How To Build Your First AI Business From Scratch (Steps & Tools)

Summary

Highlights

• Matt Wolf and Athan Lans discuss the ease of starting a business with AI tools. ✨
• They suggest brainstorming business ideas with AI, like using ChatGPT. 💡
• The duo emphasizes testing ideas with tools such as Mixio to gauge interest. 📊
• Using AI for content creation? Remember to keep it human to maintain audience trust. 👥
• The conversation underscores the importance of adapting to a future with fewer corporate jobs. 🔮

Key Takeaways

• AI tools can make starting a business easier than ever, so take advantage of them! 🚀
• Rather than creating an AI company, use AI tools to streamline your business operations. 🤖
• Testing business ideas is crucial - leverage tools like Mixio for quick validation. ✅
• Building an MVP? Tools like Cursor and Firebase are your best friends for rapid development. 💻
• Content creation can be AI-assisted for efficiency, but maintaining a personal touch is key. 🎥

Overview

How To Build Your First AI Business From Scratch (Steps & Tools) Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 we might be moving into this future where less and less people work for big companies big companies need less and less people there's really never an easier time to start a business than right now because of the tools that make all this stuff really really easy they're all at your disposal hey welcome to the next wave podcast I'm Matt wolf I'm here with Athan Lans and one of the questions that we get asked pretty often is if you are starting over from scratch with all these AI tools that are available to you
• 00:30 - 01:00 what would you do what path would you take and so in this episode we're going to break down exactly what Nathan would do if he would start from scratch what I would do if I was starting from scratch as well as the things we are actually doing right now with AI that are helping build our business so some really cool stuff get ready to take some notes and let's Dive Right In one of the things that we were talking about right before we hit record on this episode was that me personally I
• 01:00 - 01:30 don't really think starting an AI business is the smartest path for somebody to to take right and what I mean by that is like starting a business that is like your own AI company right I feel like more the path to take would be starting a business that's not like a specific AI SAS or something like that but a company that leverages all of the AI tools that exist out there to make your life and make building this business a lot easier that's the path
• 01:30 - 02:00 that I would take but I know Nathan that like if you were kind of starting over today from scratch you would build probably like a a SAS company and focus like in a very specific Niche audience how would you build that like what what tools would you use you know for let's say like the idea for the SAS you're going to use like how would you go about actually building the SAS uh would you use AI for like the marketing um you know like what sort of like what would that flow look like how would you break
• 02:00 - 02:30 down like all right I'm starting this business here's how I would go and do it I I think I would go for a walk talk to uh chat gbt voice uh just chat with it I would literally just like go for a walk and talk to AI talk about different ideas I have and go back and forth with it tell it to like summarize what I what we discussed and give me like a list of like 10 the top 10 ideas from that go back put them on a whiteboard sit down with like ideally like a a partner
• 02:30 - 03:00 somebody who's helping me you know uh Implement these ideas uh and then use something like you know cursor or something like that to just like crank out the websites and test them out yeah yeah I think I like the idea of going for a walk having a conversation with um with open ai's new advanced voice mode and then just sort of like fleshing out com like the conversation with the AI and and sort of here's my thoughts you know what are the pros and cons of this you know do you see any potential downside of doing this route you know
• 03:00 - 03:30 are there any things you would change about the idea you have that conversation with the AI and then the cool thing is you can go back to your computer at home and literally look back at the history and see that conversation and see the conclusions so like it's all there save stored for you inside of you know your chat GPT dashboard what I would probably do slightly different is I don't think I would go and necessarily build the software ideas that it gave me let's say this is what I would do um I
• 03:30 - 04:00 would probably take like the 10 ideas that we came up with from that conversation right like let's say the end of the conversation is like all right give me a recap and list 10 ideas based on what we talked about for cool software companies then what I would go do is I would use a tool there's a couple Cool Tools out there one's called like mixo I think it's mio. iio um which is a tool to rapidly build like a website with a single prompt right so you go to that website and you say I'm going to build a software product for
• 04:00 - 04:30 real estate agents um to help them find leads using AI right I'm just sort of making this up off the seat of my pants here but let's say like you gave it all of those details about like the software you're thinking about doing what it'll do is it'll go and create a landing page for you with you know images and copy and headlines and subhe headlines and all that kind of stuff with the idea for your software and then at the bottom
• 04:30 - 05:00 it'll have an email optin box that says join the wait list right so then what you can go do is take all 10 of those ideas that open AI gave you go to a tool like mixo have mixo rapidly create 10 different websites that sort of flesh out the IDE on the website and then you can go and buy advertising on Facebook ads Google ads Twitter ads wherever to all 10 of those landing pages and then whichever one has the most interest on the list whichever one's weight list
• 05:00 - 05:30 grows the fastest go make that product that's probably what I would do that's kind of like the uh was it Tim Ferris that talked about ideas like that where you would test out ideas with ads where you would you would try something I think that's how he did his books right like his book covers his book covers yeah yeah yeah where like he would do a Facebook ad and then see which one converted the best and that would like show him which direction he should go uh yeah yeah well his original book title the 4our week week work week was originally called something like um how to sell drugs for Fun and Profit or
• 05:30 - 06:00 something like that and he actually split tested that title against the 4-Hour Work week and the 4H Hour Work Week won yeah yeah yeah yeah obviously it's kind of funny that he thought it wasn't going to but um I I I wouldn't depend on AI to give me all the ideas definitely a lot of the ideas would be coming from me and me kind of brainstorming with the AI and I probably would go do research after that like I'd probably use something like perplexities so like all these different industries that I don't know much about like you know let's say it's uh uh landscaping or
• 06:00 - 06:30 or whatever like I would I would go do some like perplexity searches and pull up to see if there are existing companies in those areas and if there are I would look at their websites you know maybe cop copy and paste that into chat TBT or something to use as a reference and I think what I would do so I haven't used mix you said mix. is that well this mixo website just to clarify is literally just designed to like test Concepts like it doesn't build the whole website it's designed to make
• 06:30 - 07:00 a landing page with the idea on it and then you know send people to that weight list to gauge interest like it's specifically seems to be tailored for that use case oh interesting I have to try it out um yeah depending on how good it is I mean you might be able to just do this the same thing yourself though like using cursor like having like a template and then you go into cursor and like hey change this stuff for me like change the taglines here's the kind of stuff I want to change change the colors you probably like within like five minutes could change all that stuff then
• 07:00 - 07:30 you you if you know if you know how to use if you know how to code you just push it live and then you're good so that's probably what I would do but yeah I love the idea of using the Facebook ads and just like testing it you know just how Tim Ferris used to do yeah yeah and then and then the nice thing is too you've already built an email list so then when you go and actually release the project you just hit up all the people that joined that specific weight list that said they basically raised their hand and said I'd be interested in this product because they joined the weit list right and then boom you've got your your your sort of first marketing
• 07:30 - 08:00 campaign for it because you just mail that list I mean Heck if you want you can mail the other nine lists as well and say hey we didn't make that product but come check out this one so maybe we should try this and record it kind like yeah that actually be kind of a fun episode uh okay if we do that who owns it [Laughter] does but but yeah so that that's the way I would do it and then and then you would go and like build the the software right and you mentioned cursor cursor's
• 08:00 - 08:30 probably I believe like the biggest benefit of cursor right is that it can use your entire code base for context right like it's yes it's using I believe retrieval augmented generation which can like look at the text of everything that you upload but when you're using cursor it's looking at all of the codes so like even if it's like 30 files long right it it's going to look through all of those files to sort of understand what's going on in the software that you're creating right yeah ex actually never used cursor still yeah yeah yeah that's I mean you
• 08:30 - 09:00 know I've only used it a little bit but like the the the biggest benefit I saw was that it can see your whole code base so it's like it has context of your entire code base versus you copy and pasting something in claw and it only knows the one page it's on and doesn't know that if you change this thing it's going to break something somewhere else so it's important to know how things are interconnected yeah yeah I but I think I think you know with with the tools that are available out there you can rapidly get ideas for software you know having the the sort of conversations you can rapidly go and uh test the ideas by
• 09:00 - 09:30 collecting emails um once you've got the idea you can pretty much rapidly create the software right with between tools like cursor right you've got tools like cursor but then you've also got tools like repet and Firebase where Firebase tends to H handle like the backend sort of database of whatever website or SAS You're Building like Firebase will handle that it also handles like a lot of the single signin stuff like uh like Google login an apple login and all that
• 09:30 - 10:00 kind of stuff so you don't have to really mess with a login functionality and then repet tends to host like the front end for your site a little bit so if you're using cursor to write the code repet to host the front end Firebase to host the back end like you use all three of those tools and now uh repet just added an integration for cursor so whenever you make these updates in cursor you can have just have them automatically pushed into repet for you and fixed live on on your site so I mean
• 10:00 - 10:30 like we've said it before there's really never an easier time to start a business than right now because of like the AI tools and the tools that make all this stuff like really really easy they're all at your disposal look I'll be honest if you're not using AI in your marketing chances are you're slowing yourself down AI has helped me find new ways to Market my YouTube channel grow my newsletter and it even helps me with the process of writing my newsletter that's just another way AI has completely changed the game for me if you're looking to
• 10:30 - 11:00 freshen up your marketing tactics HubSpot just dropped a free guide that goes all in on how you can use AI to create a killer marketing plan it goes into the entire process with AI prompts at each step and how you can leverage AI to optimize your marketing strategy if you want it just grab it at the link in the description now back to the show yeah it's crazy how easy it is to make a database with Firebase you it's uh it's kind of wild like I I met James taplin I think Tamplin I believe that's his last name uh sorry James if you're listening
• 11:00 - 11:30 uh but I I met him with some friends in San Francisco like smoking hookah together they're like oh here's this guy James and like he's building something pretty cool I'm like oh cool what is it and it was like oh fire base I was like you know and and he was way more technical than me I was like oh cool it's like easy database or something okay it sounds neat like had no had no idea if it would work or like what the hell he was building exactly and then it became he Google at the time or did Google acquire it later no they they acquired it I believe Firebase was a YC startup I believe and they Google acquired it for think a few hundred
• 11:30 - 12:00 million like it was a lot um and and it all happened like within like a year or two it was kind of wild like literally like we're like smoking hookah he's telling me this crazy idea and then a year or two later like I I see the thing like Oh Google's bought them for like a few hundred million but um so so most of the stuff we were talking about was like kind of you know the stuff I would do so what what what would you do like if you were creating a business I do want to add I do want to add one more like idea to what we were just talking about um because like a lot of ideas have been done already right especially since like
• 12:00 - 12:30 AI has become a lot more prolific and a lot of coders are able to use it we're seeing just like almost like this spamming of sof SAS companies right like yeah like I run the Future tools website I have a submission form where people can submit their new tools I get like 100 new tools a day submitted I only accept about 1% of them because most of them are just like clones of tools that already exist because everything's so easy to make so the other thing that I would I would add into the mix of what we were talking about there is I would go and try to find the
• 12:30 - 13:00 products that already exist that are somewhat close to the idea that we're talking about because there's probably something out there that's already fairly close to like almost every idea you could come up with but then what I would do is I would go to like Reddit and I would search out that software on Reddit I would search out that software on trust pilot I would search it out on um oh what's the there's all those sites that are like sort of like peer reviewing websites and software that EX exist out there right I would go to all
• 13:00 - 13:30 of those different sites and I would copy and paste all of the comments all of the reviews all of that kind of stuff into cloud and then I would get like a sentiment analysis of like what do people love about this product what do people hate about this product you know what is the what is the feedback that this product has gotten and then I would use that feedback to make sure that I make my product better than the one that exists out there that's a good idea I I was just thinking I would probably just look at similar web and see if it was like trending up or down like the the
• 13:30 - 14:00 website yeah yeah but you know you can always do that sentiment analysis like I this is this is a tactic that a lot of Amazon sellers use right because like on Amazon like every product has like 30 competing products because everybody just orders them off alibaba.com and sells the same crap right so what people do on Amazon is they go and look at the reviews of the products that exist already and then sort of get the sentiment analysis of what people do and don't like about that product and then make sure that when they go sell their version of the
• 14:00 - 14:30 product they're fixing the things that people don't like and they're sort of Leaning into the things that people do like in the marketing right so like if a lot of people say like or this software I love X feature I love that they added this feature you want to make sure that that features in yours right or if you look at the software uh or if you look at the reviews for those various software companies and they say like I really really hate that they haven't added this feature it seems so easy for them to add why don't they add this feature and there's like this overwhelming uh thought that like this
• 14:30 - 15:00 functionality should be in this tool but it's not well make sure you add that functionality right so that way you're making sure that whatever you go and build you know you used AI to sort of analyze what are the features that should be in my MVP and which feature should I exclude Okay cool so so so Matt what would you do like if you were starting over today so I would likely still go down the route of being really focused heavily on content creation um I love content creation I also think
• 15:00 - 15:30 content creation is somewhat future proof right I do think like there are tools that make content a lot easier for anybody to create right you've got the uh like hay genen tool where you can make a digital clone of yourself and now anybody can just crank out videos of themselves talking right you've got notebook LM which will create really actually good podcasts that people will listen to right so I say it'll future proof me to some degree but I also feel like a lot of people as AI gets more and
• 15:30 - 16:00 more prolific right as it's just sort of everywhere and people are in inundated with AI all the time they're going to look for real humans right they're going to look for that like real voice that real person that they can trust that they know there's an actual human being behind it who's not just looking to like make affiliate commissions or whatever right and so I still think there's a lot of value to being a not a faceless uh content creator but a face full content what's the word for that not faceless
• 16:00 - 16:30 but faceful H having a face having a face have a be a face in content creation a face channel so I still think there's a lot of of um I I still think there's a lot of room to to grow and build in that space and leverage AI to make your life a lot easier to do it right so I would probably pick a fairly Niche topic um that I can that I'm really excited about and passionate about about and I can talk about myself
• 16:30 - 17:00 right and then I would use uh AI to help me with the ideation right I right now I use perplexity and clad constantly and when I am using perplexity I have the pro version and I have it set to use clad when I'm using perplexity so like perplexity and CLA are like my AI stack that I'm mostly using right now right but like I would use those tools to research what are people searching for in this Niche right now what type of content are they looking for what things that people are struggling with that
• 17:00 - 17:30 they need help with and I would go and create as much content around those topics as possible and the content is so much easier to create as well because you can have tools like Claude go and outline the the concepts for you like I can say I want to make a video about how to make um you know 3D walkthroughs of houses for the real estate Niche right I I can go and go to Claud and say hey
• 17:30 - 18:00 this is the video I want to make what are the things that I need to make sure are included in this video what is the flow of this video how can I make it that so it holds people's attention throughout the whole video and it will actually generate an outline for me and I can follow the outline and make sure I hit all the beats that it recommends I hit right like uh one of the biggest questions is what kind of camera am I going to need so make sure you talk about the type of camera you're going to need um how long do I need to set the camera down in each location of the
• 18:00 - 18:30 house all right I need to make sure that gets into my video right so I can use AI to really really help with the outlining process of the content that I would create where where where would you start first you you you've mentioned like video I think you mentioned newsletter Twitter things like that like where where would you start if you were starting a new media brand today I would simultaneously work on a newsletter and probably short form video now I long form video is my main game right long form video on YouTube is is actually
• 18:30 - 19:00 where I make the most of my money that's where most of the sponsorships lie um AdSense revenue is more significant on long form videos however short form videos I've actually started doing quite a bit of short form videos as well I'm putting out about three short form videos a week right now short form videos are so much faster to produce right I'm I'm making like a 59 second script I'm not reading the script exactly anymore I was for a little a little bit but it kind of got too obvious like you can see my eyes reading
• 19:00 - 19:30 the script and I'm like all right I need to basically like memorize what I'm going to talk about and hit all the points and so now what I'm doing is I'll like speak out a paragraph and then look down at my script and then speak out a paragraph so it's not word for word anymore but the short form videos I can I can batch record three or four short form videos in a half hour right just like here's one here's another here's another here's another and then I can either pass them to an editor or I can use a tool I use a tool called
• 19:30 - 20:00 time bolt to edit mine um which is basically like an automated tool that will go through and find all the gaps and silence and remove them automatically and it tries to find some of the mistakes and it tries to take out some of the ums and stuff like that so I can just feed my sort of rough video into that tool and then it'll spit out the sort of one minute V uh version for me and then I would go in and you know add b-roll and stuff like that the oldfashioned way using Da Vinci resolve or Adobe Premiere now I would pass it to
• 20:00 - 20:30 an editor I have an editor that helps me with short form but I would go and I would batch record a bunch of them at this point pass them all to my editor the editor would go and add the visual effects to them and the reason I like short form is because in the content world the majority of the income that I earn doesn't come from the YouTube AdSense Revenue it comes from sponsorships right and all the sponsors care about is how much reach is this video going to get right they don't care
• 20:30 - 21:00 if it's a 10minute video or a 45 second video they want to get the views on their product they want to get the views on their brand right so the people that are making these 60c shorts are making the same amount of money off their sponsorships as I'm making by putting out 20 minute long videos that take me multiple days to to dial in yeah from a sponsorship perspective ad revenue is crap on short form videos right like I can get you can get a million views on a
• 21:00 - 21:30 short form video and it'll make you like 60 bucks it's it's really dumb but from a sponsorship perspective I can basically charge the same amount to a sponsor for a short form that might get 100,000 views as I can for a long form that might get 100,000 views uh so it's you know a lot less effort for creating the content I can crank out a lot more of it and the sponsors will still come knocking as as the videos get views
• 21:30 - 22:00 right so I would probably go that route and you would use your face so you wouldn't do faceless I wouldn't do faceless I would use my face on those yeah yeah yeah I mean you could use something like ha Jen and train your face into it and then um it also learns your voice using 11 labs and then you can copy and paste a script and I know people that are doing that Rowan Chung is doing that verun Maya is doing that those guys are doing really really well with it like they're it's actually their face but it's an AI avatar version of their face and those work but I do think
• 22:00 - 22:30 at like they work for them right now because they're like the Pioneers like they're the ones that are like the first ones out there doing this stuff and being seen but there's going to hit a saturation point where half your short form content that you see is these like AI generated avatars and you start to get sick of them right so I think that's where being a real human is still going to be important you know going to conferences and you know as they say shaking hands and kissing baby right like that's uh that type of thing people
• 22:30 - 23:00 build a relationship they build a bond with you they realize you're a real person that they can trust that you know they can get to know personally that they could they feel like they want to go have a beer with right like building up that I think is really really important and I think it's only going to get more and more important as we're seeing more and more AI generated content yeah and it's Gonna Get Easier too right I think that's all Peter levels the you know famous Indie hacker he he put out something yesterday showing where you can just generate an avat car of like this beautiful woman
• 23:00 - 23:30 and and all of a sudden she's like a CNN anchor talking about whatever and literally you like you literally like copy and paste in CNN like a news story into like you know chat chbt or whatever and have it produce the script and then you just feed that into the system and it it does all of it so I mean you know I think it's kind of thing where that kind of stuff it's probably a decent tactic though like for like the next year or maybe even two but at some point there's like everyone's going to be doing it and like you're going to know okay that's another one of those it and it's going to start to be associated
• 23:30 - 24:00 with low effort content right in the same way like when I watch when I when I click on a YouTube video and let's say it's like a 10-minute video and I immediately hear like an AI voice over on the video I click away it turns me off like immediately like I'm just like I don't want to listen to an AI voice for the next 10 minutes I almost immediately click off because I just assume this was low effort content that somebody just slapped together and threw on YouTube to try to get quick views um that's what I associate with that I I you know I don't know if that's good or bad but that's what my brain Associates with it like I hear the AI voice I go
• 24:00 - 24:30 this is obviously an AI voice I'm out moving on to the next video I want to hear a human explain the thing to me right so for now though like I me Ian at some point you might not be able to tell though there that'se I agree I yeah I agree I think at some point we won't be able to tell but I also think those AI generated avatars it's going to be a similar thing right now I actually like watching verun Maya and I like watching Rowan's videos where they're doing it that way um but it's not really a shortcut like those guys put a lot of
• 24:30 - 25:00 effort still into making a lot of those videos and finding the right b-roll and cutting it at the right time so it's harder to tell that it's an AI generated video that kind of stuff there's more effort into it than I think they um they actually L on like to let people believe right but there is there is sort of a part two to what I would do right so like I did mention I would simultaneously create an email list while uh while also doing uh content I would probably do like a mix of both long and short form but I'd probably
• 25:00 - 25:30 make short form the main and make long form a little less frequent um just because of like the the pace that I can put out short form videos I can put out a lot more of them but like a newsletter there's never been an easier time to to grow on we talked about this on stage on the uh the the HubSpot Creator stage when we at inbound is like when it comes to creating a newsletter like the newsletter could mostly be outlined and uh edited using AI right
• 25:30 - 26:00 like you can have ai write an outline for you and then you go in with your own words and write it out or you can have ai flash it out write the whole thing for you or you can write it yourself and have ai go back and fix it for editing and grammar and spelling and all that kind of stuff so that it reads a little bit better like writing the newsletter should be nobody's excuse anymore right it's it's easier than ever to actually create the newsletter you have perplexity that can do the research let's say you're uh making a newsletter on their real estate Niche and let's say
• 26:00 - 26:30 it's a daily newsletter you can go to perplexity every morning and say what are the top 10 most interesting things happening in the world of real estate and perplexity will give you a breakdown of like based on the news we found here's the top 10 things happening in the world of real estate today okay cool take that list of 10 things jump over to Claude and say Here's 10 things that are happening in the real estate world today write me a newsletter around these 10 things and break it all down boom I've got that newsletter written that's you can use make.com and probably make like
• 26:30 - 27:00 a API flow where every day you just press a button and it goes and writes the newsletter for you following that formula like it's so easy to create the newsletter now right and then I would leverage the short form content with a call to action to join the newsletter right so at the end of every single video you'd have like a two-c call to action get on the daily newsletter to uh to to to be the most in the no person in real estate in your area right like if you're you're not on this newsletter your competition probably is so make
• 27:00 - 27:30 sure you're on it right you do those kinds of calls to action at the end of your short form videos and you grow the newsletter that way right and what I love about the sort of blend of having a newsletter and having a sort of content machine is that now you can sell sponsorships in a completely different way like one question I get asked a lot when I'm at these events is like you know how what's the CPM do I what CPM do I charge sponsors from my YouTube videos right other YouTubers are like all right
• 27:30 - 28:00 so per thousand CPM is how much you make per thousand views right so let's say um on average somebody might charge $40 CPM so for every thousand views a video makes they make uh $40 on it a video that gets 100,000 views might make what is that four four grand right um yeah so uh but people will ask me like what's the CPM and I'm like I I don't play the CPM game I play the bundling game I've got the Future tools website where I can put sponsors at the top of the website
• 28:00 - 28:30 I've got my YouTube channel where I can integrate sponsors in the middle of the video I've got shorts where I can make uh sponsored shorts for companies and I've got my newsletter and people can sponsor the newsletter so I don't sell CPM at all I go to these companies and say Here's a bundle you can get a featured listing on Future tools for one week I'll integrate um your ad read into one video and you can sponsor two newsletters over the next month so it's more of this like packaged deal where you're being seen on all of these
• 28:30 - 29:00 platforms right and now I get out of that CPM game and I sort of elevate Elevate above it and I'm charging way more than some other YouTubers would charge because you're now getting access to the newsletter the YouTube channel the YouTube shorts maybe Instagram maybe Twitter maybe my LinkedIn maybe my Discord community and the you know the Future tools website all of that right like all of that can be sort of worked into some sort of bundled deal so that's the game that I now with my content yeah
• 29:00 - 29:30 you you told me that in the taxi in Boston we were heading heading back uh and that was one of the main things like when I got back I told chat BT like remember this so that was one of my notes like I I did like a decompression like after Boston like what's all the stuff I learned or or whatever that want remember that was one of my big notes I'm like remember this this is smart because not only does that help you like better monetize your media properties but also they help grow each other so it's like it's amazing it's like amazing for growth and monetization uh I I do feel like with newsletters it's going it's going to be similar to like the
• 29:30 - 30:00 faceless YouTube channels where yeah it's easier than ever to create them so the ones that are really like yeah you could have newsletters right now where you literally just copy and paste stuff in and say Hey give people these bullet points just like just just summarize and and there have been like newsletters that are really successful that are just like purely summarization kind of newsletters yeah um I feel like those are going to be challenging long term though right because like yeah people are going to use perplexity or whatever else to have their own personalized summarization yeah so I think I think if you're doing it like make sure that you have a unique voice and have something
• 30:00 - 30:30 to say I think long term is going to be important CU people are going to want to have that real person and learn from that real person and hear what they have to say versus just here's a an AI summary of what happened they get anywhere yeah you know uh Peter diamandis right he's got a newsletter called future Loop and future Loop is completely automated with AI I don't think he touches it I think it like he he he's created some sort of app that watches the the sort of tech emerging Tech news for him writes the newsletter
• 30:30 - 31:00 and sends it like I literally think it's completely hands-off it's just on a daily basis it runs through this process and blasts out the newsletter without like a human really even touching it saying that out of I I subscribe to it out of all the newsletters I read I sort of have like a priority of like I always read this one like Rowan Chung's rundown is probably my favorite I always read that one Ben's bites is really good with Ben tosel right there's a handful that I'm like these are my must reads every day right and I look at Future Loop
• 31:00 - 31:30 which is like the one that's automated with AI is the lowest on my priority list right like if I'm like rushed for time and I'm just like all right give me the really quick news I only read two or three newsletters and that one doesn't make the cut right because I know it's automated I know it's AI sometimes it finds news articles that are like two months old and I'm like what did why did that make it into this one probably because automation screwed up and put the wrong article in somehow right so I do think that there is like a a sort of limited window where you can do this and
• 31:30 - 32:00 over time there'll be so many Just Junk newsletters that it's not effective anymore but if you can be that person that has a voice that it makes a difference yeah it could be it could be a good short-term strategy I mean you could do that and then you once it becomes obvious that it's no longer working like oh pivot now I'm writing the newsletter here's the new format you know I'm right at least as far as you know I'm not writing the the newsletter now ex exactly yeah I'm writing it yeah by the way this is not what I do with my newsletter I actually like work
• 32:00 - 32:30 with a team and I've got an editor and some people that help me with writing it's actually still humans behind my newsletter so I just want to say that if anybody's like listening going oh Matt's automating the whole thing I'm not but I'm just pointing out how easy it is to create a newsletter and that like the amount of time that goes into that really shouldn't be a factor yeah so so basically you're saying that it's easier than ever to create YouTube shorts in a newsletter and if you were starting over that's what you would do you'd use all these AI
• 32:30 - 33:00 tools um what do you think like so this all works today like in in like five years from now what do you do you think it'll be similar or do you think it's all going to be different yeah I think I think timing is a big factor like look when it when it comes to my success on YouTube I got insanely lucky with the timing right like I started making YouTube content around AI about six months before AI hit the mainstream Consciousness right like I was making videos about AI and cool technology and then the rest of the
• 33:00 - 33:30 world caught up because of the chat GPT launch and I had already been making videos on that topic right so I think the earlier you get in and like the sort of more brand reputation you build earlier on the better you're going to be off down the line I think you know a lot of people are going and creating air related YouTube channels now and they're just sort of floundering because there's already a handful of really really big channels that most people already follow and the smaller channels kind of are
• 33:30 - 34:00 starting to feel like me too channels like oh they're looking at the analytics and going that worked for them I'm going to try to do the same thing but it doesn't really work because there's already sort of some established names in that space I think it's going to be the same thing but I also think when it comes to like what Niche you're going to go into and talk about there's unlimited potential niches right like right maybe just think of a sub niche of the niche right like real estate is honestly probably too broad of a niche but if you can think of like a sub niche of that
• 34:00 - 34:30 Niche you can probably own it right like it's the Japanese gardening or Blue Ocean strategy versus the red Ocean strategy right like if if there's a billion content creators talking about this Niche you know Niche down even further until you're in a blue ocean where you're the only one talking about that specific portion of the niche you know I think one other interesting thing that that you you told me in Boston was how you were using perplexities API to like create to fill out Future tools I mean I I've been thinking about that a
• 34:30 - 35:00 lot I'm like God there's probably so many directories you could build using stuff like this you know and obviously I've got lore.com I'm like damn should I be using this like should lore.com be something else should lore.com be like a you know like every single fantasy thing or every game or whatever like like like a page is filled out and so like I just like you know just really game SEO on that yeah yeah yeah I don't know I mean it's a great domain name but I I yeah I'm not sure but yeah with like the perplexity API it's it's been the
• 35:00 - 35:30 problem with the API is you can't I wasn't maybe there's a way to do it but I wasn't able to pick like Sonic or uh chat GPT it lets you pick like from an open source model so I'm actually using llama 3.1 paired up with Claud right now or with perplexity right now but basically the way I used to run the Future tools website was whenever I came across a new tool that I liked I would add it to a spreadsheet then it would go to make.com it would use a tool called scraping B it
• 35:30 - 36:00 would scrape all the copy off the website it would take the copy that it just scraped it would put it into chat GPT and say summarize this tool for me and then it would take that summary and that would be the sort of content of the listing on Future tools the problem with that method was that sometimes the page that I would I would plug in would just have like a YouTube video embedded and so it wouldn't find anything to scrape or it would be like a page that's just full of images and not a lot of text and it couldn't figure out what the tool was
• 36:00 - 36:30 about by scraping it or they had some sort of like uh like Blocker on it that would block any sort of scraping tool from actually scraping it and it would say we couldn't find any data on this things like that would happen so what I started doing instead is now when I add that URL inside of a Google sheet cell instead of it scraping the website it actually takes that URL goes to perplexity and says tell me what the tool at this URL is about and why that works is because perplexity can go and
• 36:30 - 37:00 look at that website and essentially like scrape what's on it for you but if there's nothing on the website for it to scrape it goes and finds other sources on the internet that talk about that tool so if that tool is listed on product hunt if somebody's talked about it on Reddit if somebody's written an article about it on Tech crunch or something like that it's going to go still figure out what that tool is about because it's going and actually like searching for information about it as opposed to just sort of scraping the sales page the flow after that's the
• 37:00 - 37:30 same right it it figures out what the Tool's about and then goes over to like a GPT 3.5 API I think it says summarize this for me down into like a single paragraph and then it sends it to webflow and populates the website but that perplexity API has made the listings on future Tools 10 times more accurate yeah I wonder how Google's going to deal with all this I I keep being worried for Google I I don't know like this new age like like not
• 37:30 - 38:00 everyone's figured this out yet like there there's going to be like you can make so many directories with stuff like this like someone who had resources could make like a hundred directories and just like totally game everything yeah yeah I mean using something like web flow like web flow is a drag and drop no code website builder you know you can design a website in a matter of hours using webflow and then use either make.com or zapier and Link it up to perplexity and Claud and some of these a tools and the next thing you know you've got it like you can turn it on total
• 38:00 - 38:30 autopilot I still want to review every tool before it goes on the site so I pick which tools go into that spreadsheet and make the site but you can totally make a tool that's just like watching the internet for you and whenever a new AI tool pops up it just scrapes the website and puts the tool on your website and it's just automated building up the website for you and every day you log in and there's 40 new tools on the website you can totally do that I just think that um when it comes to curation the value of Future tools
• 38:30 - 39:00 isn't just having a site with the most tools listed the value of the site is my curation of the tools like if I think it's a dog crap tool it's not going to make the website and so that's why I feel like the website is still valuable to people is that I'm kind of curating the tools and all the tools that are just sort of like cheap knockoffs or money grabs or feel a little scammy aren't going to make the website but somebody who doesn't have morals could just that there's a great business
• 39:00 - 39:30 there yeah just don't put your face on it you know use a faceless channel for that one to promote that one right yeah yeah well I even think that concept has gotten so uh saturated right like there's so many like AI tool listing websites that do the same thing as Future tools now that I think if somebody went and tried to create the same concept it's it's just not going to work right it's but if you go and find a different Niche it'll work really really well right cool I don't know is there anything else
• 39:30 - 40:00 we want to talk about today maybe Ed this part I I I feel like we covered a lot of ground in this one I mean you know I know what you would do if you were starting over I know what you are going to do with a new business that you're planning you know I I talked about how I would do it if I was to start over I also told you exactly what I'm doing right now today so I feel like people listening to this have the strategies we would do the strategies we are doing and hopefully they can fill in the gaps for how can this work in my business how can this work in my Niche how can I leverage these ideas I think I
• 40:00 - 40:30 think there's a lot to go off of I also name dropped a ton of potential tools that you can use to do this stuff tools to validate ideas for products uh tools to actually create the content for you I think I think there's a lot here that people should be able to take away and run with and ideally go and and build a business that leverages these AI tools I think we might be moving into this future where less and less people work for big companies big companies need
• 40:30 - 41:00 less and less people so I think it's really smart to learn this stuff and figure out what kind of businesses could I be building right now because it may become a necessity really soon for a lot of people depend on yourself more like versus like a a company one
• 41:00 - 41:30 [Music]