's just like, fine, these are all terrifying skinwalkers. So with some more tuning, you could probably get ChatGPT to give you a better output, but I am using OpenAI— OpenArt, sorry. I use OpenArt AI if I'm trying to make thumbnails of me because you can custom train characters and build whole workflows there. So again, all of this you just generate through AI creation. And you can make for every video a thumbnail, for every blog post a picture. You can come up with pictures for the storytelling you want to share, whatever it is, and have them super quickly to support whatever it is you're creating. Once you've got this content, you've got to put it somewhere. And I very much don't recommend that you write something and schedule it on the day of, because I find it way more productive to do a week or 2 weeks or 4 weeks ahead of time. I personally use HighLevel as my content calendar because it's also my workflow automations, my email tool, which powers almost all the marketing of my agency. But Hootsuite and Buffer and a million other tools are going to let you accomplish kind of a similar thing, which is what you really want to be able to do is go look at and let me go into my own workspace here and we'll do social. Just going to pull my calendar up here. There we go. We have all of our calendar content mapped out. First, it is apparently not loading here in the calendar view. Mapped out on our calendar. You may not have anything actually— hey, there we go. Uh, oh, this is not the actual updated one. Well, it'll show the point. Yeah, a calendar here, and then we have basically is something an idea, is it scheduled, is it published here to show us where we are. I would note this doesn't synchronize to HighLevel. I have to manually go in and then take everything and schedule it, but it allows for great clarity across team members when you say, hey, I need a thumbnail for this video, or hey, I need whatever deliverable for this thing, it's due on this day. Task management happens in this tool, and then when it's done, it goes over to HighLevel for us. Like, get all your content, put it in there, and ideally, once you have this system working for you, you are going to take it and hand it off to a team member where the interviews that you used to prep for yourself, they now prep for you. If you're able to do that, you spend even less time working on your content. And that content remains crucial to the effectiveness of marketing, right? Ads decay, and Meta's ads are so different now than they were 3 months ago. Like, everybody I know who's been running ads for years is like, my ads are losing money left and right. Outbound gets harder and harder. I don't know that I've seen email marketing work terribly well for almost anybody in the last 6 months. I found outbound on Twitter and outbound on LinkedIn can work really well, but it burns through an audience. But you spam people, they don't want to hear from you. But your content doesn't do that. Your content compounds, it builds the trust, it gives you more footprint and more authority and more of what you want, as opposed to driving people away and making them mad. So finding the time, devoting it into making this work, is tremendously important to making your business go over the long term. Now I've mentioned content can work, and I've seen outbound and other tools work. This is an outbound, uh, campaign I've been running for my business, uh, that is based on two things. One is we're messaging people on LinkedIn, and the other is we have content coming out every day on LinkedIn. When you publish content on LinkedIn, it improves your response rates for your outbound campaigns, because if someone has accepted your connection request, for the next 5 days they are way more likely to see your LinkedIn content, which will remind them to reply to you. So with a really simple 3-stage campaign. This is not a lunatic 27-message, 16-platform campaign. This is only on LinkedIn, and from start to finish, it is 11 days for any one person. Sent 700 requests over the case of May. That would be, right, 750. Almost, uh, 30%, right, accepted this request. And of that 30%, 42% of them replied. And I would note, of those replies, 63, 67, so I forget precise number there, were yes, I would like to know more. Now, to get 67 people to say I would like to know more, or probably more like 62, I think, where we were at. Yeah, uh, 62 people say yes, I would like to know more. For email, I would have to have emailed somewhere in the realm of 35,000 people. And if your addressable market is big enough where you could do that every month, month in and month out, for forever, I guess good for you, you can go. But if your addressable market isn't that big, you can't really hit these people up again for a while. Because they'll get sick of you. They'll put you in spam. They'll damage your deliverability. You'll damage your brand. But outbound supported by content, the content itself, eh, it works okay, right? I got one or maybe two interested people just from pure content. But the reply rate on the outbound was insane. And not because the content of the outbound itself was so good, because I built up so much trust after someone accepted a connection. Request. Industry averages here, by the way: connection accept rate 22-25%, reply rate is 18%. This is double and leaning towards 2.5 industry average rates for what you see here, right? Here's another example from me. This is YouTube Shorts advertising, and advertising is another great way to use your content. Ads by themselves, I don't like. It is too hard to sell, especially B2B cold traffic with ads right now, and maybe for the rest of time. But what I do is I take my best organic video, my best Shorts, and I put them into a YouTube advertising campaign. And so I'm spending about $100 a week, not a lot of money, on my YouTube ads, and a full almost 43-44% of my views come from advertising. But then almost 40% of my views come from the Shorts feed, because if you've watched all of one of my videos, even if I paid for you to watch it as a Short, you will see more of my videos, and people who look like you algorithmically from YouTube will see more of my videos. So I have an ad campaign that has reach, and then a second ad campaign that remarkets the folks who saw the first instead of ads. And then a third ad campaign that is insane— don't do this— I have a 15-minute and 28-second pre-roll video. It's my channel trailer that I then copied and made its own unique video, right? Got whatever, 1,000 views over the— I think this is the month of March, uh, and 76% of people watched it all the way to the end because after they've seen me somewhere between 3 to 6 times in shorts, and now they see a full long-form video. Well, they were going to watch something else. This is all interrupted, right? You were watching something else and then this shows up. They wanted to watch something and they see this dumb mustache again, and they go, well, but Trevor's had good stuff to say, let me watch him for 20 seconds. And the falloff here is basically, if I got you for 30 seconds I had you for the rest of the video. And that, at the end of that, right, 1,000 impressions, I got maybe 100 visits to my website, booked 8 calls. Content with advertising, you can constantly put in new ads. Your best content every month goes into your ad rotation. Whatever performs best, you swap out. This works very reliably for discovery, for reach. And then driving conversion. I've got 2 more stories and I'll try and get into some questions here. This ran a little longer than I hoped it would. This is a client of mine in an extremely niche industry. They have maybe 7,000 companies in the world they can go after. Tiny market. Now those companies are all probably worth between, I'd say, $10,000 to maybe $36,000 a year to them. So there's potential to their business But you can't spray and pray. You would go through the entire addressable market in a month, and then you'd be screwed. With a very niche product, the founders— and this is key— the founders do the outreach on LinkedIn, and then they get numbers that look a whole lot like my numbers when you have the right offer and content coming out every day. Each founder was their own subject matter expert. They were each publishing 22 pieces of content a month. And so accept rate is strong, reply rate is strong. And then we actually, at the end of the month, these campaigns all stopped. We started up new ones at the beginning of June for a totally different industry to see if we could get the same performance and same accept rate. Right. And then finally, one last one here. When you take a YouTube campaign, I'm talking about this for a client that sells very, very enterprise, like $100,000 a year contracts. And we put a YouTube brand campaign. So YouTube Shorts advertising to their audience ended up driving brand search 300% or 400%, 300% launch day, right? Big spike. Now their brand search was maybe, I think, 8 to 10 a day usually. So 24, 25 a day. Cool. But you run the ad campaign, they say, well, the ads didn't make us any money. Right? YouTube ads, we got thousands of views, but no one clicked on the ads. We lost money. But then you go look at, oh, but brand search spiked up 300%. And brand search drove you 27 new trial signups over the course of 2 weeks for $200. That's actually a really good price. So the important thing here is to realize what you do with your content when you put it in front of people isn't just you instantly get a click, it isn't just you instantly get a sale. It's by being visible and being trustable, people are interested on their own. They will go and search you out on their own. If you're talking to them already, they're more likely to reply. Getting a content engine in place for your business makes money in months, not in years, and it makes everything work. Now, next week, 7 days from now, if we can all come back here, we're going to talk about how to build an MVP. And you start with a landing page in just 10 minutes. I will literally demo for you a landing page in 10 minutes from start to finish to live. And with that, you can already build a waitlist, you can start to get people to see what signups look like, you can make content, drive ad traffic, you can be ready. If you attend tomorrow's event, next Wednesday, by the end of the event, you could have your product live, seeing if people want to sign up for it before you even build the product. Then I'll walk you through how to use AI, different AI models, play them against each other, and build a product even when you're not technically skilled. All you have to do is understand what you want to build and use two AIs. Just one by itself tends to get in trouble. Two AIs together to get a way better result for building, for shipping faster, for saving you money and getting something out the door. You can build really complex products in two or three days that are minimum viable product, enough to figure out if your market wants what you're building. If you haven't already registered for it, go to fi.co/ai4founders and go register for that next week right here. And I hope to see all of you again. Thanks everybody, I really appreciate your time. See if we can hop in and get some questions before—

yes, uh, thank you so much, Trevor. So I got a couple of things here. Number one, um, This was asked 1,000 times. Yes, everybody, we, we, this is recorded. We'll be sending everybody a recording so long as you registered to this event on the FI site, right? A lot of times people will get to this event in other ways, Meetup or something like that. We may not necessarily have your email, so just make sure you register on the FI site. And I know we can throw the chat in there, or we can throw a link in the chat. Number 2, Uh, Trevor, there were some people having a hard time with the, uh, with the downloads. Number one, I think with the landing page, if they don't check the boxes, it lets them submit, but then they never get anything, just FYI. So I think everybody's there.

Yeah, yeah.

And then there's, there's no like confirmation page, so it just refreshes the, the form. So anyway, there was an issue there, but then also the zip file, which I think you saw too. So maybe, Trevor, if you want to, um, yeah, just for everybody who's here, just make sure you click on the two, um, the two checkboxes on the page, and then you'll get it in your email.

And then I'll also note I did just drop the GitHub file I linked you to is the zip file, uh, but I know a whole lot of founders don't like GitHub, so I just downloaded from GitHub and zipped it. Um, it worked fine for me on my PC. If you're on Mac, I don't own a Mac, I couldn't check. I will ask one of my teammates who has a Mac, and if that doesn't work, I will make them download and zip it on Mac and make a new file for you. And if it's not working for you on PC, I don't know, the devil's in your computer. I'll see what I can do, but you can just grab every individual file directly from GitHub right there. Awesome.

Okay, so the— yeah, lots of great questions here. I just wanted to highlight a couple of things. I loved the, I think it was one of the first tactics you talked about, which was just sending, you know, interviewing somebody, right? Obviously very applicable to any kind of sales call or anything, but I think it was really kind of a brilliant approach to identifying content that would be interesting to your, you know, to your ideal customer profile. So I really love that. I'm going to be using that immediately. I also love the don't sound like AI prompts. Definitely, you know, the slop. It's crazy now how it's like overnight everybody seems to write the same way. It's amazing, right?

Yeah.

And, and yeah, I think also the just, I have a quick question. I'm going to get to some of the questions from the chat here. When you were talking about kind of the outreach that you're doing with LinkedIn, Right. So I think super interesting. It's kind of, you know, the concept of, hey, they need to see your face kind of a couple times, get the message a couple times, and they're gonna be much more likely to accept on LinkedIn, right? When you say reaching out on LinkedIn, is that through like LinkedIn email? Are you— is it email? Like, how— what's the mechanic of how that's working?

So I will identify myself as a terrible marketer here because I don't have an affiliate link for this software even though they offer it, but it's called HeyReach. And hey, Vukasin, if you're watching, this is free for you. You used to see, see him over there. Um, heyreach.io is the tool I'm using for my outbound. It sends DM and connection requests, and it's like 70-something bucks a month, I think. I'm not entirely sure. I don't— I'm not my— I'm a terrible bookkeeper, as you might be able to tell. Um, but it basically sends connection requests, and then if folks accept the request, it will automate a DM sequence after they accept the request. And you can also throw in in-mail sequences there. I just honestly, the campaigns I've run for me and for like people who are getting, you know, 40, 50, 60, uh, calls a month out of it, I don't need to put in in-mail as well. Indeed, I had to turn off, uh, the campaign I was showing you for me because I had so many calls I could not do any other work, and they were booked, uh, 5 weeks out. And I went, just no, stop. They were booked out during— I'm here in West Virginia now, which is not my usual center of operations. That's why there's like, I'm not normally a guy with a quilt behind me. This is my mother's house. So like the, on this travel, I didn't want to be taking 40 sales calls. I was like, okay, no, done, stop. You can throw an email, you can throw in likes and like comment on posts, I think. No, you can do likes and shares, not comments. There's a bunch of other tools out there that do the same thing, right?

Waalaxy is one that we have that we use that, that's specifically LinkedIn. Waalaxy. I put it in the chat here too, guys.

But yeah, okay.

So great. Super helpful tool. So just some questions from the chat here. People were saying, okay, there's a lot of different tools, right? And what was it? Yeah, I mean, if you, adding all these tools together, you know, in, in by themselves they're not that expensive, right? But, um, how would you, like, if there are only 2 tools, Eva from Mexico was asking, um, you know, that for a founder to use, right? If you had to pick the 2, and I guess it depends on the context, right? So I guess for this content specifically, right, uh, which ones would they be?

So And some of this is maybe spoiling the next 3 workshops. I won't talk about it today. Probably the best tool you can use for content is Claude Code. And you're like, what? That's a coding tool. Yeah, but it's also a fully agentic system that runs on your computer. And next week's discussion will have not particularly Claude Code, Cloud Code, because Cloud Code is going to be really intimidating for most of your non-technical founders. But Cloud Desktop, with a little bit of work, has all the same functions as Cloud Code. And actually, um, like this morning I was working out. I have Cloud Desktop here connected to my website and to HighLevel. And so I said, hey, how do I debug why the emails aren't firing properly. And then it went through and figured out what was wrong. And then it went through and fixed it. Right. And so having an agentic AI, and right now, everybody who's in the agentic AI space is really— Claude Code is far and away number one. Number two, because it's cheaper and 70% as good, I would say, is Gemini CLI. But Claude Desktop is also like, it's in the mix there. It takes a little bit, it's not quite as powerful as Claude Code in some ways, but it may way easier to install on Windows, way easier to work with Windows. So I would recommend you get Claude, uh, the base plan, I think it's $20 a month, and then you've got to set up an API account, which then you can limit how much you do or don't spend. I would note, if you can do it Get Claude Max, spend $100 a month. It is worth it. It is probably the best $100 I spend every month. So then my number 2 tool for you, if you're making video content, Descript is, um, I mean, I'm an old grumpy computer user. It is magic. You can't convince me someone didn't sacrifice a goat and use it to create this software. Being able to—

that'd be a great— that would be a great, uh, a great, uh, testimonial to throw on their website.

But it is like being able to edit, and they were the first ones to do it. A bunch of folks are doing it now, but they were the first ones to do it. And I remember the first time I saw it, the whole top of my head came off. My brain was just out there and just hovering, uh, because it took what used to be 2 years of work to learn how to do into something that you can say to anybody, well, it's a Google Doc, edit it. And that easy, away you go. Those would be the two.

Okay, um, Dmitri was asking here, you know, and I think it's a good segue, right? Like, he was asking, could you go over B2B strategies? My customers are healthcare providers, many of whom are not on social media. So I think Dmitri, just, you know, social media, LinkedIn, everybody's online, okay? But, but I do think, like, when it comes to something like SEO, for example, right? I'd love to hear your thoughts on how that is really changing within that context, because definitely, yes, maybe, Dalmatrii, they're not on social media, but they're, but your users will be online. They'll be on LinkedIn most likely, right? And, but from an SEO standpoint, which was always, you know, kind of a very go-to kind of B2B marketing technique, Ava was also asking, you know, is, is like, just what are you seeing in the SEO space? Is, are the search engines flagging the AI content so far that you have seen?

So they are flagging obvious AI content. I don't see them flagging well-done stuff because in the end, the AI's presence or lack is less important than did a human who saw your content engage in it. There are two big trends in SEO that are, um, both terrifying in different directions. So one is, I think it's something like 70% of Google searchers stop at the AI summary now, right? Google makes a summary and you go, thanks, peace out, and never click. To the point where Claude— not Claude, uh, Cloudflare, there we go, it's close enough in the letters— Cloudflare pushed their big red button 3 days ago and they said AI crawlers are going to be blocked on something like 38% of the internet now. Yeah, because they don't want the death of how the internet has worked for 20 years, which is The search engines index the content and then they send traffic to the places that made it. Now the search engine index the content and keep it. You never leave Google, but that means people who made the content get no money for it. They're all going to go broke. So Cloudflare went, how about no, and is trying to fight back on this, right? And of course there's lawsuits in the EU, like all this. So like one thing is The content you make, when people search on Google, if you say something that is unique enough that you are cited, there's expert, there's thought leadership there, there's expert building. I've gotten people come to me and say, I searched go-to-market for startups, and I found a summary of one of your blog posts. And that was enough to make me go read the blog post. And then I got contacted by right? Cool. The other side of this, but AI is still very heavily involved, is ChatGPT is becoming the dominant search engine for people who are in the— touching in the AI space at all. I'm as guilty of this as anybody else. If I want a recipe for the ingredients in my fridge, I don't go Google anymore, I ask ChatGPT, right? If I want recommendations for Like I did yesterday, I was like, I need to pour cement for my mother while I'm here. She's like, hey, build me furniture outside. Okay, I gotta pour a slab, but then how much cement do I need? I've got, you know, an 8-foot by 36-inch, 4-inch deep. What's the cubic volume? How many bags of cement do I buy? I just asked ChatGPT. Now the problem here is it told me 5 bags and I believed it, but I have no idea if that's right. Because AI is wrong sometimes, right? It might be 5 bags is half of what I need or 2 times what I need. I'll find out tomorrow. But these AIs are getting something like 44% of their data from Reddit and from Quora. Yeah, if you want to be found there, then your content plays should be on Reddit and on Quora. Now Reddit is an unbelievably prickly place to try and put content on. And I don't recommend you just take AI slop and post it there because you will get bounced right the fuck out. But if you make good content and you make it native to the subreddit you are posting on— which, by the way, you want to train your AI to make good content for a subreddit, find the top 10 posts for that subreddit and put them in, and then say, how do I say stuff like that? And there's your content. Right? Then you put that out there and you will get the upvotes and the ranking. And then as the AIs are being trained on the data from Reddit and from Quora, you will be found, right?

It is, yeah, it's crazy how fast. And I, I can attest to the number of people, you know, Founder Institute's been around for 16 years, right? And there's different things have changed about our business, our business model, our terms, things like that. And You know, people search things and then they tell us that we're lying about our terms. And I'm like, what do you mean we're lying? And then they'll literally show us, well, ChatGPT said this or Google said this, right? And it's like, yeah, it is. And I'm glad that Cloudflare is taking a stand. They're one of the only people that can, right? Because like you said, it's something like 30% of the world's traffic goes through their systems. So it is pretty amazing. We'll see how it goes. I think Be a lot of lawyers involved here, but somebody has to stand against some of this stuff. Jay from Dubai was asking that there's a school of thought and that there's supposed evidence to show that newer models are relying less on the role in the prompt. Is that something that you have noticed in your work?

Yes and no, right? Uh, the more current models have a bigger opinion about how they should give an answer. Like you saw when I told Claude to write like Shakespeare and it went, well, that's insane, let me maybe think of some fancy language but be sensible. And I had to be like, no, bro, I want you to go like, commit to the bit. And then it was okay with it, right? But GPT-3.5 would have been like, Shakespeare, you said Shakespeare, ye shall receive. Hark, thenceforth, right? Like, it has less— it had less opinion. So now the, uh, the role is less influential than it was. I do still find it is useful to— you can't call it a frame of mind, there's no theory of mind happening here— but to give it a sense of the expectation that you are setting. You still may have to, as I showed you, like bump it in the direction you want on that first output. And one of the reasons why you would use a paid version of Claude is my, probably my number one tool right now, or any of the other engines, is because you get more times at bat, right? Your free program you might use up on two decent-sized prompts, but with even the $7 a month or $20 a month plan, like you'll get, you know, 20 or 30 before you've exhausted it. Yep. Okay.

Well, I think that's— we've gone over on time here, but that was amazing, Trevor. So for everybody, again, you will get a receipt. You will receive a video for this event. Please do check out the next events as well. We have it pinned here in the chat where you could see and you can RSVP to those events. And we'll also include a link to Trevor's download there too so you can get some of those prompts. I downloaded them immediately and I definitely plan on using them. Thank you so much, Trevor. Thanks for your time. See you again next week, same time, same place. Everybody, thank you all for joining. Trevor, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge, sharing data. Okay, I think that's something that I especially appreciate is data. A lot of people will hold data like that as a trade secret of sorts, right? But opening up the kimono there for others to see, you know, what the benchmarks are here is invaluable. So thank you.

Excellent. I had a great time. I enjoy doing this for two reasons. One is to help all of you, but also whenever I make this kind of resource, I learn a lot myself. So I'm looking forward to figuring out what I'm going to learn for the next week's workshop.

It is a great way to synthesize what you're doing and kind of postmortem it and break it out. Right. I'm doing a similar thing right now with one of the presentations I'm creating. So I hear you. All right. Thank you, everybody, so much. See you next week and have a good rest of the day.

Bye, everybody.

Bye.