#460: MASTER the Pivot: The Art of Following Your Passion with Iman Oubou, CEO & Co-Founder of Vocable.ai

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25:35Okay, so Iman, get us into a little bit of I remember how murky it was when you first started out with Vocable and like, not knowing what direction to go. How do you navigate that? Like, how did things come together? Because you didn't go to school for AI. Like, how did you figure this stuff out? Yeah, so I mean, I had a little bit of an idea around AI back in 2019. And even when I first started my last company, my last media company, I always had this idea that we're going to get to a place where we can automate a lot of the content creation aspect of the life cycle. And that because of AI, we'll be able to also help with the writing process and, you know, just basically streamline a lot of the manual tasks that go into the content creation process.

26:21And so with Sway, which I feel like was the stepping stone for me to really think through how does AI help in automating content creation process, I really wanted to almost scale our operations at the time without having to hire more editors, more writers in the team. So my thought process was if we're able to innovate here from a tech perspective and automate a lot of those tasks that my editors and writers are doing, I don't have to actually go higher for more. I can just use the AI to create tools within our platform to help our members who are writing on Sway to create their content without having to actually have a human helping them edit and write that content, right?

27:03So that was my first, I think, encounter with, all right, how do I practically figure this out and bring AI into the play so I can scale my business without having to have more overhead? And so because of that pain point at the time, this was 2019, I was able to dig deeper. And I'm also really good at being super curious and research things. Once I have like a problem, I need to solve for it. And most of the time, especially I think being a scrappy startup founder and entrepreneur, I'm just used to doing a lot of things on my own versus outsourcing immediately, not only because of money issues or anything, but also because I genuinely want to learn myself first before I bring on anybody else to manage that process.

27:44Because I've done that before where, you know, you have a problem and then you bring on someone to help you solve for it, but then you're not able to properly manage that person because you don't know what they're doing and what you're doing, right? So being able to learn that was important for me. So I started researching a lot about like generative AI and how can AI help you create content by just prompting it. My brother, luckily for me, is a software engineer. So I think that kind of helped me a little bit kind of dig deeper into, you know, have him look into creating a prototype for Sway at the time to automate our content creation process.

28:19And he started doing that and we really loved it. At the time, ChatGPT obviously was not around, but there were a lot of AI models that existed in the market, but they were just a lot older. GPT2 was the first one I was fine tuning, but it was a lot harder to work with because again, they're not as easy now to use as the chatbots. The chatbots made it so much more mainstream and easy to use for the masses because you're just talking to it in human language and you're just prompting it like you're talking to a person. But at the time when the AI models were just models and you had to fine tune them, you have to do that in what we call playground.

28:50And it's a whole other process. So luckily, again, my brother was there to help me walk through it. And so we built this prototype, right? To just kind of test it out on ourselves for our own team. And then we started kind of shopping that around to see if investors would be interested in that. And the more I talked to people about it, the more they said, well, this is actually really useful for not just your members on your platform, but people that have small businesses that they need to run, other content creators that are struggling with their creation process. So it would be really weird to just have that in your platform, but not available to everybody.

29:22Why don't you create this as a software that's standalone versus putting it as part of Sway's platform? And so that's when I started thinking, okay, this is actually a really great idea. And this is only going to evolve more and more where there's going to be a lot more to the content creation and AI than just the writing process. So at the time I made the decision to move on from Sway and then start kind of thinking through building this AI software. But basically, I think for me, the reason why I really got into AI early on is because I had a pain point I was trying to solve for. And I thought AI was the right way to go.

29:54And I just knew from a technological perspective, we will be heading into a world now where it's all about digitization, automation, and all data. So data is, they said, the new oil, right? So I had to kind of get in that mindset and start thinking if I'm going to have another business, or maybe if I'm going to run another business, then I need to be very well versed in how to create processes that can be automated and scalable. And that's, I think, ultimately what people should think about when they think about AI. Most people kind of shy away from it because they think I'm not an engineer, I'm not a software person.

30:27It's not applicable to me, but it is very important because anyone that runs businesses or even within organizations or even as an employer individual in your own life, you have to think about AI as something that can create processes that can be automated and scalable and reputable. So ultimately that's to me why I really thought that was something I wanted to get into early on because the world headed that way. And so luckily we're right there. That just reminds me another key point that I want everyone to just take a moment and notice, get into a growth industry. Like Iman's in the right place at the right time.

31:00That's not by chance. It was by design because she pivoted away from something else to get into this. For a long time, I was in the radio business. The radio business was in decline and it made my life so much harder. You're doing the same thing you'd be doing in a different industry, but you're making it harder for yourself. So take a moment, Look at the industry you're in and make sure it's a growth one. And if it's not, take the steps to start changing it. Now you will make your life so much happier and so much better. OK, so you were struggling at first. Like anything, you're building something out of a pain point, which makes so much sense.

31:31But how did you start getting it to the next level to where you guys are today? Like what were some of the decisions you made or like or how did you start landing on these massive stages teaching about AI so you built your name and your credibility so quickly? I will boil it down to a very simple concept and it might sound too simple and maybe not helpful, but honestly, I was just geeking out over it. I was so excited about all of it because it just felt like things were coming out and developing so fast and it was genuinely revolutionary, right? Like it changed so many things. It changed how we do business.

32:07It changed even now how I run my life. I mean, even my grocery list and like my Sunday errands are run by AI at this point. So it just was like one of those aha moment that I had where I was like, I'm genuinely like spending hours reading about it and sharing it with others on my social. And that's how I attracted these other opportunities. Right. So I attracted, obviously, the speaking opportunities because people saw that I was a lot more knowledgeable about AI and not only that, a lot more passionate about how to apply it. So I think one of the things about me as well is that I'm not technical.

32:42So I didn't go to school as a software engineer. I'm not a coder, but I'm just geeking out over the application side of AI. And I think that resonated a lot more with the public because it's one thing if an AI researcher or an AI engineer is explaining AI. So it's very technical and you lose a lot of people there. But it's another thing where someone just like you and I, I mean, I'm just kind of another like business owner, content creator. I'm not, again, very well trained. I didn't research AI. But I'm able to really take a lot of the technological advances in that space and understand how I can apply it for myself as a business owner, as a content creator, as a marketer, as, you know, just a human in society.

33:23And that's, I think, where people started to relate to more. It's like, oh, someone who isn't also as skilled in it, but then was able to understand it easily. And now it's simplifying that for us to understand how we can also apply it in one of the use cases for us. Right. And I think that's the biggest thing with AI now is we see all these news coming out and it's exciting. But then most of the time people kind of are left with one question. OK, this is all nice and fun, but what does it mean for me? Like, how do I use it? Right. It's like, oh, they announced a new model. Great. So what does that mean?

33:56Like, well, how can I use it? Or how is it different than the last model? And that's, I think, where maybe there's a little bit of lack of education there and like there's a gap, right? So there's like the technical people that are talking about it and explaining it. And that's pretty much who I learned from a lot of the time. But then I take that and then I kind of digest it on my own and then apply it on my own. And then most people are not really doing that on their own, right? So they're busy running their own businesses. They're busy with life. if they don't have the capacity or maybe even the bandwidth or passion to figure out how to use the latest AI model and play around with it.

34:27And then how does that going to help them with XYZ in their business? Right. So I guess that's where I come in. Right. So I love doing that. And it's exciting to me because not only it's good for us for Vocable, right? So every time we're kind of thinking about new features with Vocable, we want to know what people are struggling with and how can we bring AI into building a product that is easy to use for them. But also for me as a business owner. I use it every single day with my businesses. Now I'm, you know, I'm able to run a startup with a lot less resources and a lot less money than my first startup.

34:57And I'm an AI. So, and I'm in a much more techie startup than the last one, but because of AI, I'm able to streamline a lot of my marketing and operations that I wasn't able to do that before. That's basically like how I got into just the whole AI space. So tell us a little bit about, cause I know this is going to be helpful for a lot of people. What are the right AI tools people should be using now and how should they be using them? Because I know like you even mentioned, oh, like even your grocery list and I am the opposite. I'm not like out there looking at how can I use AI to help my life and my business.

35:28And I know a lot of my listeners aren't doing that either. One, I would say before you even go there, you want to know what your pain points are and what you're trying to use AI to solve for, right? So maybe you're not struggling with your groceries and it's easy for you, then you probably don't need AI for that as much, but I see it as more, don't go forced trying to using AI, but find what you're struggling with first, you know, whether it's like a business process or maybe it's something that's like, I don't know, like scheduling for your kids and whatever during the day that that could also be something that you can streamline.

35:59So what is something that you, one, you're wasting too much time on and you can probably easily streamline with technology or something that you're struggling with because it's scattered or the process is not in place and you need to use AI to potentially solve for that. So that's where it starts. And then I think based on those pain points, then you look at what the use case ends up being. So it could be for your business, for example, it could be customer support or marketing, you know, copywriting, or it could be like ideation for your content that you need to be pushing out there. It could also just be organizing your content calendar and scheduling in a way that's scalable and repeatable.

36:34So you can do more with less. So once you have that laid out, okay, here's what I want to use AI for because I'm struggling with XYZ, then you go into looking up which AI tools, of course, are best for that use case. So the bare minimum that you need to be using at this point is AI chatbots, right? So that's ChatGPT, of course, that everybody's familiar with. Claude, which I think, and you and I talked about this, Claude is a competitor to ChatGPT. And it's at this point, in my opinion, much, much better at a lot of tasks than ChatGPT. And then there's Gemini, there's other chatbots like Pi that are more like apps on your phone, but definitely at least two AI models that you need to be experimenting with on a daily basis.

37:15And that I would suggest chat, GBT and Claude. And then there's another layer now. So if you're very well-versed with a chatbot, you know, and then you're like, okay, I don't want to keep prompting too much. I want a little bit more sophisticated features that help me not just with generating copy or answers, which is what chatbots do, right? So you just ask him a prompt or a question, and then they give you the answer. But if you want more sophisticated features like organizational management, productivity features, then you want to look at AI powered tools. And so the best way for researching those are directories.

37:49So there are so many directories now that people can look up. One of them is there's an AI for that, which is actually really cool. So basically, it's a directory of any AI tools out there. And they also have GPTs there. So as you know, there's different GPTs now that are very tax specific on the GPT store. So if you go in onto, there's an AI for that and you type in, let's say, customer support or data analysis or whatever that task that you're trying to use AI for, then it will pull out a list of top AI tools that specifically help you with that. And at that point, you look into it. You know, this is, again, a case by case.

38:28I try not to go out there and recommend too many tools to everyone because I know it's a case by case. One is budget. Two, it's for a big team enterprise versus small business. Three, is it actually doing what you want it to do? So you have to experiment with it. And a lot of them have free trials, so it's not hard to do. Right. So I want to use AI. I want to figure out which tool it is. Yes, I can listen to other people's recommendations, but it is my responsibility as a business owner to do my own research and also stay apprised of what's out there and what kind of tools are popping up for different use cases.

38:59So I typically talk to people about AI integration in a process and a playbook versus, hey, use this tool, use that tool, because I know it's a case by case for different people. So I would say that for people that are just now integrating AI, this would be a great like step-by-step for it, right? Figure out what your pain points are, then come up with the what use case and then look up a directory to see what AI tool or which AI chatbot is best for you. guests each week.

39:36Talk us through something that you've done recently that I think is just so cool. And I think my listeners will think it's cool too. When you have people, whether it be on your website or maybe people are always, oh, I need to pick your brain about this topic, or there's always frequently asked questions that you're getting, how you were able to create a digital live clone of yourself to manage things like this. Live clone. Well, I don't know that it's live. It looks like it's you and it's talking to me. It is the weirdest thing ever. It's basically a scanned version of me and it's, yeah, like a digitized version of me, but it's interesting.

40:14Yeah. So you and I talked about this and I also did a presentation at Mindvalley about AI avatars. So it's called AI instance avatars, which by the way, for anyone listening, this is the future of AI. I mean, I think 2024 is only the beginning, but definitely going into next year, you will see a lot more creators, business owners, myself included, using AI avatars to scale their video marketing. And you know this, but I definitely hate filming content. That is one thing I just absolutely hate. It's hard for me to balance that out with running a business and being a founder in tech mode and then being a creative after that.

40:51So I jumped at the opportunity to test out this whole AI avatar concept, which basically is this idea of you upload a video of yourself, kind of like how we're talking right now. So I could have probably filmed myself doing this and then I would upload two minutes of it. You only two minutes of video footage of you. And then there's this app called, it's not an app, it's a web app called HeyGen. And there's a few others, but HeyGen is the one I've used. And so you upload that two minute video footage of yourself and you wait for it to clone you. So basically it clones you as you are, right? So you're, make sure that your background is the one you want, how your hair looks, exactly how I look now is going to be my AI avatar.

41:34And so then you have that AI avatar now available to you. Of course, if you like it, great, you keep it. If you don't, then you can continue uploading different footage or re-recording yourself until you find the right avatar for you. But then you have that available where you can just create now video content using your AI avatar instead of you filming that content. And the way it works is you can upload your script directly to the app. So you basically just give your AI avatar a script and it just lip sync it and then says it right as is, or you can also record your own voice into the app. So then basically it's going to be your AI avatar, but then it's your voice that you recorded, but your AI avatar is actually the one saying those words.

42:15And you can also clone your voice. So Hey Jen clones your voice in the process of cloning yourself. But I found that 11 labs, and you guys can take notes of this, 11 labs is the best tool to clone your voice. So what I did is I cloned my voice by uploading a voice note to 11 labs and it cloned my voice. And then I integrated that voice because it's much better and it's more like me into HeyGen. So now I connected my 11 labs cloned voice to my AI avatar on HeyGen. And all I have to do now is just upload scripts for the AI avatar to say things that I wanted to say or teach people the things that I want to teach people.

42:56and I don't have to film another thing ever again. So that actually is now something I've been experimenting with in the backend. I haven't yet posted any of this content, but my team, because my team just hates that I'm at the bottleneck, right? So they're like, oh, we need you to film something so that we can create videos for you. But I'm always either on the go traveling or just I'm not in the mood. So they now cloned me enough times to be able to just give me a script that I can edit for myself and I can just give that approval. And so now they can create all the content about whether it's like vocable tutorials or me teaching you how to use Claude or me teaching you how to clone yourself without actually me having to film that content myself.

43:38And there is actually a case study with this tech guy who has only been using now his AI avatar and is getting 25 million views on his YouTube channel, just using his AI avatar to explain tech news and create content around tech news. And so this is now becoming more and more advanced where you couldn't even tell the difference that it wasn't him. And it's actually even more interesting because when you just use the AI avatar and just, you know, you flip-flop between the AI avatar and the graphics and animations, you don't have too much time to analyze whether it's an AI avatar, if it's actually a real person.

44:13So you can't even tell whether or not it's a real person or it's an AI avatar. And that's kind of how he was able to really grow his views and channel. So I'm like, wait a minute, This sounds like my dream because I do not want to film another video ever again, but I have so much to teach and I love to kind of create content around like this is how to use AI models. This is what the latest new feature on Vocable is or this is how, you know, Claude is better than ChagieBT. I want to create that kind of content, but I just don't have the time to do it. So now if I'm able to streamline that process because of AI, I'm able to teach more people more often, but it doesn't take too much out of my time.

44:49So, yeah, that's HeyGen for you. So Hey Jen and Eleven Labs, take note. Those are definitely two apps you should be looking into now because they're getting better and better, I would say, by the day. These AI avatars are looking so good. And soon enough, by the way, you'll be able to change their clothes, probably their background. You'll be able to customize your AI avatar. It's insane. Okay, so this weekend we're creating mine. Thank you very much. Okay, so next, let's talk a little bit about, for the people listening, they're like, I never know what to do to create content. How does Vocable help them?

45:23Can you walk us through a little bit about the Vocable process and how people can use it in their life and in their business? When it comes to AI and content creation, I had this realization that I felt like we've been thinking about AI content creation all wrong. One, I feel like AI shouldn't just generate content. It should also manage your content lifecycle, which I feel like is where most people struggle, right? So it's the process. It's not just, let me write a copy here for a caption, or let me write an article here and there. It's more like, how can I create a process that I can really scale and have it organized and repeatable?

45:55And especially for small businesses, they don't have a lot of those resources, right? To be able to have a whole process in place to create content at scale. It's not just like one piece here and there every now and then, like one blog post or one guide. It's like, oh, I have a schedule of content calendar for the next month of like 30 pieces of content and I did them all in one sitting. Like that to me is content success. When you're able to really create the whole content calendar in one sitting without having to kind of last minute do the things on a whim. So that's one, right? And then I think the other realization I had is that the real power of AI is not in just one-off prompts.

46:34It's in understanding and automating your entire content process. And then I also feel like when I had talked to a lot of small business owners and just even content creators, people don't want to become prompt engineers. It's just becoming now this like, oh, I have to figure out how to prompt this the right way to get what I want out of Chat GPT. And then I have to do it not once, but multiple times for each piece of content separately. It becomes more daunting because you think, oh, AI is helping me create content quickly. But when you think about it, if you're trying to create like 30 pieces of content for the next month, And prompting ChatGPT for each piece of content is a lot of work, you know, and it's like a lot of back and forth to actually get what you want.

47:14So basically, I thought, what if we could use AI to fix the entire process, not just one piece of it? And so taking basically all these talking points and pain points that I just mentioned, I created Vocable with one specific goal, and it's to transform content creation from a scattered, frustrating process into something more automated, repeatable, and scalable. And you know me, I'm very process driven. So the way we kind of create a vocable is one, you don't need to constantly prompt. And that's one of the pain points I feel like most people struggle with when it comes to AI. It's more like point and click, right?

47:48So I want to create a content plan. Great. So I can click on that, create new content plan. All the prompts are engineered in the backend for you. And they're already optimized as well with best practices from content marketing. So instead of using prompts, basically we're using briefs, right? which is like a best practice for content marketing. So the process is pretty simple. So you go into Vocable, you create your brand, right? So you want to make sure that your content is on brand and tailored to your specific topics and niche and audience. You create your brand and all you have to do to create your brand is copy paste your website.

48:22So our platform scans your website, scrapes all the information from there around like what your industry is, what your value proposition is, what your business description is and topics, and then creates a brand identity for you, right? And then from that brand identity, of course, you can edit it and review it as you see fit. You create a full content plan on Vocable based on the content you need. It could be a LinkedIn post, YouTube scripts, newsletters, blog posts, guides, whatever your business needs. You can create a full content plan with those types of content included in your content plan just from your brand identity.

48:57And now, boom, within like two minutes, less than that, you have a full content plan already mapped out for you on Vocable. And the way, and again, I'm very process driven, the way it's generated is it looks like a Trello board or an Airtable list or a content calendar, right? So it comes with briefs. So it's not just a list of ideas for your content. It's actually ideas that are very detailed. Like what is your title for that blog post? What is the description? What is the content structure? What is the keywords that you need to use? All of that is generated for you without, again, having to prompt.

49:31And based on that, you just start drafting, right? So you just go down the list of all your content ideas and it drafts all the content for you. And now basically to simplify it, you've gone from just putting in your website to creating a full content plan with ideas, briefs, and drafts ready to review in less than five minutes. And And that's a month's worth of content. So in one sitting, you have completely fulfilled your task of creating a content calendar for the next month. And now at this point, all you have to do as a human in the loop is to review and edit the drafts and then make sure, of course, everything is on brand.

50:09Maybe you want to add more personal storytelling to it. Again, so you're just an editor in this platform. You're not the creator anymore. You don't have to manage things. You don't have to come up with the ideas. Everything is done for you so that at the end, you're just basically editing and reviewing and then scheduling for publishing. So my thought process around this is that that was basically the step by step process I did for any, you know, businesses I've done content marketing for or for the startup that I ran before. And there is a very specific way of creating content that guarantees content success.

50:41And so we basically married best content marketing practices with AI to simplify a process that many people are either oblivious to or choose to skip because they don't have the resources or are just, you know, again, too busy to implement in a way that actually scales our content. And we did it also in a way where you don't feel like you're dealing with AI, but rather just a tool that helps you tap and leverage into AI to actually create content that is effective and do it efficiently. So who is Vocable for? Who should go to the site right now and check it out? Small businesses, content teams, content creators as well.

51:25So anyone who's creating a lot of content pieces on a monthly basis. And again, just to clarify too, Vocable is mostly for text-based content. So it's not creating videos, it's not creating images, but it's creating scripts, right? So if you have YouTube, then it creates YouTube scripts. If you have blogs and it creates long form blogs. If you have Instagram, it creates captions and ideas around Instagram posts. And then it creates LinkedIn posts, LinkedIn articles. So it's really like meaty content that you need to create, which I think most people struggle with the most, right? So keeping up with your blog, keeping up with your LinkedIn, your guides, which is for lead generation.

52:03So creating guides. So yeah, for small businesses, content teams, and content creators, anyone who's creating content on a daily basis, on a monthly basis. Which is everybody, right? Everybody needs to be creating content. If you're not creating content, this is a solution you've been looking for. How do they get signed up? Tell us where to go and how everybody listening can have Vocable start creating this content for them. Yeah, so you go to vocable.ai and you start a free trial. And there's a very simple onboarding that you go through. So again, this is where you also get a little bit of a glimpse of what it can do for you.

52:36You can put in your website and it creates a full content plan for you that you accept. And then you start a free trial. And then boom, you're already kind of, once you start your free trial, you already have a contents calendar made ready for you. At that point, just start drafting. So vocable.ai, go get signed up for your free trial. And Iman, how can people follow you and how can people keep up with you? Yeah, I'm all over Instagram and LinkedIn. I'm very interactive with messages. So definitely reach out to me. So it's at Iman Oubou, I-M-A-N-O-U-B-O-U. And you can't miss her peeps. All right, go to Vogel.ai, sign up for the free trial now.

53:11You can thank us later. Until next week, keep creating your confidence. You know what we'll be.

53:21I couldn't be more excited for what you're going to hear. Start learning and growing. Inevitably, something will happen. No one succeeds alone. You don't stop and look around once in a while. You could miss it. I'm on this journey with me.