Hey everyone, welcome to The Next Wave Podcast. I'm Matt Wolfe, I'm here with Nathan Lands and today we've got an exciting episode for you. Live from Hubspot Inbound 2024, so a little bit of a different special episode. We don't normally do these in front of an audience. But we're going to talk about the AI-powered growth that we've used for our own businesses in both Twitter,
our podcast, our newsletter, the various platforms that we have. We're going to share some tools, we're going to share some workflows, should be a fun session, it's just going to be me and Nathan sort of having an off-the-cuff conversation. Super quick question, how many tabs you have opened right now? If you're like me, it's a lot. And if you're running a business, it's a lot more. And with all these tabs, you're spending more time searching through data and less time growing your business.
But Hubspot's customer platform brings all your tools into a single, powerful place that your team can use together. So close those tabs, it's business growing time. Visit Hubspot.com to get started today. But yeah, let's go ahead and start by talking a little bit about YouTube growth. So I do have a YouTube channel. Right now I'm hovering around 640,000 subscribers.
The channel is really focused on AI, but surprise, surprise. I actually used the AI quite a bit to actually grow the YouTube channel. So some of the ways that I've leveraged AI to grow my YouTube channel. Number one is probably the most obvious way that I've used AI to grow my YouTube channel is the thumbnails. So all of my thumbnails are created with AI right now.
And I'll try to quickly walk through the workflow of how I make some of those thumbnails. And they're awesome. That's like the first way I noticed you with like these crazy AI art thumbnails. So the way I've actually done that is I use a tool called stable diffusion for the AI art and stable diffusion has all sorts of like plugins and add-ons that you can use it use with it.
And one of the add-ons is a tool called Dreambooth. And Dreambooth actually lets you upload about 20 images of your face. It learns your face. And then you can go into stable diffusion and say generate an image of Matt Wolfe in a field of strawberries. And it will generate that image.
And it will generate an AI version of my face. I'd say about 75% of the time they look horrible. 25% of the time they actually look decent. And that's kind of how I generate my thumbnails. One of the ways that I like to do it now to get a little bit more dialed in with those thumbnails is I like to go and use either tool like mid-journey or Leonardo.
They make a little bit higher quality images in my opinion. So I'll generate an image of like guys standing in a field of strawberries to go back to that same example. And I'll get that image generated. And then I'll pull it into stable diffusion. And I'll sort of mask out my face and say, replace this face with my face. So I get the main image generated in a different AI image generator. That's awesome. And I ask out the face.
I'm going to ask you because the mid-journey obviously you can't put your face in there. So that's how you do it. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. So that's been one of the like biggest sort of like growth hacks I've had for my YouTube channel is I'd like to make these bright thumbnails. And a lot of times the prompts are like super bright, super colorful, man-stepping in a field of strawberries, strawberries, vibrant colors, really in greens, you know, things like that.
I try to make it as colorful as possible. I want these thumbnails to really, really ponte when people see them on on YouTube. I wanted to stay it out among all the rest of them. And mid-journey and Leonardo are the two best of that in my opinion. And so I use that sort of face swap technique. Now the other ways that I use AI is I really, really love using Claude from Enphobic for helping with like title generation.
And one of the things I like to do is I'll create my whole video. So I'll make a video that's explaining how to create a wood-shat-bot trained on your own information, something like that. I'll create a tutorial on how to do that. When I'm done making that tutorial, I'll cool it into a tool like Descript and get the whole transcription of that video.
I'll take that entire transcription, plug it in the Claude, and then say, help me come up with 10 titles that will grab a lot of attention based on this transcript. That works pretty well. It'll give me close.
Sometimes I'll change the words a little bit like the titles will be different. I know if I'd say that in real life. But for the most part it gets me close. It gets me a lot of ideas to use for those titles. And I'll use that as like the sort of rough draft, the beginning of that title ideation phase.
And so that's worked really, really well as well. Another thing you can do with Claude is they have this tool called Projects. And Projects lets you upload additional information into it that it can use as context. And so what I'll do is I'll go find other YouTube titles that I really like. It'll make a text file. And I will list out 30 different titles that I came across. And I'm like, this title works really well. This one got me to click. This is a really good title.
I pull all those titles into a text document and then upload those into a Claude project and then say, use these as examples of titles that have worked well. And then Claude will sort of do a decent job of finding titles that are sort of similar to the ones that I gave it as an example. I've done the same kind of thing with the Twitter. So you show it examples of things you like. Be so examples of things you don't like or have you.
Just things I like. I mean, I couldn't do that as well. You could just like in the same text file. Here's the titles that I like. Here's the titles that I really don't like. Use this information when creating new titles.
That kind of stuff works really, really well. I also use Claude for scripting. One of the ways that I use Claude for scripting that has been really effective is almost the same idea as the title generation idea where I will go and find maybe 10 to 15 different YouTube videos that I really like the flow of the video.
Like a beginning, a middle and end. And it's just a perfect flow. I watched the video. It grabbed my attention the whole video. I didn't want to click away. So what I'll do is on YouTube, you can grab the transcripts from those videos. I'll grab the transcripts from those like 15 different videos, pull each one individually into a Claude project and then tell it, this is the style of script I want to make for my video.
Make a video in the similar style and then I'll give it the topic. I'll say I want to talk about the new OpenAI 01 model. Write me a script about OpenAI 01 model. Here's some information about it. Write it in the style of the scripts that I uploaded. Do you modify it or do you just do what it says? No, I've modified it heavily. But it gives me that flow. What I'm really looking for is the flow. I don't need a word for word script. I don't actually read a script when I make my videos.
I'm going to go through this very often. I like the bullet points. I like how this stuff is. There's always a hook in the beginning to grab the attention. And then once you grab the attention, then you want to move on to showing what the end result is going to be. And then you want to move on to getting into the tutorial. And then you want to move into that flow of where you want the video to start and where you want it to end and the little bits in the middle.
And it sort of helps me find that arc of the video. And then I'll use that as the sort of rough draft outline for my video because I will upload information about the topic I want the video to be about. And it will sort of give me the beats to follow based on the scripts. Yeah, I wonder how many YouTubers know about all of these strategies because it seems like your team is way leaner.
Like for the size of your channel, I know other YouTubers who have like way larger teams. Yeah, for like the same quality output that you're doing. I have top one other person in my process who was making thumbnails for me for a little while. So it is very sort of teachable, duplicatable. Anybody can follow that flow. The shorts is the same flow. Yeah, so I will go and grab the transcripts of shorts.
Shorts is a brand new thing. I just started doing. I've done like 10 total shorts on my YouTube. I don't know what I think you said was Georgia allowing it. You're like kind of following what it says a little bit. Yeah, or is it a little bit more on the shorts? Yeah. And the reason I do that for shorts is because you've got to hit 59 seconds or less.
You've got to hit it like right on that time. Right. And so if I try to add lib too much, I tend to ramble. I mean, I've already been talking about my YouTube stuff for 10 minutes here. You're going on. Yeah, I'll keep going. So I kind of need a script to keep that 59 seconds or less on my YouTube shorts. Right. But if you go and find a short on YouTube that you really like, if you go and you see that YouTube.com slash shorts slash, you know, long string of letters and numbers.
Right. If you replace the word shorts with video, it'll actually take you to the video landing page instead of the short landing page. And you can grab the transcript from that page. So for shorts, I'll do that. I'll go and pull in transcripts for inspiration so that I know I'm hitting all the sort of beats that I want to hit throughout my video.
Have you tried to hit the faceless kind of YouTube stuff? Or do you think I have it? Yeah. But I do want to explore. Yeah. I was watching the the agent session yesterday. Yeah. And that really made me want to play around with some of that. See if I want to test it, put a video up on my channel where it's, I want to do the agent where it's my face. It sounds like my voice and then put some like B roll over it and then see if anybody notices. I don't think I'll do that for like all of my videos.
But I kind of want to test it. Just be like, is anybody called me out in the helicopters today? I generated version. Yeah. I think you know, I'm considering starting the AI video agency with Lauren.com. And the two guys I'm working with it on, they showed me a workflow yesterday using make.com. Yeah. Or we could like, script out an entire YouTube video and then use AI video to generate all of the stuff. And it's amazing.
I'm like, you probably could like grow a pre-lark channel. Oh, yeah. What's you get into so those make.com workflows? It gets really, really fun. But yeah, those are some of my main YouTube strategies that I've used AI to grow on YouTube. Yeah. But let's talk a little bit about Twitter because you've grown a pretty big following on Twitter as well. Yeah. I mean, so I mean, I was like a Twitter lurker for like five or six years.
Like I would use Twitter like mostly just read Twitter, you know, now X whatever. And I never really tweeted often. And then I still had like 5,000 followers just got it start ups and still come really in rate of cap, you know, raised VC funding and stuff. So I had like 5,000 to start with. And that started to really excited about AI. Obviously like writing my newsletter. And I was like, well, how do I grow the newsletter? Yeah.
I was like, OK, well, I guess you use Twitter and like share whatever you're learning about. And so I started doing that. And then quickly I learned that I could use AI in so many different ways to grow the Twitter.
Well, I'm it similar to what what you said, like I would I would teach to chat to be tea like what are the kind of Twitter threads that work like what are the kinds I like or the kinds I don't like. And it probably it would save me like two or three hours like doing threads. And I'm not as active right now.
I've been more focusing on getting our podcast going for the last five months. But when I was like doing it every day like I could consistently get at least 300,000 views on tweets every single day.
And it's how you use a guy to do that. Like what was the most of the work flow. Well, so what I would do I use this thing is not an AI tool. It's called a tweet hunter. It's like a Chrome extension. So I would use that. And then what tweet hunter would do is you can look at like who are the top people in your category.
Right. So it's like, OK, AI or freighters or whatever. You can look up those people and then you can see what are their top tweets ever. Right. So I would do that. And I would make a list like I hear the people I really want to not copy. But I like their style.
And so I would look at and I would look at their top one or two tweets. And I would put that into a chat to be tea and say here's the kind of tweets. I like right. I would use AI as an editor, not as like the writer because like the writer. I felt like there's only a few niche use cases where you can actually use it to like write the content. Right. I think it works a little bit better in LinkedIn. I'm not sure why very like the quality of the contents a little bit different.
I'm Twitter. I felt like you're writing the content for me didn't do that well. So I would write the content myself and then use it as an editor. And I felt like it's they mean probably like two hours or so because like editing Twitter's red to make it like a really go viral. Yeah.
I would be sitting in a coffee shop in Kyoto. Just sitting there. Okay. Look at it again. You look at the hook again. And then having the AI record is like showed all that and get feedback. It's taking so much time. And actually I felt like when I was doing it myself. I was getting a lot less use. And as soon as I started using AI as an editor, all was done like every time I tweeted goes viral. That's very. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
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Now you were telling me a story about in the ball, Robacon. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of things came from me growing on Twitter. I mean like in a way like very quickly I went for like 5,000 followers like 50,000 I think in like three months. Right. But you know lost up came from that like I went on TV two or three times to talk about AI. Elon must are responding to me. Yeah. Jeff Bezos followed both of us. Right. That's kind of how we connect is because Jeff Bezos saw one of my tweets and followed both of us. Well, I think it was a tweet that you put. It was like here's the people to follow in AI. And you listen to a bunch of people.
And my name was one of them. Yeah. Jeff Bezos just followed that whole list that the idea for that thread came from AI. So I was like, here's the kind of stuff that's the other people doing in different categories. Right. I do that in the AI category. Yeah. Like, oh, here's the top people to follow or here. You know, and those kind of, you know, threads don't get as many views. But they would like a lot of people I would mention they would all follow me.
Yeah. Right. So in terms of the the the ball, that was that was the one use case where I found with the Twitter that you could actually use AI to actually create the content. To give people context and the ball rabbit on the founder of angel list in Silicon Valley. He's one of the most famous people in Silicon Valley. He did a great podcast episode with Joe Rogan, one of my favorite podcast episodes ever because it talks all about like everything from business to like life.
Right. How to live a good life. And so I really just like fed the transcript of that episode into chat to be tea. And so he in it. And I already knew like what kind of threads I like and all that sort of had that context. And I just fed it to transcript. And I said, make me a thread. Put that into Twitter. And yeah, you know, I got like maybe like 500,000 views and have all retweeted it. Right.
I didn't write any of it at all. I literally just like fed it to that tragedy to be tea. And I heard that you remember what sort of prompt you gave to just to get that kind of output for it. It was literally just like me giving you the context of here's the threads I like and the ones I don't like. No, right? Because like, yeah, I want to have like a good hook and all that.
I don't want to be like too cheesy. I don't want to go to like click maybe. Yeah, well, there's like a fine line there. Right? Yeah, a little bit but not too much. Right. And it is literally just providing the context. It's not like the same thing you do with YouTube. Right. Like giving it like here's the kind of titles I like or you know, the flow is I like. Right. Same kind of thing works for Twitter. Probably works better for LinkedIn, honestly.
Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, something like that works if you're trying to grow a podcast or grow YouTube channel or even grow a newsletter. Right. Yeah. And then you're going to go in, plug the content from the YouTube video or the transcript from the podcast or the entire newsletter that you just wrote up, plug in the chat GPT and say,
hey, summarize this into something that would work well on it as a Twitter thread. And at the end, add your little call the action. And yeah, I think there's a lot of ways we probably using AI more, right? Like we both have AI newsletters. You know, he's got future tools. I've got Lord.com. And I used to do more like free called actions and post called actions to promote my newsletter.
Okay. You define that. What's it? Like a little action. I pre called action is like, okay, my newsletter is coming out tomorrow. Here's what you might learn in this newsletter issue. Right. Okay. And then the post is yesterday. So and so, you know, you know, 20,000 people got this newsletter. You know, the Lord newsletter. Here's what you missed out on basically. God and it ends to subscribe.
And so those typically don't get tons of use. They may get like 10,000 views versus like one of my other tweets getting like over 100,000 views. But they convert really well. And so, yeah, I think you probably we probably should be automating that right? Like we probably should be like feeding our newsletter into like a system and having it like just generate those tweets and like schedule them through the Twitter API or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
I like that idea. I think when it comes to Twitter personally, I still really like it to be me. Right. It'd be my voice. But if we started like a next wave podcast Twitter, I could see like trying to automate that with, you know, here's what we talked about in this episode. Every episode gets fed and like you can use something like make.com. Right.
And then you can just sort of get ball ideas here. You could use something like make.com where whenever you make a new podcast episode and watches that our ss feed pulls it into like a descriptor or some sort of transcription tool. Right.
Are we going to make a newsletter transcribed and then automatically uses the clot or gpt API to then turn it into Twitter's that and then automatically post on a Twitter account. That actually is something we probably should do with the next wave. Yeah. We can make a newsletter. Right. We're going to like.
The keep takeaways of area issue and then you could also automate the promotion of as well. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, let's talk a little bit more about some of these newsletter strategies to like grow a newsletter. Right. We've both grown fairly substantial size newsletters in the AI space. You've got Lord.
The future tools newsletter. So we've used obviously AI to help grow those and manage them and maintain them. One of the ways I've been experimenting with growing is actually using AI to create the sort of lead magnet to bring somebody onto the list in the first place.
And with these AI tools, it's so easy to create really high value lead magnets right now. Right. Like I can go and take some of my YouTube tutorials that teach really valuable concepts that people really want to learn. Have those transcribed pool those transcriptions into something like clod or chat gpt and say.
This is a transcription make it read more like an ebook or make it read more like a blog post or you know that sort of thing so that it feels more readable than just reading a transcription. Right. And now you've got a PDF that you can offer as an opt in to get people to join your newsletter.
Another thing that's got really, really easy now is even easier now with the open AI 01 platform is going and creating a simple software app. Right. Like so some of the things that I've seen. I've seen like in the real estate industry people making like fairly simple, you know, mortgage calculators and things like that.
Make really simple tools where you ask for the email in order to use the tool and you put a little check box below saying would you also like to set up to my newsletter when you know what you use this tool. That reminds me of the stuff that Greg is a bird was talking about. We're on or so like creating widgets for like SEO and stuff. Right. Like you do widget to like higher team and go build that like now, especially like with 01 that just came out like open AI recently released 01.
It's not clear if it's a new model or what it is, but it's way better at coding and like creating apps right then before. And so I'm pretty sure mostly these widgets now like a single crater can create like 10 useful widgets and like it tons of SEO traffic. There's so many things like it's hard to figure out like what to do because like the opportunities now. You can really dial it in towards whatever niche you're operating in. Right.
So you can you can create something like really, really customized just for the people that you're speaking to. And there's another tool that's been fairly popular lately called cursor, which is like a fork of visual studio code. Yeah, but it's got like AI scripting directly built in. I use cursor. It's it's amazing. Like I'm like an amateur coder.
Like I'm an insulin for a long time. So I used to code more now. I don't code a lot, but but now it's like easier to go back to coding because like it can look at your entire code base and like the just changes are like, oh, here's a bug in the code and like it knows the entire code base. It's right. Yeah, you know, in another way that I use AI for my my newsletter is I let it to be my proofreader for me. It's essentially become like my editor, right?
I actually have a team that helps me with the newsletter as well now, but I still write a bunch of it. My team still writes a bunch of it, but the final pass. We let AI look at it. And we usually plug it into. I was using chat to be tea the beginning. Now I'm using quad a little bit more, but I'll plug in the whole newsletter. And I'll say proofread this for grammar, spelling and readability.
And it will look through it and it'll tell me all the grammar and spelling looks pretty good, but you might want to move this sentence down a little bit, move this sentence up a little bit. It just makes it easier to follow what you're trying to say. Yeah, and it's really good. It's sort of rearranging some, you know, little you want stuff in the email. Right.
So make it more readable for the newsletter subscribers. Yeah, I found the same thing. Like I tried to have AI or write part of my newsletter and like it's really clear when you're using the AI to actually write the thing. Right. Like I try to that one issue like people like responded back like what what is this? Yeah. Yeah. Like, okay, that's obviously not Nathan. Like, okay. And so I use cloud to like edit my newsletter. Yeah, for sure. For sure.
And then we also talked a little bit about about the Twitter threads, right? Like, I'm assuming is Twitter the way that you've grown your list the most is it mostly because of the yeah, yeah, it's it's it's most of been Twitter. Like you should every time I do a viral treat, you know, you get like hundreds to 200 subscribers every single time. Yeah, you know, of course some people unfollow you might lose 10 or 20 people. Yeah, it's pretty consistent. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean my my newsletter is mostly growing off the back of the future tools website a little bit from the YouTube channel. I found that a lot of people like I always say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm
going to just say, but I don't really know. So this is just kind of the pattern. And then what is it? You know, I know this has really compared to this but first you know, I also got a book in the WC wC website also. I have the Joe WC blog hierarchical about how necessary this is but I have the section of I wanted to talk about my pages and like the way I add future tools, a tool that will be fine tools. Yeah. You were talking about widgets earlier. So have you actually created the widgets?
Yeah. Or is that like an idea you're thinking about using AI for? Or you already have done it? So I've messed around creating a few widgets, but I actually haven't used them as an opt-in yet. So it's something that I want to play around with more. I mean, if you look at future tools as a tool that helped find tools, that's the biggest growth for my newsletter rent. But I mess with VS Code a lot. I've been using Cloud mostly for coding. I'm going to probably start using OpenAI.
So one for coding a little bit. And I've made little widgets and stuff that I use internally for myself. But I haven't actually given many away yet. Yeah. But I think you should, because you said that future tools. So Matt has future tools. It's basically the top AI tools directory. And my understanding is when people search for AI tools, you're often like the top two Google Rousal. Yeah, it's a tie, right? Yeah, yeah. With future tools, yeah, it's really well SEOed.
And all of the descriptions of every single tool on future tools was generated with AI. That's great. So basically the way that works is perplexity goes and looks at the tool, gives me a description of the tool. All of this is through a make.com automation, right? So we're not sponsored by make.com. We're not either. But basically perplexity will go and look at the tool, give me a description of the tool. Send that description over to Cloud.
Cloud will write a single paragraph of it and then feed it into Webflow, which is what the whole database is built on top of. So that workflow is all AI. Every single description on that entire site is AI. And if anybody says that you can't rank for AI generated content, I'm proof that that's false because it's usually the tool that's number one. And the future tools listing for that tool, this number two, for a lot of AI tools. Yeah, I know. I mean, so we had Greg Eisberg on several times.
And I know he has a AI SEO agency. And he said it's like killing it. They're doing it really well. And I think they'll do stuff where they have AI generate thousands of pages of content. And they rank. And then what they do is they'll see, because obviously the quality will be a little bit lower with the AI content. And so what they'll do is they'll generate thousands of pages of content. And they'll see what ranks.
And once they find out what's ranking, then they'll go in with humans and edit the ones that are ranking to make them really, really good. Smart. Right? Yeah. So if you have one key takeaway, that's one. You've got probably everyone who's doing SEO should be probably doing that right now. Yeah. One thing I want to share before we wrap up, because we've got a couple minutes left here. Is if you don't have a newsletter, it's probably easier than ever to have a newsletter.
Because you can use AI to sort of help you, at least, at the very least, outline the newsletter if you still want to write it yourself, right? So if you're in like a specific niche, like we're both making newsletters in the AI niche, I can go and find the seven biggest news stories in the AI world for the week. Take all seven of those stories, plug them into something like Cloud or ChatGPT, and then say either write up or outline a newsletter for me with all of these news pieces worked into it.
And you can even feed it some of your past contents so that it'll try to write sort of in your style. And now you've got a quick and easy newsletter, at least at the very least, you've got an outliner or a rough draft that you can go back in and sort of add your own voice to. But it makes it really, really easy to consistently put out a new newsletter. Just pick your niche. Make sure you're keeping an eye on the news in that niche.
And then feed that in once a week or twice a week, or whatever the cadence of your newsletter is. Yeah, and I think it works for curation-focused newsletters. I do wonder though, like in the next few years, if that's going to die off because the AI tools are going to get so good that you'll just be able to have your own custom newsletter of curated information. And then, oh, it's newsletter, will I say?
Yeah, so that's what I'm trying to do, more editorial to, like actually writing what I think about stuff, where this is just like, here it is, you know. Yeah, yeah, I definitely think that's where it's going to go. Unfortunately, that's probably going to devalue newsletters, but we still have a little bit of opportunity right now. We still have a lot to get. So, you know, I feel like people should always capture that window of opportunity while you've got it.
And, um, I mean, it's helped us, so we started our podcast with HubSpot maybe five months ago. We got, I don't know, three something, thousand subscribers in the first month, the network. Were they episode, was it first episode? Oh, yeah, that's right. And then now we're like 10.3, I mean, in five months. And a lot of that's from our newsletters. So, yeah, newsletters work. Yeah. Yeah, well, I think that's about all of the time we have. This has been a fun, interesting episode. Fun story.
This is actually the first time Nathan and I have live in person. We've been doing, we've known each other for a couple of years now. We've been doing, I've been out in my big months, all the, you know, you know, but this is the first time meeting in person. He lives in Japan. I live in the say Diego. And we've finally converged here at HubSpot to record a few of these episodes live. So, we really appreciate everybody hanging out with us and enjoying the podcast.
If you want to hear more content like what we did here, our podcast is on YouTube. It's called the Next Wave Podcast. And you can find the audio version wherever you subscribe to podcasts. So, thanks again for hanging out with us and tuning into this episode. Okay. Thank you all. Goat, bear, bear, bear, you.