The Startup Ideas Podcast
He built a startup using AI that prints money (full tutorial)
Mon, 13 Jan 2025
In this episode we dive deep into modern marketing strategies with Cody Schneider, focusing on the concept of "digital gravity" versus traditional marketing funnels. The discussion covers comprehensive tactics for both B2B and B2C companies, including detailed strategies for content creation, distribution, and monetization. Special emphasis is placed on leveraging AI tools, programmatic SEO, and multi-channel marketing approaches to build sustainable growth engines.Timestamps:0:00 Intro01:23 - Digital gravity concept and content strategy10:00 - B2B marketing tactics and implementation38:45 - B2C marketing strategies and case studiesKey Points:• Comprehensive breakdown of modern B2B and B2C marketing strategies• Detailed explanation of "digital gravity" concept vs traditional marketing funnels• Step-by-step guide for building media presence and content distribution• Technical insights on email marketing, ad targeting, and influencer partnerships1) The Digital Gravity Model Forget marketing funnels. Think orbits.People don't move linearly through funnels - they orbit your brand, coming closer until they convert.More digital mass = more gravitational pull = more customers naturally drawn in.**2) B2B Marketing Stack:**• Scrape target emails ([Apollo.io](http://apollo.io/), $99/mo)• Run AI avatar ads (Heygen + ElevenLabs)• Cold email at scale (MailReef)• Launch industry podcast• Turn podcast → social content• Monetize audience w/sponsorshipsCost per click? Often less than $0.01 vs $5+ on ads.3) The Content Engine Record customer convos → podcast episodes↓Turn into blog posts↓Create social clips↓Make whitepapers↓Email newsletterOne piece of content = 10x distribution points4) B2C Growth Stack:• Pick HUGE TAM• Run FB/TikTok conversion ads• Price at $70.99/week ($29/mo psychology)• Use multiple creator accounts• Clone best UGC with AI• Add affiliate programKey: $5 CPM or less = profitable5) The SEO Playbook • Wait for DA 40+• Scrape top ranking content• AI generate 10k articles• Human edit winners• CTA every scroll frame• Pop-up at 25-50% depthFocus on long-tail keywords nobody fights for.6) Why This All Works:Traditional marketing = campaigns (start/stop)Modern marketing = always-on systemsYou're not "doing marketing"You're "marketing"Big differenceNotable Quotes:"Marketing isn't something you did, it's something you're doing. You're constantly doing marketing." - Cody Schneider"The closer your ad is to content on the platform, the less you're going to have to pay for it." - Cody SchneiderWant more free ideas? I collect the best ideas from the pod and give them to you for free in a database. Most of them cost $0 to start (my fav)Get access: https://www.gregisenberg.com/30startupideasLCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/BoringAds — ads agency that will build you profitable ad campaigns http://boringads.com/BoringMarketing — SEO agency and tools to get your organic customers http://boringmarketing.com/Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.startupempire.coFIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND CODY ON SOCIALCody’s startup: https://www.swellai.com/X/Twitter: https://tinyurl.com/5fjdn8d7LinkedIn: https://tinyurl.com/28e89f5r
What do you want to talk about today? Today, I want to talk about how the marketing funnel is like being entirely wrong way to think about marketing, modern marketing. I think it's a very just deceptive way to kind of hide what's actually happening. And yeah, I wanna propose this new way to think about this. I call it digital gravity and like break that down what that actually means.
And then talk about like this, you know, the high level theory and strategy, and then what are the tactical ways to do this both for B2B and then also for consumer.
Okay. And before you do that, could you let us know what liquid you have in your coffee mug? Yeah, this is beer. This is Modelo. I am sipping Modelo. They're out of limes though, man. I don't know about the hospitality. Is that a type of like Colombian roast? I think it's from Oaxaca. 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 in and they come out the bottom and they buy a product. That's not how people actually buy shit whatsoever.
People actually buy things as they like interact with the brand and then they get away from the brand and then they somehow get sucked back in and they do like three rotations around it and then they finally touch down. And so this is just a different way to visualize like how to build brands. Um, I've used the same strategy for like music artists, right?
Like my friend, Colby Acuff, like this is literally how we got him signed with Sony. Like at Rupa Health, this is, I was employee six there. This is like how we took the company to a multi-hundred million dollar exit. It's the same playbooks and like all the stuff that we're doing. And like, I feel like even you, like this is like a version of this. but it's just a way to describe it.
So like digital gravity in my mind is actually how you build a brand or how you build a company. What you're doing is like you're building mass, digital mass on the internet. And the more mass you have, the more influence you have within the niche or the sphere that you're in.
And so how you build that mass is through content and through really just like marketing everywhere that your customer is showing up there in some form and content is typically the vehicle for that. And so like, when you're a small company, when you're just starting out and like, I get this conversation, I have this conversation a lot with startups, like where should I market?
And there's like two different paths. Like if you're bootstrapped, it's like, okay, you, everybody has resources, time, money, money, and mental energy. And the resources that you have are dependent, you know, they're different depending on if you're funded or if you're not. You're funded, you have a ton of money, you have a ton of time and you have a ton of resources.
So you, when they ask that question, like, where should I be? It's like 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 like as the companies evolve and they scale up, all those resources change. But to get back to like building out the actual brand, like 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 spec. And imagine a comet is a customer and they're flying by, right?
You have no influence on them flying by, right? But the bigger you get, the more mass you build. And this can be applied at the local business level. This can be applied at the B2B level. This can be applied at the consumer level. What happens is you get more people that get sucked into that orbit of that planet that you're building, right?
and they get in rotation and as they get in rotation then you have more touchdowns that occur the touchdown that turns into revenue it creates this growth flywheel where you build more mass through the revenue that you generated because you reinvest back into the growth of the company and again i think that this is a better way to think about how we portray how people actually make purchasing decisions it's not this like they enter the funnel and they come out the end of it like nobody actually buys things like that right well i think
It's what you're saying is people don't like the problem with funnel is people leave the funnel.
Totally. Yeah. They go out of it and then they come back and maybe they shop around. I mean, how many times have you like not thought about something for six weeks and then you come back and you buy that thing? But yeah, you probably saw three ads. You touched a newsletter that had an ad in it. And then maybe you saw a billboard, you know, and a friend talked about it through word of mouth.
It could be years later. It could be years later, depending on like how big the purchasing, like, you know, the product is. And typically like it's a longer cycle for how much money is going to be deployed with that purchase. So I worked in the manufacturing industry at one point, like doing marketing for like doors and windows and like those types of companies.
Like we're talking about like, you know, a hotel group buying 2000 shower bases for a hotel that they're building, right? Like that purchasing decision is a five-year period. Like how are you influencing them over that entire like cycle? And I think that this is the way to think about it where, I mean, that's on a funnel, right? That's not how this is working.
Like you're, you're, you're creating, it's almost this like one to many relationship, but you have to do that over a long cycle. And then how do you do that at scale? How do you actually make it so that it's consistent? And I think the other component of this is like, when you think about a funnel, like people think about it, like,
A lot of marketing is thought about as a campaign, which is actually a holdover from the war, right? All these dudes came back from World War II and they had campaigns where you started an action and then you ended it. That's a campaign. That is where the word literally comes from. You literally defeated the enemy. Yes, exactly. And that is where that comes from. That idea, it stems from that.
They brought it into advertising, right? That's not how the world works anymore. You don't start and stop. You didn't do marketing, you're marketing. Like you're constantly doing marketing. And I think that if you think about it in that way, then that requires you to think about, okay, well, if I'm constantly making things that are adding mass to this object or this company that I'm building,
It shifts your mindset of how we actually market companies. I don't start and stop a thing. I'm continuously running ads and testing what ads are getting the cheapest CPC that is going to create the most impact, the most signups, the most conversion events for whatever the thing is that I'm building in marketing.
It's kind of how I see building a website or an app. It's not like you hit publish and you're done. It's a living and breathing entity.
I think it has to be thought like that. And like, that's the whole point. The only thing that isn't like this is really email and digital.
Quick break in the pod to tell you a little bit about Startup Empire. So Startup Empire is my private membership. where it's a bunch of people like me, like you, who want to build out their startup ideas. Now they're looking for content to help accelerate that. They're looking for potential co-founders.
They're looking for tutorials from people like me to come in and tell them, how do you do email marketing? How do you build an audience? How do you go viral on Twitter? All these different things. That's exactly what Startup Empire is. And it's for people who
want to start a startup, but are looking for ideas, or it's for people who have a startup, but just they're not seeing the traction that they need. So 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, pretty malleable. You can always adjust it. Email is the only thing that we have. And we have, you know, internal processes where it's like, Our rule is three people have to touch the copy before it's sent. Like three people have to proof it basically so that we get like, you know, is this just checks, right?
Because we can't take that back. But that's one of the few things that you can't, you know, you can't take back in this digital realm. So with that in mind, it's like, okay, well, how do I do more? And I think that's the game that's happening. Like if you look at short form social right now, This is the game. Like I just got off a call with like a TikTok shop agency owner.
And she's like, yeah, like literally all we're thinking about is volume. Like the best affiliates that we're working with, they're doing like, you know, 10X videos that the lower performing affiliates are. Because it's just a surface area game. Like if I do, you know, thinking about it as a batting average, like if I hit 300, right? Which is like decent.
And I go up to the plate, but I only swing once. Like strong likelihood, I don't even touch the ball. But if I swing 10 times, I get on base, right? And it's the same idea with the amount of content, the amount of stuff that we're doing. And I think that there's this,
even in the digital space, a shift that's like starting to happen in people's, like if you talk to older brands, they're like, no, we only have one Instagram account. It's like, that's old school at this point. That is like an old way to think about how this should actually be done. Like we publish, you know, a blog post a week. Like, are you kidding me? What's a blog post? It's crazy, man.
So yeah.
Anyway. So can we, I'm sure people are listening to this and they're like, okay, I buy that. But like, tactically. How do you do it? How do you do it? Yeah, totally.
Do you want to start with B2B or consumer?
I want to start with B2B, but you know what also has a B in it is beer. And I don't know if you have an empty mug in there. No, I have stuff in here still, shockingly. That is shockingly. Okay. Well, if you do need more beer, we have one ice cold right there for you. Amazing. I appreciate you.
Yeah. So let's start with B2B. So how do you grow a B2B company? Framework that I use is pretty straightforward and it's evolving always, but this is like, you know, the tactical things that you can try to do. So first off, smaller target audience. So it's a lot of the times it's like 50,000 people that you're trying to get in front of.
So first thing, go scrape every one of their emails and you can use tools. You know, there's thousands of these out there. I mean, you can just use LinkedIn if you really want to, but you can go use something like Apollo.io. I think it's like $99 a month to extract like 10,000 emails out of it. It's absolutely crazy. You can do the filtering that you need for the industry.
Once you have those emails, at that point, you've identified really your customers. Now it's like, how do I get in front of them? Every place they spend like time online. and also in the physical space.
So I'm just gonna like run through all the things that I've seen work in the past and people can pull out the different plays from this playbook that also all add to the same idea of like, how do I like make this company famous within this category? So you take those emails, I would first go and I would import them into Google ads.
I would import them into Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, any of the places that people are spending time online. You do a customer match list. It's gonna find, it depends on the channel, but like Facebook ads, as an example, you're gonna find probably like 30 to 40% of those emails get matched. So it's not the whole list that you pulled, But it's still a percentage of them.
So then you go, you can run ads to those people. So you turn on ads, they're running indefinitely in the background. At this point, I would do UGC AI avatar ads. That's like talking to the pain points that they're experiencing.
How do you do that?
Like what tools do you use? Yeah. So the tools that we're using right now is, hey, Jen, just because the quality is the best. I personally, as like the founder, go make a version of yourself that's showing up in these ads because you're going to make yourself famous through these ads to your target audience. Right. And so like make a digital clone of yourself. So hey, Jen is the avatar.
Use 11 labs as the voice. That's just what we're seeing be the best currently. And then do like 100 different variations of this ad. So talking, you know, different hooks, different settings, different backgrounds, different content, different pain points that you're hitting.
you run all those ads against each other, and then based off of what is the best performing, so the lowest CPC typically, you're gonna then allocate all of your ad budget there, right? So say 80% goes to those best performing, 20% is always running in the background doing testing. As soon as you find a better performing variant, put that into the better for, to the, to the campaign that has 80%.
So this is just like a classic, like alpha beta, the campaign is what they would call it structure. We were having something that's always in testing. And the majority of that, that spend is going to that, that best performer. So 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 like you raise money, like that's the game you're playing, right? Like you just signed on for this. And if you're not like about that, Probably not the right game personally. This is my opinion, right? It just means nothing. Take it all with a grain of salt. But I think that that is what it's coming down to. And there's totally different ways to do this.
Like you move silence and everybody has their own play. But like, you want to raise more money? You want to make your next round way easier? Like make yourself famous. It's all 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 like grow the Instagram account of the CEO and also like the company.
And then use that as a leverage point because all of the people that were in like, you know, investing in health tech were like, look, they literally were like inbounding. Like, how are you doing this? And it's like, you know, behind the scenes it's, to 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 like, I'm the founder of XYZ, right? So there's a story there. People buy from people, not brands. 100%.
you want to get your first, whatever, a hundred customers for a thousand customers, it's a great leverage point. Like it's just a lever you can pull down on.
It beats, hey, I'm an AI avatar. Let me tell you about my business.
Totally. The AI avatar, it's like the angle you have to come from it with that is like problem solution orientation with storytelling format. So it's like pain point, Like I was experienced. I mean, all you're doing is just the hero journey cycle, right? Like I had this problem and then I discovered, you know, I went on this discovery journey and I ended up here now and I'm better.
Like it's, it's, we're just telling the same story over and over again in different places, but. That's the first layer of this. Build these ads, same emails. You're then going to go and you're going to cold email every one of them. So you're going to use a tool. Right now, what we're seeing be successful is something like MailReef.
Basically, what they do is they spin up a server that's an AWS server that's specialized for cold email sending. you can send like 4,000 or sorry, you can send 50,000 cold emails from one of these servers for about $400 a month right now. Smart lead account or a instantly AI about $89. So you can get whatever that is about a 50,000. What is smart?
What is a smart lead?
Yeah. Yeah. So smart lead is a cold email sending software. Basically how it functions is you can have multiple email accounts that are, um, put into Smart Lead. So there's really three types of email, in my opinion. Everybody has different views on this. There's transactional email. So email that's sent from the product. There's email marketing or newsletter email.
So it's like, you know, basically doing Say, for example, like product updates or like stuff that's happening in e-commerce, it would be like product sales or something like that. And then the other form of email is cold email. So cold email is a little bit different than the other two. So transactional email, typically I would suggest sending from the core domain of the app.
The newsletter I would send from its own separate domain. Why you're doing this is because you're trying to create domain isolation so that if one of the domains basically gets flagged for spam, compromised, whatever, because you're sending or you're being aggressive. then you're not going to affect the product negatively.
If you need those transactional emails, for example, for password resets, I see this all the time again with early stage companies where they like are sending from all the same domain. They end up sending from, you know, cold emails from their core domain. It's a classic, right?
And what ends up happening is that they basically like they nuke their core domain and suddenly their transactional emails are going to spam and they can't figure out how to get them out. So what SmartMe Lead does, it allows for you to have multiple inboxes that you can send from. MailReef is a server that manages those inboxes. You can spin those up.
So for example, you can do an infrastructure where I buy 30 domains and then I make five different inboxes for those 30 domains. Those inboxes are all sending from the same name. So for example, Cody Schneider, but it would be, you know, Cody at x.com, Cody at y.com, codyschneider at y.com, cschneider at y.com, all these different variations.
So that whole list that you just scraped, you're gonna go and you're gonna cold email every one of them. Super simple on the email side. You're just gonna talk about the problem solution orientation, just like the ad that you did, exact same way. And you're gonna hit that list both with the cold email side and then also with the ad side, right?
So if we're touching them in these two different places simultaneously, The cold email piece of this, like what you'll end up seeing is like, you're going to hit this inbox. Percentage of them are going to respond back more often than not. They're going to see these ads three months later and be like, oh, yeah, there's that company. I have this problem now.
They're going to go and they're going to go back to their email. They're going to search in their email. They're going to use it as a search engine. and click on that and come back as a lead.
So like, I am of the opinion, I'm trying to land as much email as possible in an inbox as I can, because what it does is again, it makes more surface area and you can hit these same leads from different, I mean, the thing that kills me, especially with early stage founders is they're like, well, I don't want to burn this audience. It's like, dude, they don't care.
Like they don't care about you at all. Like to convince somebody to care about you is so hard. It is impossible.
like so you can't really burn them like unless you're doing spam right like but it's like you're not you're you're trying to provide value to them right and everybody's like oh that cold email doesn't work it's absolute like bullshit it 100% works i gotta be honest today we had a conversation like with my executive team and partners and quote unquote cold email doesn't work
I believe it.
I think a lot of people think that, but they're approaching it in a way that doesn't like address the problem that that, like it's the smaller you get in your audience. Like if I go and I'm, for example, I worked with this company, they do like, it's like dock management for like shipping yards, right? Super small set of controllers, but their messaging was so specific.
Like here's this problem that you face on a daily basis, dock check-in. If we could automate this for you, is that interesting? Dude, like one out of five people responded, yes. Can we talk to you? Like that, it's just hitting it from the angle that actually like provides value. Now there's different spaces.
Like what you guys do, like probably it's way more, you know, there's a lot more competition.
Yeah. I mean, like we were talking about, you know, for example, LCA, which is like our design agency that only works with like a dozen clients every year. And our target is like CEO of a Fortune 250 company. Right. So it's kind of like the way you get in front of, you know, the CEO of call it Shopify, let's say, maybe not cold email. Totally agree.
But I've also seen inbounds happen like that. And if it is a pain point and a real problem that they're facing and it's top of mind, and this is like the hardest part.
It's possible, right?
It's totally possible.
You can hear these stories all the time. But as a founder, you... There's only so many bets that you can place, right? A thousand percent. A thousand percent.
But I think that like, if you're, you know, want to play at this like game, this level, that's like this like higher piece, 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's like focused on, I move on to the next thing.
This is how I think that you actually like grow companies on an exponential level. It's like, you're layering on growth curve after growth curve. You can grow linearly really effectively if you're just doing Facebook ads and cold email.
But if I layer on, hey, to that same email list, I'm going to make a podcast where I interview people from the industry about their business and the insights that they have. And then I'm going to send it out a newsletter to those same people that I'm doing cold email to. 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, that I can put on all these other places that we're running ads, but I can do an organic version of that as well. I'm also going and following all of those people on all of those accounts. I'm, you know, inviting them for connections.
When you layer all of 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 be like, I love your show. Like, I love what you're doing with your company. And this is a nobody with like five people on their team. Right. So, um, yeah, but yeah, to take a step back. So,
Doing the cold email piece, you've layered that on. Now moving to the next part of this, how do you build content out that is going to be valuable to your industry, to your audience? Just talk to your customers and record it. Like you're already having these customer conversations if you're running your company right.
You're getting feedback from them, you're understanding their pain points, their problems. Take those, make it a little bit of a more formal setting, record it, and you just turn that into a podcast that you then send out to that entire list. So that email list that you just scraped, you go and you sequence that into an email sending service.
I mean, you can basically do this with any of them, but you just import 200 a day, have the subject line be... Podcasts, whatever the name of the episode is. Hey name, the newest episode of XYZ podcast is live. One paragraph summary, five key takeaways. We've done this for countless companies. Which tools do you use?
Yeah.
So MailerLite is one that we use. We also use Beehive. We've also used in the past like SendGrid. They're all kind of functioned in the same way. But what we found is that you can when it's this content is industry specific to them, then it's providing value to them and they look at it as educational content. Right. And it's way more approachable than doing that cold email.
That's very transactional. Like if I can do X for you, do you like is that valuable contrast? It's like this top of funnel thing. And what this allows for you to do is you can build yourself into a media company, which is it creates this leverage point within the industry. So like at Rupa, this is something that we did because we saw that we were a small startup, right?
We wanted to go and negotiate with these huge lab companies. They wouldn't even talk to us, right? We made a podcast. It got 180,000 downloads a month after six months. It was top 20 medical podcasts in the US. I don't even know where it is now. I think it's in like top 100 for health, which is an insane category, right? So at that point, they were inbounding me like, yo, can we come on the show?
And it's like, actually, we want to do a deal with you. We'll give you these media kit like placements. If you do it at these price points, we negotiated down the percentages that we were going to have to pay them on fees because we had owned media that 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. And so it turns it from a cost center into a profit center. So same thing. Did this while we were at Rupa. We then took that and we went to companies that were in the health space and sold ad placements for the podcast. and also within the newsletter.
Athletic Greens is one of the companies that we worked with. It was subsidizing the entire growth team's cost, okay? It was basically making it. So you're talking about a fast, like 20% month-over-month growth compounding startup that is subsidizing the cost of their growth off of the media that they're producing, basically. So you want to talk about like, yeah, what is it, a negative CAC?
Like this is literally the playbook for it. How much does that fire you up? I live for this, right? Like, I mean, you can see me. I'm over here like.
Well, I see like, you know, your, you know, your main artery just exploding. I'm like, is this guy going to get, you know, 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, It almost feels too good to be true.
It sounds too good to be true. But this works. I've done this now with multiple companies in multiple industries, in multiple spaces. Again, the same tactics. Use this to make a music artist... like famous, right? That's crazy when you think about it like that. Like the fact that you can just do these things, these activities, and it can like make a person famous or make a company famous.
And it just makes you realize like how flex, you know, how much you can bend the world, like bend the reality. And it's the classic quote that I feel like is going viral right now. Like you can just do stuff.
But you can do, you can just do stuff. And it's, and I feel like everyone basically in, let's talk about B2B should be creating a media business.
A hundred percent. And it's not new, right? So there's this company, it's called Arrow Electronics, $6 billion market cap, huge. Nobody talks about it. Okay. They own basically every electronics blog, magazine, anything that you can imagine related to this. They resell electronics components. I don't even know what you're talking about right now. Exactly.
It's like we're talking about like, you know, the tiny little like cameras, like whatever sensors. Exactly.
Yeah.
Doesn't matter. So their whole play, how are they that big of a company is because they have this huge media arm that is functioning in the background.
Red Bull is actually a media company. You know who else is also a media company? Y Combinator. A thousand percent. Nobody talks about it. They're a media company.
It's crazy to me that every VC doesn't have a podcast.
YC is a media company that sells venture capital. A thousand percent. A 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 did Lightcone and all of this, right? So it's going to be weekly talks about AI. All it is is derivatives of what the founders are saying from the front lines. I think that's what's hilarious. But they're just like talking to their, like their customer is founders.
They're talking to their founders and they're reiterating and regurgitating what they're hearing from the people that 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 yeah, anyways, so you built the podcast. that's running, you're growing it. And now suddenly you're like, oh, I have all this video podcast. I can turn it into literally everything else that I need for my business.
So I can extract all of the pain points that my customer is talking about. I can talk, I can turn that, take that show. I turn it into a transcript. I make a blog post from it. I make 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 like the whole point behind it. Cause I was doing this for companies and we saw the AI like progress that was happening. We're like, Oh, like I used to need a team of five people to accomplish this. Like I now do this, you know, one person who's cracked can handle this. Right.
It's just a VA over the top of this can do this. So yeah, You upload it, makes clips, writes your show notes, does all of the media assets that you would need or make. You take those, you go and you schedule them out across all the platforms that all of your customers are spending time online at. So whether that's LinkedIn or Instagram, whatever that is.
And you then can grow those media accounts. And so again, same thing, a bunch of tactical stuff you can do. Greg actually has a great video on this. I'm like, what are the opportunities on LinkedIn right now? Short form content is just blowing up. If you just take shorts that were working on like TikTok or Instagram reels and put them on LinkedIn, it will go viral.
By the way, I have a great video on it based on the insight that you gave me. Yeah. So now you have your own take.
I thought it was like really insightful. But the so that's a piece of it. Other tactical things that you can do on Instagram, you can run Instagram only ads with a call to action in the caption to follow this account for more content like this. Follow like at this account, like literally put the ad in there.
So when you do that, what it looks like from an ad standpoint, when it shows up on Instagram, you do it for impressions. So you're just going for as much reach as possible. we've done this where we did like basically us-based targeting. If the content resonates with the person, a certain percentage of them clicks the ad, they then go to the profile and they follow up.
Certain percentage follows the profile. So like, this is how we grew this like musicians. Instagram is entirely through that process. We were getting followers at one point at like 30 cents a piece. And so this is just this way where you can work back into the number. Like, Oh, I want to hit a hundred thousand followers on Instagram. We need to spend X amount of money.
Literally 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. We'll probably talk about that in consumer 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 the ad. We're trying to get it for free. And the closer your ad is to content on the platform, the less you're going to have to pay for it. That is going to be the overarching theme throughout all of this. Why do we try 100 different variations of the ad?
We're trying those 100 different variations because we're trying to identify the piece of content that doesn't feel like an ad. It feels like content, but it still accomplishes the goal that we're trying to get to happen, which is revenue in some form, you know, or some leading indicator of revenue in the future. So you build all these channels out and suddenly, you know, 12 months pass.
Let's break down what you've just done there. You've got this massive ad remarketing that's happening from everybody that touched the website. You also have top of funnel of those people coming in. You know, they're your target customer. You now have every one of those on an email list that you send out on a weekly basis because you're hosting the podcast.
You're running ads on the podcast that's promoting the show. You're negotiating better deals because you have this media on the podcast. You also have all of these social channels posting on a daily basis across all the platforms, showing up in the lives of your customer day after day, right? So combine all those things together and like,
It's done. It's crazy how few companies do what you're talking about.
I think it's just a lot of different things that are happening simultaneously. I left out a cold email in there that that part of it is actually critical. So I want to throw that back. But the challenge is like... There's just so many components that are going on. But in reality, it's like, this isn't hard stuff. It's just grindy stuff. Right. And like for most companies, like they don't want it.
Like they can't sit down and invest 12 months into this. Right. Like, and this is the job, like, you know, we do podcasting as a service. That's like one of our things. And like the first 90 days, nothing looks like it's happening. Like you're, you're just trusting the process, man. But then suddenly it's like, oh, we're at a 15K sub, like on our email list.
And like, I'm feeling a little bit something there, right? We're with the company, right? That we did some work, we've been doing work for for the last, I think we're at like 18 months with them. They have a list now of 130,000, okay? Every send that we do, it drives 10,000 clicks to their website. We do two sends a week. So in a month we drive, 40,000 clicks, or 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 to them, they're in the life sciences category. They're paying $5 a click on LinkedIn to 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, is what you traditionally would pay.
You're paying $450 for that. It's a cent a click is basically what it's translating into. Insane. That's in 18 months, 18 months of running this. Are you kidding me? Why aren't like, why, why would you be doing anything else? This is the game. This is the, like, this is, this is the opportunity. And like, this is all evolving, right?
All of these like tactical things, but like all you have to do to be a part of this is just be a practitioner, like just do the work. And like, you're going to find these, these arbitrage. Also all of these people that are in this game, they also all share it. If they're actually good. Like I have friends that it's like, I'll just get a random call and it's like, cool. We crack Twitter ads.
Like, here's what we're doing. And it's like, what have you seen, right? Like I have multiple, and it's because there's so few people that are doing this. I have a friend right now. He's growth hacking, basically a blog for a startup.
They're in a traditional category, like one of the big 10 software categories think, you know, anything that like Adobe or Microsoft or, you know, any of these like old traditional software companies or All right, so there's like nobody that he knows that's doing this. I don't really know anybody else that's doing versions of this, right?
But they just took their traffic from like, I mean, we helped on the design of kind of what their whole tactical, like what they were gonna do from their content strategy to do this, but they took their traffic from a thousand clicks a month up to 250,000 clicks a month in under six months. I mean, so the opportunities change, but it's a lot of the same tricks, right?
It's like a lot of the same like fundamentals that are being applied there. And like, we didn't even, I'm talking about the media stuff. We didn't even talk about like the organic plays that you can do, all the social stuff that you can do on YouTube. You can layer all of these pieces on, but like when you have this long form, like source material,
Also like your podcast is probably the biggest driver of your inbound leads now, right? Like just, is it just from like a trust standpoint? And the only reason I say this is like, if I have somebody sit down with me for an hour a week and they listen to me talk for an hour a week for two months, like they just spent eight hours with me asynchronously.
We were, right before we recorded this, we were talking about some wins from the podcast in terms of like, like a revenue perspective, because we don't sell ads on the podcast. And we had a lead that came in, listens to the podcast, Fortune 500 company. 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.
And we did, you know, incredible work for them. And the team is amazing. And they, you know, they were happy.
And I'm not saying the product isn't critical.
Right. Yeah.
But like bad product is, It wins all the time because it has better marketing, right? So if you have a good product and good marketing on top of it, like you're going to, there's no way you're not going to win.
Yeah. And I think it's also like when you, when you, you know, I'm not saying we own this category, but I'm saying that when people who listen to this show are like, I need to build my ideas, who do I think about? They're like, oh yeah, Greg from the Startup Ideas podcast. You own that mental real estate.
Mental real estate. And there's no way that they're gonna ever, like somebody's, it's gonna be so hard for them to remove you from that part of their mind, right? Like name three chapstick brands for me, like three like lip balm brands. Dude, to be honest, I've never put on chapstick in my life.
Okay, so most people, they give like two spaces in their mind. What, Chapman, is that one? Not even. Dude, have you seen these lips? These are, couldn't be more moist. Crusty. I'm not saying kiss me or anything, but you know.
No, but so most people, they only designate so much space in their mind for a brand category, right? Like a lot of the times it's like two to three brands is all they're going to give. So you're fighting over that space, right? And so that's why like people will go and they're like, oh, we have to, why did HubSpot invest in inventing a new category inbound marketing?
Why did they call it inbound marketing? It's because nobody else is going to be able to ever unlodge them from this idea. They created new mental real estate in the mind. 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 way easier is find an idea that people already have that's common.
You attach yourself to it and you cannibalize it and you're going to make it evolve into a new thing. You can always morph it into something else, but it's very hard to make new space in somebody's mind.
So this is the B2B playbook. It's the B2B. Now we got to talk about the B2C playbook. Yeah, it's B2C. But before we do that, I got to pee. I got to pee too. I'm a drinker. You're like, I got to pee too. I've wet myself. All right, go for it. So... Consumer. Consumer. Yeah, so consumer, different animal. First of all, don't go into consumer. First of all, don't do it.
I say this and we like know people killing it right now in consumer. Um, did you tweet something about that? Like you're like, yeah, dude, I had this tweet forever ago. It's a, it's a running, a running tweet.
What is it again? Pro tip. Don't do, don't do D to C. No, I, I, You have to be unbelievable at marketing to win in consumer. It's just so much more competitive and the biology and the mechanics of it function differently. You just- But if you win at consumer, there's nothing better. Oh, 100%. I mean, I think everybody wants it too.
Like I've, you know, there's this part of me that's like, it's like an ego trip, you know? Like until you've done it and like had some success in it, like are you even, you know, pro? Like are you even playing pro ball? Totally. It's like the boss level. Yeah, 100%. But anyway, so consumer, different animal. The biggest thing, and like right now, I feel like the game has entirely changed.
But what we're seeing to be successful, there's some crossover. First thing that you do, like... You need to have a huge TAM, right? Total, like, you know, huge total addressable market that you can go after.
That's the only way that consumer works because you have to make content that is going to be like broad enough that like a large enough part, like subset of the population can basically be targeted through it. So for example, like we're doing this app in women's health space. They're like one in three women have this problem. And so like, we can just target like all women, right?
And you know, 30% of them have that issue. And like what we're seeing with this is like right now we're getting ebook downloads at like 40 cents. It's crazy. Right. And we can work our way back into this whole thing. And then we upsell into this product. But, and you can use AI to create ebook. A hundred percent. Yeah. A hundred percent. And write these.
It's so like, but the challenge is again, finding these seams that are able to be
been like gone after because it's so competitive it's so 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 um so first i think is like you have to like build an application like number one with this this play is like to build an application that uh like people actually want that's like a large enough audience
I think there is an opportunity though right now. I mean, we're seeing this play out with a lot of these like consumer apps. Like AI has changed kind of the fabric of what we can do with these consumer applications. And these apps that have like a single thing that they do, and if they do it well, that's how people are buying it.
A tactical thing that you can do is charge $7.99 a month or $7.99 a week. which translates into like $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.
talk through the actual like kind of marketing process. So the first thing that I would do is you go again, Facebook ads, TikTok ads, probably the two places you're going to do a conversion event on the signup. It'll 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.
And when I say action, what I'm talking about is like literally the user doing that thing. So you run those ads, again, all these different variations. You're going to test those against each other. And what is most effective and like what people are doing more and more is they're creating all of these versions of ads with influencers.
So like going and hiring, for example, five UGC creators or 10 UGC creators. You can get creators right now where they do like a post a day. It'll cost you about a grand a month. They do a video a day and they... Cross posted across all the accounts.
So what they're going to do is they're going to basically turn into this like test bed for you of the types of content that is most likely to go viral on that platform related to the product. Right. A lot of the times it's like hook and then some type of pain point. And then the product is the hero within that journey of that, like, you know, that piece of content.
Again, when I when I say an ad like what we're trying to do is find an ad that doesn't feel like an ad that feels like content. It feels like it's it's it's providing this like greater value. It's like entertaining people. And that's that cross section of like entertainment and education. That's like actually how you sell people in my mind. But you're running these ads.
You're also doing the UGC side of this. The other strategies that you can do and that people are crushing it on right now is you go and you spin up 10 different TikTok accounts and you create variations of the best performing UGC content that the creators made for you. You take those, you remix those with AI, use ChatGPT to change the scripts. Hey, Jen, to do the videos.
do use 11 labs to do the the audio and then chop those in up into uh basically shorts right you can do like cap cut to do a green screen removal background of the ai avatar put whatever the app is behind it they're now talking over this and you've got basically um your first uh kind of like top of funnel touch of the product so
A lot of the times when people see these, what they'll do is they go and Google the thing, right? So critical, pick a name that nobody else has. It's like a huge piece of this so that you're not competing on the front page of Google with all these other companies that are similar names. When they touch that website, what you're going to do is you're gonna go and pixel them.
So pixel, what that means is basically you can install the Facebook pixel, the LinkedIn pixel, or any of these other apps. Again, since consumer is probably gonna be Facebook and it's gonna be TikTok and maybe Google, those are the only three places that they're probably gonna spend time online.
When they touch the website and they get pixeled, what that allows for you to do is you can run ads to them indefinitely anytime that they're on those platforms in the future. So again, you're just building this kind of... Funnel. Yeah, in a way, right? But I think that it's... When you think about it growing, though... The F word. Yeah, exactly.
But I think that a funnel feels like it's like this...
this finite thing like what the more people that touch the site the bigger that audience gets and then it creates like again that like a larger mass that has more influence the larger the audience is the more likely it is that i can do a customer match list to that same audience that's touching the website that's doing the install that's like actually like you know putting the product on their phone
On that website, have a way for them to sign up or install the application. A lot of the times people will put like an email there as well so that you can do an email nurture. Layer on that email nurture, that's just like upselling them into the product. And those are going to be kind of like the things that you can do internally.
The next thing that we do see done is basically like influencer outreach at scale to like, how do I basically create some type of affiliate play? It's a classic playbook that I've seen like other companies run, especially when it's like prosumer applications, you can go and scrape, YouTube search keyword that's in within your category.
You can find all the channels, all of the creators that are specific to that category. You can scrape all of their emails from YouTube. Okay. Yes. So they have in their bio, there's emails and you can just scrape them all.
You go and then you do cold email like we talked about. Actually I said what, but then I realized, damn, I think we have... Like on our YouTube. Totally. An email. It's a contact email, right? To reach out.
Yeah. So you can use that. Go and scrape them all. And then you can do cold outreach to them. Ask them what their pricing is. They're going to come back and they're going to be like, hey, my pricing is X. A percentage of them are going to come back. Yeah, a percentage of them. We'll say, whatever, 10%, 20%.
Come back, they say my pricing is X. And then what you'll do is start to look at average views versus the cost that they're suggesting. And then you're going to be able to build a table where you're going to find discrepancies with the pricing of the market. It's going to be
market that is not liquid like it's it's it's not not perfect an imperfect mark it's an imperfect market and what that allows for is for you to find arbitrage when you find that arbitrage you go and you work with those creators typically the structure of the deal that we see be successful you go and buy like a three video package with them one doesn't make sense often from an impact standpoint
What we found is like three to be kind of that sweet spot where it's like their audience starts to trust you enough because you've talked about it enough. And then you do an affiliate commission with them. So it's like 30 percent. So you're paying them on a per video basis. So I'm going to buy a three pack of videos for fifteen hundred dollars.
And then I'm going to also give you an affiliate commission on the website. whatever you bring in the door for us on a recurring commission payout. And what that does is creates the stickiness. Cause naturally when they talk about this, what you're going to see is competitors will go and clone the product. And then it turns into this whole game.
But if they have, you know, on a monthly basis, 45 grand or whatever that ends up being like, and I've seen this with, with some friends companies where it's like these creators that they're partners with, they're making so much money from them that it's like, if, if, 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. So that same strategy, you can also take that. You can go to Instagram as an You can use a tool like igleads.io. You can go and you can scrape people that are in specific hashtags or categories or have specific keywords in their titles. You can scrape the emails from those accounts.
Again, do the same like bulk reach out, same thing on TikTok, same thing on any of these others. And so that is like kind of the core fundamentals of the flywheel.
100%.
And so 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... muck around with all of these creators. Why would you even go through that process? It's because you're paying a 50% discount, basically, for that CPM. That's all this game is.
It's like, how do I get as many eyeballs on this thing for as cheap as possible? So I think then the other strategy, depending on the category that you're in, is you can go and you can do programmatic SEO for the product. So like Cal AI, like if I was them, I would all day long be looking at like diet, you know, plans, nutrition plans, you know. How to lose weight. Calorie counts.
There's thousands, hundreds of thousands of these keywords. So the strategy there is you basically like as the app starts to get domain authority. So domain authority is basically the trust that a website has on the Internet. How that's measured by Google, like how that's that's basically factored in is the backlinks from other websites that are trusted going to your site. Right.
And what is a backlink? It's literally like when you click a link on one website and you end up on another website, that is a backlink. And there's different types of backlinks. The two core ones are no follow and do follow. Do follow are what you want. No follow are typically social links. Do follows are more valuable.
No follows, you can kind of do some things with them, but we won't get into the details. for this, but as the site though, naturally starts to get more and more traction, it's just gonna naturally build backlinks.
As soon as you get to a domain authority of 40-ish plus, a lot of the times you can start to rank for a lot of these long tail keywords that are lower keyword difficulty, which means that they're just like less competitive. Process, super straightforward. go scrape what's ranking on page one for that target keyword that's related to your product.
You then take that all, you know, all the content, all that is ranking on page one, scrape it, put it into a context window, create a blog post outline for the target keyword based off of that context. Use one of these AI like,
tools to to basically write that blog post what we do is we have it write an outline and then we write it section by section and we find that to be the best quality and also like best readability and um also from a uh like if you do that like what i just described like it's all those like ai humanizers it's gonna pass every single one of those are all bullshit it's so funny to me um but
Anyways, or sorry, not the humanizers, the like AI, yeah, the checkers or whatever. The humanizers kind of make sense. So what we do, you go and you publish, you know, whatever, say for example, 10,000 articles, like doing this process. Human doesn't touch them in the beginning.
If you're doing, being very aggressive and doing this growth hack, like growth hacky way, that's like, if you're more comfortable with risk, this is the way to do it. If you're not, have a human then go in and do edits on top of this before they go live on the site.
If you publish 10,000 of them, strategy basically is go, once the page gets traffic, as soon as you get one session, then a human comes in and they do the edits. We have an SEO specialist, for example, or a content writing specialist that's on staff. Their whole job is they're basically rewriting anything that's got seen by humans.
So there's two factors of getting content to rank in my experience. It's like what Google wants to rank. And then like, is the human actually reading this and consuming this content? And so you have to find that cross section between the two of them. When you find that cross section, that's when you get like a page to basically stay on page one.
So on that page, so they search, you know, we'll say whatever again, how to lose weight or all these like long tail variations. We land on that page. You then have a call to action after the first paragraph that's like sign up for the app for free. Every frame, you want at least a call out, one call out to be seen within every frame of that scroll. So on mobile or on
desktop and then also have a pop-up that occurs with the same call to action, but that just like takes over the whole screen that occurs at like a 25 to a 50% scroll rate. So as they scroll down that page, it like gets in their face, creates that sign up action to happen. This also does is when they touch your website again, you're pixeling all of them.
So you've already gotten, you know that they have an interest in this thing. They go into your remarketing funnel and that's how you can layer that on. Yeah. So yeah, those are kind of the plays that I'm seeing be effective right now. Just for CalAI, I mean, there's a great episode literally breaking down exactly what they're doing on the organic social side.
I have a friend that's building this app that's like, It's basically a sober tracking app. One of the most insane growth trajectories I've ever seen on consumer. It's like they built in like an AI. The app's called Sunflower Sober. And they built in a AI basically like sponsor app. And the engagement with it is unbelievable, like crazy.
And their entire acquisition strategy is like through Facebook at a price that actually makes sense. Right. And not just Facebook that, you know, I think they're running ads like basically everywhere. But it's funny, like everybody's obsessed with short form social right now. There's still so like there's still so much opportunity. And.
these traditional ad channels for these, it's just figuring out, you know, like what is that new thing that people are looking for?
So anyway, yeah. Dude, these are, this is, this is gold. You're an angel. Live to serve. Live to serve.
Thank you guys always.
Thank you. Thank you. This is, this is going to change some lives. So thank you. I hope so. For, uh, Laying it out for people.
Yeah. If they have questions, let me know, reach out. I'm happy to help however I can.
So Cody Schneider exec. Yeah, that's it. All right. Well, we'll throw that in the show notes. Cool. Appreciate it. I'll see you in a bit. Oh yeah.