497: He Used AI to Gain 100K Followers in 30 Days | Domenic Ashburn AKA Mr. Grateful

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2:42We've got a true icon that I've been following his work for a while now. I'm excited to have him part of this incredible virtual conference. so uh dominic aka mr grateful uh the first question that i ask everyone that comes on is how did you get your job aka how'd you find yourself doing the work you're doing today what is my job i guess is how i would start how i would define that um my job is to right now create content i'm a content creator i'm a tech entrepreneur but honestly i don't feel like i have a job. I feel like I am of service. I serve people by inspiring them like through my creations and how I came about doing that is by creating.

3:32I kind of trust the downloads that come to me and I act on them. But now how I make money, I guess, would be the job question is by multiplying the impact of the things that I'm creating. And I think that what's valuable from that is the inspiration and kind of giving people knowledge that they think that they can't find elsewhere. And I started doing that by removing my ego and teaching people things that I knew they couldn't get elsewhere and giving people answers that I needed myself. And that all started from when I I just turned on a camera on my phone and I posted my first video on Instagram.

4:18And that was only four months ago. And right now I have 300 ,000 followers on Instagram and my life has completely changed and a lot of other people's lives have changed in the process. So how I came about doing that was starting to post content and removing my ego from my creative process. so you used to run an agency before but then you went um basically all in on ai and uh how i found you was uh actually you'll find this interesting i found you a few months ago before we connected in a ypo group chat where one of my buddies said hey have you heard of this guy who's trying to build a million dollar business just from using AI.

5:10And then I went down this rabbit hole and I found out that you grew like to, I think it was 150 ,000 plus followers in a month just using AI. And then, yeah, I've been following and a fan of your content ever since. So I have to just like get straight to it, man. Like, can you tell us about kind of how you grew your social following just using AI in 30 days? Like what did that look like? Yeah. So when I first started on Instagram, I made about four posts and I started at 3000 followers and I made about three posts. And I think something clicked for somebody who ran a page called ChatGPT Tricks.

5:53I immediately started talking about AI and I was giving people little tips about how to use artificial intelligence. Like, for example, my first video was when Dali 2 came out. And what you could do is you could insert a picture and then you could kind of hover over an area where the picture was cropped off and you could generate the rest of the picture. And at the time, this is when image generation was first becoming mainstream and people were pretty surprised by that. So, you know, that immediately kind of got me on the radar. And someone saw me who ran a page with about 200 ,000 followers at the time.

6:25And they were like, hey, do you want to collaborate on a post? Now, somebody with 150K at that time when I'm at 3K was very impactful to me. So we collaborated and I got me another few thousand followers in the next couple of weeks. But I knew that the rate of growth there wasn't as fast as I wanted to. I needed to make massive change in my life at the time. So I had seen three pieces of inspiration that I did not know were going to come together. So first, this one guy on Twitter said that he was going to create like a hustle GPT. He was going to try to make a bunch of money from like$100 and just let ChatGPT tell him what to do.

7:05And then I had a conversation with an agent from California, and he was telling me how like the whole influencer economy works and everything. And then third, there's this man who tried to learn a new skill every single day and then post about it. So one day when I was meditating, these three points kind of came together. Just they snapped. And I thought, Agent GPT, I can use artificial intelligence to help me with my social media. I had been trying to grow on social media for years. I tried doing the whole like hype beast thing where I was buying a bunch of expensive clothes and taking pictures in it, trying to make that work.

7:43I was teaching, I was, uh, you know, doing like the carousels where I was having like, you know, informational slides where I would go back, uh, you know, you, you would swipe and then get a new piece of information. You'd slide, uh, that didn't work. Um, you know, and then I tried doing some very artistic things cause I, I've always been good with design that didn't work. So I had given up, you know, and I was like, all right, this is my last straw. Well, those three pieces of inspiration came together and I launched it. And I just said, I'm going to use artificial intelligence to help me get 100 ,000 followers in 30 days.

8:19We'll see if it works. If it doesn't, no harm, no foul. At least you saw I tried, right? Well, I immediately got a million views on that first video. and every day after that I was getting about first I started to get about 1 ,000 followers a day and then it was 2 ,000 then it was 3 ,000 and then come day like 10 I'm getting 10 ,000 followers per day and it really hit for me that it was actually going to work when I made it halfway through and what I was doing was I was giving ChatGPT all of the information about me already so I was I I was telling it who I was, the type of creator I wanted to be.

9:02I was giving it context about who I am, which is a crucial step that some people miss. They kind of expect this linear relationship with artificial intelligence where you tell it to do something and it should do it right the first time. But it's artificial intelligence. It's not absolute intelligence. So you have to give it information. You have to give good data in, good data out, and kind of have this circular relationship with AI, almost like ping pong or tennis, back and forth. So I started to give it information about myself. And then every single day, I would give it the transcript of the reel that I made, and then the metrics of how that reel performed, like my likes, my views, my comments, my shares, saves, all of that.

9:44And it would start to pair these things up. So after about a week, I could start asking ChatGBT, hey, what has worked so far? And why did it work? And it started to connect some dots and find the patterns. And then at that point, once it had information about myself and what was working, I could then ask it, can you write a script about this topic based on what has worked in the past? And this is like that snowball effect that started to happen where people were starting to connect with me and understand who I was. So my engagement was going up, but also it was streamlining the content creation process because the AI was starting to learn me and learn what works.

10:23So just over time, it snowballed. And by day 22, we had reached 100 ,000 followers. And right now I'm at 300, a little over 300k. Yeah, crazy. Hey, FounderFam, I want to talk to you about something super exciting. We're officially partnered with OmniSend, the email marketing and SMS platform built specifically for e-commerce founders. We've been recommending OmniSend to founder students for a while now because it just works. Whether you're launching your first store or you're scaling to seven figures, it really helps you automate your marketing and get real results. Did you know on average, OmniSend customers make$68 for every$1 they spend, which is an insanely good return on investment.

11:07And because you're part of the founder community, you get 50 % off your first three months with the code founder50. Just head to omnisend.com forward slash founder without the to get started. All right. Now let's jump back into the show. And I know there's like a lot more kind of nuances into that, which I know you're going to go through in our AI accelerator program that you're teaching part of, but like, is it just chat GPT that you use or is it, is it, you know, barred like, like what is, what is your preferred tool? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I have a preferred tool based on what I'm actually trying to do.

11:50So I do use multiple, I use a suite of tools throughout my day, but it all depends on what I'm trying to do. So if you're talking about large language models, like ChatGPT, essentially I, I use three different types. I use ChatGPT, I use Bard and I use Claude. And I also use Pi. I'm not sure if anybody has heard of Pi, but I use Pi as well. And I can kind of tell you about that. So I use ChatGPT for my more creative endeavors, things that are going to require strategy and reasoning. I use ChatGPT. It's superior in that way. For example, it can solve riddles, whereas other platforms have a really hard time connecting those dots and making conclusions on their own given multiple problems in one prompt.

12:42So I use that for maybe scripting content ideas and things. Then I'll use Claude for longer documents. For let's say research papers when I'm trying to research a new AI tool and I need to understand it better, sometimes these documents and these webpages are 20 pages long. And also for contracts. A lot of contracts that I deal with are many pages long. And I use Claude for this because Claude has a large token limit. And what a token is, is you can essentially think as one token is like four characters of text. So ChatGPT can process around 32 ,000 tokens at a time, where Claude can process 100 ,000.

13:27So I'm able to basically upload a book. You could upload the equivalent of like a Harry Potter book into Claude and it can process all of that text. So for longer pieces of information, I use Claude. And then I use Google Bard for things that I need a direct connection to the internet with. In the past, ChatGPT did not have web browsing. It has opened up to some beta users, but it isn't always there. So I've started to use Google Bard for things that require an internet connection. Um, so, uh, those are the three tools that I use and it just depends on what type of thing that I'm actually trying to achieve in that moment.

14:10Interesting. So you grew your social following you in 30 days, very, very fast, over a hundred thousand and basically you didn't stop there. Then you started this founder GPT initiative. Can you tell us about that, how that all came about and like, yeah, what was the, how'd this project come about and where is it at currently? Absolutely. So I started Founder GPT after I had achieved with Agent GPT. I just, I have this, I have this obsession to make people's eyes go really wide and make them say, wow, and kind of break people's mental frames. and I just try to think of what is the next thing that would make somebody have that moment for themselves, that realization like, oh, wow, I didn't know that was possible and then make them realize it was.

15:05I kind of make myself the guinea pig for situations like that so that I can break other people's mental frames and make them think, wow, maybe that's possible for me. And the next step for me that a lot of people have been asking after I had gotten this following is, how do you actually monetize that though? So that was my next step. I just thought, okay, how do I monetize this? I don't know. I haven't been through it before. So Agent GPT, AI helped me with my social media. Maybe AI can help me with monetizing as well. And it has. Since I started it, I've made a little over$100 ,000 just from the help that Founder GBT has given me.

15:49Through that revenue stream of just like working with Founder GBT and trying to come up with revenue stream ideas and using AI to help me, I made a little over$100 ,000. And I've done that with the help of ChatGPT and a few other tools that I can get into. And the whole goal of this was to see if I can make a million dollars only using artificial intelligence as the co-founder of my business. So without, there was this quote that I heard from Peter Thiel and he said, we don't invest in ideas. We invest in teams. We don't invest in solo entrepreneurs. We invest in teams of entrepreneurs. I thought, okay, I've always had a personality though, where I want to make choices fast.

16:39I want to do it on my terms. And I want to just, I want to get moving with things. I want to, I want to move in whatever direction of the downloads that I'm given at the time. And that's really, really hard to do sometimes when you have a large team and you're breaking up equity and ownership and all that. So I just thought, well, AI doesn't really have any agenda of its own. It doesn't want equity. It just wants to help. So I thought, well, okay, well, maybe AI I can help me, you know, run this business. And, um, it has come up with revenue stream ideas. It has told me, it has helped me with my financial projections.

17:12It's helped me with my branding. It has helped me, uh, come up with, um, products. Uh, it has helped me with just the overall marketing strategy of actually how to execute all of it. And it's actually been working. So, So it's working slower than I anticipated, but it was more my fault than Founder GPT's fault. You know, we can get into that if you want. But yeah, so that was the goal is just to make a million dollars with AI. And we're still on course to do that. We have 90 % more to go. Awesome. And like, tell me about how it's been more your fault than ChatGPT. Well, I haven't said any of this in public yet.

17:58I haven't said anything about it. But the thing that got me my success was my selfless, transparent content creation. And what happened when I started Founders EPT is every single day my vision would get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And I started to realize, OK, it's not just this isn't just about doing a brand deal. I can also do brand deals and build tools with these companies. Oh, it's not just about building tools with these companies. I can build my own internal tool and try to revolutionize education completely. so the whole the whole idea was to what founder tpt told me was i could make money five different ways i could i could um have brand deals i could uh i could sell a course i could um make my own product i could uh there were like two other ones and i just decided okay i'm gonna bring all five together.

19:04And what I decided to do was build this platform where people could go on and watch educational content while having an AI tutor modeled after the human teachers, help them through the content to create personalized education. And that's a huge endeavor. My first concept was to make this million dollars in a hundred days. That's ambitious. and then I decided I'm going to do it by creating a revolutionary tool. Well, when you become a founder of a company at that scale, you are spread very thin. You have to hire teams. You have to be a project manager. You have to do your marketing. You have a lot of things to do.

19:48And the problem with like a founder GPT is that you have to be actively doing it. It'll give you advice, but you have to be the human hands that are actually, you know, making the choices. So, uh, what I did was, is I started building a company instead of making content. And, you know, it takes away from the thing that actually makes you, uh, that actually made me successful in the first place. We have an amazing tool that's being built. And I really do think that it's going to revolutionize the way that people learn online. And it's going to change people's relationships with artificial intelligence completely.

20:23However, um, it was more my fault because I decided to focus on that rather than the content itself. And I think that I actually maybe could be at a million dollars right now if me as a human wasn't being so toxically ambitious. You know what I'm saying? So AI does not have that emotional capacity to tell me to just go hard and forget about sleep and work and, you know, or sleep and working out and family and all that. I do. And I, you know, I kind of inserted myself in that way. So, um, you know, it's, it, this is kind of where pie comes in. I was telling you about pie. Pie is very like, pie is a very, uh, it's a very, it's an emotional AI, I would say it's very chill and like, you know, it's pretty like trendy and it can talk to you like a friend does.

21:13Um, so when I'm having those kinds of quarrels internally where I'm like, I don't really, you know, I'm not sure which direction to go here. I can actually talk to Pi and Pi is less business-like and much more like relaxed and just kind of relates with you and talks to you in that way. So that's another tool that I use kind of internally, but not on a business side. Hey guys, I hope you're enjoying this episode and learning a ton. As you know, in this series, we interview some of the greatest founders of our generation to find out how they did it. However, if you're thinking of starting your own business and you want to hear from some incredible stories from everyday people like you or I who are actually in the trenches, only been building their business for maybe one year or two years, like they're building right now and they're really in the early stages, but they're getting success.

22:02You should come and check out our new podcast from zero to founder hosted by our community manager, Molly Flynn. These are in the trenches stories from our very own successful students that have gone through some of our programs. People just like you who are deep within the process of building their very own successful business. These are the founders of tomorrow. You can find the From Zero to Founder podcast on all platforms. And remember, it's founder without the E. All right, now let's jump in the show. Well, thank you for being open and honest and sharing, man, because yeah, it was a bold thing to do.

22:39And I'm curious, you said there was other tools that you use. What are the other tools that you could go into? Yeah, of course. So there's two tools. One is going to be very applicable to businesses, especially the e-commerce side. And the other one is going to be very personable and humanitarian. So the first one that I use is called Cassidy AI. And it was actually built by my friend, Justin Feinberg. He's only 24. He's built multiple tech companies before. He has an office in New York right now. He's an awesome guy. He makes educational AI content as well. And he has this tool called Cassidy AI.

23:19And what it does is it references all of the pieces about your, all the information about your business, like your products, your pricing, who your customer is. It has your legal documents, your internal policies, everything. You can insert everything into this. And what it does is it creates a team of different AIs. So you can have a sales, like a sales agent, you can have a marketing officer, a finance officer, an assistant, and each one of them have kind of their own personality and will reference information from your internal documents to then provide you with the information or generate content as you need it based on what their role is.

24:04So instead of me going into just ChatGPT and having multiple threads in there where I got to kind of train each one, this tool allows you to have all of your internal policies in one place and then source from those. And it speeds up the process, like it multiplies it like crazy. So that's one of the tools that I would suggest. It's called Cassidy AI. Justin Feinberg is on Instagram and Twitter and TikTok and all that, you can definitely tap into him. He's great. And that's a tool that I've been using. The other tool that I've been using that's been more personable and my surprise people is I have cloned my voice professionally and I have had, and I generate, I generate meditations and podcasts and content in my own voice so I can listen to it back.

24:51And what I do is, is I will go into ChatGPT and I will generate a full 20 minute podcast on a content on content that I'm interested in. So let's say I'm for that day, I'm interested in Tao philosophy. I'll generate a full like 20 minute, you know, script on that. And then I will plug it into 11 labs is what I'm using. I'll plug it into that. I got my voice cloned like 99 % there professionally like hand fine-tuned by the team out in Poland. And, uh, it's like 99%. You, my friends can't tell the difference. I send them like voice notes and stuff and they can't tell the difference. I personalize my emails a bit.

25:31Also, I'll just copy and paste the text from my email and throw it into and put like the voice note into my email. And it kind of personalizes the, that email a little bit and creates a cool experience that people will like remember. um and yeah i will throw you know my voice in there or that you know the text in there generated in my voice and i'll listen to that sometimes when i'm driving around or working out like you know certain you know when like certain songs or certain podcasts they just aren't hitting my voice listening to me back that always hits it's like you're you know you think in your own voice so um that's that's a tool that i use that maybe maybe surprise some people and they haven't really thought about that, but it's been very helpful and pretty novel for myself.

26:16Yeah, that's crazy. So you find that when you hear things in your own voice, you have better comprehension? 100%. 100%. Yeah, it absolutely multiplies the comprehension. Absolutely. Meditations, affirmations, knowledge, information, all that. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That's crazy. There you go. Okay. Yeah. I mean, you think in your own voice, right? Your thoughts are in your voice. So, you know, if you're healthy. So, you know what I'm saying? Like, it's definitely helpful. Absolutely. It's been a cheat code for me, for sure. Yeah, there you go. Okay. So let's talk about other tools. Like, you know, we'd be foolish not to.

27:03But like I said, you're teaching a component of our AI Accelerator program and you're going to go through all this stuff in depth. It's going to be next level. It's going to be Q &A, all sorts of stuff. It's going to be game changing, which people can find out more soon. But I was going to say, what other tools should e-com founders be thinking about using? Any other game changes, any other goal that you could share? because you're like, you're a wizard of this stuff, man. My, my philosophy on this is that a lot of people are, you know, a mile wide and an inch deep. And they, they're trying to find a breadth of different tools instead of understanding and diving deep and having methods and systems on what's presently working.

27:49Um, you know, I, I do use a lot of different tools just like throughout my content process. So I can just name those out. But I do want people to realize that, you know, the tools that I'm going to say, we're going to dive deep into each one of them, like you said, in the actual summit in those workshops, I want to dive deep into each one of those so that people can get like a deeper understanding of the actual methods and systems that are being used for each of these tools. But if you want to know about more tools and kind of have a library of them, um first one obviously chadgbt um i'm creating separate threads in each one for each different type of topic that i want to talk to it about second obviously is mid journey i use mid journey because it's the most uh mid journey is an image generation uh ai platform and i'm using that to generate images for my landing pages, for pitch decks.