[00:02:09] Cody Schneider: Yeah, so it kind of all started just like everybody else. Like, how do I make money on the internet? And I was 16. So I figured out how to sell things. So I got into the e-commerce world.

[00:02:18] Cody Schneider: This is back in the day when you could just get free clicks from Facebook pages. And that was really kind of the origin of all this. So fast forward, I ended up starting a company and it took off. And so I dropped out of school and traveled around for a while. That company basically imploded because it just wasn’t what I was doing. I wasn’t building a brand and so honestly it was the best thing that could ever happen because it really quickly early on with not a lot of stakes taught me that when you’re building these things building these companies focus on the brand because that’s the only thing that actually has value long term so fast forward I ended up Getting connected, Sky while I was still in school, I studied business economics and again, just had a ton of knowledge on just really advertising, like digital advertising in general.

[00:02:58] Cody Schneider: So I ended up going and working for this B2B marketing agency. That’s where things really got interesting and how I got into the B2B world. So at that agency, we worked with a lot of manufacturing companies. So imagine wood manufacturers, windows, we’re talking massive Fortune 500 companies and we basically helped them transition into digital.

[00:03:14] Cody Schneider: And so that was my role there was like. designing all the strategies, building the processes out, and then helping implement them and building basically the analytics infrastructure for them to actually understand what was working and what wasn’t, so their teams could have a north star that they could work towards.

[00:03:29] Cody Schneider: So while I was there, I was like, always building software on the side. I ended up leaving that company and just, again, was. Traveling around. I was actually on a ski trip with a buddy. We were chasing snow all winter and my friend called me. His name’s Kobe Conrad and he was working at a company called Rupa Health.

[00:03:44] Cody Schneider: And he was like, Hey, this thing is the craziest growth company I’ve ever seen. I want you to come help me. And I bluntly was just like, no, I was not interested at the time. And so anyway, he sent me some data and I was like, Oh my God, this is insane. It was, the graph was like word of mouth. I’m just going nuts.

[00:03:59] Cody Schneider: He’s I just layered on ads. And basically, it was just, it was growing compounding for a 30 percent month over month. And so we were just, to me, I was, it was blue ocean, especially in the space that it was in. So I ended up moving out to San Francisco a week later, had my bag packed, and that’s what I basically moved out with, moved into a friend’s extra room and crashed out there.

[00:04:17] Cody Schneider: And yeah, we ended up just scaling that company really quickly. I was there about a year and ended up leaving and working at a crypto company that was basically a DeFi-powered savings account. It was in the height of all that bubble. It was growing like 3x month over month, for the four months that I, it was there basically functioning.

[00:04:34] Cody Schneider: How they structured the application, it was using this protocol called MStable and a wallet that was basically your own. So it was like from a safety standpoint, like why I was there and believed in it. It was providing a lot of value, but everybody thought they were insulated from Sierra Luna.

[00:04:48] Cody Schneider: They weren’t. The collapse happens. The business model basically eroded overnight. We did a retro of the whole thing. And, I was like, you should have been paying me. So I went to my, the CEO, his name’s Jeremiah. It’s my friend. And I was like, yo, my specialty and expertise is in like companies that have product market fit.

[00:05:03] Cody Schneider: They know there’s an audience and they’re trying to figure out how to build distribution. That’s what I would do. And so I ended up going back and just doing consulting for early-stage startups and building out that initial infrastructure. People call it a lot now like fractional heads of growth.

[00:05:15] Cody Schneider: I think that’s dumb. It’s basically just like a stopgap so that they can, have a great product. They just don’t know how to get their first 100 users or whatever. And so I helped them do that. But yeah, so I was before I took that crypto company job, I was really baiting, going all in on my stuff and that kind of gets to where we are today.

[00:05:30] Cody Schneider: My co-founder, Max, who I’m building Swell AI with. She like we met at Rupa Health. We had been basically building side projects and messing around with things for, honestly, the whole time that we had known each other. And then we built Swell in September of last year and ChatGPT hit December 2022.

[00:05:49] Cody Schneider: January 2023, Swell just basically took off. And yeah, it was just, honestly, grabbing the reins, holding on tight, and praying for an intervention from God. So it was just, everything was on fire. We’re just basically riding that. But yeah, so that kind of leads us to where we are today. And what we’re we just launched this about 40, fired on June 21st.

[00:06:07] Cody Schneider: So whenever this AI, SEO engine. You plug your website in and it’s gonna ride. Content at scale for your brand. The idea is you can basically grow your organic traffic and our long-term vision is we want to see if we can basically have your blog grow itself. So you have this business goal, whether it’s signups, et cetera, and you plug it in and have it go.

[00:06:27] Cody Schneider: So anyways, that’s how it led here. And in the background, sometimes I’m like, I had no idea how it ended up here. It’s one of those things. I really just kept pulling the string of the things that were interesting and it just kept leading to a direction and that, that really, I honestly, I think it’s how this all happens.

[00:06:43] Cody Schneider: Like when you’re learning anything or building any company, it always is like that. 

[00:06:47] Robert Leonard: Where did you learn the growth and marketing stuff? I know you did the B2B agency, but like even there did they teach you? Did you learn it on your own while you were working there? Did you go through some sort of training?

[00:06:58] Robert Leonard: And then, obviously I’m sure it’s evolved over time and you’ve tested things, but like just generally, what are you doing to learn this type of stuff? 

[00:07:04] Cody Schneider: Yeah YouTube videos and Reddit threads. , that’s straight up it. I’m a huge fan of the, digital marketing campy talk because it changes, it evolves so quickly.

[00:07:13] Cody Schneider: If you see a class or a program at a university, it’s two years old and none of that information is relevant. It’s trial by fire. , I always joke on Twitter you’re either in the pit or you’re not. And what I mean by that is basically, , You’re either doing this on a daily basis because it’s changing so quickly and actually understanding what’s going on or you’re not.

[00:07:29] Cody Schneider: And that’s really it. People always ask, like, how do you learn this? And where do you start? Like my go-to always is, make a blog that you’re like about a topic you’re interested in, figure out how to get traffic to it, figure out how to sell something to that traffic. And you’re in the top 1 percent of marketers if you can do that.

[00:07:43] Cody Schneider: And that’s straight up it. 

[00:07:45] Robert Leonard: And so when you watch YouTube stuff, you just start with one topic and then you watch a video and they might mention, I don’t know, two, three, four things in that video that you don’t know, but they are. So then you’re like, okay, I’ll watch a video on this topic and this topic.

[00:07:56] Robert Leonard: And then that same thing happens and you just continue to watch. Is that kind of how you do it? And the same with the Reddit threads, right? They mentioned something. You don’t know what it is. You research that. You just keep going. 

[00:08:05] Cody Schneider: Exactly. Yeah. That strategy simultaneously with documenting the things that you’re learning in public, it’s just going to create people that have the same interest in you to do inbound, right?

[00:08:14] Cody Schneider: So all growth people that are good, they want to all talk to each other and we all talk to each other. Like I have calls literally weekly where I’m talking to friends who are in head of growth roles or CMO roles at these other companies. And I’m basically mining them for information, and they’re doing the same for me.

[00:08:28] Cody Schneider: What are you seeing working right now? What isn’t working? Where is the arbitrage going? , we’re all just trying to find that, basically, that alpha that exists within the market and capitalize on it while that exists. I just had a conversation, as an example, with my friend Yon. He was the head of growth at Deliveroo, and then the head of growth at Depop, and now he’s at this new company.

[00:08:46] Cody Schneider: So his background is like deep T in apps, so iOS apps in particular. And for him, he’s yo, I’m using the same strategies, but across different channels. Like it was Facebook ads when I was at Deliveroo. It was Snapchat ads when I was at Depop. And it’s TikTok ads now that I’m at this new company that he’s at called Newt.

[00:09:03] Cody Schneider: And I think that’s like a great illustration of how this all works. Like we’re all trying to communicate and understand those things. You can only get that when you talk about it in public. 

[00:09:11] Robert Leonard: On this podcast, I usually ask pretty direct questions of the guests, but with you, I’m going to do that, but it’s also going to be a little bit different.

[00:09:18] Robert Leonard: I have some direct questions, but I also have some broad topics that I want to just mention to you that I don’t have one or two specific questions. And I’m just going to mention the topics and I’ll just let you run with it and share what you want to talk about. So to get started though, I do have some specific questions.

[00:09:33] Robert Leonard: I want to talk about niche sites and content sites. I was a little bit surprised to see on Twitter that you have involvement in that. I didn’t know that was something you were involved in. So I’m excited to talk about this. This podcast is not dedicated to niche sites or content sites. So not everybody listening knows what they are or how they work.

[00:09:48] Robert Leonard: So give us a rundown of what a niche site is and how the business model has worked traditionally. We’ll talk about what you’re doing now and how it might be changing. But just for now, give a quick overview of what it is and how it’s traditionally worked. 

[00:10:01] Cody Schneider: It’s funny you say Hey I didn’t know that you were involved in like niche sites.

[00:10:04] Cody Schneider: I always joke like every way there is a way to make money on the internet, I’d probably done something in the last 10 years. But yeah, so niche sites traditionally, this is actually where I got my start. This was back in 2012, 2013. You would basically rank these websites that were related to products, and then you would send traffic to an affiliate and get a commission for that.

[00:10:23] Cody Schneider: So as an example, One of the companies I was working for, or one of the sites I was in charge of, it was basically like best binoculars. So best binoculars for birding, best binoculars for hunting, et cetera. And so the idea is that you’re getting traffic and you’re brokering that traffic in some way.

[00:10:36] Cody Schneider: Traditionally, three or four different ways that you can monetize that traffic. It’s either through an ad network like AdSense or Ezoic, et cetera. You can sell basically affiliate traffic. So sending traffic, Amazon is like a really traditional one. And you get a commission off of that traffic that you sent.

[00:10:51] Cody Schneider: So as an example, you search best birding binoculars, you click the post, you click off of that website to Amazon, you make that binocular purchase, and then that business owner would get a kickback to get an 8 percent commission, 4 percent commission on whatever that transaction is. The other piece is that people will actually build brands on top of this.

[00:11:08] Cody Schneider: As an example, I have a friend who owns a big site in the garden ish. And so he sells PDFs that are basically how-to guides, right? So his whole strategy is I build a massive email newsletter list. And then every couple of months, I will basically sell this guide. And every time he does an email set, he makes like just racks.

[00:11:25] Cody Schneider: It’s absolutely insane. It’s the craziest business model to me. Because he makes money in the interim off of the ad network as well, right? So it’s like making money off of AdSense. And then he’s selling a product directly to them also as well. The other side of this is partnering with large companies and running these sites for them.

[00:11:41] Cody Schneider: So as an example, there’s these huge media agencies that will have thousands of niche websites, say for example, in the baby space, and they specialize in consumer packaged goods, types of companies. So they’ll go and they’ll basically do deals with imagine Nestle or like that size of the organization.

[00:11:56] Cody Schneider: And they have all this traffic that they can send any direction. They’re basically sitting on that and they’re going to sell you, they’re going to sell you those clicks and traffic. So That’s the traditional structure. 

[00:12:06] Robert Leonard: So now tell us, we have an understanding of the traditional. Now tell us how you’re approaching it differently today and specifically with what you’re doing with Draft Horse.

[00:12:15] Cody Schneider: Yeah. So what we saw, and this is the changes that have happened in the last 12 months. So in July of 2022, something happened with the AI where basically the content that I was making was good enough. It was for the first moment ever, from a marketer’s point of view, that I was actually usable.

[00:12:30] Cody Schneider: Like I was like, Oh, this is better than the average person that I could go pay. So fast forward now, basically what we are, how niche sites have evolved and content writing used to be the biggest cost for a niche site. So as an example, you wanted to write a thousand articles. You would pay 100 a piece for those thousand articles to get an okay article, right?

[00:12:48] Cody Schneider: Not even bought from an expert. And that would cost you a hundred grand. So now fast forward, we have AI, we can augment basically this writing. The cost has gone basically to zero. So what used to cost you a hundred grand, you can now pay, with Draftforce, bucks to write a thousand articles. And overnight, you can basically build this niche website out, but traditionally that would take you six months of time you working full time or a team working on it, et cetera.

[00:13:13] Cody Schneider: And, I’m spinning these niche sites out personally in 10 hours. It’s finding a niche. I find all the low KB and low competition keywords related to that topic. I then put them into drafthorse. It writes. These articles like long format, Imagine 2000 plus word articles about XYZ keyword phrases related to one I just did recently was how to start XYZ business.

[00:13:34] Cody Schneider: So we wrote like how to start a polymailer business, how to start a handmade clothing business, all these different variations. You publish all of these, and because there are these low-day, low KBT words, you start to rank immediately, because there’s not a good result currently. And so this totally flips the paradigm of niche sites.

[00:13:53] Cody Schneider: Before, it was cost-prohibitive for you to basically do this strategy, but now, because it’s so cheap to make this content, to write these articles, you can go after all of this long tail in a way that you could never previously, because it just would cost so much. If you wanted to do this in a traditional sense, like we’ll say, we’re talking millions.

[00:14:10] Cody Schneider: In comparison to thousands. And so that’s really this like shift in the market that we’re seeing. There’s a short window for this. I think it’s going to be like 18 to 24 months and everybody is going to basically figure this out. All of this is going to be built into all of these tools, any CMS in some way.

[00:14:25] Cody Schneider: So really how we’re thinking about it is like it’s a land grab that’s occurring. Simultaneously, there’s also this opportunity where you could if that happens, the AI is really good at writing to the center of the belfer, like it’s average. So experts suddenly become more. Important than ever before.

[00:14:40] Cody Schneider: And I’m happy to go down this rabbit hole, like where do we think this is going and then where we’ll end up. But basically, our view is that these experts are going to live within organizations or you’re going to pay them to basically come in, get fireside chats, do podcasts, and write up PDFs with all of their knowledge.

[00:14:56] Cody Schneider: You’re then going to put this into what’s called a vector database. That vector database, you can then query against. And create content about a target keyword phrase that’s specific to your brand that’s related. So again, how to start XYZ business and that content is going to be unique because it’s coming from that expert and nobody else has that data to you.

[00:15:16] Cody Schneider: And so this is how we’re starting to talk to companies about this. Like, how are you going to differentiate? If the cost of making content is zero, how do you differentiate? The only way to do that is to have your own corpus of information that is siloed from the rest of the world, that you’re basically telling the AI, hey, you can only work from this corpus.

[00:15:34] Cody Schneider: We want you to use your general knowledge, but this is your source of truth. And that’s where you’re going to basically see these companies that’s who’s going to win long term in our view. So happy to dive deep into that. 

[00:15:44] Robert Leonard: Yeah, I wrote down about 10 questions that I want to get. I want to talk about all of that, but just to your last point real quick about the AI basically accessing this vector database. Once you publish that content on your site, say you do, you get an expert, you publish it on your site, and it’s only your info. Now, because that’s public in the public domain, can’t any AI model use that for their own content? 

[00:16:06] Cody Schneider: Totally. 100%. And I think this is where we don’t know where it’s going to go.

[00:16:10] Cody Schneider: If everybody’s scraping everybody it’s starting to happen already where you can basically put a, like a Roblox TXT file, but for these LLMs where it’s like a no scrape. And if you do, it basically blocks ID and there’s I’m not that technical. I can’t go into where this is going from that side, but I think experts are always at the forefront.

[00:16:27] Cody Schneider: They’re going to constantly be learning things. They’re basically going to be constantly adding to that content library, that backlog of the content library. And that’s going to be the only way to stay. It’s just like content harkening, right? Like we’ve been doing the same thing in a different way since the beginning of time.

[00:16:40] Cody Schneider: So all that’s happening now is we’re augmenting the production. So the repurposing of that content, traditionally that used to be a team of people that would go in and they would mine that library. Now we can use these AIs in, they’re called agents. It’s basically think about it as a little robot that you can train to do tasks.

[00:16:57] Cody Schneider: And we can use these agents to basically interact with this corpus of information in the way that a recent college grad used to. That’s really the arbitrage that’s happening. And what we’re seeing is that large companies think about this as Oh, I used to hire fresh marketing grads to come in and they would be the ones that are repurposing all the content.

[00:17:15] Cody Schneider: Like maybe it’s chopping up clips or whatever. Now I don’t need them. I don’t have to pay their salary anymore. And what I really need is I need a curator. So somebody who’s like sitting over the top of that and basically they’re putting the good content in and they’re looking at the final output that the AI makes.

[00:17:30] Cody Schneider: And those are the only two touch points that’s happening. Everything else in the middle is basically going to be in some way augmented by all of these tools, all these LLMs that are starting to interact with these types of content. 

[00:17:41] Robert Leonard: So I’m going to get into a couple of tactical things. I’ve used Draft Horse for some articles, and the articles are good.

[00:17:47] Robert Leonard: I noticed that it prints or it creates, I think, two or three versions of the article when I do that. Why is that? 

[00:17:54] Cody Schneider: Yeah. So when we initially launched, this was something that was just like, one of the technical challenges that we had to get around. We now have a version that basically when you give it a target keyword phrase, like how it functions is how you would traditionally create a blog post outline that you would hand to your SEO writer.

[00:18:09] Cody Schneider: So like I would be an SEO manager. I would say, Hey, here’s this list of 10 target keywords. I would make a blog post outline for that. Each of those keyword phrases. So imagine for keyword one, it would be here’s 15 different headers that I need you to write sections about. And then I would hand that brief off to my concept writer.

[00:18:27] Cody Schneider: My concept writer would go in and basically write that. So that whole process, that’s what we built into DraftForce. It’s just doing the same thing. So I give the keyword phrase, it now creates that blog post outline, and then the writer goes to that outline and writes basically to the spec that you give it.

[00:18:41] Cody Schneider: But what we built internally, like the technology that we built AI the context of it knows what it’s going to write in the future. It knows what it’s writing currently, and it knows what it wrote in the past. And that’s how you can create this cohesive document. With all this gets better as we go to the first version of DraftTours was, like, It would sometimes get on repeater mode and say the same thing over and over again, or it would, , basically write multiple articles in in different fashions within the outputs.

[00:19:05] Cody Schneider: So as time goes on, it just gets more and more as we get feedback from users, get a better understanding of the content quality that it’s outputting. The other side of this is what we’re starting to build is we just connected Search Console to Draft Horse. So imagine I have a website, I write content with Draft Horse, and the Search Console is plugged in.

[00:19:22] Cody Schneider: It’s providing that data from Google Search Console back to Draft Horse. Basically, the content that we can write, we can learn whether it’s good or not based off of is it ranking or not. And is it getting traffic for that company or not? The thing that’s further with that is we can then refresh that content based on the data that Google is providing us so that the content gets more effective at driving more traffic.

[00:19:43] Cody Schneider: And where we can like then take this even further is I can give you a strip tag, you put it on your website. You have a user action you want, like a signup, and we can actually send that information back to DraftForce. So then it can make decisions on top of all that data. So it’s okay, cool.

[00:19:57] Cody Schneider: I wrote this stuff. I published it. The Search Console is giving me this information. Okay, I’m going to go back and I’m going to rewrite this article based on the Search Console data. And that whole process, it’s the first version of this is a manual version, like where we’re going and what we’re experimenting with and what we’re trying to like this is the crazy part of us.

[00:20:15] Cody Schneider: It’s we’re like, can a blog write itself? Can I just plug I’m talking to all these different companies that are in all these different verticals, like art shipping versus cremation versus I talked to an HVAC guy yesterday who’s in Florida who does certification? And for all of them, I’m thinking, okay.

[00:20:30] Cody Schneider: Can you just plug your website in and it just grows your organic content based on whatever your business goal is? And we think we can do this just based on what we’re seeing, or at least get 90 percent of that automated. And the last, the tails are the things that the people have to end up touching.

[00:20:45] Cody Schneider: So anyways, it’s I’m over here from a marketing standpoint to see this is the most insane time that’s ever existed. This used to be just hours of work, like thousands of hours of work. And now it’s happening in literally minutes. Today, I’m writing 3000 articles for three different properties.

[00:21:01] Cody Schneider: Like I’m writing 1000 articles for my personal website about marketing. I’m writing 1000 articles about WordPress for draftforceai. com. And I’m writing a thousand articles about podcasting for Swell.ai. com. And all of those will be live in two hours. So like when they’re off on the website and starting to get traffic.

[00:21:17] Cody Schneider: So that’s basically what I’m thinking about it. And like how crazy this is in this moment in time that we’re in for a pure marketer that has like that understanding in the skill sets. 

[00:21:28] Robert Leonard: That’s my exact next question when you do use draft tours or really, let’s just assume any AI tool, but in this case specifically draft tours, what are you doing with the text that it puts out?

[00:21:39] Robert Leonard: I agree. It’s actually pretty good. Like I said, I’ve used it. It’s not really too much. You have to change, but if you look at some of the best blog posts, they have images, they might have graphics, they might have videos. You can’t do what you just said at scale and add images and videos and such. So what are you doing?

[00:21:53] Robert Leonard: Are you only uploading text or like, how are you handling that piece of it? 

[00:21:58] Cody Schneider: Yeah, so how I’m thinking about it is I’m going to upload text. I’m going to get it live in the wild. And then as it starts to get traffic, then I’m going to go back and have human intervention. So that’s when we go, we add photos, we add videos, we add CTAs in more specific positions.

[00:22:12] Cody Schneider: We’ll maybe rewrite sections that we don’t think are perfect. My view on this is the head. It’s different for each business size, right? Like we’re startups. It doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect. There are no repercussions if it isn’t if you’re a large form that’s in like accounting, it’s a way different game.

[00:22:27] Cody Schneider: Like you have laws that you basically have to follow. And so it depends on the scale or like where the scale or like where the journey of the company is. But how I’m thinking about it personally is to publish all of this. If nobody’s seeing it, it doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect. As soon as people are seeing it again, we’re just looking at the data.

[00:22:43] Cody Schneider: Then we go back in and we’ll touch that article up again, doing those improvements. We’ll also do internal linking at that point. So on the DraftHorse roadmap, these things are all there as well. Like automatic internal linking, automatic indexing, and adding photos with the exact match keyword. All of these things are doable.

[00:22:59] Cody Schneider: It’s honestly now just like straight up. We need more eng. It’s my co-founder and I like, it’s still early. This thing is 45 days old. I have no idea where it’s going or what’s happening. We’re just trying to build basically what our customers are asking for. The things that they hate doing that they know make impacts like refreshing content makes an impact, internal linking makes an impact, photos make an impact, etc.

[00:23:20] Robert Leonard: When you were answering a question a few minutes ago, I wrote down, one of the things I wrote down was, would you do this if you had a brand? Because I think what you were talking about, I wasn’t sure if you said you have 18 to 24 months. I’m like, okay, this isn’t going to be a permanent thing.

[00:23:36] Robert Leonard: And then you mentioned before too, that like brand is really the big value add here. So I’m thinking to myself, would we do something like this blog content at scale if we have a brand? Or would it be better to maybe take a slower path and write it yourself, add really creative and individualized images and videos, like really specific stuff?

[00:23:55] Robert Leonard: So that’s what I was wondering, but then you just said you’re doing it for your own company. So while AI and Draft Horse, like you’re doing it for your own company. So I guess the answer to this question is yes, you would probably do it if you had a brand, but I guess more so what if you wanted to build like an ESPN, right?

[00:24:09] Robert Leonard: Like you wanted, you had a topic, whatever the topic is. not necessarily sports, but you wanted to be a media company. You didn’t have the software that you were trying to sell. You just want to be a media company. Would you still use AI to create that content? 

[00:24:22] Cody Schneider: A hundred percent. So I’m like watching the company do this.

[00:24:25] Cody Schneider: Like I just can’t say names, but like I’m watching a huge podcast network do this right now where they’re like, okay, we’re going to basically build all of these blog posts that are all related to the niche that we’re in. And then we get all this organic traffic that naturally comes from all of these posts that we write again, just to talk about scale, I’m talking like 10, 000 plus articles that they all write.

[00:24:43] Cody Schneider: On those blog posts, they have a call to action to either listen to their shows or join their newsletter or whatever that is. So that creates this inbound, like SEO traditionally, like there’s two plays of it. In all reality, what you’re trying to do is get the user to do something for you for free.

[00:24:57] Cody Schneider: So like when we think about just marketing in general, there’s kind of two types of marketing. There’s transactional marketing and there’s like long-term investment marketing. So like transactional marketing, it’s something like paid ads, it’s cold email. It’s something like I’m going to do an action and then immediately later I’m going to feel that thing.

[00:25:11] Cody Schneider: SEO falls into that bucket where it’s way more like a long-term investment. What I do now, I’m not going to feel the effects of that until 12 months later. So if I’m a media brand and I can go and I can spend five grand and that makes me 10, 000 articles that are related to my company and I know that, okay, 12 months from now, we’ll say 10 percent of those articles actually provide any traffic.

[00:25:32] Cody Schneider: Suddenly I have this massive inbound engine. that I can basically tap into. So you’re trying to grow a newsletter or any of these media pieces, which is like what everybody is trying to do. This is a way to create that evergreen content that’s almost like a lead magnet for that media company. So like when I think about it for Swell and Draftforce, what we’re focusing on with this is I’m trying to get free traffic.

[00:25:53] Cody Schneider: And then I have a call to action to sign up for the software at the top of that page. And a percentage of those people that come in, sign up for the software. That’s a free lead. So if I can spend 50 cents now, and that creates one signup in the next 12 months. It pays for itself. Of course, I’m going to do this.

[00:26:09] Cody Schneider: Like I’m going to do this until it stops working. And that’s personally how I’m thinking about it. While I build these companies and build these brands out, basically. 

[00:26:17] Robert Leonard: So right now you have to find a keyword, whatever that keyword is, and you put it into an AI tool like Draft Horse and overhead an article for you optimized for that keyword.

[00:26:27] Robert Leonard: What if you want to? make it about a news story that like, say it’s like a breaking news story that just happened. And so there’s not really a lot of stuff ranking. There’s no specific keyword, like people are searching a bunch of different stuff just to find this news story. Or even, it’s not even really an SEO play at that point.

[00:26:44] Robert Leonard: It’s more of like content for social, but it’s still in this niche site realm. Like, how do you use AI for that? And is there a way to maybe use an AI tool like Draftforce to paraphrase content from another site that’s already talked about the news story? 

[00:26:58] Cody Schneider: Totally. So this is actually the technology we built for Swell can do this, but like Swell isn’t designed for that.

[00:27:03] Cody Schneider: So Swell is an AI writer for podcasters. You upload an mp3 into it, it creates a transcription, and then you can basically like, write whatever content about the transcription that you want. So hypothetically, you could do the same thing. So have you seen, there’s all these it’s like the, like chat with PDFs, like that, I feel like that went viral, like recently, like all these types of products.

[00:27:21] Cody Schneider: And then everybody cloned each other. Cause somebody likes to put an MRR graph in public. That was like, it was like, they hit 80 grand in four months or something insane. So that technology is what a vector database is basically. And so what you end up doing is you like, I upload this information in a written text format.

[00:27:36] Cody Schneider: So for a podcast, it’s like I’m uploading a transcript, but it can be in any written text format. I upload that in, you put it into a vector database. We, so for our stacks, we use something called Pinecone and then we use LangChain. And that’s basically how we interact with these vector databases. So imagine as news happens, you go and you find all the sources for all of this news and you’re this niche site that’s like trying to report on it.

[00:27:57] Cody Schneider: So you could aggregate and say there’s 10 sources. I aggregate all that information. It could be in the form of transcripts. It could be in the form of again, stuff that other people wrote, etc. I put that into the Spectre database, and then I can have the AI go and write against that information. So I’m like, okay, cool, here’s the structure of this article output that I want to have.

[00:28:17] Cody Schneider: Okay, AI, go write to this article structure using the information that I just put there. And so how this function is basically the LLM is going and finding relevant information. within that corpus of data that you’ve given it. So say, for example, I’m writing about telehealth, it’s going to go and find every mention of telehealth.

[00:28:33] Cody Schneider: If I say, Hey, write a title about like how much is telehealth declining after COVID, it basically will come and find all the relevant information to that. And then write that section for you based on what you provided it. So totally possible. Like we just haven’t built a tool. I know there’s somebody out there that’s building something like this, like a hundred percent, it’s happening.

[00:28:52] Cody Schneider: So that, that can be done with Swell, or no? The technology that Swell uses is what basically we can repurpose Swell. It’d probably be its own brand spin-it out, but the technology that we built with Swell, 100 percent could do that. Somebody could do that exact thing. Absolutely.

[00:29:08] Cody Schneider: Right now, it doesn’t function for it. There’s no way you’re just gonna get Swell to function. You can’t upload anything into Swell, that’s just pure text. We only take an MP3, etc. But yeah, the idea is, yes, you could do this. The technology exists for you to do that. 

[00:29:22] Robert Leonard: So I mentioned before that I follow you on Twitter and that’s what I want to talk about next.

[00:29:26] Robert Leonard: As I said, this is an example where I don’t have one direct specific question. I just want to hear all the things you have to say about what you’re doing on Twitter. So tell us why you started, what you’re doing, how it’s going. It’s just like everything about Twitter and why you’re there. 

[00:29:42] Cody Schneider: Yeah.

[00:29:43] Cody Schneider: So at the beginning of the year, I saw this arbitrage start to develop on Twitter. And it was really just like people just started, I just started hearing rumblings from friends that people were just getting a breach that was unprecedented just for social media. So social media typically starts out is like They want you to get free reach and then they get you sucked in as a brand and then they basically flip a switch off and you no longer get free reach and they want to charge you for that reach that they got, right?

[00:30:09] Cody Schneider: So that’s the whole idea of building this massive network out that they can sell ads to. So Twitter had this moment. where we started seeing, Oh, like we’re getting free reach. Like you would get with a startup social media company. So again, imagine Facebook in 2012, where they’re just like, you get all of this reach.

[00:30:25] Cody Schneider: And so I saw that happening and I was like, all right, I’m going to just basically go in on this because I think I can sell these tools through this channel. So fast forward, I think I had 400 followers at the beginning of the year. It’s like at 8, 000 now, I do 2. 2 million impressions per year. I paid 5 for Twitter Blue to get those two points.

[00:30:42] Cody Schneider: Sorry, not 2. 2 million impressions per year. 2. 2 million impressions per month. I pay 5 a month to get those 2. 2 million impressions. It’s the cheapest CPM on the internet right now. So my process to do this it’s the same process I use for all marketing. It’s figure out a channel, turn it into a system, and then look at the data to see what’s working, and do more of what’s working and less of what isn’t, and then just do that over and over again, like a lifestyle habit, right?

[00:31:08] Cody Schneider: For Twitter, to get really specific, what 10 tweets per day. It’s straight up me just being honestly ridiculous. Like I’m just documenting the things that are happening. And I like it style-wise, it’s like I made it really specific. It’s like bare-bones information. I’m trying to give you the essence of the idea.

[00:31:27] Cody Schneider: Because I think that’s like the best form of Twitter. But that’s when it actually thrives as a type of social media. And so I do 10 tweets per day. I sit down every Sunday. I have a glass of whiskey. I write those 70 tweets. Every Sunday I look at all the data. I see, I look at it like the past three months.

[00:31:42] Cody Schneider: I see which were the best-performing tweets that occur based on impressions. And then I write 70 more tweets that are similar, like basically remixing those ideas for that next week. And so what that does is it creates this viral loop, right? So it’s I’m learning the type of content that my audience is most likely to interact with.

[00:32:00] Cody Schneider: I’m then writing more content that I know they’re going to have a high likelihood to interact with and then that creates more reach. And so then it’s just it continues. It has that snowball effect. And so that’s like basically my entire process. We’ve been debating building this out. So I’m doing this like half automated with AI right now.

[00:32:16] Robert Leonard: I was going to say, why aren’t you having AI do this? Why? I know you want to drink whiskey, but like you just have AI do it. 

[00:32:22] Cody Schneider: A hundred percent. So like we’re doing this, like my process is augmented currently, but like we, again, we think we can actually automate this. So imagine that vector database.

[00:32:31] Cody Schneider: And I’m like, all right, robots write tweets based on this internal information. Now publish those tweets. Now look at the data, which of those tweets are getting the most impressions? Okay. Go write more tweets that are based on those best-performing tweets. But again, go back to that database that we added that vector database and find information that’s similar to what we just talked about.

[00:32:50] Cody Schneider: That’s doing the best. Again, create that viral loop. We think we can do that. It’s one of those things where it’s just like it’s end resources. Like I only have, we only have so much time basically. So anyway, drop source is really the focus right now. So we’re trying to keep like honed in on that.

[00:33:05] Robert Leonard: One of the tweets that you had recently talked about how you have a very basic website that you built with just Tailwind and API calls, yet that it’s worth more than your townhouse because of distribution. A common adage is build it and they will come, which is often applied in the business world to just building a good product.

[00:33:23] Robert Leonard: And then startup founders, it’s said that a lot of like first-time startup founders say Oh, let’s just build a really good product and they’ll come. Second-time founders know that you need distribution. So talk to us about the importance of distribution versus product. 

[00:33:37] Cody Schneider: The easiest way to say it is that I see worse products win all the time because they have better distribution.

[00:33:42] Cody Schneider: NextSuite is a prime example of that, right? It’s a terrible product. But I think valued at a billion plus. I don’t even know. I’d have to look at its market cap. And that’s the idea, right? And it’s always product people. This happens in SF so much, it drives me insane. They think, Oh, I just built this unbelievable thing and people are going to find it.

[00:33:59] Cody Schneider: No. And it’s it’s always these founders that are like, they have this, it’s almost like they’re idealistic. They think that they’ve been like, basically, that’s what they’ve been taught. A good product is an aspect of it. Of course. And a good product is expected at this point. You can’t just make the okay product.

[00:34:13] Cody Schneider: You have to make a product, but the only way to differentiate, especially now when I can create software for nothing, it’s so easy to clone software now more than it’s ever has been just like, it’s so easy to clone content, like more than it ever has been before. What I’m trying to say is that like distribution is how you basically create your model.

[00:34:34] Cody Schneider: It’s there are two things that are going to create Motsu in this new age that we’re in. It’s distribution, having owned media that is a way for you to talk with an audience that nobody else has access to. And the other piece is in having customer data that nobody else has access to. Everything else can be duplicated, but those are the only two things that you can use, like any type of differentiation.

[00:34:55] Cody Schneider: So when I talk about that tweet, it’s an ASL and it is like our apps are straight up. It’s these are. Tailwind Components, which is a CSS library, and it’s an API wrapper around OpenAI. But the value we’re providing is more important than those things, right? If you take those pieces apart, there’s a great book.

[00:35:14] Cody Schneider: It’s called The Innovation Stack. It’s by the co-founder of Square. What’s that? I can’t think of his name right now. Jack Dorsey? No, it’s the other one. McKinley. He did actually all the hardware. I think his last name’s McKinley. If you look up Innovation Stack, it’ll come up. His concept is basically I’m going to take all of these ideas.

[00:35:30] Cody Schneider: And I’m going to pile them together and then suddenly there’s this tipping point when you get to 8 to 11 ideas like stacked together that a new idea forms. So when you look at the components, you’re like, this is nothing new, but when you look at it in the aggregate, you’re like, oh, that’s a new thing that solves something.

[00:35:47] Cody Schneider: And I want to pay for that. And when we get down just to break down the unit economics or the jobs to be done with Draft Horse, they traditionally were writing this content. And if I can come in and be like, you paid 100 before, now you pay me a dollar, and you get the same output that you were getting previously.

[00:36:01] Cody Schneider: Of course, I’m gonna that’s a no-brainer. If I’m a business owner of course I’m gonna do that. There’s nothing that’s gonna hold me back from doing that. And that’s basically it. 

[00:36:10] Robert Leonard: You’ve also tweeted quite a bit about how you’ve helped your friend’s podcasts grow. This show that you’re on right now is pretty big in relative terms compared to other shows, but if I’m being completely honest and transparent, we’ve hit a bit of a wall in terms of growth.

[00:36:25] Robert Leonard: It grew really fast when it first started, but it’s become more or less, it’s more or less plateaued since then. Take us through what you’re doing to grow your friend’s podcasts and maybe what you’d recommend for us to do to grow this podcast. 

[00:36:39] Cody Schneider: Totally. Yeah. They’re the stack that I always suggest for people.

[00:36:43] Cody Schneider: This works mainly for podcasts that are trying to zero to one they’re nonexistent to existent. Like how you’re trying to basically like, and that’s mainly the companies that I work with and have helped. I’ve done this in the biotech space and the marketing space.

[00:36:56] Cody Schneider: In the insurance space, et cetera. So the things that you layer together are podcast SEO, Facebook ads to iOS-only devices, and then newsletters in either the form of SMS newsletters or email newsletters. So let’s break those down. So podcast SEO. The idea with podcast SEO is basically how you rank internally on the platforms.

[00:37:17] Cody Schneider: So on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, that’s where 90 percent of the streams are happening when it comes to these apps. 90 percent of downloads are occurring. So how you name your podcast, what you put in the description of your podcast, what you put in the title and the show notes of your podcast, all of that, how you basically get downloads, how people find you.

[00:37:35] Cody Schneider: So say as an example, like my friends just started this other, this podcast, they wanted to, they’re basically wanting to make a marketing podcast in the UK. It’s about growth and marketing. And so for them, what they did is they named the show with growth in the title. And they like also include marketing in the title and they include all of these target keywords that they want to show up for related to the content that they’re talking about within all pieces of the show.

[00:37:59] Cody Schneider: And again, it’s shown us within, etc. So what that does is as you get downloads, you start to show up more effectively. So like an SEO that’s called domain ranking, their DR, you basically what it is like how many links you have from other websites. And it’s a representative number of how trustworthy your site is.

[00:38:17] Cody Schneider: And can you even rank for these keywords? So when we translate that same idea to podcasts, downloads are that metric, basically. It’s a factor. That is the biggest factor in you showing up within the search engine. So the more downloads you get, and if you’re going after the target keywords, you get more reach from that.

[00:38:33] Cody Schneider: So I see this happening all the time. And this is actually something that we do with Swell. Like we’ll get these companies that come in and they’re like, Hey, I have a show. It has 500 episodes. The first 200, the show notes are terrible. The naming is terrible. They’re basically dead on the vine.

[00:38:49] Cody Schneider: And what we’ve seen people do is they go back and they rewrite all of the show notes of these previous shows. And update those, refresh those, but now that the show has more downloads, suddenly those old episodes can get like inbound reach Basically that’s happening because of now discoverable by making these small changes.

[00:39:06] Cody Schneider: We’ve seen Lips where it’s 30 percent like week over week by just doing changes in that app catalog. So things like that, where it’s just it’s apparent that this is affecting it. So that’s one component of it. The other piece that we pair is we do Facebook ads to iOS-only devices.

[00:39:23] Cody Schneider: So why don’t we do that? So iOS devices have the Apple podcasting app installed on every mobile. So when you send them to an Apple podcast URL from a Facebook ad, and the ad we’re doing is straight up, just a clip from the podcast, we can do this exact same thing with this, right? Like you pull out one of the interesting pieces, you put it into a clip.

[00:39:41] Cody Schneider: And typically what I tell people is like, Hey, test 20 of them together against each other. Whichever one has the cheapest CPC, all of your ad spend goes into there. So when you target iOS-only devices and send them to the Apple podcast episode URL, it’s technically a deep link. So when they click that ad, it opens, it prompts them Do you want to open the Apple podcasting app?

[00:40:00] Cody Schneider: It takes them right to that episode and they can like, when they press play, that turns into a download. So the other thing that you can do in the same vein is you can actually, it’s called a podcast, subscribe, deep link. I’ll send you this just to add to the show notes, Robert, so you have it later. But basically, it’s podcast colon forward slash.

[00:40:17] Cody Schneider: You push the RSS feed of the podcast after that. And again, when they’re on a mobile device and they do that click, it’s going to take them into the Apple podcasting app. And then it’s going to prompt them to subscribe to the Apple podcast. When they subscribe, every new episode that you publish is an instant download for your podcast.

[00:40:35] Cody Schneider: So the other piece that we layer with it is the doing newsletters. So newsletters are what we’ve seen like recently, and we did email traditionally. And that email is straight up just like the newest episode of XYZ podcast is live. And so I’m doing some work with a biotech company. We’re actually scraping their entire industries, all their emails, right?

[00:40:54] Cody Schneider: And I’m sequencing them to an email. This is a gray list. And we’re getting open rates of 40 percent and CTRs of 5 percent on these cold emails that we’re sending. And because they’re being added to a newsletter, basically how we do it is I add like 200 emails per day and we built an automation that does this.

[00:41:10] Cody Schneider: As soon as they get added, they automatically get sent an email. It’s the best podcast episode that they’ve done just from a data standpoint. We know that it hooks people the most. They get that email. Once they join that list, every time we get, we publish a new episode every week, they get an email that the new episode has been dropped.

[00:41:27] Cody Schneider: So it’s basically like the new episode is live. Click this link. It takes them right to the Apple podcast and link. It talks about what they’re going to learn in that podcast episode. And again, this is like one of those arbitrages that we’ve identified right now. This will be gone, in the future, but right now people are receptive when they get an email that’s Oh, it’s a podcast episode about something in my industry.

[00:41:47] Cody Schneider: And I’m getting free education? They don’t look at that as spam, even though technically, this is probably like a grey-hat spam email that’s happening. So anyway, what that does is that creates an immediate download that comes from that. You also, we’re seeing people pair SMS groups. They’re using one of those software that basically like, Klaviyo has this where you can have like a list.

[00:42:05] Cody Schneider: Of phone numbers and do like bulk texting. It’s basically just marketing, right? So they’re sending emails about what every time a new podcast es episode drops with, again, that link like the newest episode of X, Y, Z podcast is live linked to the podcast episode. We’re seeing like 90% open rates, like 40 to 50% clicks on those text messages that we’re sending.

[00:42:24] Cody Schneider: I have a friend of mine who is starting to experiment with this, with WhatsApp. He’s in Europe, so that’s why he’s doing it. I imagine it’s going to be the exact same thing from Dwork, but basically by pairing those three things together, you can make growth happen so fast. It’s actually insane. And the component of this, I haven’t talked about it.

[00:42:40] Cody Schneider: So all of the podcasts. So if you Google top us marketing podcasts, what’s going to come up with sites like chartable.com. So Chartable is just scraping all of their top podcasts. They’re just scraping that from Apple podcast categories. So if you search like Apple podcast category marketing, it’s going to have like popular podcasts and there’s going to be 300 of them that list that Charterpool is showing you, it’s just those podcasts just scraped from the, from directly from Apple.

[00:43:07] Cody Schneider: com. So all of those websites, those aggravators that are like writing podcasts, they’re all scraping just from Apple. So if you can get more downloads within Apple, what you get is basically more free reach through all of these tools. You get more again, and it’s just we’re just trying to create growth flywheels, like with all of our, with everything that we’re doing.

[00:43:26] Cody Schneider: As we get more downloads, we get more podcasts as we SEO. As we get more subscribers, we get more downloads. As we get more newsletter followers, we get more downloads. As we get more downloads, we climb the charts. As we climb the charts, we get more downloads. And it creates this virtuous cycle in all of it.

[00:43:40] Cody Schneider: So that’s how we’re pairing it together. That’s how we’re seeing people have effectiveness with this. 

[00:43:44] Robert Leonard: So how about for a newsletter? So, at TIP, basically, one of my main focuses right now is to grow our newsletter. We started a daily newsletter, very similar to Morning Brew with our own spin on it.

[00:43:58] Robert Leonard: It’s a business unit that we’re trying to send up. We’re at about 33, 000 subscribers for anybody that’s listening. That’s not subscribed. Go subscribe. It’s theinvestorspodcast.com/subscribe. We have about 50 percent open rates for six months straight and we’re sending daily seven days a week, like 51, 52%.

[00:44:17] Robert Leonard: And these are long emails. Like we have really good open rates, but our growth is pretty slow. I don’t know the exact number off the top of my head in terms of how much we’re growing, like a couple hundred ish a month, probably three, four or five, six, seven, a hundred a month, maybe a thousand. But I want to supercharge it.

[00:44:30] Robert Leonard: I want to go from 33, 000 to 330, 000 subscribers. How would you do that? 

[00:44:37] Cody Schneider: Yeah Sam Parr built the hustle off of Facebook ads alone. But like, how could he do that? Could you do that now? I don’t think so. In the same way, just like he was getting dollar signups to his newsletter, right? And so you work that math backward.

[00:44:50] Cody Schneider: Okay, I’m going to spend 100 grand and I’m going to get 100, 000 people on this newsletter. How much money, how much more money can I make per 100, 000 more people on this newsletter? And then you can basically start to do that ROI analysis and what’s that payback period for this capital investment?

[00:45:04] Cody Schneider: I say that you couldn’t do that, but I have a friend that has a newsletter that’s in the AI space and he’s getting dollar downloads from Facebook, or sorry, it’s dollar signups from Facebook. And literally, the ad that he’s running is a screenshot of an Apple note. that’s why I just found this newsletter.

[00:45:18] Cody Schneider: It’s unbelievable. It’s basically like wrapping up everything that’s happening in AI for you in a day. And it’s like super easy to read. It’s basically something pretty simple Jericho. And again, it’s a screenshot, like the image they’re using for this is a screenshot of an Apple note. That is how they’re getting people to click and then sign up for this thing, getting those dollars down.

[00:45:36] Cody Schneider: That’s one piece. There’s this new company that just came out. I haven’t done this personally, but again, just from what I’ve heard in the industry, it’s called Viral Loop or something like that. Again, I’ll find you the actual name of it, but basically how it functions from my understanding is you do a cross-promotion between newsletters.

[00:45:51] Cody Schneider: So newsletter owners basically sign up and then they have a newsletter you might like. And they add that to the end of the newsletter and then basically I’m seeing people add 20, 000 subscribers in seven days as seven days after they sign up for this company. Again, I can’t remember the name off the top of my head.

[00:46:08] Cody Schneider: I’ll find it and send it over to you after this, just so you have it for the show notes. But I think pairing those things together like I always, whenever I’m thinking about a company, it, and it depends on the level of capital you have, you’re starting from I have zero money, but it’s a way different position, but if you have the capital to deploy.

[00:46:22] Cody Schneider: If I was in your shoes, I would be like, okay, where’s the channel that we can get subscriptions to these newsletters from? And it’s probably going to be one of the most recent, it’s probably going to be TikTok in all reality. And it’s going to be like, especially for your audience, like millennial Gen Z how do you, how do I start a business, et cetera.

[00:46:37] Cody Schneider: I’m going to look for, I’m going to test all the channels against each other. I’m going to look for what’s the cheapest signup. Like where’s the cheapest signup coming from? So I’m going to compare all the data, the signup data against each other. And then I’m going to look at that number. Okay. It’s again, costing me a dollar.

[00:46:51] Cody Schneider: And if you can get a dollar subscriber to a newsletter, again, Sam Parr with the hustle sold that 40 million. Like he did that in two years, which is Facebook ads, right? Of course, you have to write good content and all this, but if your open rates are good and your readership is good. Yeah. We have good content.

[00:47:04] Cody Schneider: Yeah. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. And so what it turns into then is then you have that number like, Oh, I want to get to a million subs on this newsletter. Okay. I’m getting down I’m getting signups at a dollar. That means I need to spend a million over this time period or whatever.

[00:47:17] Cody Schneider: And of course, there’s knock-on effects that happen. As you get bigger, you’d start you get more word of mouth, you get more natural inbound, et cetera. But I would do basically paid ads and then pair that with this company that does newsletter cross-promotion for you within it.

[00:47:30] Cody Schneider: Those two things together, it just. That’s what I’m seeing working right now based on the conversations I’m having with just founders. 

[00:47:37] Robert Leonard: Awesome. Cody, before we go, I want to give you a chance to tell everyone where they can go to, learn more about you, Drop your Twitter handle, your resources, your company, or anything you want people to go online and find let me know and we can put it in the show notes.

[00:47:53] Cody Schneider: Love it, man. Thanks for the plug. Always love it. Yeah. So I’m just my Twitter handle@codyschneiderxx. I basically am just like wide tweeting as me build these companies and everything we’re seeing and learning. If you like this, you’re going to like that. And then the two things that I’m building right now is Swell AI.

[00:48:09] Cody Schneider: com and then drafthorseai. com. If you Google both of them, they should come up. And if they don’t come up, I’m not doing my job so yeah, those are the places. 

[00:48:18] Robert Leonard: Awesome. I’ll put those below in the show notes for everybody that’s interested in checking them out. Cody, thanks so much for taking time out of your day to join me.

[00:48:24] Robert Leonard: I really appreciate it. 

[00:48:26] Cody Schneider: Appreciate it, Robert. Thanks for having me, man. 

[00:48:28] Robert Leonard: All right, guys. That’s all I had for this week’s episode of Millennial Investing. I’ll see you again next week. 

[00:48:35] Outro: Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to We Study Billionaires by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Every Wednesday, we teach you about Bitcoin, and every Saturday we study billionaires and the financial markets. To access our show notes, transcripts, or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com.

[00:48:50] Outro: This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.