Revolutionizing Newsletter Creation: Beehiiv's AI-Powered Text and Image Integration

0:00What can 160 years of experience teach you about the future? When it comes to protecting what matters, Pacific Life provides life insurance, retirement income, and employee benefits for people and businesses building a more confident tomorrow. Strategies rooted in strength and backed by experience. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you today. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. When the AI revolution began, it really hit and scaled in the marketing department first. And this was something I feel like I saw with companies like Jasper and Copy AI, where they were getting millions of users using AI.

0:43Essentially, they were APIs that Jasper is using from OpenAI's DaVinci model to help generate, you know, articles and content like that. And that was really one of the big companies, you know, Jasper back in October before ChatGPT raised a$1.5 billion valuation on their round of funding. They raised over$100 million. And I think this is an area that really scaled. So this is, of course, with myself having a marketing background, an area that I'm very, very excited about. And today on the podcast, I want to talk about a marketing tool that has been taking the industry by storm, in my opinion. I say that because I'm a user, so I'm biased.

1:24And this is something that I absolutely love. And they've just integrated AI in a very big way that gets me very excited because I think it's indicative of what's going to happen in the industry and with tools in general with the successful companies. So without further ado, let's jump into it. So the headline news today is the fact that Beehive, the newsletter platform, has just integrated an AI image and text generated assistant. and they have a bunch of different dropdowns and cool tools that I think really help when they're super integrated like this. I think this is going to take perhaps a little bit of thunder from some tools that we're trying to, you know, build plugins to do this on top.

2:00But, you know, of course, Beehive has built this right in. Now, if you're a subscriber to the AI Box newsletter that we send out every week about, you know, some of the top news stories in AI, we break them down and give you a summary of them. You'll know that those newsletters are all sent from the Beehive platform. So it's a platform that I absolutely love. And I think I'm sure I probably have some sort of affiliate link on my account that I'll link. So if you're interested in starting a newsletter or saving your email somewhere, definitely click through that. I'm sure we'll both get some sort of bonus for it.

2:30I haven't looked into it, but in any case, I'm sure I'll leave a link to sign up for Beehive in the description. But without further ado, let's talk about some of the features that they're adding, because I think this is a very, very cool use case, and it's a company that I currently use. So I'm always excited about that. So the basic overview is that I think they've added an AI writing assistant that can create content based on a user's desired output along with a Few different parameters like length and tone length and tone are kind of cool So I saw in their little demo There's a drop down where you can say like write six paragraphs about blah blah blah You put them in you say write it in, you know, this sort of tone They got a drop down for tone.

3:06The thing that I like about that is you can add that to a prompt for for GPT-4. Sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it doesn't. I'm wondering, GPT-4 definitely does a lot better than GPT-3.5. And so I'm wondering if, I'm wondering if that's just a prompt, essentially, that they've integrated, right? They have a software with dropdowns. It's like, you know, drop down how many paragraphs, and then you like click on six, and then it just changes like in the prompt, right? Six paragraphs about this prompt. I'm sure that's how they integrated it. But sometimes, sometimes GPT-4 doesn't do that perfectly.

3:39I think it's probably more of a problem with GPT 3.5 I'd be like write six paragraphs about whatever and then it'd write like five or I'd yeah whatever it annoyed me actually paragraphs is probably better at I think what it's really bad at is if you say write a thousand words about this topic uh it just does not do a thousand words it's usually like kind of caps out at whatever it's traditional message sizes I feel like I was getting like 600 words max um when I tell it to do a thousand so in any case that's really cool that they're doing this I saw them do a live really cool in their product demo they also have ai text tools so you can change the you can change the tone of voice autocorrect autocomplete lengthen shorten simplify and do a lot of other things all using ai right it's kind of cool right if there's a paragraph if there's like a sentence you you'd highlight sentence say lengthen this thing to like three sentences it can kind of elaborate make it longer if you want or shorten if there's something that's a paragraph you're like hey you know summarize this thing real quick um for me tools like that are really useful because in my newsletter i essentially take a news story and give you like a little summary of it and so if I pasted in an entire article for example highlight the whole thing and say shorten this whole article to three sentences covering like the main stuff it does it I you know I've read the news article I read the thing after and be like okay yeah this is like a good uh this is a good summary but a bing but a boom I think that's pretty awesome uh the other thing they do is an AI image tool you can generate images without actually having to leave beehives editor now i think that they're using dolly 2 for these images and in my opinion dolly 2 is kind of horrible but you know aside from that um mid journey doesn't have an api so i'm assuming they don't have they haven't they haven't plugged that into it which would kind of be like the industry leader but in any case someone on their comment someone on their tweet where they were kind of announcing this tool said i hope you don't get hosed by their two cent API for Dolly 2.

5:31I guess Dolly 2 images are pretty expensive and they said I hope you're running your own You know your own model of stable diffusion Which a lot of people have recommended because of course that's a lot cheaper than API and into Dolly 2 so I'd be curious to see if they are doing that if anyone knows Make sure to you know tweet at me. Let me know The other thing that I think is pretty interesting here is that they have an AI translator. So And first first things first when people say AI translator I'd be curious to know if anyone has done this but if anyone's put like Google Translate head-to-head with like just getting ChatGPT to translate something to a different language I wonder if ChatGPT would do a better job because it could like listen to the whole sentence understand the meaning and do it in correct grammar for that um you know in that specific language or or if Google does this better um if Google does it just as good I'm always curious why people feel like they need to say like AI translator it's like why don't just use a plugin with Google Translate, which is virtually free.

6:31But in any case, it is a cool feature. So that's plugged in. That's right on there. And so now on your newsletters, you can just get the whole thing translated to a new language. You could start your newsletter in five different languages if you wanted, which I think is pretty cool. So why this whole thing matters, I think being able to translate your newsletter into multiple languages is a big deal. I think that's going to unlock a whole bunch of new possibilities. I think they do Spanish, French, German, and some others. But in any case, overall, I think the reason this is a really exciting story for me to cover is because this isn't just Beehive.

7:04This is every tool, every software service that essentially is or should be integrating AI. This is obviously, these are no-brainer use cases for AI. You're writing a newsletter, you're like, oh, what should I put here? How do I summarize this? How do I condense this? How do I make this shorter? How do I make this longer? Anything that you manually have to do should be automated, that can be automated by AI, should be automated by AI, and you don't necessarily want to go to find some third-party software to do all of this stuff. And so I think it's really cool when you see companies like Beehive integrating this, you can get it done.

7:35I will say that currently when I'm writing newsletters for AI, I actually use AIbox, which is my software startup that I'm working on right now, raising a round of funding and building out. It's not released yet, so sadly I can't give you a link to try it out because it is an absolute lifesaver. but essentially I've built like a workflow on there. Pretty much what AI Box does, if you haven't listened from other podcasts, is it's a AI workflow generator. So you can chain together multiple AIs. So for the newsletter one, for example, I find three news stories that I think are really interesting and important to cover.

8:09I throw them in there. I click go. And based off of that, it generates all the content for my newsletter. It generates, you know, summaries of those newsletters. It generates bullet points. It generates an intro and outro, a bunch of different content. It can generate images I can embed, although usually I'm just embedding, you know, relevant tweets, what people are tweeting about on that topic. Again, also shout out to the newsletter. If you're not subscribed, I'll have a link in the, you know, in the show notes in the description for that as well. But yeah, so pretty much right now I have a box and I can throw in a few news articles, click go, boom, it generates all the content.

8:42And then I just copy it over. In the future, I'm going to work on doing a lot of third-party software integrations on AI Box. so I'll be able to have that plug straight into Beehive or another platform hopefully that you know I throw my news articles in click generate or even better yet I'll have it grab it I'll have it do the searches find the most relevant news articles generate all the content integrate with Beehive fill the whole thing out I go proofread it make sure everything looks good make some edits throw some stuff in there if I have sponsors swap them in and out and then publish the whole thing so that should save a ton of time which kind of would make the whole some of the new features from Beehive Redundant, but you know, you're always going to want to do some old, some of your own custom stuff and integrations in there.

9:24So for that reason, some of these Beehive features are very cool. And of course they're available now and AI box is still under in the works. So in any case, all in all, I would say if you're interested in newsletters, get Beehive. It's amazing. I've tried a lot. I've done MailChimp. I was on a$2 ,700 a month tier there. And it was just really annoying having that as a business expense for a lean startup I was doing prior to AI Box. Switched over to MailerLite, which was, you know, four or five hundred bucks a month, and then was able to switch over to Beehive. And that is a hundred dollars a month.

10:00It's amazing. They do everything. They have really high open rates. I believe the newsletter. So my my other startup has a newsletter. It's called Self Pause, and it has around 90 ,000, 90 ,000 plus subscribers on that newsletter. It's a daily newsletter. And I was blown away because just by switching from mailer light to beehive, I think they just do their platform better with how they do their sends, how they warm up their emails. And I guess they have a better reputation score or something because as soon as we switched over, we went from having like a 5 % open rate on our daily emails to having like a 15 to 25 % open rate on our daily emails.

10:41And that makes a big difference when you have 90 ,000 people and you're going from 5 % to 25%. It was like mind blowing. And yeah, so anyways, I cannot say enough how much I love Beehive. Very awesome platform. They've made a big difference with us. They have a cool feature too where they'll go and find you sponsors to throw on your newsletters. So we've got a bunch of sponsor placements with BetterHelp and a bunch of other platforms through them. They just found them for us. So that also saved us some time. It was really nice. But in any case, highly recommend Beehive. very cool that they're adding these ai features and if you're interested in starting up i'll leave a link to them in the description have an amazing day