The first video on TikTok about ChatGPT was my video. It got 20,000,000 views. I went from zero to, like, 200 k followers in two weeks. That's Riley Brown. Riley has built an audience of 1,500,000
followers, raised 9,000,000
to start a vibe coding company in San Francisco, and developed a content strategy so systematic
that a single viral video gets reposted across seven accounts every week for the rest of the year. In this episode, you'll learn Riley's unique strategy for creating free content. Find what people are paying for, do it, make it free. Why using AI to write your scripts is a mistake? The more you use AI for writing your scripts, the more you're going to sound like AI, and in the long run, sounding like AI is suicide. And stick around to the end to learn the one content strategy he's using right now that's tripled his company's revenue in two months. Thank you to one of 10 for sponsoring this video.
Three years ago, I started making content.
Actually a little over three years ago, before ChatGPT came out, I decided that I was going to fully make content on AI.
This was
honestly
a means for me to explore my curiosities. So I was in this Discord channel where people were starting to use Midjourney. I'm sure a lot of the audience has heard of Midjourney,
which is just like an AI image generator.
And AI image generation seems trivial now, because so many tools allow for this, and everyone has used it, whether it's Nano Banana or within ChatGPT, you can just generate images. But at the time, I thought it was the coolest thing in the world, and it basically opened up all of these curiosities. Then I ended up in a Discord
group for what was going to become ChatGPT. It was called GPT three at the time, and people didn't even
converse with it like a chatbot. Anyway,
it became just a massive obsession for me, and I and I just decided I'm gonna dedicate my time to making TikTok videos
about this. And then eventually I'll find some sort of then I'll figure out how to make a living around it, and I quickly blew up to like 500,000
followers on TikTok
talking about AI.
And creating content quickly became a means for me to follow my curiosities, and I was always diving as deep as I can into AI, and I always tried to get to an edge
while making content. Like I wanted to be at the intersection between AI and content creation,
and then eventually I found
AI and coding,
which has become Vibe Coding.
And I was the first person on long form and short form platforms to start talking about using AI to code despite being fully untechnical,
and I fell in love with it. I I built a massive following on
Twitter mostly,
where I was making videos, building apps with AI.
And people loved it, people started following me. I created a community,
a free community on Circle. And I know you're on Circle as well, I'm pretty sure you're a huge fan of the platform. For sure. And we had like 15,000
people in this free community, and we didn't really know what to do with it. Eventually I started running into
problems,
and this guy reached out to me on Twitter. He said, hey, I can help you out. I can help you create a back end
for the apps that you're building. And so he ended up helping me. His name was Anj.
And I was like, dude, this was super helpful, let's make a video about this together. We ended up doing Riverside like we are now. We filmed a video of him, of us
making an app without writing a single line of code, and adding Firebase as a back end.
And this video ended up blowing up,
and
I ended up reaching out to Anj again. I said, dude, this video was awesome.
Why don't we work together?
And then we basically spent the next six months together hacking away at different things and making content,
and eventually
he was just like, dude, I'm pretty sure we can make a mobile app that builds mobile apps. And then that's when our company formed.
And we moved to San Francisco, we raised a bunch of money. I have a massive audience that's super interested in AI and coding, And so,
sorry, this is a long winded answer to say that I've been using AI to or
I've been using content creation
to just push the boundaries
of my curiosities,
and that ended up leading to a company. And we ended up raising $9,000,000
to start a company here in San Francisco.
And we're one of the faster growing
like vibe coding startups in all of San Francisco right now, and content is basically at the center. And
I have two separate teams of remote editors,
and we just make content, again, on what we find interesting within the vibe coding space.
And we basically have unlimited content because I genuinely love the
vibe coding space, and I think I think
just AI agents building software is really cool. And so, yeah, we just do it at scale, and I can hop into the details if that's interesting to you. It is. I wanna I wanna take a step back real quick because the speed at which you started growing on TikTok and then X was very, very fast.
Faster than most people would experience if they started creating under a new account on a new platform.
And it it seems from the outside,
you know, a couple years removed now, that it was practically immediate.
But did it was it really that fast? Did you really, like, hit something
and it just worked and you started getting eyeballs to your your content immediately?
So I was there was a period of time on TikTok where I was the only person making content on ChatGPT for like two weeks. Wild. And you can imagine,
yeah, people didn't really know what it was, and I had been in this Discord learning about what GPT three was before anyone,
and most people who were interested in ChatGPT were kind of nerds. They were, you know, people
in the trenches of of this technology,
and most of those people couldn't really articulate it enough to actually make videos on social media. I recognized this the day ChatGPT came out. I put out a video the day ChatGPT came out. The first video on TikTok
about ChatGPT was my video. It got 20,000,000 views.
And so I basically told all my friends and immediate family, like, this is all I'm going to do for the next six months, and I'm gonna see what happens. I think this is the biggest opportunity that I'll ever have. And yeah, I went from zero to like 200 k followers
on TikTok
in two weeks. Crazy. And,
you know, it wasn't because of my skill of making content, it was the fact that I was the only person or one of the only people
who
were making videos
about the most transformational
technology of of our generation.
So
that's kind of what I can attribute it to, and then I ended up
over time pushing that audience to Instagram,
and then I started building a following on on Twitter,
and then on YouTube, and I did a decent job like pushing my audience from one platform to the other. And now between all of the platforms, have close to 1,500,000
followers. And I still talk about AI. I love it. Still interesting. I just have a company now. It seems like there's a lesson here about the value of first mover advantage.
Because I would guess, well, I I feel
100% confident that you understand content much more deeply and intricately now than you did when you started. But I think a lot of people when they're getting started, they're like, okay, I hear that a hook is important and I gotta have b roll and they get so bogged down in the minutiae of what makes a good video
that they downplay some other aspects like what what is this video about? What do I have to say? And in a situation where you're a first mover, it seems like it kind of takes a lot of that out of the picture. It matters far less. Do you agree? A 100% agree.
I especially think now in the current landscape, because of AI generated content,
anyone can just kind of get AI to
create a basic script,
but to genuinely have knowledge about something that not many people have knowledge about is I think 90%
of the game.
And
I think it's incredibly important to just like become obsessed
and interested in in obscure
things, because I just really think AI is coming for a lot of content creators who just talk about like the same things people have been talking about for years. And I think there's never been a better time to be in the edge
of of some sort of because all of technology's changing,
which impacts content creation, and I'm sure that you think about how AI is gonna impact content over time. And so I would just
find some niche intersection and get really knowledgeable and be able to talk about that subject
without thinking about a hook. I do think hooks are important,
and the way that I film my videos is I take an interesting idea or we're gonna build something, because most of my videos are screen share, where we're actually building something,
and we'll film the whole video, and then afterwards I'll just do the hook and intro.
And then that is the acquired skill of actually getting really good at
a, capturing attention immediately, and then framing the video so that people know what to expect, they know exactly what value
they're gonna get out of the video, and mostly you wanna make sure that they know that they're not gonna waste their time watching your video, which I've gotten really good at. And as you said, yeah, the more reps you do of that, the better you you just naturally get. This is a hard question to articulate, but I'm gonna try because I've never quite asked it this way.
I know from my lived experience,
I wake up every day, and there's typically
some thought or pattern of thoughts that's driving me forward. You strike me as a very ambitious person, so you clearly have a plan and things that you wanna accomplish each day. And I'm curious what your inner monologue is
related to content when you get up in the morning.
You know, before I started my company, it was way different.
I would literally wake up and I would just kind of I would go to coffee, and I would just bring my phone, and I would scroll Twitter. And there was enough interesting things going on where I would just scroll until I found something interesting, whether it was eleven Labs new voice model,
or some new that I could put into an app that I build. Like I would just literally find something I'm interested in, and then make a video on Like that was my day.
And then once I picked the video, I'm like, okay, I'm tuning out everything except for making the video, and I'm just gonna make this really good.
And you know, whether if I had I used to do a lot more paid sponsorships,
so that would always influence it a little bit, but like that was basically my process. I'm like find something I'm interested in where I'm gonna be super passionate. My content where I'm really passionate in the thing is way better than content where I'm not passionate about it, And so I would always make sure that I'm deeply interested in it, and then I would make a video. And real quick, before you say like what it's like today, in that world where your process was go through Twitter, find something I'm interested in, make a video,
What was the inner monologue behind that? Was it like
I'm asking because some some days I feel almost panicked that I have this looming deadline of I need to create something today. And I don't think that actually leads to the best energy of what I need to create. And I'm just so curious, somebody that's as prolific as you are, what your relationship
to
pressure if it exists, or whether you're operating from a place of no stress, no pressure.
That's a good question.
Yeah. I feel like if I was ever giving my giving
myself pressure to make content,
my content would always be worse.
And I've talked to a lot of people who are seasoned in the content game, a lot of people who are in the newsletter game. You know, they've built up these newsletters that have hundreds of thousands of people, and they turn their
content engine into this kind of structured
business almost where you have predictable
revenue streams. The more structured I tried to get, the worse I started to perform in my content,
and the more I was just playing, the better I was. The more I would grow, ironically. The more results I would get from
from a the paid sponsorship shot, like everything would get better when I was playing versus
when I had this like rigid structure.
And I I knew that I wasn't my DNA is not in the boring business,
whether it's newsletters, courses, communities. I've tried all of them. I think they're wonderful businesses, and they can super
high cash flow, they can impact a lot of people and help a lot of people. It's just not for me. The only business I saw myself starting is something on the edge. You know, I talked about how I love being on the edge, I love talking about cutting edge technology and AI specifically,
and so I had to start a company in that spot for me to really capitalize on what I've done so far. And that's why I went the route of moving to San Francisco and doing an actual startup, because I think in order to create an AI startup that
can truly scale to
nine plus figures, you need to be on the edge, and I think you do need to raise money. Cool. Okay. Well, sounds like you had a much healthier relationship to content than I currently do, which is great. I'm curious. Like, what's you you like, are you running into some, like, mental barriers with content right now? I'm I'm curious. I think in some ways. A lot of this changed when
we had our daughter, and, like, time has just constricted.
Because
I had built
a machine, I think of my business as kind of a machine, to be honest. And it's like, I know that certain inputs lead to certain outputs. And if I need to change the outputs, I need to change the inputs or I need to change the design of the machine.
The machine that I had built
really demanded and consumed all of my time before having a child. And then in a post child world, I had less time, but of course wanted the same or better outputs.
So I've I've had a really
rough go of it over the last year and a half figuring out what does this mean for the future of the machine in my content because
it's just not sustainable.
I think that's come through at times in the last year in my content that it was feeling a little bit more like a job than it was
this place of play that it previously had been.
And now with
the changes that are happening in the landscape,
I feel more pressure to adapt and fix this machine that I already felt pressure to fix in a more time strapped world. So it's been it's been a challenge for me over the last, call it, six to twelve months.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah. I think I I would always run into, like, every six six months, I would run into, like, I felt the format that I was doing was getting stale.
I wanted to move and try different platforms,
which for a lot of creators actually creates more problems than it does harm. Like the best thing to do might just be to like literally create rigidity and and stay consistent, because I've seen what consistency can do for content creators. It's hard to deal with that. And yeah, I'm sure when I have kids, I'll run into the same time constraints.
So yeah, I guess I haven't dealt with that before. Oh, good. So today, you said that was your process. That was how things felt pre company.
So now, today, what is your relationship to content? My relationship to content has changed a lot. Startups need to grow. And so
eight months ago, we started
our company, and we it was me and two other cofounders.
We just moved to San Francisco. We were in a WeWork,
and we were trying to build a product. And so half of my time,
way more actually probably like 70% of my time is dealing with like stuff that isn't content.
Whether it's helping figure out how to build the product, hiring developers.
Our team right now is it's me,
one other person who runs the studio, and then six developers. And we basically just build the product all day, and I make content. Now, the benefit of starting a company
and raising $9,000,000
like we did is I can outsource
a lot of things without really thinking about the cost. You know, obviously we we take price into consideration, but I have like two very high quality agencies overseas who edit my videos. It did take a lot of time to a train them and just hire them in general,
but like once you get that down, it's incredible leverage to be able to just film a video and just send it off, and I don't really think about it, and then it just gets done correctly.
And so that's incredibly high leverage. That means all I really need to do is have two spare hours
to film a video, and I just film something I'm passionate about, send it off to the editor, and everything else gets done. I don't think about the thumbnail or the title,
but these are all things that take a lot of time because I had to train the team to do that. Real quick, what's the turnaround on that? You you film a video for an hour or two, and then you ship it off to this agency. How quickly does a finished video get back to you ready to post? One of the agencies, it's ready in ten hours, so the next day. One agency,
three
days. The one that takes longer is a little bit higher quality, and so we have, I have a gauge on whether
whether or not it needs to be highly polished. Some things I wanna get out sooner, whether or not whether it's like a product demo that I I just want to align with one of our announcements, or if it's like AI news, I'll I I I'd rather have it out earlier
than be more polished later. I just think like certain things need to get out quick.
And so I'll kind of decide,
but both of them are pretty quick. I think a three day turnaround for a highly polished edited video is actually pretty solid,
and so I can't complain.
Do they do short form as well? That's one thing that I I'm actually currently struggling with, is figuring out how to short form cut my videos. My videos are very much screen share, and usually it's like a screen share for an extended period of time. So like taking a clip of a tutorial's
way tougher than clipping something like this where it's just me talking
about something, or it's it's less clippable.
So I film my short form content separately. They're kind of like separate videos, and I have my whole process for doing that. It's very quick. Probably takes me thirty minutes
end to end to make a short form video, and usually they're pretty good. And it's usually me building an app quickly or talking about an update. I send it off to
one of my editor teams, and they'll send it back the next morning with multiple variations.
So it's pretty streamlined on that part. In this hiring of these agencies, I'm sure you talk to a bunch of them. If somebody's listening to this and they're like, that sounds great. I just wanna go out and hire a team that can handle this video cutting end to end for me. How would you ballpark what they should expect to spend for that level of quality and turnaround time?
For
high end editors, I think a thousand dollars per video is on the high end.
But if you're a big company,
I think that's actually somewhat reasonable if you have an existing YouTube audience.
You can expect to pay like 800 to 1,200 per episode.
The most important thing for me for
an editor is actually not technical
abilities like in Premiere Pro or After Effects.
It's domain
understanding or expertise. So like, they're able to realize what's important about a video. I think that's really important, and Editor, I'm sure you've run into that. I I used to I really admire your videos when you have things pop up on screen while someone's talking. Like, maybe you'll have like a t chart that pops up. And I think a well timed
t chart, very simple,
no animations are can be so much more valuable than the super, you know, like, animated type of intros that that we're we're really in in, like, I would say, like, 2024.
They got super animated, but we optimize for education.
Obviously, we like to make things look polished, but we optimize for education. And so, like, as we continue to build out our content team, I will focus more on adding relevant charts. Like, I'm talking about some concept that's not on screen, I want a pop up to come up that, like, assists that point getting across. I think that's incredibly important.
Yeah. And I'm I'm guessing those prices do not encapsulate
thumbnail as well.
It doesn't. We have a separate thumbnail designer
who actually used to work for Matt Wolf, for those who follow the AI space. He's one of the biggest, if not the biggest. And so, I hired him. He is his old thumbnail designer and he's great. Very quick turnaround, like one day turnaround for thumbnails.
Let me show you how easy it is to use one of ten's thumbnail generator to make YouTube ready thumbnails. I'm working on a solo video where I share a life update about having a second child in the fall. I'm both excited and nervous, and I wanna try to make a thumbnail here in one of 10. The first thing I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna sketch this out because I have kind of a rough idea of what I'm going for. I'm going to take a photo of this. Now I'm gonna come back over to one of 10 and I'm going to type in the video description. I'm going to upload my reference images.
I'm going to upload my sketch
and let's see what happens. Okay. We got these back. I'm going to edit this one with AI.
Okay. Wow. I could actually throw this directly into an AB test and see how it does. It's pretty crazy what one of 10 can do with their thumbnail generator. I recommend giving it a shot yourself. You can learn more at the link in the description.
I love your style of videos because I do love that most of the time,
it's like a demonstration. That's kind of how I'm architect ing this and thinking about this in my mind and where I think there's actually some opportunity for folks on YouTube today is a lot of videos now, you know, the advice for a long time was
create a curiosity loop, you know. And I think it's still true. But if I can actually just close that loop by asking Gemini, like, the answer to whatever the loop was, I'm not gonna watch the whole video. If I'm not interested in the video, I just have, like, this itchy feeling that I wanna know the answer to this question.
But for folks like you and
Greg Eisenberg is doing a really good job of this,
when I can watch a full demonstration of how this person does this thing,
I'm still watching that at regular speed
all the way through. I think it's a big opportunity.
And sometimes you have like a presentation
in Canva.
And I'm just thinking, man, how much planning went into
thinking through the the linear education of this video
and or the creation
of this deck in Canva?
Yeah. So I think the video that I think you're referring to is there's a video that I did where it's like the complete guide to AI,
where I literally laid out every AI tool that I've ever learned. I divided them into three chunks and made this Canva whiteboard,
and I just kind of went through them.
Surprisingly enough, way less planning went into the probably three hours of prep, and then I just turned on my camera and filmed for four and a half hours. I remember that video took me four and a half hours. I cut it down to two.
But I think most of my prep comes from me just tinkering with the tools. What people don't see are the hundreds of hours I've spent using the tools, so I don't need to like prep for the video as much as just laying out what I wanna talk about. And what I wanna say to to the audience watching, if you're someone who
understands a niche skill, especially on a computer, I genuinely
believe there's so much room in the market for high quality screen share style videos, and I would encourage you to
simplify it as much as possible.
I would use a tool like Excalidraw or Canva, some whiteboard tool, and this is how I would structure my videos to start. I would put up the logo of whatever it is you're talking about, just make sure it's big. For me it's Claude Code. Like you put Claude Code up on the screen,
and then put a stick figure on the screen,
and put an arrow from like where you are now to where you'll be at the end of the video. This is just an idea.
But like literally say,
today, or just say something, like this is your hook. Claude Code is actually insane.
You can, and then point at the little character, you can build an app in twenty minutes and show and just say that. In this video, I'm gonna show you that you can do that. We're gonna we're gonna be using this tool, this tool, and this tool. Let's not waste any more time. Let's dive in. And you can use a tool like Descript or Tele to do screen recordings. I think both are reason are pretty good. I like Tele as a as a tool because
you can film it in chunks.
If you've ever used
CapCut,
they have this like multi clip feature where you can film something, and if you mess up on just one of those chunks, can delete it. So you can do a lot of the editing while you're filming the video. Right? You can film a chunk, and if you mess up on the chunk, you can just hit restart, and you can go back to the start of that chunk, and you can film the video in chunks, and by the time you're done, you just have all of your good chunks, and then
all you have to do is a little bit of cutting at the end. That's how I started. You know, I think it was a little over a year ago.
I still had, I had like an editor that I would use sometimes, but I was editing my own videos, and I was just filming stuff I was interested in. Some of my videos were getting over a 100,000 views. People love to over complicate
content,
and it annoys me because there's some people that are so smart and so talented,
and can just use a computer in a way that would blow people's mind, that would give them value, just do that. And so all you need is a one minute at the beginning of your video that explains what you're about to do, and then do it, and then at the end just say subscribe.
That is literally all I would do to start until you hit 50 k subs, then worry about optimizing other things if you want to go down this type of content route. I love that. And also huge proponent of Tele. I'll put a link in the show notes because we're an affiliate, and hey, what an opportunity.
I use Tele to record courses, paid courses. And I think paid courses are going the way of the dinosaur in the near future as well. And I think it's actually an opportunity
if
you're not afraid of this as a creator. If you have had paid courses in the past,
like we're gonna redesign
the slide decks that I used in my membership course, which I think is my best course.
And maybe instead of selling it, I just record that and put it on YouTube.
Like I feel like that might actually be the highest leverage use of that
asset,
and say if you enjoy this and you wanna learn with other creators, join the lab. I think that's a wonderful strategy.
And
I agree with you. I think online courses are are going away.
And what's funny is I will actually search the internet and find the highest grossing paid courses
that that are in my domain of expertise, and I'll I'll go in and get the syllabus for this course, and then I'll just make the full video and put it on YouTube. And I'll do it in three hours.
I I find where I think Alex Hormozi talks about this a lot. He's just like, find what people are paying for, do it, and make it free. Like,
that is the best way that you could
grow a following. It's which is another way of saying, find things that people think are valuable and put it on the internet for free. And I don't think people realize what good can come from this. Like it is the only reason I've been able to start a company and raise a ton of money, and we're doing very well as a company. And it came from me making a ton of content without expecting anything in return. I just threw out a ton of value. I was getting views. I was getting paid a little bit, but I knew that building
the brand of being someone
in a niche making valuable content is just
it is so valuable
to your audience, and you will just you will come up with a way to monetize it later. So I would just encourage people to just start
putting out free value on the Internet. There does seem to be something unique about you in that you
seem inherently
just unafraid
of making and posting. I think a lot of people who are getting started, like, there's there's some self censorship,
there's
kind of a stop start experience.
There's a lot of, like, editing and agonizing over things. But it really feels like, from the beginning, you've been like, I'm gonna make something, and I'm gonna let it rip. And then you do that multiple times per day. Do you is that innate? Did you have to learn that? Yeah. I think a lot of people have a bunch of analogies to explain this. I think Greg Eisenberg talks about the Cringe Mountain. You have to cross Cringe Mountain
at the very beginning of your journey.
I don't know if you've ever have you seen this before? I well, I recently had Yoni Smolyar on the show, and he said the same I
love I love Yoni. He's one of my good friends. But I think that, yeah, when you start, you're worried about
all of the people you've met in the past judging you for making content when you have no followers. Right? You have to be the weird person making content on the internet who has no followers for a little bit of time,
and you just need to get past that. For me, I started making videos, and I did obviously feel cringe. I was not natural at talking to a camera at first. I did pick it up pretty quickly,
but I did blow up really early, and then all of it went away, and I wasn't afraid to say anything. And then once you make enough videos,
I don't overthink any content now. Like, even if I put out something absolutely terrible, like,
I'm like, no one will see it. That's the cool thing about the algorithm now. It's like, you people don't realize that if your videos suck, no one will see. Like, literally no one will see it. And you you think, like, your
old friends are gonna stalk you and see that you're making a video and be like, oh, he got 50 views on his videos. Like, they don't care. So stop pretending that people care about you and just make videos. It it'll it'll pay off. And it is easier said than done. Like, I do empathize with with with people who are struggling
not being authentic on camera, because it is hard. At this point, because you've had so much success,
do you have
hopes and expectations, hopes or expectations, for any single piece of content that you put out? Yeah. Obviously, I do. I mean, our success of a company now, which is eight people, is dependent on my ability to market the product, you know, at least in part.
And obviously,
I want to make content, grow our company, and then continue to make better and better content.
So but I don't really do it at an individual level. I I do this thing on Sundays where I just do weekly recap,
and I'll look at my videos and and just think about what I can improve. Should I even be making those types of videos? Because I've reached the point between all my platforms.
I could make 20 different types of content, and so it's basically just choosing where I wanna allocate my time and effort, and then how I can delegate those. It's really hard to delegate in content, like the creative side of content. It's almost it's not impossible, but it's very difficult to outsource that, so I know that I have limited amount of time, and now I am more selective about what I do, and I've found that right now, currently, long form
is just the way to go, because long form's doing really well on X. People don't realize this. Twitter is
first of all, X is my favorite controversial take, my favorite platform by far
to be a consumer on, and it's also becoming a great platform for long form video. People do bookmark it. Maybe they only watch a little bit of it, but like it's a great way to like go
super viral on X is to post a really high quality video, have really good time stamps. You can put time stamps in your tweet, and they operate the same way they do on on YouTube,
and my videos crush it. And what people don't realize about Twitter,
which is actually kind of my secret sauce right now, which I'm happy to share, is I have seven accounts on X.
They're all about vibe coding and
combined over 200,000 followers.
You can just repost the same videos over and over and over again, and the viral videos will go viral again. Oh, you mean so like account
one, you post it, it does well. Account two, you post the same video natively from that account. You're not reposting yourself.
On Twitter, there's a difference between quoting, quote tweeting
a post with a video and reposting a video. Are you familiar with the difference between the I
mean, barely.
Okay. Yes. If you on the Twitter app, you can hold a video down, and you can hit repost a video.
What it does is you can basically just add a new caption to the video, and it just shows the video, and then below the video it says who it's from. So it's like a way of reposting a video without reposting the whole post, you're just reposting the video.
I learned this because a lot of these bot accounts from other countries started reposting my videos over and over and over again, and they were going viral. And they do this I don't know if you've seen the this guy literally
on X. Yes. There's like a plague of accounts that all they do is say this guy literally does x. And so they're reposting my videos. And I saw that they were going viral. My videos, the same videos over and over again, and I just immediately thought, I'm like, I should not let them be doing this. I should be doing this from our owned accounts, and so that, like, we gain those followers. It's just too easy not to do it, and so we just started doing it. And so every week, we look at the performance of the videos of the previous week, and they're like, okay, let's schedule some video. So I like to keep them like a week apart. But yeah, like if I get a viral video, that will be posted
every week
for the rest of the year. I I don't see a reason not to do it. And the nice thing is because it is your face, like even if another account that is not your accounts is sharing it, like there's still massive benefit to your brand and what you're doing, but 100%.
But it's still better to own the accounts than to let other people do it, you know? Wait. So are you stopping other people from doing it? Is there a way to stop people from reposting Oh,
I'll let them do it as much as they want. I just
you know, like I'd rather it be my accounts, and then I'll mix in a bunch of other content. And so like, I'm starting to build out our content team,
and they'll be posting other accounts in between reposting my videos, so that the account in and of itself is valuable,
we're gonna basically our product is a vibe coding tool. Right? You can build mobile apps, you can build web apps, and now you can build
agents.
And so each
account is actually gonna have one narrow focus.
I just think this is kind of you notice kind of like Barstool does this where they have a network of accounts, or you've seen Polymarket and Kalshi
have
niche
accounts for one brand, and that's how I'm gonna build out our Twitter
and Instagram
over the next six months is just take parts of the product and make
your own account for it. I I do need to hire probably like two or three people to manage all this though. Yeah. Say more about that because I'm listening to this. I'm like, okay. Not only are you operating on practically every content platform that's out there, but now you're talking about multiple accounts per platform.
How is this managed right now? What type of, like, internal
benchmarks or
requirements do you have for these different platforms?
You know, we're we're actually in the middle of like tracking everything. There's no tracking. There's very little method to the madness other than pure instincts. Know, like I we use what's called Typefuly. I don't know if you've ever heard of Typefuly. It allows you to
schedule posts on Twitter, and it allows you to just like you know, you can create drafts, you can schedule posts, and you can also set up comment campaigns, so you automatically DM anyone who comments on a Twitter post. Yeah. I mean, the method is, again, on Sundays. I do like a this Sunday
is all about kind of looking at the previous week, and then
deciding
all the videos I'm gonna make the next week, but then also reposting all the videos that did well from the previous time. So on Typefuly, it lets you it's hilarious. My Typefuly has nine accounts. I not only do I have all the ones that I own for our company, but I have my cofounder's
Twitter
and our our first engineering hire. His Twitter's in there, so I'll just tweet from their account sometimes.
But, yeah, I basically take all the posts that have done well, and I'll just draft up a bunch of posts. And then for the videos that we haven't made yet, you can actually tag them, and I'll say, like, video about blah blah blah so I know what videos I need to make, and then I'll just schedule when I'm filming those videos
through that week. So
I have gotten a lot more scheduled as time goes on just because out of necessity because I'm also in other meetings as well. And so that's kind of how I think about it. I think about it in weeks,
and every week I just try to get better. And I think so much about social media is about whatever's working in the moment. You know, Gary Vee talks about day trading attention,
and I think that is very important. If you find an opportunity, you need to be able to just drop everything and just pour all of your energy into that. And this Twitter strategy is currently
that
thing that I've been doing. It is starting to taper off, so I'm I don't get emotionally attached to it, but like it literally caused our company's revenue to triple in two months. Wow. So that was pretty cool. How many assets
do you think you're creating to publish each week? And I'm saying assets because like it could be long form, could be short form, could be a text based post.
Just to give a
for folks watching
the volume that you're doing, how would you estimate this?
I used to go for more quantity,
but now that I can now that I'm realizing you can repost the same content over and over again, we're going for quality. Because if you get one really high quality viral video that you can post every week, that's 52 posts in one. Not to mention you can post them multiple times on other platforms, which you haven't set up yet. We're just doing it on x. We're gonna start doing it on Instagram. So
I've gone for more quality as of late, so I would say
I try to do four short form videos, like high quality short form videos that are educational, how to use VibeCode,
and then two other posts about whatever I'm interested in. Like I made one about Clodbot last week, and it went pretty viral across all platforms.
A lot of it is when something is cool, I'll make a video about it. You know, it's it's
really hard to make content that's good if you don't have something good to talk about. And so some weeks, so much happens that I'll just like
I've been doing this thing. I actually don't know if I have it. I don't have it here. I have this little finger. I don't know if you've seen the videos where I have this like No. Wish I had one on me. They're these little plastic
fingers
that you can like extend. They're like pointer pointers, and I'll just film a video of me making something on my phone, and I'll tap the screen with this pointer, and the videos,
some of them get over a million views. And they're pure educational,
and they convert to our product.
And so I found I think short form, super underrated,
just holding your phone and showing
something happening,
especially if you add a little gimmick.
Yeah. Like I also use
I also bought these giant pencils I've that I'll seen put in the video. Yes. Yeah. And so I'll point at it with these pencils, and the the retention just goes up. So I just film film something cool. You know, I have the the value of the video is my unique perspective. That's probably above
99%
of people because I'm deep in the niche. Once you do that, you don't need to overthink everything else. You can just show the cool stuff, find a little gimmick, put it in there, you know, get the ADHD
points,
and call it a day. So when Claude Bot hit,
I I got on that actually pretty early, earlier than I get on most things.
And I noticed that you lagged behind me a couple days on that, and I actually took that as a point of
legitimacy for you.
Because I have to think that your incentive
is to be so on top of everything that happens in the AI space that you are once again like a first mover sharing things.
But as time has gone on, you've built a brand that has a lot of trust within it. How do you how do you think about that? Because
if you're just going for speed,
it's really easy to not
have full consideration
around something.
For sure. We we we think about it, and I don't really think about being early. Like, I don't try to be first now that I've built such a big brand. Like, I think if I were to make a really, really good video three days after it becomes a big thing, that is a win versus, like, trying to be first. Trying to be first first is is was my very early strategy, but not anymore. I don't need to do that anymore.
The reason I was late to Claude Bot was just
I saw a lot of red flags in the people talking about it. A lot of people interested in crypto
were the loudest people talking about Quadbot.
And just from the last five years studying
how the media landscape works, anytime you have any topic where a lot of crypto people are talking about it, you're gonna end up with
90% nonsense.
Like, it's unfortunate. I have nothing against crypto. I think Bitcoin's cool, whatever. But, like, I saw a lot of people just making absurd videos. I thought it was entertainment.
I'd I I said that in my tweet. I said, it's 98% entertainment,
2% utility.
I've realized it is more useful, but I think the content being made on it is still pretty bad, and people aren't actually talking about the tangible utility
around Clodbot.
And in fact,
an hour after this podcast, I'm going to get a Mac Mini, and I'm going to
make a Claude Bot that is chief marketing officer of
our company, and I'm going to make it super as boring as possible. Everyone else is doing these flashy things with it. I'm going to show people exactly how I'm gonna use an AI agent to run a lot of boring parts of my company, because that's where I think Claude Bot, and again, I have no affinity to Claude Bot, think agents in general, like not enough people are paying attention to Manus, was purchased by Meta. These agents are really cool, and they can be really practical, but they the people
aren't really talking about how they're practical, and so that was why I was late to that. This is Meta, but you create content about AI.
Do you use AI to create content about AI?
I have never
used, like, AI avatars
except for I early in my content days, had a character named George that I would talk to. Like, people actually always tell me to bring back George, the people who've been following me forever,
but I use AI all day to just explore my curiosities.
I I don't understand how people aren't always trying to learn stuff with AI. Like, my rate of learning has increased so much. You know, I'll go to Claude, and I'll be like, okay, I just learned about Claude Bot. Please look
into the GitHub repo. Tell me everything about it. Explain it in simple language and lay it out in a presentation.
I've been doing this thing where every day I try to print something off. I go to FedEx, which is right next door, and I'll print something off, and I'll just sit there without my phone and read it.
And I'll usually have AI like print off a PDF,
and I'll just use AI to learn like crazy so that making the video authentically is super easy. Right? I can just speak about it, and people will find it interesting, and I find using AI heavily in content
has provided no
real benefit. You know, I've tried the avatar stuff, like I don't even know how people are using it for content.
I don't think people follow me for that reason. Know? I don't know if do you use AI in your content at all? One of the first use cases anytime I'm playing around with an AI tool is like, hey, here's an essay I wrote. To make some short form out of this. And I've like tried to get better at prompting it and giving it parameters and showing it what successful short form looks like, but it either doesn't sound like me
or
just like it doesn't feel right. Something about it doesn't feel right. I just can't I can't
pull the trigger on posting that stuff. And I just don't know why. I don't know if it's a quality thing. I don't know if it's an integrity thing.
But it feels like we're in a moment where there is like an arbitrage opportunity of simulating volume using tools like this. I just can't bring myself to do it.
There is.
But like the more you use AI for writing your scripts, the more you're going to sound like AI, and in the long run, sounding like AI is suicide.
I I tell people that with
content, you gotta go all in on AI, because I know the people running content farms. I've met them.
I don't think people realize
I'm
bringing up Gary V again. Gary V has this viral clip we're going around saying AI avatars are gonna be huge, and he says, like, Sally Sally's gonna be making content of
her AI avatar, Richard, and it's going to get a 100,000 views, and I just don't think that's gonna be the case. I think we're gonna see massive content farms that basically just have a ton of Mac Minis
that are going to algorithmically
crank out this content and flood the feeds.
I think AI generated content will be the same
as
will it will be viewed the same as the ways people view
Instagram
bot comments. You know, like, you see the Instagram bot comments. Go to one of maybe it's gotten a little bit better, but, like, three months ago, you could go to one of, like, Alex Hormozi's videos, and it's all just financial
scams,
just complete
slop,
that's coming to AI video. These models are getting cheaper to create avatar content. They're getting more believable.
There's a new model coming out of China,
Seed Dance, that is absurd.
Like, it's so good.
Like, they they made a video of this, like, 10 year old girl playing one on one with LeBron. LeBron looked completely realistic. The girl was dunking. It was so entertaining. And so people are gonna be like, oh, you can hop in and be creative.
The the
algorithms are just gonna pump out content, and it's gonna be impossible to compete manually. You're gonna have to use AI to to create it at scale.
Sorry. This is a really long winded way of saying I would avoid trying
to
sound like AI or use AI to write your content. You wanna sound very human because I think those are gonna be the creators who end up staying on top
when AI is just cheap to flick out, you know? Yeah. It's gonna be really interesting to see because there's a world where the platforms themselves
churn out content that they think will perform.
And
the hope like, think I think they'll absolutely test that. I think that's part of what,
like, Sora was
meant to test.
But in that world,
it's all gonna come down to advertising dollars for them. Are we keeping enough eyeballs on the platform to
increase
ad revenue.
And if not, they're going to find ways to kind of fight that back for the more human content. So we'll have to see. Well, I I think every human would say, I would rather watch human content. But we're gonna get big data to tell us if that is true or not. Because I agree with you that the feeds are gonna get absolutely
slammed with options.
And competing in that world
feels very daunting,
even if you are
being just a genuine person.
Yeah. 100%. And that's when we get into a more of a philosophical conversation,
whether or not, like, what people want
versus what people end up doing are completely different, you know, and that's just the nature of these algorithms. Know, AI's been running our society for a lot longer than ChatGPT's
been around. I mean, these AI algorithms that run Instagram,
TikTok,
and and YouTube have been around much longer, and they're getting really powerful. And so if you pair their curation
AI abilities with a creation,
right, YouTube has
VO.
Meta is building their own video model. TikTok has Seed Dance. That is where we get into kind of this dystopian thing where these platforms just make content for you. Like, whatever you might theoretically want to see, there you go. You can see it. That's when it gets weird, and we're not that far away from it. And I try not to even predict what I think is going to be the result. I think that there is a chance there's this massive
revolt
thing where people are just fed up with AI content, and it's almost like cigarettes,
where people
like like people are just fed up with being addicted. Oh, we've been lied to about what content is, and they just leave the platforms and go somewhere else. I think that's a realistic possibility,
but I also think it's a possibility that people just passively go along until everyone's watching AI brain rot. I think we will 100% refer to social media as phone cigarettes at some point. It's, like, already there. And not to say that everyone who's creating short form content is contributing to this problem,
but I think it is a problem.
You know, it's it's the classic I'm not saying anyone's wrong. The incentives are such that you should
contribute to this problem. You know, it's it's like simultaneously,
it's like the cigarettes, but it's also simultaneously the best way to build your brand. It's the best way to make money. It's the best creating short form content is one of the best ways
to secure your future. As as, like, as as sad as that might sound, it is it has been way more impactful for me than my college degree for making short form content. But you can hold both beliefs as true. You can think that it's bad for society,
but also what you should do. Maybe that's a difficult thing for people to hold in their head. It's kind of sad, but it is true. It is the exact cognitive dissonance
that I felt in this season. It's a huge dilemma.
It's it's the it's the algorithmic pull to making Brain Rot, and I've had to brain rotify my content to make it go viral, and I will do it shamelessly because it helps my business, and I want my business to grow. When we talked about these platforms, we've pretty much exclusively talked about video. So it's pretty clear to me that, like, video is
your focus when it comes to creating content. Somewhat. I think this where my brand is the strongest is on x, and that comes from me just ripping posts. Twitter's the one platform, like my main Twitter account is the one platform that I don't think about in terms of like volume or anything. I just anytime I have an idea, just tweet it. It's super
fun and beneficial, and it's my favorite one to make content on because it's so low friction.
Do you have any
data or concerns about proximity of posts on X? Like if you just posted something
twenty minutes ago, and you have something you wanna rip, do you does that stop you?
I don't think about the algorithm at all. I found that the more youth people think about the algorithm, the more
it just stops them from making content. I'll post 20 times in ten minutes. I just think of it like a group chat with the Internet.
Obviously,
I'm in a niche like,
Twitter is the best place to learn about AI by far. Like, you have data scientists working at x AI and OpenAI and Anthropic.
They post their stuff on x because they don't have time to make a video. They just fling it up on x, and they'll just post a PDF
that they they're working on, and they'll just post it, and it'll resurface, and it's like the most valuable place to share stuff. So if you're in the right niche,
usually tech type stuff does really well. And
one thing I do on X, for those of you who actually want to give X a try, I know it has if you only use threads or Instagram, you might have you might feel this type of way about X. I would just go in and relentlessly mute words. You can mute specific words, so every political word that you can possibly think of is just muted. I don't see them on my feed.
You can click not interested in this post.
When I I scroll slowly on x, every post I'm not interested, I press the three dots and pressed and pressed not interested, and now when I scroll my feed, it's all the stuff I wanna see, stuff I wanna make content on, stuff that's valuable for our team.
Heavily
manually curate on X, and you will have a way better experience.
My last question would be, given that you are so active on so many platforms,
trying to put aside the bias of your favorite platforms,
how would you rank them by where you see the most opportunity for somebody
starting today or wanting to like really double down on some platform today?
I think if you're if you're interested in like more consumer things and you wanna end up, you know, making money through consumer,
you know, selling sunscreen or something like that, like I would go TikTok or Instagram.
I'm most interested in actively hiring people who are developers who wanna make content. We're actually building out kind of a developer content team, so I can make videos sitting across from them in the studio.
But I I I really think the most opportunity right now is, if you're smart, is to do what I was explaining earlier on YouTube, and you can also post these on X, where you just make educational video on your computer.
You can even use your webcam. Start out using your webcam.
I would get I use this
Hollyland mic. I would just get like a a simple wireless mic, maybe a $100,
and
film
videos
about things that you're interested in, and you can go to Google Trends and see if they're like trending, and you can find ways to make it more about a topic that's more trending. But I would just turn on your computer,
one minute hook,
like this tool's actually insane. You can just say that overtly.
In this video, I'm gonna show you how to do x,
and then you can do a little bit more outlining. Let's dive into the video, and then immediately hop into the value of the video. Just start going through and teach people how to use a computer. Think think teach people how to create a framework for running their business with AI.
Think about and, you know, obviously, I'm biased towards AI, but just show people how to do it because
a bonus if it's unique to you. Because that's not in the AI training data,
and the more passionate you are about a topic, the better you'll do. And so that that is my format. Educational
videos,
screen share on YouTube, I think a massive opportunity,
and I've seen people crush it in that niche, and you'll get paid sponsorships
from these AI companies. Right? We're not the only company raising millions of dollars. Like, AI companies are still raising a ton of money. When they do paid sponsorships,
like, you can make a lot of money
in
educational
content. A ton. So that that would be my advice to get started. If you wanna learn more about creating educational videos on YouTube, watch this interview with Thomas Frank. Thomas abandoned his 3,000,000 subscriber channel to start a new channel based on tutorials
and actually grew his business.