He Built a Startup using AI That Prints Money (Full Tutorial)

What do you want to talk about today? Today, I want to discuss how the marketing funnel is an entirely wrong way to think about modern marketing. I believe it's a deceptive way to conceal what's actually happening. I would like to propose a new perspective on this, which I call "digital gravity," and break down what that actually means.

And then let's discuss the high-level theory and strategy, as well as the tactics and ways to implement this, both for B2B and for consumers. Before we dive into that, could you let us know what liquid you have in your coffee mug? Yes, this is beer. I am sipping on a Modelo.

They're out of limes, though, man. I don't know about the hospitality. Is that a type of Colombian roast? I think it's from Oaxaca. No.

Cool. All right. Digital gravity. Yeah, um, so marketing funnel, right? We all know it. I'll talk about it: it's like this thing that people enter and then they come out the bottom and buy a product. That's not how people actually buy things whatsoever. People actually buy things as

What you're doing is like building mass, digital mass on the internet. The more mass you have, the more influence you have within the niche or sphere you're in. You build that mass through content and by marketing wherever your customers are showing up, in some form. Content is typically the vehicle for that. When you're a small company just starting out, I have this conversation a lot with startups about where they should market.

There are two different paths to consider. If you're bootstrapped, you have limited resources, time, money, and mental energy. The resources available to you vary depending on whether you are funded or not. When you are funded, you have a lot of money, ample time, and extensive resources at your disposal. So when they ask the question, "Where should I be?" the answer is, "Everywhere."

You should be everywhere. That is why you raise money. That's the whole point of this. Your bootstrapping is totally different. You probably have a lot of time, you probably have no money, and you probably have a lot of mental energy.

And then, as the companies evolve and scale up, all those resources change. But to get back to building out the actual brand, how do you make a brand famous in 12 months to the target audience? It's by building, again, this mass. When you're starting out, you're the small speck. Imagine a comet is a customer, and they’re flying by, right?

It's like you have no influence on them flying by, right? But the bigger you get, the more mass you build. This concept can be applied at the local business level, at the B2B level, and at the consumer level. What happens is that you attract more people who get drawn into the orbit of the planet you are building.

And they get in rotation. As they get in rotation, more touchdowns occur. The touchdown that turns into revenue creates a growth flywheel. You build more mass through the revenue you generate by reinvesting back into the growth of the company. Again, I think this is a better way to think about how we prepare for trade and how people actually make purchasing decisions. It's not like they enter the funnel and come out at the end; nobody actually buys things that way. I think the issue with the funnel is that people leave it entirely. They go out of it and then come back, maybe shopping around. How many times have you not thought about something for six weeks and then returned to buy it? During that time, you probably saw three ads.

You touched a newsletter that had an ad in it, and then maybe you saw a billboard. You know, a friend talked about it through word of mouth. It could be years later, depending on how significant the purchase is and how much money is involved in that decision. Typically, it's a longer cycle for larger purchases. I worked in the manufacturing industry at one point, doing marketing for companies that produced doors and windows.

We're talking about a hotel group purchasing 2,000 shower bases for a hotel they are building, right? That purchasing decision spans a five-year period. How are you influencing them throughout that entire cycle? I think this is the way to approach it. This isn't just about a funnel; this situation works differently.

Creating is almost like a one-to-many relationship, but it requires a long cycle to execute effectively. Then, how do you scale that? How do you ensure consistency? Another important aspect to consider is the funnel concept. Many people think of marketing as a campaign, which is actually a remnant of wartime thinking. After World War II, returning soldiers had the mindset of launching campaigns where an action started and then concluded, similar to how they would have strategized to defeat an enemy. This idea transitioned into the realm of advertising.

That's not how the world works anymore. You don't start and stop; you're constantly marketing. It's not that you didn't do marketing; it's that you're always marketing. If you think about it this way, it requires you to consider that if you're constantly creating things that add value to your company, it shifts your mindset regarding how we actually market businesses. I don't just start and stop a campaign. I'm continuously running ads and testing which ads are generating the cheapest cost per click. I need to create the most impact—more signups, more conversion events for whatever it is that I'm building and marketing. It's similar to how I view building a website or an app. It's not like you hit publish and you're done.

You know, it's a living and breathing entity. A thousand percent. I think it has to be thought of that way. And that's the whole point. The only thing that isn't like this is really email and digital communication.

Quick break in the podcast to tell you a little bit about Startup Empire. Startup Empire is my private membership where a bunch of people like me and you come together to build out their startup ideas. They’re looking for content to help accelerate their progress, potential co-founders, and tutorials from experts like me to learn how to do email marketing and more.

How do you build an audience? How do you go viral on Twitter? All these different things are exactly what Startup Empire is about. It's for people who want to start a startup but are looking for ideas, or for those who have a startup but aren't seeing the traction they need. You can check out the link to StartupEmpire.co in the description.

It is like the only thing that once you hit send, you can't take back. Everything else is pretty malleable; you can always adjust it. Email is the only thing that we have, and we have internal processes where it's like our rule is that three people have to touch the copy before it's sent. Three people have to proof it, basically, so that we get, you know, a set of checks, right? Because we can't take that back. But that's one of the few things that you can't undo in this digital realm. So, with that in mind, it's like, okay, well, how do I do more? I think that's the game that’s happening.

If you look at short-form social media right now, this is the game. I just got off a call with a TikTok Shop agency owner, and she said that literally all they are thinking about is volume. The best affiliates that they are working with are producing about 10 times the number of videos compared to the lower-performing affiliates. It’s just a surface area game.

Sure! Here’s your text reformatted with correct capitalization and spelling: "Like if I do, you know, thinking about it as a batting average, if I hit .300, right, which is like decent, and I go up to the plate but only swing once, there’s a strong likelihood that I don't even touch the ball. But if I swing 10 times, I get on base, right? It’s the same idea with the amount of content and the amount of stuff that we're doing. I think there's a shift happening in the digital space. If you talk to older brands, they'll say, 'No, we only have one Instagram account.' It's like that's old school at this point; that’s an outdated way of thinking about how this should actually be done. They might say, 'We publish a blog post a week'—are you kidding? What’s a blog post? It's crazy, man. Anyway, I’m sure people are listening to this and thinking, 'Okay, I buy that, but tactically, how do you do it? How do you do it?' Yeah, totally. Do you want to start with B2B? Your consumer? I want to start with B2B, but you also have a 'B' in it—beer. And I don't know if you have an empty mug in there."

No, I have stuff in here still. Shockingly. That is shocking. Okay. Well, if you do need more beer, we have one ice cold right there for you.

Amazing! I appreciate you. Yes, let's start with B2B. How do you grow a B2B company?

The framework that I use is pretty straightforward and always evolving. Let's start with B2B. How do you grow a B2B company? The framework I use is simple and continuously changing, but here are some tactical things you can try. First off, target a smaller audience. Often, this means focusing on around 50,000 individuals that you're trying to reach. The first step is to gather the emails of those individuals. You can use various tools available; there are thousands out there. You can use LinkedIn if you prefer, but another option is Apollo.io, which I believe is around $99 a month and allows you to extract up to 10,000 emails. It's absolutely crazy.

You can do the filtering that you need for the industry. Once you have those emails, you've really identified your customers. Now it's about how to get in front of them in every place they spend time online, as well as in the physical space. I'm going to run through all the things I've seen work in the past, and people can pull out different strategies from this playbook that all contribute to the same idea: how to make this company famous within this category. So, take those emails. I would first import them into Google Ads.

I would import them into Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, or any of the platforms where people are spending time online. You create a customer match list, which will find matches based on the channel. For example, with Facebook Ads, you may find that around 30 to 40% of those emails get matched. So, while it's not the entire list you pulled, it's still a significant percentage. Then you can run ads targeted at those people. You can turn on the ads, and they'll run indefinitely in the background.

At this point, I would focus on UGC AI avatar ads. That involves addressing the pain points that the audience is experiencing. How do you do that? What tools do you use? Yes, yes, yes.

The tools that we're using right now are HeyGen. The quality is the best. I personally, as the founder, recommend creating a version of yourself that will appear in these ads because you can make yourself famous among your target audience. So, create a digital clone of yourself. HeyGen is the avatar platform.

Here’s the text reformatted with correct capitalization and spelling: --- "Write in English language. Use 11 Labs as the voice. That's just what we're seeing to be the best currently. Then create around a hundred different variations of this ad. Incorporate different hooks, settings, backgrounds, content, and patterns. Address various pain points that you're targeting. Run all those ads against each other." --- Let me know if you need anything else!

And then, based on what performs best—typically the lowest cost per click (CPC)—you will allocate all of your ad budget accordingly. For example, 80% of your budget goes to the best performers, while 20% is continuously running in the background for testing purposes. As soon as you find a better-performing variant, you incorporate it into the campaign that receives the 80% allocation. This follows a classic Alpha-Beta campaign structure, where you have a component that is always in testing, and the majority of your spending is directed toward the best performer.

What if you don't want to be famous? Yeah, I mean, that's fine, right? I think you can still run ads that are going to be effective without that. If you're a founder, though, and you raise money, that's the game you're playing, right? You just signed on for this, and if you're not about that, it's probably not the right game for you. Personally, this is my opinion, which means nothing.

Take it all with a grain of salt, but I think that is what it's coming down to. There are completely different ways to approach this. You move in silence, and everybody has their own strategy. However, if you want to raise more money and make your next round significantly easier, you need to work on making yourself famous.

It's all it comes down to. I mean, this is like a playbook that we ran when we were at Rupa. We're like, cool, we're going to grow the Instagram account of the CEO and also the company. Then we'll use that as a leverage point because all the people who were investing in health tech were literally inbounding, asking, "How are you doing this?"

And it's like, you know, behind the scenes, it's two degenerates running Instagram-only ads with a call to action to follow this account for more content like this. I mean, also if it's yourself as the founder doing the ads, you can say, "I'm the founder of XYZ," right? So there's a story there. People buy from people, not brands. One hundred percent.

So, there's a story there: people buy from people, not brands. 100%. If you want to get your first 100 customers or your first 1,000 customers, it's a great leverage point. It's just a lever you can pull down on. Instead of saying, "Hey, I'm an AI avatar. Let me tell you about my business," focus on building genuine connections.

Totally. The AI avatar is like the angle you have to come at it from, which is problem-solution orientation with a storytelling format. It focuses on the pain point that I was experiencing. Essentially, all you're doing is following the hero's journey cycle, right?

I had this problem, and then I discovered something. I went on this journey of discovery, and I ended up here now, feeling better. It’s interesting how we often tell the same story over and over again in different contexts. But that’s just the first layer of this. Build these ads and the same emails. After that, you’re going to cold email each one of them. So, you’re going to use a tool right now.

What we're seeing as successful is something like Mail Reef. Basically, what they do is spin up a server that's an AWS server specialized for cold email sending. You can send about 50,000 cold emails from one of these servers for about $400 a month right now. Smart Lead accounts or Instantly AI cost around $89. So, you can calculate whatever that is for 50,000 emails. What is Smart Lead?

Sure! Here’s the reformatted version: "Yeah, so Smart Lead is a cold email sending software. Basically, how it functions is that you can have multiple email accounts set up within Smart Lead. There are really three types of email."

In my opinion, everybody has different views on this. There's transactional email, which refers to emails sent from the product. Then, there’s email marketing or newsletter emails. For example, this could include product updates or news relevant to e-commerce, such as product sales or other related events.

And then the other form of email is a cold email. Cold emails are a bit different from the other two types. For transactional emails, I typically suggest sending from the core domain of the app. For newsletters, I would recommend sending from a separate domain. The reason for this is to create domain isolation, so that if one of the domains gets flagged for spam, it doesn't affect the others.

Yes, compromised, whatever, because if you're sending or being aggressive, you're not going to negatively affect the product if you need those transactional emails, for example, for password resets. I see this all the time with early-stage companies, where they send from the same domain. They end up sending cold emails from their core domain. It's a classic scenario. What ultimately happens is that they essentially ruin their core domain, and suddenly their transactional emails go to spam, leaving them unable to figure out how to resolve the issue.

So, what SmartMeLead does is allow you to have multiple inboxes from which you can send emails. MailReef is a server that manages those inboxes, and you can create them as needed. For example, you could set up an infrastructure where you buy 30 domains and then create five different inboxes for each of those domains. All of those inboxes would be sending from the same name.

So, for example, Cody Schneider. But it would be, you know, cody@x.com, cody@y.com, cody.schneider@y.com, and c.schneider@y.com— all these different variations. The whole list that you just scraped, you're going to use to cold email every one of them. It's super simple on the email side. You’re just going to talk about the problem-solution orientation, just like the ad that you did, in the exact same way. You’ll target that list with both cold emails and ads simultaneously. With the cold email piece, you’ll see that a percentage of them will respond back. More often than not, they will see these ads three months later and think, “Oh yeah, there's that company.” If they have this problem, they will go back to their email.

They're going to search in their email. They're going to use it as a search engine, click on that, and come back as a lead. So, I am of the opinion that I'm trying to land as many emails in an inbox as I can because, again, it creates more surface area. You can reach these same leads from different angles. The thing that frustrates me, especially with early-stage founders, is that they say, "Well, I don't want to burn this audience."

It's like, dude, they don't care. They don't care about you at all. Convincing someone to care about you is so hard; it's almost impossible. So, you can't really burn them unless you're doing spam, right?

Like, you're trying to provide value to them, right? And everybody's like, "Oh, that cold email doesn't work." It's absolute nonsense; it 100% works. I have to be honest, today we had a conversation with my executive team and partners, and the term "cold email" was mentioned. A lot of people think it doesn't work, and I believe that, but they're approaching it in a way that doesn't address the problem. The smaller you get in your audience... For example, I worked with this company that specializes in dock management for shipping yards. They have a super small set of controllers, but their messaging was so specific: "Here’s the problem that you face on a daily basis."

Document check-in. If we could automate this for you, would that be interesting? Surprisingly, only one out of five people responded positively. Can we talk to you?

Like that, it's just approaching it from the angle that actually provides value. There are now different spaces. What you guys do is likely much more competitive. We were talking, for example, about LCA, which is our design agency that only works with a dozen clients every year, and our target is the CEO of a Fortune 250 company.

So it's kind of like finding a way to get in front of the CEO of, let's say, Shopify. Maybe not through a cold email—I totally agree with that. But I've also seen inbound opportunities happen. If it addresses a genuine pain point or a real problem they're facing and it's top of mind, and this is like the hardest part, then it's possible. It's totally possible.

You can hear these stories all the time. But as a founder, there are only so many bets that you can place, right? A thousand percent. A thousand percent. But I think that if you want to play at this level, which is a higher level, it's like you're doing all of these things simultaneously and then figuring out, okay, how do I automate or delegate all of this so that somebody is focusing on it? And then, as soon as that is focused on, I move on to the next thing.

This is how I think you can actually grow companies on an exponential level. It's like you're layering growth curve after growth curve, right? You can grow really effectively if you're just using Facebook ads and cold emailing. But if I add to that, for the same email list, I'm going to create a podcast where I interview people from the industry about their business and the insights they have. Then, I'm going to send out a newsletter to those same people I'm reaching out to with cold emails.

Oh, what? And I can also go and clip that up into shorts that I can put on Instagram, that I can put on LinkedIn, and that I can put on all these other places where we're running ads. But I can do an organic version of that as well. I'm also going and following all those people on those accounts. I'm inviting them for connections. When you layer all these pieces, it's like how you can basically, again, take a company from being non-existent to 12 months later, they're at an industry conference, and people are coming up and saying, "I love your show, I love what you're doing with your company," and nobody has like five people on their team, right?

So, yeah, to take a step back: regarding the cold email piece, you’ve added that layer. Now, moving on to the next part, how do you create content that will be valuable to your industry and your audience? The answer is simple: just talk to your customers and record those conversations. If you're running your company correctly, you're already having these discussions with your customers.

You're receiving feedback from your audience and gaining insight into their pain points and problems. Take that information and create a more formal setting to record it. Then, transform it into a podcast that you distribute to your entire email list. For the email list you've compiled, utilize an email sending service to sequence your outreach. You can essentially do this with any service, but aim to import around 200 contacts each day. Set the subject line as "Podcast: [Episode Title]."

Hey [Name], the newest episode of the XYZ podcast is live! Here’s a one-paragraph summary along with five key takeaways. We've done this for countless companies. Which tools do you use?

So, MailerLite is one platform that we use. We also use Beehive. In the past, we've used SendGrid as well. They all function in a similar way. What we've found is that when the content is industry-specific to them, it provides value, and they consider it educational content, right?

And it's way more approachable than sending a cold email that feels very transactional. If I can do X for you, is that valuable? In contrast, it's like this top-of-funnel approach. What this allows you to do is build yourself into a media company, which creates a leverage point within the industry. At Rupa, this is something we implemented because we recognized that we were a small startup.

We wanted to go and negotiate with these huge lab companies, but they wouldn't even talk to us. So, we made a podcast, and it gained 180,000 downloads a month after six months. It was in the top 20 medical podcasts in the U.S. I don't even know where it is now, but I think it's in the top 100 for health, which is an impressive category.

Right? So at that point, they were reaching out to say, "Yo, can we come on the show?" And it's like, actually, we want to do a deal with you. We'll give you this media kit and placements if you do it at these price points. We negotiated down the percentages that we were going to have to pay them in fees because we had owned media, which we could use as a leverage point.

Unbelievable. So that's the first piece of it on this podcast. As you build this whole media arm out of the company, the other side of it is that you can go and monetize that same audience. This transforms it from a cost center into a profit center. We did the same thing while we were at Rupa.

We then took that information and approached companies in the health sector, selling ad placements for the podcast as well as within the newsletter. Athletic Greens is one of the companies we worked with, and it was subsidizing the entire growth team's costs. Essentially, it was allowing for a fast, 20% month-over-month growth compounding startup that is offsetting the costs of their growth through the media they are producing.

So you want to talk about, like, yeah, what is it? The negative CAC? This is literally the playbook for it. How much does that fire you up? I live for this, right? You see me?

I'm over here like, "Well, I see your main artery just exploding." I'm thinking, "Is this guy going to go into cardiac arrest right now?" Not yet. Not with these downers. No, I know.

I mean, to be honest, it fires me up too, right? Like the idea of getting something that almost feels too good to be true. It sounds too good to be true, but this works. It's like I've done this with multiple companies, across various industries and spaces. Again, the same tactics can be used to make a music artist famous, right?

That's crazy when you think about it like that. The fact that you can engage in certain activities and, just like that, make a person or a company famous is astonishing. It really makes you realize how flexible the world is and how much you can bend reality. There's a classic quote that I feel is going viral right now: you can just do stuff. You can just do stuff. I feel like everyone, especially in B2B, should be creating a media business.

100%. And it's not new. There's this company called Arrow Electronics. It has a six billion dollar market cap. Huge.

Nobody talks about it. They own basically every electronics blog, magazine, and anything you can imagine related to this. We sell electronic components. I don't even know what you're talking about right now. Exactly. We're talking about the tiny little cameras that go in.

I know. Whatever sensors. Exactly. It doesn't matter. Their whole strategy, how they became such a large company, is because they have this huge media arm functioning in the background.

Red Bull is actually a media company. You know who else is also a media company? Y Combinator. 1000%! Nobody talks about it. It's crazy to me that every VC doesn't have a podcast. It's a media company that sells venture capital.

Thousand percent. Thousand percent. That's why they're doubling down so much on YouTube. Have you seen this? A hundred percent.

They're going all in. Yeah, it's obvious. I mean, it's why they developed Light Cone and all of this, right? So it's going to be weekly discussions about AI.

All it is, is derivatives of what the founders are saying from the front lines. I think that's what's hilarious. They're just talking to their customers and founders, reiterating and regurgitating what they're hearing from the people who are actually doing this. I think they're doing a great job.

They're doing an unbelievable job. It's some of the best content on the internet right now. It actually feels like, oh, this is applicable and really insightful. So, um, yeah. Anyway.

So you built the podcast that's running, and you're growing it. Now, suddenly, you're like, "Oh, I have all this video podcast content. I can turn it into literally everything else that I need for my business." I can extract all of the pain points that my customers are talking about, and I can discuss them.

I can take that show and turn it into a transcript. I create blog posts from it and produce white papers. What software do you use to do that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we built a software that does this called Swell AI. That was the whole point behind it because I was doing this for companies, and we saw the progress that was happening with AI. We were like, "Oh, I used to need a team of five people to accomplish this. Now I can do this with one person who is skilled."

It's just a very over-the-top tool that can do this. You upload your content, and it creates clips, writes your show notes, and generates all the media assets you would need. You can then take those assets and schedule them out across all the platforms where your customers are spending time online, whether that's LinkedIn, Instagram, or any other platform. This allows you to grow your media accounts. Again, there are many tactical actions you can take to achieve this.

Greg actually has a great video on this topic regarding the opportunities on LinkedIn right now. Content is just blowing up. If you take the shorts we’re working on, like TikTok or Instagram Reels, and put them on LinkedIn, they will go viral. By the way, I have a great video on it based on the insights you gave me. I thought it was really insightful.

So that's a part of it. Other tactical things you can do on Instagram include running Instagram-only ads with a call to action in the caption to follow this account. For more content like this, follow @thisaccount—literally include the account name in the ad. When you implement that, from an advertising standpoint, it appears on Instagram targeting impressions, aiming for as much reach as possible. We have done this by primarily focusing on U.S.-based targeting.

If the content resonates with the person, a certain percentage of them will click the ad. They then go to the profile, and a certain percentage will follow the profile. This is how we grew the musician's Instagram entirely through that process. At one point, we were gaining followers for about 30 cents each. This allows us to work backward from the numbers; for example, if I want to hit 100,000 followers on Instagram, we need to spend a specific amount of money. This is exactly what we did at Rupa.

Same strategy. Grew that to 100,000. Why would you do that? What's the point of this? Why would I grow any of these other assets?

I'm getting free impressions on those platforms the larger the account is, right? And this is all changing with short-form social media. We'll probably talk about that in Constance and what's happening there. But the same idea applies. We're just trying to get something that we normally would have to pay for in advertising.

We're trying to get it for free. The closer your ad is to the content on the platform, the less you'll have to pay for it. That will be the overarching theme throughout all of this. Why do we try 100 different variations of the ad? We're experimenting with those variations to identify the piece of content that functions best as an ad.

It feels like content, but it still accomplishes the goal that we're trying to achieve, which is revenue in some form, or some leading indicator of revenue in the future. So, you build out all these channels, and suddenly, after 12 months have passed, let’s break down what you've accomplished. You now have a massive ad remarketing effort targeting everyone who has visited the website, as well as a top-of-funnel strategy for those people coming in.

You know they're your target customers. You now have everyone on your email list that you send out on a weekly basis because you're hosting the podcast. You're running ads on the podcast that promote the show. You're negotiating better deals because you have this media presence on the podcast. You also have all of these social channels posting daily across all platforms, consistently appearing in the lives of your customers day after day.

So, combine all those things together, and it's done. It's crazy how few companies do what you're talking about. I think it's just hard; it's just a lot of different things that are happening simultaneously. I left out cold emailing in there, and that part of it is actually critical. So, I'm going to bring that back up. The challenge is that there are just so many components that are involved.

Um, but in reality, it's like this isn't hard stuff; it's just grindy stuff. Right? And for most companies, they don't want it. They can't sit down and invest 12 months into this.

And this is a challenge. We offer podcasting as a service; that's one of our specialties. It looks like the first 90 days are going well. You just need to trust the process, man.

But then suddenly it’s like, "Oh, we’re at 15,000 subscribers on our email list." I’m feeling a little something there, right? We’re with the company that we did some work for; we’ve been collaborating with them for the last 18 months. They now have a list of 130,000 subscribers.

Every send that we do is a list of 130,000, okay? Every send drives 10,000 clicks to their website. We do two sends a week, so in a month, we drive 40,000 clicks. Sorry, is that right? Yeah.

No, we drive 80,000 clicks to their website from an email newsletter. That costs us $450. And how much is a click worth to them, right? A click for them, since they are in the life sciences category, costs $5 per click on LinkedIn to reach the same audience.

So, 80,000 clicks. I mean, we'll just round it up to 100,000, right? So you're paying $500,000 in clicks. What do you traditionally pay? You're paying $450 for that.

It's a cent a click, which is basically what it's translating into. That's after 18 months of running this. Are you kidding me? Why would you be doing anything else? This is the game.

This is the opportunity. And this is all evolving, right? All these tactical things. But all you have to do to be a part of this is to be a practitioner. Just do the work.

And you're going to find these arbitrages. Also, all these people who are in this game share their insights if they're actually good at it. I have friends who sometimes call me out of the blue, saying, "Cool, we cracked Twitter ads. Here's what we're doing." I'll ask, "What have you seen?" I have multiple friends doing this because there are so few people engaged in this field. One of my friends is currently growth-hacking a blog for a startup in a traditional category, like one of the top ten software categories. Think of companies like Adobe, Microsoft, or any of these old, established software companies. There's nobody he knows who is doing this, and I don't know anyone else doing similar things either.

But they just took their traffic from, like, we helped on the design of what their whole tactical strategy would be, from their content strategy to this. But they increased their traffic from 1,000 clicks a month to 250,000 clicks a month in under six months. I mean, the opportunities change, but a lot of the same tricks are still applicable, right? It's a lot of the same fundamentals that are being applied there. And, like, we didn't even discuss the media aspects.

We didn't even talk about the organic strategies you can employ, like all the social media tactics you can use on YouTube. You can layer all of these elements together, but when you have this long-form source material, your podcast is likely the biggest driver of your inbound leads, right? Is it primarily from a trust standpoint? The only reason I mention this is that if I have someone sit down with me for an hour a week and listen to me talk for an hour over the course of two months...

They just spent eight hours with me asynchronously. Right before we recorded this, we were discussing some wins from the podcast in terms of revenue perspective because we don't sell ads on the podcast. We received a lead from a Fortune 500 company that listened to the podcast. They wanted to work with LCA, and we sent them a $2.2 million proposal. They said yes.

No questions. No questions. Why is it so cheap? Literally. We did incredible work for them, and the team is amazing. They were happy with everything.

I'm not saying the product isn't critical, right? Yeah. But a bad product can win all the time because it has better marketing. So if you have a good product and good marketing on top of it, there's no way you're not going to win. Yeah, and I think it's also like when you... I'm not saying we own this category, but I am saying that when people who listen to this show think, "I need to build my ideas," who do they think about?

They're like, "Oh yeah, Greg from the Startup Ideas Podcast." You own that mental real estate, and there's no way that they're going to ever forget you. It's going to be so hard for someone to remove you from that part of their mind, right? Like, name three chapstick brands for me. To be honest, I've never put on chapstick in my life. Okay, so most people, they only give like two spaces in their mind for a brand category, right? Like, a lot of the time, it's two to three brands that they're going to remember. Chapman is one of them. Dude, have you seen these lips? They couldn't be more moist! I'm not saying kiss me or anything, but you know...

So you're fighting over that space, right? That's why people question why HubSpot invested in creating a new category in inbound marketing. Why did they call it inbound marketing? It's because no one else will ever be able to dislodge them from this concept. They created new mental real estate in people's minds.

But people are like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm going to do that." It costs so much money to do that. It is so hard. What's much easier is finance. An idea that people already have, something common—you attach yourself to it, cannibalize it, and make it evolve into a new thing. You can always morph it into something else, but it's very hard to create new space in someone's mind.

So this is the B2B playbook. It's the B2B. Now we've got to talk about the B2C playbook. Yeah, it's B2C. But before we do that, I've got to pee.

I've so B to C. But before we do that, I've got to pee. I have to pee, too. I'm going to drink. You're like, "I have to pee, too." I've wet myself. Alright, go for it. So, consumer... yeah, the consumer is a different animal. First of all, don't go into consumer. First of all, don't do it. I say this, and we know people who are killing it right now in consumer. Did you tweet something about that? Like, you're like, "Yeah, dude, I had this tweet forever ago. It's a running tweet." What is it again? Did you tweet something about that?

"Like, you're like, 'Yeah, dude, I had this tweet forever ago.' It's a running tweet. What is it again? Pro tip: don't do D to C. No, I mean, you have to be unbelievable at marketing to win in consumer. It's just so much more competitive, and the biology and mechanics of it function differently. But if you win at consumer, there's nothing better. A hundred percent. I mean, I think everybody wants it, too."

Like, I've got this part of me that's like, it's like an ego trip, you know? Until you've done it and had some success in it, are you even, you know, a pro? I mean, are you playing, like, professional ball? Yeah.

It's like the boss level. Yeah, a hundred percent. But anyway, consumer behavior is a different animal. The biggest thing is that right now I feel like the game has entirely changed.

Um, what we're seeing to be successful is some crossover. The first thing to do is to have a huge TAM, right? Total Addressable Market. That's essential because you need to create content that is broad enough so that a large subset of the population can be targeted through it. For example, we're developing an app in the women's health space.

They're like one in three women have this problem. So, we can target all women, and 30% of them have that issue. What we're seeing right now is that we're getting eBook downloads at around 40 cents each.

It's crazy. We can work our way back into this whole thing, and then we upsell into this product. You can use AI to create an e-book—100%.

You can write these. But the challenge is again finding these seams that are able to be pursued because it's so competitive and saturated. Well, I mean, you can use AI to write it, and then you can use something like Gamma to publish it. Totally.

Yeah, totally. Yep. So first, I think the most important thing is to build an application that people actually want. It should target a large enough audience.

I think there is an opportunity right now. I mean, we're seeing this play out with many consumer apps. AI has changed the fabric of what we can do with these applications. These apps often focus on a single function, and if they execute that function well, that’s how people decide to purchase them. A tactical approach you can take is to charge $7.99 a month or $70.99 a week, which translates to about $29 a month. People will buy this as an impulse purchase.

It turns into three months of revenue for you. So if you can come in and even get them at a $10 CAC, then what that does is you get a 10x payout over the lifetime of that customer. But we'll get to that in a second. To talk through the actual marketing process, the first thing that I would do is focus on Facebook Ads and TikTok Ads; those are probably the two places where you're going to see a conversion event on the signup.

It will be a deep link for the actual app install and then some action that is taken within the application. Typically, it's a signup action or a paid action. When I say "action," I mean the user literally performing that task. So, you run those ads with all these different variations.

You're going to test those against each other, and what is most effective—what people are increasingly doing—is creating various versions of ads with influencers. For example, you can hire five or ten UGC (User-Generated Content) creators. You can find creators who will produce one post a day for about a thousand dollars a month. They will create one video a day and cross-post it across all their accounts.

So what they're going to do is basically turn this into a test bed for you, showcasing the types of content that are most likely to go viral on that platform related to the product. A lot of the time, it's about establishing a hook and then addressing some type of pain point, with the product serving as the hero within that narrative. Again, when I refer to an ad, what we're trying to achieve is to find an ad that doesn’t feel like an ad; it should feel like content that is providing greater value.

It's like entertaining people. That intersection of entertainment is actually how you sell to people, in my mind. You're running these ads, and you're also focusing on the UGC side of things. Another strategy that people are excelling at right now is creating ten different TikTok accounts to produce variations of the best-performing UGC content that the creators made for you.

You take those, remix them with AI, and use ChatGPT to change the scripts. Hey, Jen, create the videos. You can use ElevenLabs for the audio and then chop them up into basically shorts, right? You can use CapCut to remove the green screen backgrounds of the AI avatar and put whatever the app is behind it. They're now talking over this, and you've essentially created your first touchpoint for the product.

So, a lot of the time when people see these, what they'll do is go and Google the thing, right? So, critically, pick a name that nobody else has. It's a huge part of this process, as it prevents you from competing on the front page of Google with other companies that have similar names. When they visit that website, you'll want to pixel them. To "pixel" means that you can install the Facebook Pixel, the LinkedIn Pixel, or any of these other applications.

It's again because the consumers are probably going to be Facebook, TikTok, and maybe Google. Those are the only three places where they are likely to spend time online. When they visit the website and get pixeled, it allows you to run ads to them indefinitely anytime they are on those platforms in the future. Again, you're just building this kind of funnel, in a way, right?

I think that it's about the concept of it growing through the funnel. Yeah, exactly. But I believe that a funnel feels like this finite thing. The more people that visit the site, the bigger that audience becomes. This, in turn, creates a larger mass that has more influence.

The larger the audience is, the more likely it is that I can create a customer match list for that same audience that is engaging with the website, installing the application, and actually putting the product on their phone. On that website, there should be a way for users to sign up or install the application. Often, people will provide their email addresses as well, allowing you to implement an email nurture strategy. Layering on that email nurture will help upsell them into the product. These are some of the internal strategies you can employ. Next, we see influencer outreach being utilized at scale, focusing on how to create some type of affiliate program.

It's a classic playbook that I've seen other companies use, especially for prosumer applications. You can go and scrape all of the YouTube search keywords that are within your category. You can find all the channels and all the creators specific to that category. Then, you can scrape all of their emails from YouTube.

What? Yes. In their bio, they have email addresses that you can scrape. Then you can proceed to send cold emails, as we discussed.

Actually, I said, "What?" But then I realized, "Damn, I think we have an email on our YouTube." It's a contact email, right? To reach out. Yeah.

So, you can use that to go and scrape them all. Then you can do cold outreach to them and ask them what their pricing is. They're going to come back and say, "Hey, my pricing is X." A percentage of them will respond—maybe around 10 to 20 percent—saying, "My pricing is X." What you’ll do is start to look at the average views versus the cost that they suggest. From there, you're going to be able to build a table where you can identify discrepancies in the market pricing. It's a market that is not liquid; it's imperfect. This imperfection allows you to find opportunities for arbitrage.

When you identify that arbitrage opportunity, you should collaborate with those creators. Typically, the structure of the deals that we see being successful involves purchasing a package of three videos from them. Often, a single video does not make sense from an impact standpoint. We have found that three is the sweet spot, as their audience begins to trust you enough after hearing about it multiple times. Additionally, you can establish an affiliate commission with them.

So it's like 30%. You're paying them on a per-video basis. I'm going to buy a three-pack of videos for $1,500. Additionally, I'm going to give you an affiliate commission on whatever you bring in the door for us through a recurring commission payout. What that does is create stickiness.

Cause, naturally, when they talk about this, what you're going to see is competitors will clone the product. Then it turns into this whole game. If they have, you know, on a monthly basis, $45,000 or whatever that ends up being, I've seen this with some friends' companies where these creators they partner with are making so much money that if a competitor comes in, they almost have to buy them out of that contract in a way. So it creates this moat around the media and the relationship that you have with this creator. You can also apply that same strategy.

You can go to Instagram as an example. You can use a tool like igleads.io. You can scrape users who are in specific hashtags or categories or who have specific keywords in their titles. You can collect the emails from those accounts and perform the same bulk outreach. The same process applies to TikTok and other platforms as well.

And so that is kind of the core fundamentals of the flywheel. Just as a data point, by the way, I had the founders of, in two separate pods, Calai and RizGPT, come and do an interview. I asked them how much they pay per CPM — like, what is successful for them? So they basically acquire... I mean, they're doing like a million dollars a month in MRR, I think, and they pay $5 CPM.

Like that's their number—100%. And just for context, the average CPM on TikTok is about $10 if you're buying through. This is the arbitrage that exists here. Why would you even go and mess around with all of these creators?

Like, why would you even go and muck around with all of these creators? Why would you go through that process? Because you're essentially paying a 50% discount for that CPM. That's all this game is. It's about how to get as many eyeballs on this thing for as cheap as possible.

I think then the other strategy, depending on the category that you're in, is to explore programmatic SEO for the product. If I were them, I would be constantly looking at diet plans, nutrition plans, how to lose weight, and calorie counts. There are thousands, even hundreds of thousands of these keywords. The strategy here is that as you add content, the app starts to gain domain authority. Domain authority is essentially the trust that a website has on the internet. Google measures this based on the backlinks from other trusted websites pointing to your site.

What is a backlink? It's literally when you click a link on one website and end up on another website; that is a backlink. There are different types of backlinks. The two core ones are "nofollow" and "dofollow." Dofollow links are what you typically want, especially social links.

Do-follow links are more valuable. No-follow links can have some utility, but we won't get into that. As the site starts to gain more traction, it will naturally begin to build backlinks. Once you reach a domain authority of around 40 or higher, you can often start ranking for many long-tail keywords that have lower keyword difficulty, meaning they are less competitive. The process is super straightforward.

Go scrape what's ranking on page one for that target keyword that is related to your product. Then, take all the content that is ranking on page one, scrape it, and put it into a context window. Create a blog post outline for the target keyword based on that context. Use one of these AI tools to essentially write that blog post. What we do is have it write an outline first, and then we write it section by section. We find that to provide the best quality and readability. Additionally, if you do what I just described along with all those AI humanizers, it's going to pass every single one.

Those are all nonsense. It's so funny to me. Anyway, sorry, not the humanizers—the AI, yeah, the checkers or whatever. The humanizers kind of make sense. So, what we do is go and publish, for example, 10,000 articles using this process.

Humans don't touch them in the beginning. If you're being very aggressive and using this growth hack approach, and if you're comfortable with risk, this is the way to do it. If you don't have a human, go in and make edits on top of this before they go live on the site. But you should publish 10,000 of them.

Um, the strategy basically is to go, uh, once the page gets traffic. As soon as you get, you know, one session, a human comes in and makes the edits. We have an SEO specialist, for example, or a content writing specialist on staff. Their whole job is to rewrite anything that has been seen by humans. So, there are two factors in getting content to rank. In my experience, it’s about what Google wants to rank.

And then, is a human actually reading this and consuming this content? You have to find the intersection between the two. When you find that intersection, that's when you can maintain a presence on page one. So, on that page, for example, when they search for topics like "how to lose weight" or various long-tail variations, we want to ensure they land on that page.

You then have calls to action after the first paragraph that encourage users to sign up for the app for free. In every frame, you should include at least one callout that is visible in each section of the scroll, whether on mobile or desktop. Additionally, consider implementing a pop-up that appears with the same call to action; this pop-up should take over the entire screen and activate at around 25% to 50% scroll depth. As users scroll down the page, this pop-up will capture their attention and prompt them to sign up. Moreover, when they interact with your website, you will be able to pixel all of them.

So, you've already gathered that they have an interest in this topic. They enter your remarketing funnel, and that's how you can layer that on. Yes, those are the types of strategies that I'm seeing as effective right now. Just for Cal AI, there is a great episode that literally breaks down exactly what they're doing on the organic social side. I have a friend who is building an app that serves as a sober tracking tool.

One of the most insane growth trajectories I've ever seen in the consumer space. It's like they built in an AI. The app is called Sunflower Sober. They integrated an AI that acts like a sponsor, and the engagement with it is unbelievable—it's crazy. Their entire acquisition strategy is through Facebook at a price that actually makes sense, right?

And not just Facebook. I think they're running ads basically everywhere. It's funny. Everybody's obsessed with short-form social right now. There's still so much opportunity in these traditional ad channels for these.

It's just figuring out what that new thing is that people are looking for. Anyway, yeah. Dude, this is gold. You're an angel. Thank you, as always.

Thank you! You deserve all the thanks as always. This is going to change some lives, so thank you. I hope this lays it out clearly for people. If they have questions, let me know. Reach out; I'm happy to help however I can.

Cody Schneider? Yeah, that's it. Alright, we'll throw that in the show notes. Cool. I appreciate it.

I'll see you in a bit. Hell yeah!