Making $$ with AI Marketing

Alpha that's working right now so that you can actually build a software company. Agent company that actually gets customers. So I'm gonna explain how to do it by the end of this. You're gonna get your creative juices flowing. I needed to make this episode. I really needed to make this episode. I'm actually recording at night.

And you know, I tweeted this that, you know, people need to figure out distribution, you know, and it hurts me that people uh you know, don't have the ideas around it. So like and comment if you want me to do more episodes on this. Let's get right into it.

Uh and then marketing as at the bottom. Like literally the laughing stock of Silicon Valley were marketing people. Now today I believe that, you know, because of AI, distribution, people who understand distribution, how to get customers is You know, you're at the top of the list. Then it's product people and then it's developers.

Um, this is uh, you know, a big deal because I actually think that not a lot of people understand drip distribution. They don't understand brand, they don't understand advertising, they don't understand content. Um but I think that, you know, if you can, you know, if you do understand it, you are at an unfair advantage. Um, you know, there's 200,000 new vibe coding projects being created every single day on Lovable. Um, how many people are actually seeing those products? Probably not a lot.

Um Peter Levells has three million dollars plus of revenue. He has zero employees. The reason why he's a been able to uh you know, get so much revenue as a one person business is he's got seven hundred and fifty thousand plus followers, I think. And also he's got great SEO. I mean, if you look at some of the stuff that he works on. You know, nomad list, for example.

A lot of the tools, uh like these could be, you know, copied quite quickly. Um you know, it's it's essentially a directory. I've done episodes and tours on how to vibe code directories before. You know, but he's he's obviously got good data and data's part of that, but it's also largely he's got an audience, he's got trust, and he's built good SEO. We'll talk more about that in this episode. So the big trap uh

That I think a lot of founders and builders do is they vibe code something. You know, once they've built the product, they've got this great idea. Um, then they're just gonna try marketing things, but it's just silence. So then they're gonna build more features and they're gonna launch again and more silence. So they basically are just thinking about how do I build a really good product?

Um and if you build it, they will come, but they don't come. What smart builders do is they start with the distribution. So they'll grow an audience. uh to maybe a thousand people. They ask that audience what they need. Uh and then they go and build it in a weekend, twenty four hours, seventy two hours, a few days.

Um and then that audience is shocked that, wow, you built the thing that I wanted. And then you launch it to a warm audience, you iterate with real users, and you start making money. So it's distribution first. product second. Always. You know, the example of Peter Levells, I think I you know, I think he's tweeted a hundred and twenty five thousand

times in the last like eight years. You know, he's he's put in the consistency and the work to actually go and build that audience and he's been iterating with users and customers, you know, with them.

So let's get into the actual tactic. Uh strategy one is gonna be about using an MCP server as your sales team. So, you know, if you're listen if you're a listener to Star Up Ideas Podcast, you probably know an MCP is. Um but you can think of it as basically like an uh an an app.

Um, you know, the example I'll I'll use here is, you know, plugins in OpenAI use the o the MCP protocol. So you can just be like at Google Drive, find the right drive, then summarize a doc and update a sheet or edit a slide stack. So there's this massive opportunity to build MCP servers as your sales team. How does it work? Well a user asks an a the AI, it could be you know Claude, it could be ChatGPT. As a question, the AI discovers your MCP server and the AI returns uh

y you know, your product and the user gets value from it. So there's zero CAC. The AI assistant basically becomes your sales teams. And I have friends who are, you know, I'm actually incubating uh some things you know a ra around here and actually if you look at ideabrowser.com, you know, we we've been doing some MCP stuff. We also have a lot of friends who just, you know in in for example in the fintech space, you know, a hundred and fifty plus installations in thirty days.

Zero dollars ad spend for something that he vibe coded uh quite quickly. So I believe that building an MCP server in 2026 is in a lot of ways building. like kind of building for mobile in twenty ten, there's just a lot of opportunities to show up in LLMs in these connections, plugins, or MCP servers. So how can you start uh this week? And and by the way, I realize that this, you know, an MPC an an MCP server, it's not for everyone, right? If you're building a boring business.

Maybe that's not for you or you know, even some software businesses might might not be for you. But for some people, for SAS, you know, if you want to get started this week, um, what can you do? Identify what question your product answers. That's the first thing you're gonna wanna do. Number two, you're gonna wanna build an MCP server that returns that data. You can vibe that code that realistically in 24 hours or less. You're gonna wanna publish that to MCP registries.

uh smithery, mcpt, open tools, and then every AI assistant that connects to your server is now selling for you 247. So that's a bet that you're gonna make um and that's strategy number one. Let's get to strategy number two.

Strategy number two is programmatic SEO. So it's how can you create 10,000 pages, SEO pages, in 48 hours? So you're gonna wanna look at you know a keyword a keyword pattern pattern. Best X for Y. So best uh CRMs for dentists, for example. Then you're gonna want to do uh look at uh data sets. So you're gonna want to I actually did a whole episode on fire crawl recently, a tutorial on how to use it.

Um so you're gonna wanna but basically what does that do if you haven't seen that? It basically goes and scrapes and gets you clean structured data uh so that you can actually, you know, provide value in your pro in your pages. Uh then you're gonna wanna do use a page template, NextJS. You can use cloud code or something to actually go and build this. Uh then you're gonna wanna actually create AI content.

And then you're gonna go and create ten thousand pages. Now I know there's a big gap. Uh I can see the comment right the comment section right now. It's okay. Oh, you're just gonna press one button and then just automatically create ten thousand pages. Uh well No, of course not, because you you know, you you do need to make sure that the content is good and doesn't feel like AI. So there's gonna be a lot of optimizations that you're gonna have to do to actually get it so it doesn't feel like AI.

But once you get it to there, I mean you can start with just a few pages, and once you get it to there, then you can start scaling to to more pages. Um, you know, the math is is pretty simple. If you end up creating, you know, ten thousand pages and each page gets thirty visits a month, which, you know, it's not a lot of visits, right?

Um that could go up to you know 300,000 monthly visitors. If you convert at 2%, that's 6,000 conversions a month. Maybe that's$10 each. And then all of a sudden you're making$60,000 a month from pages you built once. Now those thirty visits a month, that's not gonna happen overnight. Um the SEO does take some time to compound. But but like think about it directionally, right? Directionally the idea is build a lot of pages.

Get really good at creating AI content, get structured data that's ex that's high quality. Um and uh And and and rinse repeat. So how can I actually start this this week? If this is something that's interesting to you, how can I go and start this this week? Well, you're gonna wanna pick a keyword pattern. So like the product type for niche or service and city. Um like for example the C R M for dentists or um you know uh roofing in

Miami. You're going to want to build your data set. So you're going to want to scrape with Firecrawl or you can use existing databases. You can create a template in your framework, like you know, NestJ, NextJS, Webflow, WordPress doesn't, you know, just stick with the thing that you're going to use. And then you're gonna wanna use AI to generate unique content per page. So not just variable swaps, actual paragraphs, high quality stuff.

Um and you know you m also might want to have a human in the loop to actually edit and look at some of this content. Publish a hundred pages as an MVP, monitor indexation, and then that's when you can go ahead and scale. So that's number two. I think that's applicable to really anyone. It doesn't make a difference if you're building a service, a SaaS, an app, you've got a boring business, you've got an agency, programmatic SEO is still under tap.

Strategy number three, uh three on seven, is doing a free tool as a top of the funnel uh uh for your top of the funnel. So the tool is your marketing. Um, you know, the example I would use. is uh href for for a while has had this backlink check uh checker. So you know you you put in your domain, for example, greg eisenberg.com.

It's gonna see what are the different backlinks, like who's r uh connected to me, uh what links are connected to me, um and you know, it's high quality and stuff like that and you know, but The the reality is it gives you a taste of their full product. So if I want more, I have to go and spend hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars a month with HREF. So they kind of hook you in through that.

So you know, step one is building a free tool. It could be a grader, it can be an analyzer, it can be a calculator. Uh step two is the user gets instant value. So, you know, your site scores forty three on a hundred. Um generally what you want to do is obviously grab their data in some capacity, you know, text message, email, in order to get access that. Uh step three is the user shares their score. So that's gonna help this thing go viral. Uh social proof, back backlinks.

Um and then step four is more users are gonna discover it. So you've got this organic viral loop and step five is upsell to a paid product. So you wanna fix these issues? Well, we've got the product for you. Now This uh strategy has been around for for a while, right? Um you know, but w why is it different? Well, now it's different because you can use clawed code uh to go and actually build these

Free tools, right? It's now like not crazy to build a free tool a week. Whereas in the past these things would have taken you months. So you can vibe code a free tool in a day, ship it by lunch, and it markets itself forever. So uh I really like this one. This is something that I'm doing in all my businesses as much as possible. Um and if you want to get started this week, I would just say uh, you know, I would ask uh, you know, your LLM of choice to be like, here's what I'm working on.

And give me ten ideas for free tools that can act as my top of the funnel. And that's, you know, you're gonna have your ten tools. You can prioritize the best possi the ones that you think are the best. You can even ask your audience, hey, what would be more interesting? This or that?

Um, get them involved and then go and build it. And then just you know, we we think of uh when you do social media you you think of like an editorial calendar, a content calendar, but no one really thinks about like a free tool calendar. And I really do believe the tool is the marketing. This is working. Don't know why more people aren't doing it. Um, but Strategy number three, one of my faves. Strategy number four, answer engine optimization. So you want to be the source that AI cites.

So the old way of, you know, getting seen obviously was SCO. You just wanted to get, you know, on on Google page one, you do three thousand word blog posts, you're doing backlink building, keyword stuffing. Oh my God. Um click through your site. You know, I I'm just having flashbacks of all of doing all this stuff. Um it's there's still opportunity in SEO. I mean we talked about it today, but it's declining. Um and zero click searches are growing, right?

So, um if AEO is in twenty twenty six is where SEO was in twenty ten, first movers will own these niches for years. So Uh the idea is answer engine optimization. How do we get cited by ChatGPT and perplexity? You know, structured direct answers, you can do an FAQ format, schema markup. comparison tables that AI can parse so that, you know, that way

uh yeah, you're getting seen a little more. Um and then AI AI is gonna send users to your product. So um yeah, I think it was Peter Levell's actually uh I believe that he said like his AI referrals jumped from four percent to twenty percent in one month. I think that it's only going to increase for, you know, across the board on e commerce, SaaS, apps, you n you name it. So um it's worth kind of uh exploring. It's worth exploring.

So okay, great. You know, you probably already knew this. Obviously, go, you know, you want to be seen in Perplexy or ChatGPT. But how do you how can you start this this week? Well, Google the top, step one is to Google the top 20 questions your customer asks. And you're gonna step two, write the definitive structured answers for each. So I'm not talking about three thousand word fluff. I'm talking about clear, direct, citation worthy. It's all about getting citation worthy content.

Then you're gonna add step three, add schema markup and FAQ blocks. Step four, you're gonna wanna publish on a domain with authority or build authority through the other strategies. Um obviously it's bet you know why a Peter levels you know, could could get his SEO and AEO up quickly qu more quicker than the average person listening to this is because a lot of his domains have built authority over time. So uh you know n

There's no better time. Start building that authority today. And then lastly, monitor your perplexity in Chat GPT citations. You can use tools like Auditerly, there's profound, there's manual testing. Um but the important thing here is that you're just getting started. So get started this week on AEO.

Strategy number five is how can you make your outputs of your product shareable? So we all know, you know, the end of year December Spotify wrap. Um, they get a hundred million shares every December of that thing. It's absolutely crazy. Um everyone wants to share it, your mother wants to share it, your sister wants to share it, your kids want to share it, everyone is sharing it, laughing about it.

It says it says about something about your identity, who you are. So what is that for you, right? So what is the free distribution, output, charitable thing that you can be creating? You know, the way I th the way I The way I have it in my head at least is, you know, ask what does my user want to brag about and then make that thing beautiful and shareable. Uh for GitHub, they've got the contribution graph. Um and then you see like devs bragging about sharing those green squares on Twitter.

Uh Stripe Atlas, which allows you to create companies. You know, the artifact there is the incorporation milestone. Founders tweet, uh I just I just incorporated, or it's been five years since uh I incorporated. Uh here's my you know, my anniversary post lessons learned. Duolingo, perhaps, you know, one of the most famous uh examples, daily streak count.

And then uh you know, users are bragging about three hundred and sixty-five day streaks. I don't know if Snapchat was before them. I think they were. Um But like I think yeah, I think that was an original Snapchat thing too, right? Um I like to look at like how social product Like, what are social products doing? Um, because you can actually take a lot of that thinking, that psychology, and bring that into whatever it is you're doing. So your product.

What is the artifact that you're going to create? What is the viral artifact that you're going to create? Um, what do your users wanna brag about? So if we want to get started this week, What are we gonna what do we need? Step one, we're gonna have to identify the output or milestone your user would screenshot and share.

Step two, let's make it beautiful, let's make it shareable, let's make it branded. Your logo actually should be subtle but present. I've seen some examples of artifacts that the logo is super big. And it's just no one wants to share someone else's logo. It should be fe it should feel uh it's about you. Step three is you're gonna want to add a share button that pre-fills the post with the artifact.

Step four, every share is free impressions to your exact target audience, so that's a huge win. Um the user is doing your marketing because they're bragging about themselves. Uh people are gonna say, well, these are you know mostly consumer uh examples. Will this work in B2B um Or you know, yeah, B to B. Yes, you know

At the end of the day, B2B is are people too. There's things that these pe you know, people want to share. Maybe they're sharing it within Slack, maybe they're sharing it within Microsoft Teams. But just think about what is something that they are willing to share. uh with your with uh the group that you ultimately want. More of. So that is strategy number five.

Strategy number six. So you know me. You know I think audiences are really important. Um sometimes, you know, it's just hard to build an audience. Listen, a lot of times it's hard to build an audience, more m more often than not. Uh it takes it takes sometimes years. It requires daily content. Uh there's no guarantee it works too, right? Sometimes you just it doesn't work. Um and then it it's tough, right?'Cause you have zero subscribers on day one.

So uh What if you just acquired a niche newsletter and sent a building from zero? So this is something a lot of people don't think about, but you can go and like buy a ten thousand subscriber newsletter for five to twenty thousand dollars, you inherit that trust from day one, you plug in your product immediately, and then you can repeat that across niches. If you have a product that you believe in and you understand the LTV, this just might make sense for you. So

It and a lot of these uh smaller newsletters, like they're not really monetizing that well. So they might be like stoked to get a ten thousand dollar offer from you. So if we want to get this started this week, uh I would go to deuce dot com, uh which is like a you know, listing of selling newsletters, newsletter investor, or just search your niche. newsletter on Twitter or Substack. And just try to find these newsletters. That's step one. Step two is

You probably want to look at the five thousand to fifty thousand subscriber in your target niche. You obviously don't want to buy something so big in the beginning. Uh, but I mean, listen, if you have the money and you really do understand the L T V, maybe you do. Um It's all about confidence, uh, how much confidence that you have. Uh step three is DM the owner. Have you ever thought about selling?

uh you'd be surprised how many people would sit uh would take the call. Um next step is, you know, a lot of these a lot of these folks, as I mentioned, are not really making that much money. Maybe they're making zero to five hundred dollars a month. And they would be open to a fair offer, uh, you know, five to ten to fifteen to twenty thousand dollars.

And then all of a sudden you own a direct channel to your exact audience. And more importantly, it's not a social media account that could be taken away from you at at any point. This is a yeah, a direct line uh that you can go and put links to and if you wanna put your product in there and say, Come buy my product, you know, it's gonna get seen. Unlike places

uh like social media that could suppress your reach over time. So I think this is something that not a lot of people think of. So d I definitely want to throw it throw it in there.

Um the last strategy is uh thinking about uh AI building an AI content repurposing engine. So The way I think about it is this You can think about uh creating one, you know, hero or pillar piece of content. That could be a podcast episode, a YouTube video, a a long blog post, an essay. Um And that one piece of content ends up becoming Uh a lot more. You know, it could be fifty, seventy five.

you know, twenty, depends how much you want to get out of it. So you can actually use AI to take that pillar content, turn it into five to ten, you know, t tweets, three to five LinkedIn posts, two to three short form videos, one newsletter And the short form videos would be using like a remotion. Uh skill.

uh on something like a claude code, um, you know, a newsletter edition, a blog post, five to ten quote graphics that you can use creative LLMs to go and create for you, email sequences. And a lot of this stuff can actually you know, for the people into OpenClaw, they can go and automate with OpenClaw. You can also use um just Claude Dispatch and and I think uh you know, Claude Cowork.

Um perplexity computer, any of these to go and automate some some of this stuff for you. The big the big idea here is you get one thing that'll equal a bunch of different contents and that gives you way more touch points across uh multiple platforms. Um so if you want to get that started this week.

Um, you know, I I I would suggest just starting recording like one 30 minute piece of content. It could be a podcast, it could be a video, or just a voice memo. It's way harder to actually go and write a uh 3,000 word essay on something. And I just find if you just voice memo something or you do a podcast.

Uh can be like almost it could also just be an internal podcast or just a pot like literally a video of you that you don't end up putting out and that like the actual value is in the you know, the repurposing that AI is gonna do. Uh you're gonna want to transcribe it. You can tr drop the translation into Claude, turn this into five tweet threads, three LinkedIn posts, and one newsletter. Um obviously it needs to be set up properly. Obviously, uh, you know There's a

you you're gonna get sloped at by default. So you have to optimize to not slop. And a part of that is having a really good brand and reference images. A part of that is, you know, setting routines so it's going you know, and researching, you know, different topics and adding to what you have. Part of it is uh Part of it is knowing what skills and having those skills, you know, implemented. Um, but you know, you can get started by just

by just getting started and then schedule across platforms. Um if you do this every week, I think in three months you'll have more content than your competitors. You know, your competitors are not putting out this amount of of amount of content. They just really aren't. And where we are with content just, you know, in 2026 is because of 4U pages, um, you know, you could you never know when you can go viral in your niche.

Um and you don't need a lot of followers to s to start. You just need a lot of shots on net. So this is kind of like a shots on net strategy. And I don't know why more people aren't, you know, building this out.

So those are the seven strategies, growth strategies that, you know, I think are interesting. and that I think, you know, I would pay attention to if I was vibe coding something, if I wanted to build a business, if I wanted customers to that business, if I wanted to build a growth engine.

Um code used to be the moat. I think by now, maybe by the end of this you you understand that. Uh distribution is the new moat, right? It's the most important thing is distribution. You know, it's scarce, right? AI can't build it. Product is really important, but it you know, in lots of ways it is commoditized and code is fully commoditized. So I've given you seven distribution weapons. Uh just to summarize, I've given you MCP servers, so let AI sell for you.

I've given you programmatic SEO, ten thousand pages in a weekend. I've given you free tool. The tool is your marketing. I've given you answer engine optimization, be the source AI sites. I've given you viral artifacts, make your output shareable. I've given you buy a newsletter, acquire the audience, and I've given you AI, repurposing engine, one pillar, and seven channels. So pick two of them. Start this week. Don't just vibe code.

Um, I wanna see you get customers, make money, grow from there, reinvest, have fun. Um and I'm ha I you know, I wanted to do this because like I said, I want I want I don't want you just to To be, you know... vibe coding stuff and no one's seeing it. And I think there's too many people doing that.

Um, so if this is interesting, like I said, let me know and I can do more of these. I have tons of strategies that I use. I can go deeper in the future. Um, I'm here to help you. Um the Startup Ideas podcast, like I I I am here to help you get uh increase your odds of success with good ideas, growth tactics, startup ideas. So, you know, please share this with a friend. Let me know what you think. And I'll see you on the next episode. Happy building.