January 16, 2024 • 29 mins
EPISODE SUMMARY
In the fast-paced world of SaaS, staying ahead of the curve is crucial for growth. This episode of "Scale Your SaaS" does a deep dive into leveraging AI for content creation with host and B2B SaaS Sales Coach Matt Wolach and Swell AI and Drafthorse AI co-founder Cody Schneider. This discussion will give you insights on revolutionizing content creation, propelling business growth, and navigating the ever-evolving landscape of SaaS.
PODCAST-AT-A-GLANCE
Podcast: Scale Your SaaS with Matt Wolach
Episode: Episode No. 299, “How AI Can Automate Your Content Creation - with Cody Schneider”
Guest: Cody Schneider, Co-Founder at Swell AI & Drafthorse AI
Host: Matt Wolach, a B2B SaaS Sales Coach, Entrepreneur, and Investor
TOP TIPS FROM THIS EPISODE
- Strategize for Rapid Growth
- Balance Multiple Ventures
- Leverage AI in Content Creation
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
- The AI Revolution in Content Creation
- The Genesis of AI-Powered Content Creation
TOP QUOTES
Cody Schneider
[13:07] "The intersection of technology and creativity is where the magic happens – AI is proving to be a catalyst for this convergence."
[16:38] "Founder-led growth is crucial, especially in the early stages. Your passion and belief in the product are infectious."
[13:56] “My focus in the beginning stages is figuring out all the puzzles, once I figured those out, like how do I automate as much of that as possible, or delegate as much as that as possible?
Matt Wolach
[18:11] "The challenges we face today are the stepping stones to the advancements of tomorrow."
[22:01] "SaaS enthusiasts and entrepreneurs should keep a close eye on the evolving landscape of AI – it's a game-changer."
LEARN MORE
To learn more about Swell AI, visit: https://www.swellai.com/
You can also find Cody Schneider on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/codyxschneider/
For more about how Matt Wolach helps software companies achieve maximum growth, visit https://mattwolach.com.
Get even more tips by following Matt elsewhere:
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Matt Wolach (00:03):
Hello, and welcome to Scale Your SaaS. Really glad
that you made it. Thank you forshowing up. By the way, if this
is your first time here, ourgoal is to help you generate a
whole ton of leads, close thoseleads, grow your business and do
exactly what the show says ScaleYour SaaS. If you're wanting to
do that, hit the subscribebutton right now that way, you
will not miss any of the amazingguests and information we give
(00:24):
you so you can do what you gotto do. And today, I'm super
excited to be joined by myspecial guest Cody Schneider.
Cody. How you doing?
Cody Schneider (00:32):
Good, man.
Thanks for having me on, man.
Super excited to be here.
Matt Wolach (00:35):
Absolutely. I'm excited to have you here as
well. And I want to make sureeverybody knows who you are. So
Cody, he's the co founder atSwell AI as well as Drafthorse
AI two cool things going on. Bythe way, Swell AI, they help
podcasters and YouTubers converttheir podcasts and videos and
articles. You can upload yourrecordings and swell AI writes
detailed content mimicking yourunique voice, I can tell you,
(00:57):
that is a very cool thing andvery needed. And Cody, he's
really awesome. He's anentrepreneur who's established
multiple successful SaaSventures. And he really
exemplifies productive scaling.
And you're going to hear aboutsome of the cool things. He's
done. One of those, of courseDrafthorse, which that's an AI
SEO engine that helps you growyour organic traffic, you can
upload a list of target keywordsand get articles written in
(01:19):
minutes. It's really, reallyneat what they're doing right
there. And so I can't wait todive into both of these. But
Cody, thanks for coming on theshow.
Cody Schneider (01:27):
Yeah, thanks.
Yeah. Again, Matt. Thanks forhaving me. Super excited.
Matt Wolach (01:32):
So tell me what's been going on with you lately?
And what's coming up?
Cody Schneider (01:34):
Yeah, I mean, I mean, we honestly just been
focused, really heads down onthis content engine powered by
AI idea. We're of the opinionthat like, we're on the
precipice of this really kind ofrevolutionary moment, especially
for early stage companies, whereit's like, Hey, I have one
marketing person, how do I, youknow, be everywhere. And so what
(01:55):
we've seen is that AI is thisvehicle for that. And so the
tools that we've been creatingis really to kind of augment
those teams. My background wasin like early stage startups, I
was out in the valley did thatwhole thing. And what we found
is that, you know, content islike one of the best ways to
zero to one a brand, when nobodyknows you exist. You just like
just raised around. It's like,how do I make my entire audience
(02:19):
know who I am? And honestly,podcasting was the initial
vehicle that we did for it. Thenwe did webinars, all that, but
we can get into those pieces. Soyeah, that's kind of the high
level.
Matt Wolach (02:28):
Very cool. So tell me, how did this all come to be?
How did you get into AI andcontent and creating all these
these products that you've comeup with?
Cody Schneider (02:36):
Yeah, yeah. So it initially started what we
were doing, I think everybodywas experimenting with it in
some way. But in in July of2022, it's like this moment
happened with the all thebasically we everybody was
experimenting with GPT three,and it got good enough where
like, as a marketer, or asalesperson, I was like, Oh,
this is like actually usable. Ithad this kind of tipping point
(02:57):
that occurred. And so at thetime, I was doing consulting for
this company, they were like aninsurance tech software, it was
basically like a CRM forinsurance agents. And for them,
like we spun up this podcast asa vehicle to basically again,
like zero to one their brand. Sowe scraped all their target
customers, you know, their ICPemails, we then sequence them
(03:17):
into a newsletter. And thenevery week, we would just like
email them the podcast, right?
And they'd have guests on thattalk about their business. Now
they structured it, and yadayada is a lot of them are kind
of, you know, solo insuranceagents. Some of them are
crushing it, whatever they weredoing, like, you know, three
quarters of a million a year,like, it's not like, you know,
it's smaller, you're larger,smaller businesses, or larger
small businesses, I guess Iwould say, Yeah, so for them,
(03:38):
though, it's like, you know,basically did this podcast
thing. And over a year, we foundthat we could just took, we've
made the founders like kind offamous where it's like, they
would go to conferences, and nowthese people know who they are,
right? Because they like gotrandomly sequenced into this
newsletter. And so podcasting isgreat to create, like long form
(03:58):
source media, that it can chopup and repurpose into all these
different forms. Thatrepurposing process is like the
hardest part. And it's the mosttime consuming and like when I
was at a previous company, likeI had a team of 10 to 15 people
that we're constantly working onthis, like, we're doing
webinars, we're doing podcasts,and then they would turn that
into blog posts and tweets andLinkedIn posts, etc, for all the
(04:20):
channels that we're trying to dodistribution through. And so the
AI piece was like, Oh, this is aperfect vehicle for that we can
take these transcripts, we cantake these videos and basically
turn them into all this media inwhat used to take us, you know,
50 hours of time, we can do itin three hours, right. And so
that was kind of the inceptionof it, it's now evolved into
like a way larger thing, but thefirst version of it was actually
(04:41):
a Google Drive folder that Ishared with some friends, they
uploaded mp3 files, we wouldlike download it locally, run it
on our machines and send it backand that's how we got our first
10 customers that there werelike, hey, this idea is
validated. Let's ship this and,you know, it's kind of evolved
into the kind of web applique Itis now. So
Matt Wolach (05:01):
I love that story.
And actually, that storyillustrates something that I
teach my clients is, hey, in theearly days, you might have to do
things that don't scale. Like,obviously at scale, that process
wouldn't work. But in the earlydays to figure out, does this
work to verify if it's somethingthat can be valuable for
somebody? That's what you do.
And so it might have felttedious at first, but you
(05:23):
figured out that this issomething that people like, and
it works, right.
Cody Schneider (05:26):
100% Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the times
too, it's like, due to, I see somany companies that are they're
trying to do too many thingssimultaneously. And in reality,
they need to do like one or twothings like most companies can
get to a million ARR with justlike to at distribution
activities. So whether that'slike cold email, and pairing
that with like, Facebook ads, sothat same audience, like I've
(05:46):
seen that work, I've seen itwhere it's like, okay, I'm just
gonna only do b2b influencermarketing, and then Pair that
with like, cold DMS. Like, a lotof the times, it's like focusing
on those transactional things.
And pairing two of those thingstogether, that I see make a lot
of impact for these early stagecompanies, rather than focusing
on a long term investment, likeso many people do SEO and all
the shit, it's like, no, like,you need to get to a million
(06:08):
arr. So you become sustainable,until you're at that point, like
you don't think about long terminvestments into like
distribution, or marketing orany of that. Like, it's like,
what are these transactionalactivities like selling like,
you know, cold calling, etc,that I can do with that makes an
immediate impact on my revenuetomorrow, rather than you know,
something that's going to takeeffect six to 12 months from
now.
Matt Wolach (06:31):
I love that I love that the focus is purely on we
just got to get to a millionARR. And that's something that's
really important. It's somethingthat I've constantly kind of
told my clients, this is acheckpoint, the companies who
get there, they have so muchmore likelihood of actually
being successful and making itbecause once you've reached
that, you've shown that you knowwhat you're doing, you've
reached product market fit, youunderstand how to get in front
(06:52):
of people how to close them. AndI think it's super critical. And
one of the the first checkpointsin fact, the first checkpoint is
for me 10k MRR that shows thatyou've had some initial early
success. And you were able to dothat to get to 10k MRR in one
month with Drafthorse. That'ssuper impressive. Can you share
some of the simple strategiesand tactics and what you did
(07:13):
leveraging personal branding andsome of the content stuff to
create that trust? And virality?
How did you guys get to $10 KMRR so quick?
Cody Schneider (07:20):
That's a great question. So honestly, I it was
total just viral moment I if Itried to recreate it, it was
like right time, right placewith kind of the right
resources. But the kind of thecompounding things that happened
at the moment. So we built aninternal tool to basically do
programmatic SEO for swell. Andthen I was talking about it in
public on Twitter. And I hadbeen growing this Twitter
(07:43):
account, just because I realizedthat it was like a great vehicle
to do cold outreach with, like,the more followers you have on
these social channels, the morereceptive people are to getting
pitched your thing. And so to meanyways, yeah, it was growing
that, honestly. And we wrotesome software that basically
like, helps with the tweetwriting process, I was
publishing like, 10 tweets aday, and it was honestly, you
(08:05):
know, I don't know if you cancuss on this, but just
shitposting right. And so,anyway, the so we people were
talking about in public, peoplewere asking about the tool. So
we spun it out into a separateproduct, we basically just like
clone the code base that we hadfor swell and put draft horse up
(08:25):
in it. And then I did a tutorialthat was like, I'm gonna write
1000 articles that are SEOoptimized off of these target
keywords that are related to mybrand in the next 60 seconds.
Like, click the button, and thenit writes those articles, and
then, you know, click one morebutton and publish them to the
WordPress site, right. And theywere now live and in public. And
so anyways, that went viral. Andthen we just rode that wave. I
(08:47):
mean, the servers were on firefor the next 30 days, it was
just like pure madness. Like, wewere definitely under staffed.
And we're a small team, likewe're early stage and self
funded. And so, for us, we'rejust like, you know, trying to
juggle 1000 things just like allfounders are. Yeah, so and then
really just double down on thosetypes of things. Like everybody
(09:09):
is looking for the solutionsright now that speed up the
processes of like contentproduction, right? So it's like
I have these inputs, I'mdesiring these outputs, like
what are these ways that I canuse AI to kind of abstract away
all of that time consuming piecethat later and that's really
what we've been showing, likejust publicly in demos. And so
it's that combination of and Ithink people you know, this is a
(09:33):
learning, you know, across allthe platforms, like every
platform has content thatthey're most receptive to, but
it's figuring out how do I likefind that cross section between
what's most likely to get reachwhile simultaneously like how do
I also create inbound for mycompany, right? Yeah, we got it
to 10k MRR in the first 30 days.
And then just yet been growingit since then, and building out
(09:54):
kind of these other flywheelpieces. So we found YouTube TV
great vehicle for that company.
And so we're doubling down onthat. And we've been running a
lot of off YouTube paid trafficto the YouTube channel. And what
that does is it basically likewe've been buying like Twitter
traffic for like, super cheap,right? I actually don't even
(10:15):
want to say this in Public. It'sso insane. But like, you know,
I'm talking like point 0001 centlink clicks, sends them to the
YouTube channel they want like,that turns into the views that
turns into subscribers. But whatit does is it creates virality
that happen on the YouTubechannel itself. So this life,
basically, it's just a tutorialof your, your software that's
(10:35):
going viral, like showing peoplehow to use it, which again,
creates inbound. And so that'ssomething that we found to be
like a kind of an incrediblekind of arbitrage. And so we're
we're capitalizing on it at themoment. But yeah, happy to dive
deeper on any of that as well. Iknow, that was like a ton of
random information. So
Matt Wolach (10:52):
no, I think that's amazing information. And you did
mention that you were fortunatethat this buzz happened. But I
would disagree, I actually thinkyou did a lot of work to create
that brand to, to build that,that channel on twitter to
create that kind of public trustto kind of build your community.
And so that when you did havesomething, you had a community,
you had a group of people whoalready trusted you believed in
(11:14):
you. And were willing to jump inand be a part of this thing,
especially since you told thestory. So well. I think I think
people saw that realize it wasan issue realize it was
something that they had achallenge with, and they could
get benefit from. So I thinkthat you did everything right.
Yes. Sometimes you just needthat magic for it to hit. Right.
But I think you did so much.
Well, though that I don't thinkit was super fortunate. I think
(11:34):
you follow the right process.
Cody Schneider (11:37):
No, I think it's part of it. And like, for every
founder that's listening to thisthis is such an opportunity
right now is just like buildinglike founder led growth is this
massive lever that anybody canpull. I'm seeing this happen
more and more where it's like,they hire a ghostwriter. That
ghost writer interviews them,like once a week, it's 30
minutes, they sit down 30minutes to an hour, they take
(11:58):
that recording, and then theghost writer basically like
builds out okay, here's thistone, style and voice guy that
we can give the AI now we go andwrite all this content for this
founder. And then this founderlooks like they're everywhere.
And just like fluorophoreproliferating all of this, like
their ideas and content andreally almost the like, you
know, ride along entrepreneurjourney that's becoming this
(12:19):
like very powerful mechanism togrow these companies. But that's
actually, we have a client thatuses swell. And that's what they
do is they basically likeinterview these founders. It's
honestly an insane company, I'mstill shocked that like, there's
not more than it's like a solofounder. They're charging 5k a
month, I think he has like 30ish clients now at this point.
So it's like 150 MRR right? It'sa service business, obviously.
(12:42):
But what he, it's literally thatlike, have these conversations,
like crank out all this contentat scale, I think he has like a
couple of yeas that help them.
And that's, that's, you know,literally it, but it's in there.
That's this way that you canzero to one these products
overnight, right. And that's thedream. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna
repeat, you know, I'm gonna, I'mgonna start as many companies as
I can over and over again, like,that's my favorite part is like
(13:03):
the beginning stages, figuringout all the puzzles, like once
we define the operations at thatpoint, like, let it exist, and
it can kind of run itself. Butwhat you know, how you do this
over and over is you have thatowned media channels, right? You
have that own distribution,where and the best that I've
seen so far that are the twothat can't be taken away from
(13:23):
you are podcasts andnewsletters, you always own
those vehicles. And then thekind of next piece of those is
then okay, I grow these socialchannels, whether that's like
LinkedIn profiles, like personalLinkedIn profiles, or Twitter
accounts, etc. So
Matt Wolach (13:41):
yeah, it's great stuff. You mentioned, you're
running a few differentcompanies, you love that early
stage, how do you balance yourtime? How do you balance your
focus between them? Because Ialso have multiple companies?
And I find it tough. I'm reallyfocused on this thing. And like,
oh, yeah, I gotta do that. Andhow do you keep it all straight?
Yeah.
Cody Schneider (13:57):
I mean, I think it's the hardest part. Right
now. It feels like we're justlike fires, I need to hire like
two more people, for swell inparticular. But the I think the
biggest thing that I like Ifocus on is like, what's the
most impactful thing that I cando at this moment to like, move
revenue that move that number,then whatever that is, like that
(14:17):
is that is what I do. Right? Andthen the other kind of filter
that I employs, like, again, myfocus is on the puzzles, like,
but once I figured those out,like how do I automate as much
of that as possible, or delegateas much as that as possible? And
then whatever can't be automatedor delegated, like, that is what
I I'm there to manage. But theit's the kind of the age old
(14:40):
challenge, whether you're fundedor not funded, like it's like
where, you know, what do I I'velimited resources, I have time,
money and mental energy. Like Ihave to think about that
combination of things every dayand I think for every founder,
it's figuring out and thatmental energy one is one that
you know, we don't think about alot. It I think it's actually
(15:01):
the most important is like thatcontext switching between all of
this is the hardest part. But wetry to make like for us, what we
do is like making it selfservice possible. So the lower
tier can basically jump into theproduct and start using it, that
also creates a great opportunityfor you to do like affiliate
marketing and build out anaffiliate audience in network.
The other pieces then like for,you know, all the enterprise
(15:23):
sales, like, that's where it'slike, my head is focused on
because it's like, you know, ifyou're talking to a larger
organization, like they're gonnaneed at least four to six months
for some of these deals, if notmore, especially when it's like,
you know, they're bringing thelawyers in, you got an MSA, etc.
You're just, it's just a longertime, peace thing, right. So
(15:43):
it's like, automate as much ofthat lower interior as possible
and try to make it so that itcan be a self service, it can, I
think it's like a big learningthing that it's over the last 12
months has been kind of criticalfor us. So I
Matt Wolach (15:54):
love that I love the way you put that I hope
everybody grab that because yousaid you'd like to figure out
the puzzles, and then figure outhow to either automate or
delegate it and then solve therest. And I think that's so
critical. That's a great way toscale a great way to, to
continue to keep yourselffocused on on kind of those
higher tasks, those, those thosemore tasks that you need that
that thinking and your energyand your experience to be able
(16:16):
to solve and let eitherautomation or delegation take
care of the rest. And I thinkthat that's, that's super smart.
I love that. I want tounderstand, though, if, you
know, for a layman like me thatdoesn't know AI very well. Why
use something like swell ordraft horse as opposed to go
into chatGPT or Bard what's thedifference?
Cody Schneider (16:36):
Yeah. So with Swell in particular, like we're
focused on content repurposing.
So you could do the exact samething and catch up. Like, say, I
wanted to make a podcast shownotes. The biggest difference
that we've kind of created isthe ability to create, we call
them prompt chains or templates.
So like, just how you have achat within chatGPT. Like we can
(16:57):
save that as like, here's thesequence of events that have
prompts and responses that canbe chained together, that's
saved as a template, so thatevery time that you practice for
providing some raw sourcematerial, ie the podcast, it
just automatically generatesthat output. So if you're, you
know, a marketer, and you'relike, Okay, I'm interviewing two
people a week or whatever, forthis podcast, to grow my agency,
(17:19):
etc, I can build out thesetemplates that just
automatically, like write afirst person blog posts in this
tone, style and voice and makesure that it's like, hits these
key points you want to call toaction name, be included in the
first paragraph, oh, also writeme 30 tweets, also write me five
LinkedIn posts, also, you know,whatever, whatever those content
outputs that you're looking for.
Our big thing is focusing onbuilding kind of dislike
(17:41):
pipeline from all of that. Soit's, um, the analogy I always
use is like, we want to takethose raw materials that like,
think about it as like oil. AndI want to turn it into plastics
and gasoline and diesel, likewhatever we can basically
produce those templates or allof those different versions of
what that raw material can beturned into. So that's really on
the swell side, on for drafthorse, the biggest thing that we
(18:03):
do is like, you just provide usa target keyword phrase. And
again, like, minutes later,you'll have hundreds of articles
written so like, as an example,worked with a client that they
were in, had a part of theirsoftware was like an SMS sending
service. So it was like, youknow, SMS marketing for hotels,
SMS marketing, for b2b SaaS, SMSmarketing for E commerce, etc.
(18:25):
So we found all these longtailkeywords that are like, you
know, bottom of funnel keywordsthat if somebody's searching,
that they're probably searchingfor their software as a
solution. And you know, theygave it a list of draft boards
that lifted like 500 keywordsthat are all does longtail. And
five minutes later, they'republished on their website. And
it's like, we set up autoindexing for them. So it's
(18:47):
actually being submitted toGoogle, through the Google
indexing API. So that is justlike, growing their blog kind of
on autopilot, right? I mean,that's how we're seeing this use
is like zero to wanting thelike, a ton of content
simultaneously. And I always getthe question, especially on the
SEO side is like how Googleviews add content. It basically
stated in February of 2022, or2023. Like we don't care how
(19:10):
it's made, like as long as itprovides value. And I think that
framework is like where this isall going right is how are you
like, does this actually providevalue to the whoever's consuming
this? And it that's going to bethe filter across all of these
platforms, right? Whether it'sGoogle, whether it's YouTube
shorts, whether it's tiktoks,etc.
Matt Wolach (19:31):
I love it. That's great stuff. And it's super
important because so many timesI look at somebody's blog, like,
yeah, we've got a content play,and they've their last article
was written like two months ago,and I get it, it's hard to keep
up with it or it's expensive tohire a team to keep up with it.
But if you can have AI take careof that for you, and especially
take all of those key thingsyou're focusing on and go out
(19:51):
and come up with the content forit. That's fantastic. I love
that
Unknown (19:54):
Also can just go after competitors in a way that you
never could previously. Like Ijust saw a case study From this
company, they basically took thesitemaps of all their
competitors, like, a sitemap isjust like all the articles that
are written on a website, theycan basically scraped all of
those articles to find all ofthe titles from every one of
(20:15):
those, like, you know, imagine1000s of blog posts that have
been written over the lastwhatever, 10 years say it's an
incumbent, right. And they thensave each of those as like a txt
file, they then take it to an AIand they're like aI like write
blog posts, about thiscompetitors, entire sitemap,
like every one of thosearticles, we're gonna make our
own version of that, and thenpublish it. And like the data
(20:38):
that they had was insane. It waslike 12 months, they got to a
million impressions per month onGoogle. It was driving like I've
something nuts, like 30% oftheir inbound lead or inbound
signups. And it was all writtenfor around like $2,000. And
that's kind of the most, that'sthe arbitrage right now is, in
(20:58):
the past, if I wanted to write1000 articles like and I wanted
them to be like a quality thatwas good enough that I would
actually publish them as brands,that would cost me $100 An
article, right. So it's likespending 100 grand to go and
write all this content. Incontrast, now, I can do that
same thing. And I can get it outthe door for like $500. So
that's the moment that we're in,it's going to, you know, it's a
(21:20):
small gap that this is going toexist, I'm guessing like two to
three years. So like that's onthe draft or side and contract,
like we were calling thatcommodity content. That's like
knowledge that the AI like theLLM naturally has built into it,
you can just write about thesetopics. In contrast to that,
like the thought leadershipcontent is actually going to
become more and more valuable.
And this is how you candifferentiate his brands. So
(21:42):
imagine I go and I interviewlike three industry experts say
like you as an example that I'mtalking about, like early stage
sales. And I interview thesethree, you know, we'll say five
experts about how do you doearly stage sales, I take those
transcripts. And then I say,Okay, I told me a detailed blog
post outline, focusing on thistarget keyword how to do early
(22:03):
stage, you know, b2b sales, b2bSaaS, sales, it builds that
outline. And then I canbasically limit it to that
transcript information fromthese experts. And then have it
actually write that contentbased off of that that kind of
corpus of information that I'mproviding to it, like, saying,
Hey, this is this walled gardenthat you can only write from.
(22:25):
And that's how we're going tosee these brands like it's your
your domain knowledge, we likewe have a cybersecurity company
that's doing this, their domainknowledge in this space is so
deep, that they're going towrite the best content, and
always win, because they havethe most knowledge trapped
within their library that theycan then repurpose over and over
again, for all these differentchannels that are trying to do
(22:46):
and so that's how we're thinkingabout it more and more is like,
how do we make it so that youcan have this library of content
that you can go back and datamined, and then pull out these,
you know, these clips, etc,whenever your team needs them,
or you see, hey, in our data,clips like that include were the
keyword XYZ, dig, they do reallywell, or when we're talking
(23:08):
about, you know, cold email,they do really well find me all
the clips that are related tocold email, write me 40 tweets
about you know, related to coldemail or whatever that is,
right, I can just go back tothat, that that library that I
have, and then reuse that overand over again. And that's how I
create these, this ever creamcontent engine that is going to
again, differentiate my mybrand, as commodity content
(23:28):
that's made by AI becomeseverywhere. And that just
becomes like the the expertisewill never be in there. Like
you'll see from a human being.
So
Matt Wolach (23:42):
I love it. And I can see how passionate you are
about this. Cody, it's so coolwatching you talk about it and
hearing what you have to say,because you can just feel how
excited you get about it. We'rerunning out of time here. But I
want to make sure that we reallyshare some great stuff with our
with our audience. So whatadvice would you have for early
stage startup founders who arewanting to start to leverage AI
(24:03):
and start to have it help theirbusiness?
Cody Schneider (24:05):
Yeah, I think right now, there's a massive
opportunity to just disruptthese industries that look on
disreputable like the other day,like I was looking at, like
surveys, right? And I'm like,surveys could just be automated
at this point, like I surveypeople. And then I abstract all
those insights. So like, thinkabout it is like you're a
product. So you're you're tryingto do product research, right,
(24:27):
based off of your turn userslike we're doing this actually
internally. And there was thismoment where I was like, fuck, I
want to just go build thiscompany. Because it's just like,
it'd be super valuable to whatwe're doing. But I take all of
those survey responses, I throwit into a context window and I'm
like, okay, like, list the most,like, list the insights from
this from this whole librarythat I just provided you but
(24:49):
weighed them based on the thingsthat are most referenced. And
like we just did this and it'slike, Okay, here's these 10
things that are stack ranked,that are the most impactful for
you to reduce terms. So like theThe survey and like business has
been here for since day one. Butnow this base technology change
has happened that hasn't tiredlike it's going to shake up. The
analogy I'm using is like, it'slike a snow globe, right? Like,
(25:11):
you're shaking it up. Like it'shard to move the snow, if I
don't like if it's not shaking.
Whenever I have a basetechnology change, that snow
globe gets shaken, I get to likeposition it to make that
snowfall wherever I want. Andlike that is what's happening
right now. It's like I get toput weight on the scale. And so
with the like, like surveys is ahuge one, what we're another one
that I could see somebody goingand building a massive company
(25:32):
in is social media, scheduling,like social media Scheduling and
Management, like AI, again, hastotally disrupted that space.
All of these, like greatexamples, like later.com was
built in like 2010, right? Likethe stack they're using is so
arbitrary, like it eautiful.
It's, it's not even likeHootsuite, all of them are the
(25:54):
same time, right? As soon asthere's API's available for
Instagram and Facebook, etc.
That's when they came out. Sothere are these massive
companies that are like slowlytrying to shift. And if you just
come in and from the ground upbuild with AI as a component,
rather than like layering onthis bloatware on top of it,
which is what they're doing, youcan entirely disrupt that market
and take over a huge marketshare, because that's what these
(26:16):
people are looking for. Like, Iwant to tell me why customers
are leaving, right? That's agreat use case. Like I want it
and it's something that we'realready doing. I guess that's
the big thing is like focusingon the things that we're already
doing that there's massivemarkets for. And again, how can
I automate a percentage of that,because then it's an easy sell,
like for us, like how I sellswell as an example to like,
(26:37):
podcast networks and agencies islike, we cut costs by 60%. On
average, like you have a team of40 people that you're paying
salaries like that, overnight,like 60% of that cost is cut,
right? It's like it's a nobrainer. And it's the same thing
that you can do in these otherspaces. So
Matt Wolach (26:56):
super cool, amazing advice, and definitely something
that people should take you upon and go out and start doing
that. I want to make sure thatpeople understand where they can
learn more about you and, andSwell and Drafthorse. Where's
the best place for them to go?
Cody Schneider (27:09):
Yeah, I'm most active on Twitter and LinkedIn.
That's where you can find me ifyou want to reach out and chat.
But again, yeah, it'sswellai.com and drafthorseai.com
If you Google both of them, theyshould come up and if they
don't, I'm not doing my jobwell, so yeah, those are all the
places you can find me.
Matt Wolach (27:26):
perfect. We'll put all that in the show notes as
well. So if you're listening,you can grab all that right
there. But, Cody, this has beenawesome. Thanks so much for
coming on and sharing all thesegreat tips with us.
Cody Schneider (27:35):
I appreciate it man. Thanks for having me.
Again. Super excited.
Matt Wolach (27:38):
Absolutely.
Everybody out there. Thank youvery much for watching and
listening. Really glad to haveyou here. Again, make sure you
are subscribed, you do not wantto miss out on any other amazing
advice like Cody just sharedwith us. So hit that subscribe
button. You'll be good to go.
And then we will see you nexttime. Take care
Hello, and welcome to Scale Your SaaS. Really glad
that you made it. Thank you forshowing up. By the way, if this
is your first time here, ourgoal is to help you generate a
whole ton of leads, close thoseleads, grow your business and do
exactly what the show says ScaleYour SaaS. If you're wanting to
do that, hit the subscribebutton right now that way, you
will not miss any of the amazingguests and information we give
(00:24):
you so you can do what you gotto do. And today, I'm super
excited to be joined by myspecial guest Cody Schneider.
Cody. How you doing?
Cody Schneider (00:32):
Good, man.
Thanks for having me on, man.
Super excited to be here.
Matt Wolach (00:35):
Absolutely. I'm excited to have you here as
well. And I want to make sureeverybody knows who you are. So
Cody, he's the co founder atSwell AI as well as Drafthorse
AI two cool things going on. Bythe way, Swell AI, they help
podcasters and YouTubers converttheir podcasts and videos and
articles. You can upload yourrecordings and swell AI writes
detailed content mimicking yourunique voice, I can tell you,
(00:57):
that is a very cool thing andvery needed. And Cody, he's
really awesome. He's anentrepreneur who's established
multiple successful SaaSventures. And he really
exemplifies productive scaling.
And you're going to hear aboutsome of the cool things. He's
done. One of those, of courseDrafthorse, which that's an AI
SEO engine that helps you growyour organic traffic, you can
upload a list of target keywordsand get articles written in
(01:19):
minutes. It's really, reallyneat what they're doing right
there. And so I can't wait todive into both of these. But
Cody, thanks for coming on theshow.
Cody Schneider (01:27):
Yeah, thanks.
Yeah. Again, Matt. Thanks forhaving me. Super excited.
Matt Wolach (01:32):
So tell me what's been going on with you lately?
And what's coming up?
Cody Schneider (01:34):
Yeah, I mean, I mean, we honestly just been
focused, really heads down onthis content engine powered by
AI idea. We're of the opinionthat like, we're on the
precipice of this really kind ofrevolutionary moment, especially
for early stage companies, whereit's like, Hey, I have one
marketing person, how do I, youknow, be everywhere. And so what
(01:55):
we've seen is that AI is thisvehicle for that. And so the
tools that we've been creatingis really to kind of augment
those teams. My background wasin like early stage startups, I
was out in the valley did thatwhole thing. And what we found
is that, you know, content islike one of the best ways to
zero to one a brand, when nobodyknows you exist. You just like
just raised around. It's like,how do I make my entire audience
(02:19):
know who I am? And honestly,podcasting was the initial
vehicle that we did for it. Thenwe did webinars, all that, but
we can get into those pieces. Soyeah, that's kind of the high
level.
Matt Wolach (02:28):
Very cool. So tell me, how did this all come to be?
How did you get into AI andcontent and creating all these
these products that you've comeup with?
Cody Schneider (02:36):
Yeah, yeah. So it initially started what we
were doing, I think everybodywas experimenting with it in
some way. But in in July of2022, it's like this moment
happened with the all thebasically we everybody was
experimenting with GPT three,and it got good enough where
like, as a marketer, or asalesperson, I was like, Oh,
this is like actually usable. Ithad this kind of tipping point
(02:57):
that occurred. And so at thetime, I was doing consulting for
this company, they were like aninsurance tech software, it was
basically like a CRM forinsurance agents. And for them,
like we spun up this podcast asa vehicle to basically again,
like zero to one their brand. Sowe scraped all their target
customers, you know, their ICPemails, we then sequence them
(03:17):
into a newsletter. And thenevery week, we would just like
email them the podcast, right?
And they'd have guests on thattalk about their business. Now
they structured it, and yadayada is a lot of them are kind
of, you know, solo insuranceagents. Some of them are
crushing it, whatever they weredoing, like, you know, three
quarters of a million a year,like, it's not like, you know,
it's smaller, you're larger,smaller businesses, or larger
small businesses, I guess Iwould say, Yeah, so for them,
(03:38):
though, it's like, you know,basically did this podcast
thing. And over a year, we foundthat we could just took, we've
made the founders like kind offamous where it's like, they
would go to conferences, and nowthese people know who they are,
right? Because they like gotrandomly sequenced into this
newsletter. And so podcasting isgreat to create, like long form
(03:58):
source media, that it can chopup and repurpose into all these
different forms. Thatrepurposing process is like the
hardest part. And it's the mosttime consuming and like when I
was at a previous company, likeI had a team of 10 to 15 people
that we're constantly working onthis, like, we're doing
webinars, we're doing podcasts,and then they would turn that
into blog posts and tweets andLinkedIn posts, etc, for all the
(04:20):
channels that we're trying to dodistribution through. And so the
AI piece was like, Oh, this is aperfect vehicle for that we can
take these transcripts, we cantake these videos and basically
turn them into all this media inwhat used to take us, you know,
50 hours of time, we can do itin three hours, right. And so
that was kind of the inceptionof it, it's now evolved into
like a way larger thing, but thefirst version of it was actually
(04:41):
a Google Drive folder that Ishared with some friends, they
uploaded mp3 files, we wouldlike download it locally, run it
on our machines and send it backand that's how we got our first
10 customers that there werelike, hey, this idea is
validated. Let's ship this and,you know, it's kind of evolved
into the kind of web applique Itis now. So
Matt Wolach (05:01):
I love that story.
And actually, that storyillustrates something that I
teach my clients is, hey, in theearly days, you might have to do
things that don't scale. Like,obviously at scale, that process
wouldn't work. But in the earlydays to figure out, does this
work to verify if it's somethingthat can be valuable for
somebody? That's what you do.
And so it might have felttedious at first, but you
(05:23):
figured out that this issomething that people like, and
it works, right.
Cody Schneider (05:26):
100% Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the times
too, it's like, due to, I see somany companies that are they're
trying to do too many thingssimultaneously. And in reality,
they need to do like one or twothings like most companies can
get to a million ARR with justlike to at distribution
activities. So whether that'slike cold email, and pairing
that with like, Facebook ads, sothat same audience, like I've
(05:46):
seen that work, I've seen itwhere it's like, okay, I'm just
gonna only do b2b influencermarketing, and then Pair that
with like, cold DMS. Like, a lotof the times, it's like focusing
on those transactional things.
And pairing two of those thingstogether, that I see make a lot
of impact for these early stagecompanies, rather than focusing
on a long term investment, likeso many people do SEO and all
the shit, it's like, no, like,you need to get to a million
(06:08):
arr. So you become sustainable,until you're at that point, like
you don't think about long terminvestments into like
distribution, or marketing orany of that. Like, it's like,
what are these transactionalactivities like selling like,
you know, cold calling, etc,that I can do with that makes an
immediate impact on my revenuetomorrow, rather than you know,
something that's going to takeeffect six to 12 months from
now.
Matt Wolach (06:31):
I love that I love that the focus is purely on we
just got to get to a millionARR. And that's something that's
really important. It's somethingthat I've constantly kind of
told my clients, this is acheckpoint, the companies who
get there, they have so muchmore likelihood of actually
being successful and making itbecause once you've reached
that, you've shown that you knowwhat you're doing, you've
reached product market fit, youunderstand how to get in front
(06:52):
of people how to close them. AndI think it's super critical. And
one of the the first checkpointsin fact, the first checkpoint is
for me 10k MRR that shows thatyou've had some initial early
success. And you were able to dothat to get to 10k MRR in one
month with Drafthorse. That'ssuper impressive. Can you share
some of the simple strategiesand tactics and what you did
(07:13):
leveraging personal branding andsome of the content stuff to
create that trust? And virality?
How did you guys get to $10 KMRR so quick?
Cody Schneider (07:20):
That's a great question. So honestly, I it was
total just viral moment I if Itried to recreate it, it was
like right time, right placewith kind of the right
resources. But the kind of thecompounding things that happened
at the moment. So we built aninternal tool to basically do
programmatic SEO for swell. Andthen I was talking about it in
public on Twitter. And I hadbeen growing this Twitter
(07:43):
account, just because I realizedthat it was like a great vehicle
to do cold outreach with, like,the more followers you have on
these social channels, the morereceptive people are to getting
pitched your thing. And so to meanyways, yeah, it was growing
that, honestly. And we wrotesome software that basically
like, helps with the tweetwriting process, I was
publishing like, 10 tweets aday, and it was honestly, you
(08:05):
know, I don't know if you cancuss on this, but just
shitposting right. And so,anyway, the so we people were
talking about in public, peoplewere asking about the tool. So
we spun it out into a separateproduct, we basically just like
clone the code base that we hadfor swell and put draft horse up
(08:25):
in it. And then I did a tutorialthat was like, I'm gonna write
1000 articles that are SEOoptimized off of these target
keywords that are related to mybrand in the next 60 seconds.
Like, click the button, and thenit writes those articles, and
then, you know, click one morebutton and publish them to the
WordPress site, right. And theywere now live and in public. And
so anyways, that went viral. Andthen we just rode that wave. I
(08:47):
mean, the servers were on firefor the next 30 days, it was
just like pure madness. Like, wewere definitely under staffed.
And we're a small team, likewe're early stage and self
funded. And so, for us, we'rejust like, you know, trying to
juggle 1000 things just like allfounders are. Yeah, so and then
really just double down on thosetypes of things. Like everybody
(09:09):
is looking for the solutionsright now that speed up the
processes of like contentproduction, right? So it's like
I have these inputs, I'mdesiring these outputs, like
what are these ways that I canuse AI to kind of abstract away
all of that time consuming piecethat later and that's really
what we've been showing, likejust publicly in demos. And so
it's that combination of and Ithink people you know, this is a
(09:33):
learning, you know, across allthe platforms, like every
platform has content thatthey're most receptive to, but
it's figuring out how do I likefind that cross section between
what's most likely to get reachwhile simultaneously like how do
I also create inbound for mycompany, right? Yeah, we got it
to 10k MRR in the first 30 days.
And then just yet been growingit since then, and building out
(09:54):
kind of these other flywheelpieces. So we found YouTube TV
great vehicle for that company.
And so we're doubling down onthat. And we've been running a
lot of off YouTube paid trafficto the YouTube channel. And what
that does is it basically likewe've been buying like Twitter
traffic for like, super cheap,right? I actually don't even
(10:15):
want to say this in Public. It'sso insane. But like, you know,
I'm talking like point 0001 centlink clicks, sends them to the
YouTube channel they want like,that turns into the views that
turns into subscribers. But whatit does is it creates virality
that happen on the YouTubechannel itself. So this life,
basically, it's just a tutorialof your, your software that's
(10:35):
going viral, like showing peoplehow to use it, which again,
creates inbound. And so that'ssomething that we found to be
like a kind of an incrediblekind of arbitrage. And so we're
we're capitalizing on it at themoment. But yeah, happy to dive
deeper on any of that as well. Iknow, that was like a ton of
random information. So
Matt Wolach (10:52):
no, I think that's amazing information. And you did
mention that you were fortunatethat this buzz happened. But I
would disagree, I actually thinkyou did a lot of work to create
that brand to, to build that,that channel on twitter to
create that kind of public trustto kind of build your community.
And so that when you did havesomething, you had a community,
you had a group of people whoalready trusted you believed in
(11:14):
you. And were willing to jump inand be a part of this thing,
especially since you told thestory. So well. I think I think
people saw that realize it wasan issue realize it was
something that they had achallenge with, and they could
get benefit from. So I thinkthat you did everything right.
Yes. Sometimes you just needthat magic for it to hit. Right.
But I think you did so much.
Well, though that I don't thinkit was super fortunate. I think
(11:34):
you follow the right process.
Cody Schneider (11:37):
No, I think it's part of it. And like, for every
founder that's listening to thisthis is such an opportunity
right now is just like buildinglike founder led growth is this
massive lever that anybody canpull. I'm seeing this happen
more and more where it's like,they hire a ghostwriter. That
ghost writer interviews them,like once a week, it's 30
minutes, they sit down 30minutes to an hour, they take
(11:58):
that recording, and then theghost writer basically like
builds out okay, here's thistone, style and voice guy that
we can give the AI now we go andwrite all this content for this
founder. And then this founderlooks like they're everywhere.
And just like fluorophoreproliferating all of this, like
their ideas and content andreally almost the like, you
know, ride along entrepreneurjourney that's becoming this
(12:19):
like very powerful mechanism togrow these companies. But that's
actually, we have a client thatuses swell. And that's what they
do is they basically likeinterview these founders. It's
honestly an insane company, I'mstill shocked that like, there's
not more than it's like a solofounder. They're charging 5k a
month, I think he has like 30ish clients now at this point.
So it's like 150 MRR right? It'sa service business, obviously.
(12:42):
But what he, it's literally thatlike, have these conversations,
like crank out all this contentat scale, I think he has like a
couple of yeas that help them.
And that's, that's, you know,literally it, but it's in there.
That's this way that you canzero to one these products
overnight, right. And that's thedream. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna
repeat, you know, I'm gonna, I'mgonna start as many companies as
I can over and over again, like,that's my favorite part is like
(13:03):
the beginning stages, figuringout all the puzzles, like once
we define the operations at thatpoint, like, let it exist, and
it can kind of run itself. Butwhat you know, how you do this
over and over is you have thatowned media channels, right? You
have that own distribution,where and the best that I've
seen so far that are the twothat can't be taken away from
(13:23):
you are podcasts andnewsletters, you always own
those vehicles. And then thekind of next piece of those is
then okay, I grow these socialchannels, whether that's like
LinkedIn profiles, like personalLinkedIn profiles, or Twitter
accounts, etc. So
Matt Wolach (13:41):
yeah, it's great stuff. You mentioned, you're
running a few differentcompanies, you love that early
stage, how do you balance yourtime? How do you balance your
focus between them? Because Ialso have multiple companies?
And I find it tough. I'm reallyfocused on this thing. And like,
oh, yeah, I gotta do that. Andhow do you keep it all straight?
Yeah.
Cody Schneider (13:57):
I mean, I think it's the hardest part. Right
now. It feels like we're justlike fires, I need to hire like
two more people, for swell inparticular. But the I think the
biggest thing that I like Ifocus on is like, what's the
most impactful thing that I cando at this moment to like, move
revenue that move that number,then whatever that is, like that
(14:17):
is that is what I do. Right? Andthen the other kind of filter
that I employs, like, again, myfocus is on the puzzles, like,
but once I figured those out,like how do I automate as much
of that as possible, or delegateas much as that as possible? And
then whatever can't be automatedor delegated, like, that is what
I I'm there to manage. But theit's the kind of the age old
(14:40):
challenge, whether you're fundedor not funded, like it's like
where, you know, what do I I'velimited resources, I have time,
money and mental energy. Like Ihave to think about that
combination of things every dayand I think for every founder,
it's figuring out and thatmental energy one is one that
you know, we don't think about alot. It I think it's actually
(15:01):
the most important is like thatcontext switching between all of
this is the hardest part. But wetry to make like for us, what we
do is like making it selfservice possible. So the lower
tier can basically jump into theproduct and start using it, that
also creates a great opportunityfor you to do like affiliate
marketing and build out anaffiliate audience in network.
The other pieces then like for,you know, all the enterprise
(15:23):
sales, like, that's where it'slike, my head is focused on
because it's like, you know, ifyou're talking to a larger
organization, like they're gonnaneed at least four to six months
for some of these deals, if notmore, especially when it's like,
you know, they're bringing thelawyers in, you got an MSA, etc.
You're just, it's just a longertime, peace thing, right. So
(15:43):
it's like, automate as much ofthat lower interior as possible
and try to make it so that itcan be a self service, it can, I
think it's like a big learningthing that it's over the last 12
months has been kind of criticalfor us. So I
Matt Wolach (15:54):
love that I love the way you put that I hope
everybody grab that because yousaid you'd like to figure out
the puzzles, and then figure outhow to either automate or
delegate it and then solve therest. And I think that's so
critical. That's a great way toscale a great way to, to
continue to keep yourselffocused on on kind of those
higher tasks, those, those thosemore tasks that you need that
that thinking and your energyand your experience to be able
(16:16):
to solve and let eitherautomation or delegation take
care of the rest. And I thinkthat that's, that's super smart.
I love that. I want tounderstand, though, if, you
know, for a layman like me thatdoesn't know AI very well. Why
use something like swell ordraft horse as opposed to go
into chatGPT or Bard what's thedifference?
Cody Schneider (16:36):
Yeah. So with Swell in particular, like we're
focused on content repurposing.
So you could do the exact samething and catch up. Like, say, I
wanted to make a podcast shownotes. The biggest difference
that we've kind of created isthe ability to create, we call
them prompt chains or templates.
So like, just how you have achat within chatGPT. Like we can
(16:57):
save that as like, here's thesequence of events that have
prompts and responses that canbe chained together, that's
saved as a template, so thatevery time that you practice for
providing some raw sourcematerial, ie the podcast, it
just automatically generatesthat output. So if you're, you
know, a marketer, and you'relike, Okay, I'm interviewing two
people a week or whatever, forthis podcast, to grow my agency,
(17:19):
etc, I can build out thesetemplates that just
automatically, like write afirst person blog posts in this
tone, style and voice and makesure that it's like, hits these
key points you want to call toaction name, be included in the
first paragraph, oh, also writeme 30 tweets, also write me five
LinkedIn posts, also, you know,whatever, whatever those content
outputs that you're looking for.
Our big thing is focusing onbuilding kind of dislike
(17:41):
pipeline from all of that. Soit's, um, the analogy I always
use is like, we want to takethose raw materials that like,
think about it as like oil. AndI want to turn it into plastics
and gasoline and diesel, likewhatever we can basically
produce those templates or allof those different versions of
what that raw material can beturned into. So that's really on
the swell side, on for drafthorse, the biggest thing that we
(18:03):
do is like, you just provide usa target keyword phrase. And
again, like, minutes later,you'll have hundreds of articles
written so like, as an example,worked with a client that they
were in, had a part of theirsoftware was like an SMS sending
service. So it was like, youknow, SMS marketing for hotels,
SMS marketing, for b2b SaaS, SMSmarketing for E commerce, etc.
(18:25):
So we found all these longtailkeywords that are like, you
know, bottom of funnel keywordsthat if somebody's searching,
that they're probably searchingfor their software as a
solution. And you know, theygave it a list of draft boards
that lifted like 500 keywordsthat are all does longtail. And
five minutes later, they'republished on their website. And
it's like, we set up autoindexing for them. So it's
(18:47):
actually being submitted toGoogle, through the Google
indexing API. So that is justlike, growing their blog kind of
on autopilot, right? I mean,that's how we're seeing this use
is like zero to wanting thelike, a ton of content
simultaneously. And I always getthe question, especially on the
SEO side is like how Googleviews add content. It basically
stated in February of 2022, or2023. Like we don't care how
(19:10):
it's made, like as long as itprovides value. And I think that
framework is like where this isall going right is how are you
like, does this actually providevalue to the whoever's consuming
this? And it that's going to bethe filter across all of these
platforms, right? Whether it'sGoogle, whether it's YouTube
shorts, whether it's tiktoks,etc.
Matt Wolach (19:31):
I love it. That's great stuff. And it's super
important because so many timesI look at somebody's blog, like,
yeah, we've got a content play,and they've their last article
was written like two months ago,and I get it, it's hard to keep
up with it or it's expensive tohire a team to keep up with it.
But if you can have AI take careof that for you, and especially
take all of those key thingsyou're focusing on and go out
(19:51):
and come up with the content forit. That's fantastic. I love
that
Unknown (19:54):
Also can just go after competitors in a way that you
never could previously. Like Ijust saw a case study From this
company, they basically took thesitemaps of all their
competitors, like, a sitemap isjust like all the articles that
are written on a website, theycan basically scraped all of
those articles to find all ofthe titles from every one of
(20:15):
those, like, you know, imagine1000s of blog posts that have
been written over the lastwhatever, 10 years say it's an
incumbent, right. And they thensave each of those as like a txt
file, they then take it to an AIand they're like aI like write
blog posts, about thiscompetitors, entire sitemap,
like every one of thosearticles, we're gonna make our
own version of that, and thenpublish it. And like the data
(20:38):
that they had was insane. It waslike 12 months, they got to a
million impressions per month onGoogle. It was driving like I've
something nuts, like 30% oftheir inbound lead or inbound
signups. And it was all writtenfor around like $2,000. And
that's kind of the most, that'sthe arbitrage right now is, in
(20:58):
the past, if I wanted to write1000 articles like and I wanted
them to be like a quality thatwas good enough that I would
actually publish them as brands,that would cost me $100 An
article, right. So it's likespending 100 grand to go and
write all this content. Incontrast, now, I can do that
same thing. And I can get it outthe door for like $500. So
that's the moment that we're in,it's going to, you know, it's a
(21:20):
small gap that this is going toexist, I'm guessing like two to
three years. So like that's onthe draft or side and contract,
like we were calling thatcommodity content. That's like
knowledge that the AI like theLLM naturally has built into it,
you can just write about thesetopics. In contrast to that,
like the thought leadershipcontent is actually going to
become more and more valuable.
And this is how you candifferentiate his brands. So
(21:42):
imagine I go and I interviewlike three industry experts say
like you as an example that I'mtalking about, like early stage
sales. And I interview thesethree, you know, we'll say five
experts about how do you doearly stage sales, I take those
transcripts. And then I say,Okay, I told me a detailed blog
post outline, focusing on thistarget keyword how to do early
(22:03):
stage, you know, b2b sales, b2bSaaS, sales, it builds that
outline. And then I canbasically limit it to that
transcript information fromthese experts. And then have it
actually write that contentbased off of that that kind of
corpus of information that I'mproviding to it, like, saying,
Hey, this is this walled gardenthat you can only write from.
(22:25):
And that's how we're going tosee these brands like it's your
your domain knowledge, we likewe have a cybersecurity company
that's doing this, their domainknowledge in this space is so
deep, that they're going towrite the best content, and
always win, because they havethe most knowledge trapped
within their library that theycan then repurpose over and over
again, for all these differentchannels that are trying to do
(22:46):
and so that's how we're thinkingabout it more and more is like,
how do we make it so that youcan have this library of content
that you can go back and datamined, and then pull out these,
you know, these clips, etc,whenever your team needs them,
or you see, hey, in our data,clips like that include were the
keyword XYZ, dig, they do reallywell, or when we're talking
(23:08):
about, you know, cold email,they do really well find me all
the clips that are related tocold email, write me 40 tweets
about you know, related to coldemail or whatever that is,
right, I can just go back tothat, that that library that I
have, and then reuse that overand over again. And that's how I
create these, this ever creamcontent engine that is going to
again, differentiate my mybrand, as commodity content
(23:28):
that's made by AI becomeseverywhere. And that just
becomes like the the expertisewill never be in there. Like
you'll see from a human being.
So
Matt Wolach (23:42):
I love it. And I can see how passionate you are
about this. Cody, it's so coolwatching you talk about it and
hearing what you have to say,because you can just feel how
excited you get about it. We'rerunning out of time here. But I
want to make sure that we reallyshare some great stuff with our
with our audience. So whatadvice would you have for early
stage startup founders who arewanting to start to leverage AI
(24:03):
and start to have it help theirbusiness?
Cody Schneider (24:05):
Yeah, I think right now, there's a massive
opportunity to just disruptthese industries that look on
disreputable like the other day,like I was looking at, like
surveys, right? And I'm like,surveys could just be automated
at this point, like I surveypeople. And then I abstract all
those insights. So like, thinkabout it is like you're a
product. So you're you're tryingto do product research, right,
(24:27):
based off of your turn userslike we're doing this actually
internally. And there was thismoment where I was like, fuck, I
want to just go build thiscompany. Because it's just like,
it'd be super valuable to whatwe're doing. But I take all of
those survey responses, I throwit into a context window and I'm
like, okay, like, list the most,like, list the insights from
this from this whole librarythat I just provided you but
(24:49):
weighed them based on the thingsthat are most referenced. And
like we just did this and it'slike, Okay, here's these 10
things that are stack ranked,that are the most impactful for
you to reduce terms. So like theThe survey and like business has
been here for since day one. Butnow this base technology change
has happened that hasn't tiredlike it's going to shake up. The
analogy I'm using is like, it'slike a snow globe, right? Like,
(25:11):
you're shaking it up. Like it'shard to move the snow, if I
don't like if it's not shaking.
Whenever I have a basetechnology change, that snow
globe gets shaken, I get to likeposition it to make that
snowfall wherever I want. Andlike that is what's happening
right now. It's like I get toput weight on the scale. And so
with the like, like surveys is ahuge one, what we're another one
that I could see somebody goingand building a massive company
(25:32):
in is social media, scheduling,like social media Scheduling and
Management, like AI, again, hastotally disrupted that space.
All of these, like greatexamples, like later.com was
built in like 2010, right? Likethe stack they're using is so
arbitrary, like it eautiful.
It's, it's not even likeHootsuite, all of them are the
(25:54):
same time, right? As soon asthere's API's available for
Instagram and Facebook, etc.
That's when they came out. Sothere are these massive
companies that are like slowlytrying to shift. And if you just
come in and from the ground upbuild with AI as a component,
rather than like layering onthis bloatware on top of it,
which is what they're doing, youcan entirely disrupt that market
and take over a huge marketshare, because that's what these
(26:16):
people are looking for. Like, Iwant to tell me why customers
are leaving, right? That's agreat use case. Like I want it
and it's something that we'realready doing. I guess that's
the big thing is like focusingon the things that we're already
doing that there's massivemarkets for. And again, how can
I automate a percentage of that,because then it's an easy sell,
like for us, like how I sellswell as an example to like,
(26:37):
podcast networks and agencies islike, we cut costs by 60%. On
average, like you have a team of40 people that you're paying
salaries like that, overnight,like 60% of that cost is cut,
right? It's like it's a nobrainer. And it's the same thing
that you can do in these otherspaces. So
Matt Wolach (26:56):
super cool, amazing advice, and definitely something
that people should take you upon and go out and start doing
that. I want to make sure thatpeople understand where they can
learn more about you and, andSwell and Drafthorse. Where's
the best place for them to go?
Cody Schneider (27:09):
Yeah, I'm most active on Twitter and LinkedIn.
That's where you can find me ifyou want to reach out and chat.
But again, yeah, it'sswellai.com and drafthorseai.com
If you Google both of them, theyshould come up and if they
don't, I'm not doing my jobwell, so yeah, those are all the
places you can find me.
Matt Wolach (27:26):
perfect. We'll put all that in the show notes as
well. So if you're listening,you can grab all that right
there. But, Cody, this has beenawesome. Thanks so much for
coming on and sharing all thesegreat tips with us.
Cody Schneider (27:35):
I appreciate it man. Thanks for having me.
Again. Super excited.
Matt Wolach (27:38):
Absolutely.
Everybody out there. Thank youvery much for watching and
listening. Really glad to haveyou here. Again, make sure you
are subscribed, you do not wantto miss out on any other amazing
advice like Cody just sharedwith us. So hit that subscribe
button. You'll be good to go.
And then we will see you nexttime. Take care
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