MI293: Hacking Marketing & Growth w/ Cody Schneider

19 Sep 2023 · 52 min

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In short

The Intrinsic Value Podcast - Episode MI293: Hacking Marketing & Growth w/ Cody Schneider

Episode Overview In this episode, host Robert Leonard interviews Cody Schneider, an expert in digital marketing and online business. Cody shares insights from his experiences in various growth roles within startups and his journey in founding two successful SaaS businesses, SwellAI and Drafthorse AI.

Key Topics Discussed

Introduction (00:00 - 09:33)

  • Host introduces Cody Schneider and his background in digital marketing.
  • Highlights the importance of understanding business growth and marketing strategies.

Understanding Niche Sites (09:33 - 12:06)

  • Definition: Niche sites are specialized websites focusing on specific topics or products.
  • Business Model: Traditionally, these sites generate revenue through affiliate marketing and ad networks.

Impact of AI on Content Generation (12:06 - 30:44)

  • AI's Role: AI tools are revolutionizing content creation, making it significantly cheaper and more efficient.
  • Discussion on how AI can produce quality content quickly, allowing for rapid scaling of niche sites.
  • Concerns about the long-term viability of niche sites with the rise of AI.

Social Media and Brand Importance (30:44 - 41:23)

  • The significance of using platforms like Twitter to build brand presence and engage audiences.
  • Strategies for leveraging personal branding.

Growing a Podcast (41:23 - 51:44)

  • Tactics for Growth:
  • Optimize podcast SEO to improve discoverability.
  • Utilize targeted advertising, especially on platforms like Facebook.
  • Implement newsletter strategies to keep audiences engaged.

Growing a Newsletter (51:44 - 51:44)

  • Suggestions for supercharging newsletter growth, including leveraging paid ads and partnerships with other newsletters.

Key Takeaways

  • Distribution Over Product: Distribution channels can significantly impact a product's success, often more than the product's intrinsic quality.
  • Niche Sites and AI: The integration of AI in content generation has created a shift in how niche sites operate, making it essential for marketers to adapt quickly.
  • Engagement Strategies: Building a personal brand and utilizing social media effectively can enhance visibility and growth across various platforms.

Resources Mentioned

  • Books:
  • *Buy Then Build* by Walker Deibel
  • *The EXITPreneur’s Playbook* by Joe Valley
  • Related Episodes:
  • Building an Online Business Empire w/ Jacky Chou
  • Investing In (and Building) Online Businesses w/ Mike Vranjkovic

Conclusion Cody Schneider provides a wealth of knowledge about navigating the evolving landscape of digital marketing, particularly with new tools and strategies for online growth. The discussion underscores the importance of adapting to changes brought about by AI and the significance of effective distribution channels in achieving business success.

Follow Cody Schneider on Twitter: [@CodySchneiderXX](https://twitter.com/CodySchneiderXX) Explore SwellAI: [swellai.com](https://swellai.com) Discover Drafthorse AI: [drafthorseai.com](https://drafthorseai.com)

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Transcript

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0:00You're listening to TIP. In this week's episode, I chat with Cody Schneider about all things digital marketing and online business. Cody Schneider has held various head of growth roles at startups, helping them scale rapidly, and has now founded two successful SaaS businesses, Swell AI and Draft Horse AI. This episode is a perfect example of why I personally like podcasting. Cody is someone I've followed on Twitter for a bit and found some of his content really interesting. It led me to think a bit deeper about things and I developed questions about what he was talking about. Rather than DMing him as a random follower and hoping that he responds, I was able to invite him as a guest on this podcast with hundreds of thousands of listeners each month and get my specific questions answered.

0:50If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this benefit it might be worth doing so on its own. And in this episode, Cody will tell you how to grow it. And now, without further delay, let's get right into today's episode with Cody Schneider.

1:28Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Millennial Investing Podcast. I am your host today, Robert Leonard. And with me today, I have Cody Schneider. Cody, welcome to the show. Robert, thanks for having me, man. Super stoked to be here. Love the pod, the newsletter. So it's pretty exciting to be on and talk to you. Thank you for saying that. Yeah, I appreciate it. Usually I ask guests on podcasts and just most podcasts, they ask for their background. It's like kind of a formality. But in your case, I'm actually genuinely curious to learn more about your background and how you got to where you are today.

2:00I follow the stuff you're doing on Twitter, but you don't really talk too, too much about how you got to where you are. You just kind of talk about what you're doing today, which I do enjoy. But I want to learn more about how you got to where you are right now. Yeah. So it all started just like everybody else. How do I make money on the internet? and I was like 16. So I figured out how to sell things. So I got into the e-commerce world. This is back in the day where you could just get three clicks from Facebook pages. And that was really the origin of all this. So fast forward, I ended up starting a company and it took off.

2:31And so I dropped out of school and traveled around for a while. And then that company basically imploded because it just wasn't... What I was doing was not... I wasn't building a brand. And so honestly, it was the best thing that could ever happen because it really quickly, like early on with not a lot of stakes taught me, like when you're building these things, building these companies, like focus on brand, because that's the only thing that actually has value long-term. So fast forward, I ended up getting connected. Skywild was still in school. I studied business economics. And again, just had a ton of knowledge kind of on just really advertising, like digital advertising in general.

3:01So I ended up going and working for this B2B marketing agency. That's where things really kind of 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. And so that was my role there was designing all the strategy, 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 can work towards.

3:33So while I was there, I was 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 this company called Rupa Health. 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. The graph was like word of mouth and just going nuts.

4:04He's like, I just layered on ads. Basically, it was just... It was growing I'm compounding 30 % month over month. And so we were just, to me, I was, it was blue ocean, right? 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 like extra room and crashed out there. 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 kind of in the height of all that bubble.

4:34It was growing like 3x month over month, like for the four months that it was there and basically functioning. How they structured the application, it was using this protocol called mStable and a wallet that was basically like you own. So it was like from a safety standpoint, like why I was there and kind of believed it. It was providing a lot of value, but everybody thought they were insulated from Terra Luna. They weren't. The collapse happens. The business model basically eroded overnight. We did a retro of the whole thing. And it was like, you should have been paying me. And so I went to my CEO, his name Jeremiah, he's my friend.

5:05And I was like, yo, my specialty and expertise is in companies that have product market fit. 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, fractional heads of growth. I think that's dumb. It's basically just like a stopgap so that they 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 kind of, before I took that crypto company job, I was really baiting, just going all in on my stuff.

5:35And that kind of gets to where we are today. So my co-founder, Max, who I'm building Swell AI and DraftForce 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, January, 2023, three swell just basically took off and so yeah it was just honestly grab the reins hold on tight and pray for an invention from god because it was just everything was on fire and we're just basically riding that but yeah so that kind of leads us to where we are today and we just launched this about 45 on june 21st or whenever this is called draft horse ai it's basically an ai seo engine you plug your website in and it's going to write content at that scale for your brand the idea is you can basically grow your organic traffic.

6:25And 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. 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 was 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 really, honestly, I think it's how this all happens. When you're learning anything or building any company, it always is like that. Where did you learn the growth and marketing stuff?

6:58I know you did the B2B agency, but 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? And then obviously, I'm sure it's evolved over time. You've tested things. But just generally, what are you doing to learn this type of stuff? Yeah. YouTube videos and Reddit threads. That's straight up it. I'm a huge impronitive that like digital marketing can't be taught because it changes. It evolves so quickly. Like if you see a class or a program at a university, it's two years old and none of that information is relevant. So it's trial by fire.

7:28I always joke on Twitter, like you're either in the pit or you're not. And what I mean by that is basically like you're either doing this on a daily basis because it's changing so quickly and actually understand what's going on or you're not. 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 like 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 % of marketers if you can do that. And that's straight up it.

7:54And 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, 2, 3, 4 things in that video that you don't know what they are. So then you're like, okay, I'll watch a video on this topic and this topic. 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, they mention something, you don't know what it is, you research that, you just keep going. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, 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.

8:23So all growth people that are good, they want to all talk to each other. And we all talk to each other. I have calls literally weekly where I'm talking to friends that 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. What are you seeing working right now? What isn't working? Where is the arbitrage going? We're all just trying to find basically that alpha that exists within the market and capitalize on why 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.

8:55And now he's at this new company. So his background is like deep tea and apps. So iOS apps in particular. And for him, he's like, yo, I'm using the same strategies, but across different channels. 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 at this new company that he's at called Newt. And I think that that's a great illustration of how this all works. We're all trying to communicate and understand those things. You can only get that when you talk about it in public. On this podcast, I usually ask pretty direct questions of the guests.

9:25But with you, I'm going to do that, but it's also going to be a little bit different. I have some direct questions, but I also have some just 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. 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 that was something you were involved in.

9:51So 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. 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. It's funny you say, I didn't know that you were involved in niche sites. I always joke, everywhere there is a way to make money on the internet, I'd probably done something in the last 10 years.

10:20But 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. 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, etc. And so the idea is that you're getting traffic and you're brokering that traffic in some way. Traditionally, 3 or 4 different ways that you can monetize that traffic.

10:50It's either through an ad network like AdSense or Ezoic, etc. 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. 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. They get a 8 % commission, 4 % commission on whatever that transaction is. The other piece is then people will actually build brands on top of this. As an example, I have a friend that he owns a big site in the garden-ish.

11:22And so he sells PDFs that are basically how-to guides. So his whole strategy is like, I build a massive email newsletter list. And then every couple months, I will basically sell this guide. And every time he does an email set, he makes just racks. 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. So it's 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. So as an example, there's these huge media agencies that will have thousands of niche website, say, for example, in the baby space, and they specialize in consumer packaged goods types of companies.

12:01So they'll go and they'll basically do deals with like, imagine Nestle or that side of organization. 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 those clicks on traffic. So that's kind of the traditional structure. 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 DraftHorse. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what we saw, and this is kind of 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.

12:37Like it was for the first moment ever, like from a marketer's point of view, I was actually usable. 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. Like 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 a hundred dollars a piece for those thousand articles to get an okay article, right? Like 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.

13:06The cost has gone basically to zero. So what used to cost you a hundred grand, you can now pay, that would draft towards like 500 bucks to write a thousand articles. And overnight, you can basically build this niche website out that traditionally, that would take you six months of time, you working full time or a team working on it, etc. And I'm spinning these niche sites out personally in 10 hours. It's like, find a niche. I find all the low KD, low competition keywords related to that topic. I then put them into Draft Horse. It writes these articles, long format. Imagine 2000 plus word articles about XYZ keyword phrase related to one I just did recently was how to start XYZ business.

13:46So 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 they're these 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. 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, we're talking millions in comparison to thousands.

14:24And so that's really this shift in the market that we're seeing. There's a short window for this. I think it's going to be 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. So really how we're thinking about it is 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 bell curve. It's average. So experts suddenly become more important than ever before. 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?

14:57But 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, write up PDFs with all of their knowledge. 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 too. And so this is how we're starting to talk to companies about this.

15:32How are you going to differentiate? If the cost of making content is zero, how do you differentiate? The only way to do that is 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. 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 like that's who's going to win long-term in our view. So happy to dive deep around that. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Even Einstein had blind spots.

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18:36To begin getting smarter about investing, just visit theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks. That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks. And for a limited time, you can use code stocks15 for a 15 % discount at checkout. All right, back to the show. Yeah, I wrote down about 10 questions that I want to talk about on all of that. But just to your last point real quick about the AI basically accessing this vector database. Once you publish that content though 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?

19:19Totally. 100%. And I think this is where we don't know where it's going to go. If everybody's scraping everybody... I mean, it's starting to happen already where you can basically put a Robux TXT file, but for these LLMs where it's like a no scrape. And if you do, it basically blocks IP. I mean, I'm not that technical. I can't go into where this is going from that side. But I think experts are always on the forefront, they're going to constantly be learning things. They're basically going to be constantly adding to that content library, that backlog of content library. And that's going to be the only way to say, it's just like content hearkening, right?

19:49We've been doing the same thing in a different way since the beginning of time. 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, and they're called agents. It's basically like, think about it as like a little robot that you can train to do tasks. 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 like large companies think about this as like, oh, I used to hire fresh marketing grads to come in and they would be the ones that are repurposing all the content.

20:28Maybe it's chopping up clips or whatever. Well, 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 sitting over at 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. 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. So I'm going to get into a couple of tactical things.

20:56I've used DraftHorst for some articles and the articles are good. I noticed it prints or it creates, I think, two or three versions of the article when I do that. Why is that? Yeah. So when we initially launched, this was something that it was just 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, how it functions is how you would traditionally create a blog post outline that you would hand to your SEO writer. So 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 each of those keyword phrases.

21:32So 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 content writer. My content 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. But what we built internally, the technology that we built is we've given the AI the context of it knows what it's going to write in the future.

22:01It 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 DraftTorts 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 different fashions within the outputs. So as time goes on, it just gets more and more... As we get feedback from users, get better understanding of the content quality that it's outputting. The other side of this is like, and what we're starting to build is we just connected Search Console to DraftHorse.

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22:31So imagine I have a website, I write content with DraftHorse, Search Console is plugged in, it's providing that data from Google Search Console back to DraftHorse. And so 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 off the data that Google is providing us so that the content gets more effective at driving more traffic. And where we can then take this even further is I can give you a script tag, you put it on your website, you have a user action you're wanting, like a signup, and we can actually send that information again back to DraftForce.

23:07So then it can make decisions on top of all that data. So it's like, okay, cool. 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... I mean, this is the crazy part of us. It's like, 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...

23:38I talked to an HVAC guy yesterday who's in Florida who does certification. And for all of them, I'm thinking, okay, can you just plug your website in? And it just grows your organic content based off of what whatever your business goal is. And we think we can do this just based off of what we're saying, or at least get 90 % of that automated. And the last, the tails are the things that the people have to end up touching. So anyways, it's like, I'm over here from a marketing sample. It just seemed like this is the most insane time that's ever existed. I mean, this used to be just hours of work, like thousands of hours of work.

24:09And now it's happening in literally minutes. Today, I'm writing 3 ,000 articles for three different properties. I'm writing 1 ,000 articles for my personal website about marketing. I'm writing a thousand articles about WordPress for DraftForceAI.com. And I'm writing a thousand articles about podcasting for SwellAI.com. And all of those will be live in two hours to when they're off on the website and starting to get traffic. So that's basically what I'm thinking about it and how crazy this is in this moment in time that we're in for a great viewer marketer that has that understanding in these skill sets.

24:42That's my exact next question is when you do use DraftForce, or really, let's just assume any AI tool, but in this case, specifically DraftWars, what are you doing with the text that it puts out? I agree. It's actually pretty good. Like I said, I've used it. It's not really too, 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? Are you only uploading text? How are you handling that piece of it? Yeah. So how I'm thinking about it is I'm going to upload text.

25:15I'm going to get it live into 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. We'll maybe rewrite sections that we don't think are perfect. My view with this is that it's different for each business size. We're startups. It doesn't matter if it's not perfect. There's no repercussions if it isn't. If you're a large horde that's in accounting, it's a way different game. You have laws that you basically have to follow. And so it depends on the scale or where the scale or where the journey of the company is.

25:48But how I'm thinking about it personally is 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. 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 DraftForce roadmap, these things are all there as well. Like automatic internal linking, automatic indexing, adding photos with the exact match keyword. All of these things are all doable. It's honestly now just like, we need more edge. It's my co-founder and I, it's still early.

26:18This 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 and the things that they hate doing that they know make impact. Refreshing content makes impact. Internal linking makes impact. Photos make impact, et cetera. 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 know, you said you have 18 to 24 months. I'm like, okay, this isn't going to be like a permanent thing.

26:50And then you mentioned before too, that like brand is really the big value add here. So I'm like thinking to myself, would we do something like this, 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 like really creative and individualized images and videos, like really specific stuff. stuff. So that's what I was wondering. But then you just said, I mean, you're doing it for your own companies. Swell AI and DraftForce, 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.

27:20But I guess more so, what if you wanted to build an ESPN? You had a topic, whatever the topic is, not necessarily sports, but you wanted to be a media company and you didn't have software that you were trying to sell. You just wanted to be a media company. Would you still use AI to create that content? 100%. So I'm watching company do this. I just can't say names, but I'm watching huge podcast networks 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.

27:52Again, just to talk about scale, I'm talking like 10 ,000 plus articles that they all write. On those blog posts, they have call to action to either listen to their shows or join their newsletter or whatever that it. So that creates this inbound, like SEO traditionally, there's two places in it. In all reality, what you're trying to do is get the user to do something for you for free. So when we think about just marketing in general, there's two types of marketing. There's transactional marketing and there's long-term investment marketing. So 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.

28:25SEO falls into that bucket where it's a way more 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 % of those articles actually provide any traffic. 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.

29:01So when I think about it for Swell and DraftForce, what we're focusing on with this is I'm trying to get free traffic. 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, they sign up for the software, that's a free lead. So if I can spend 50 cents now, and that creates one sign up in the next 12 months, it pays for itself. Of course, I'm going to do this. 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.

29:31So right now you have to find a keyword, whatever that keyword is, and you put it into an AI tool like DraftHorse and I'll read an article for you optimized for that keyword. What if you want to make it about a news story that... Say it's a breaking news story that just happened. And so there's not really a lot of stuff ranking. There's no specific keyword. 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. It's more of content for social, but it's still in this niche site realm. 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?

30:12Totally. So this is actually... The technology we built for Swell can do this, but Swell isn't designed for that. So Swell is an AI writer for podcasters. You upload an MP3 into it, it creates a transcription, and then you can basically 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 chat with PDFs. I feel like that went viral recently, all these types of products. And then everybody cloned each other because somebody put an MRR graph in public. It was like they hit 80 grand in four months or something insane.

30:42So that technology is what a vector database is basically. And so what you end up doing is you upload this information in a written text format. 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. So for our stacks, we use something called Pinecone, and then we use LaneChain. And that's basically how we interact with these vector databases. So imagine news happens. You go and you find all the sources for all of this news, and you're listening to this site that's trying to report on it. So you could aggregate and say there's 10 sources.

31:13I 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, et cetera. I put that into this vector 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'm wanting to have. Okay, AI, go right to this article structure using the information that I just put there. And so how this functions 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.

31:45It's going to go and find every mention of telehealth. If I say, hey, write a title about how much is telehealth declining after COVID. It basically will go and find all the relevant information to that and then write that section for you based off of what you provided it. So totally possible. We haven't built a tool. I know there's somebody out there that's building something like this. 100 % it's happening. So that can be done with Swell or no? The technology that Swell uses is what... Basically, we can repurpose Swell. It'd probably its own brand, like spin it out. But like the technology that we built with Swell, 100 % could do that.

32:19Like somebody could do that exact thing. Absolutely. Right now it doesn't function for it. Like there's no way you're just going to get Swell defense. Like you can't upload anything into Swell. That's just pure text. Like we only take like an MP3, et cetera. But yeah, the idea is yes, you could do this. Like the technology exists for you to do that. So I mentioned before that I follow you on Twitter and that's what I want to talk about next. Like 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.

32:48So tell us why you started, what you're doing, how it's going, just everything about Twitter and why you're there. Yeah. Yeah. So at the beginning of the year, I saw this arbitrage start to develop on Twitter. And it was really just like... I just started hearing rumblings from friends that people were just getting a reach that was unprecedented just for social media. So how 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 like flip a switch off and you no longer get free reach and they want to charge you for that reach that they got.

33:23Right. 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 like a startup social media company. So again, like imagine Facebook in 2012, where they're just like, you get all of this reach. 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 have like 400 followers at the beginning of the year. It's like at 8 ,000 now, I do 2.2 million impressions per year.

33:53I pay$5 for Twitter Blue to get those 2... 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. And so my process to do this, it's the same process I use for all marketing. It's like, 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. So for Twitter, to get really specific, what I do is I publish 10 tweets per day.

34:27It's straight up me just being honestly ridiculous. I'm just documenting the things that are happening. And style-wise, I made it really specific. It's like bare bones, information. I'm trying to only give you the essence of the idea. Because I think that that's 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 look at the past three months. I see which were the best performing tweets that occur based off of impressions.

35:01And then I write 70 more tweets that are similar, basically remixing those ideas for that next week. And so what that does is it creates this viral loop. So it's like, I'm learning the type of content that my audience is most likely to interact with. 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 like, it continues. It's got that snowball effect. And so that's basically my entire process. We've been debating building this out. So I'm doing this half automated with AI right now. I was going to say, why aren't you having AI do this?

35:32I mean, I know you want to drink whiskey, but you just have AI do it. 100%. So we're doing this... My process is augmented currently, but again, we think we can actually automate this. So imagine that vector database. And I'm like, all right, robot, write tweets based off of 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 had, that vector database, and find information that's similar to what we just talked about.

36:04That'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 eng resources. We only have so much eng time, basically. So anyway, DraftTorce is really kind of the focus right now. So we're trying to keep honed in on that. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Hey, it's Sean O'Malley, just popping in with a quick message. If you like this podcast, Well, I've got great news for you. We've got a handful of other shows for you to explore, from learning about Bitcoin to embracing a richer, wiser, happier lifestyle.

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39:43All right, back to the show. 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. And a common adage is build it and they will come, which is often applied in the business world to just building a good product. And then startup founders, it's said that a lot of first-time startup founders say, like, 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.

40:17The easiest way to say it is that I see worse products win all the time because they have better distribution. NextSuite is a prime example of that. It's a terrible product. But I think valued at a 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 and it drives me insane. They think, oh, I just built this unbelievable thing and people are going to find it. No. And 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...

40:46Basically, that's what they've been taught. Good product is an aspect of it, of course. And good product is expected at this point. You can't just make okay product. You have to make good 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 ever has been. Just like it's so easy to clone content more than it ever has been before. So what I'm trying to say is that distribution is how you basically create your mode. It's like, there's two things that are going to create modes in this new age that we're in.

41:18It'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. So when I talk about like that suite, it's an AAPO. And it is like our apps are straight up. It's like, 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.

41:54It'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 is McKinley. If you look up Innovation Stack, it'll come up. His concept is basically like, I'm going to take all of these ideas and I'm going to pile them together. And then suddenly there's this tipping point when you get to like eight to 11 ideas 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.

42:27And 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 DraftHorse, they traditionally were writing this content. And if I can come in and be like, you paid$100 before, now you're paying me a dollar and you get the same output that you were getting previously. Of course, I'm going to... That's a no brainer. If I'm a business owner, of course I'm going to do that. There's nothing that's going to hold me back from doing that. And that's basically it. You've also tweeted quite a bit about how you've helped your friends' podcasts grow. This show that you're on right now is pretty big in relative terms compared to other shows.

43:02But if I'm being completely honest and transparent, we've hit a bit of a wall in terms of growth. 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 friends podcast and maybe what you'd recommend for us to do to grow this podcast. Totally. Yeah. So, I mean, the stack that I always suggest for people, this works mainly for podcasts that are trying to zero to one. They're non-existent to existent. And that's mainly the companies that I work with and have helped. So I've done this in the biotech space, in the marketing space, in the insurance space, et cetera.

43:39So 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. So on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, that's where 90 % of the streams are happening when it comes to 90 % 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.

44:16So say as an example, my friends just started this podcast. They basically wanted to make a marketing podcast in the UK. It's about growth and marketing. And so for Tim, what they did is they named the show with growth in the title. And they 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. And again, in show notes, 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...

44:50What it is is how many links you have from other websites. and it's a representative number of how trustworthy your site is. 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. So I see this happening all the time. And this is actually something that we do with Swell. We'll get these companies that come in and they're like, Like, hey, I have a show.

45:21It has 500 episodes. The first 200, the show notes are terrible. The naming is terrible. They're basically dead on the vine. 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 inbound reach basically that's happening because of now discoverable by making these small changes. I mean, we've seen lips where it's like 30%, like week over week by just doing changes in that app catalog. So things like that, where it's just, I mean, it's apparent, right?

45:57That 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. 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 could do this exact same thing with this, right? Like If you pull out one of the interesting pieces, you put it into a clip. And typically what I tell people is like, hey, test 20 of them against each other. Whichever one has the cheapest CPC, all of your ad spend goes into there.

46:29So 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 like, do you want to open the Apple podcasting app? 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 forward slash. You push the RSS feed of the podcast after that.

47:01And 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. So the other piece that we layer with it is the doing newsletters. So newsletters are what we've seen recently. 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.

47:34And I'm sequencing them in to an email list. This is a gray list. And we're getting open rates of 40 % and CTRs of 5 % on these cold emails that we're sending. And because they're being added to a newsletter. So basically how we do it is I add like 200 emails per day. We built an automation that does this. So 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. So we know that it hooks people the most. So they get that email. Once they join that list, every time we publish a new episode every week, they get an email that that new episode is dropped.

48:08So it's basically like the new episode is live. Click this link. It takes them right to the Apple podcasting link. It talks about what they're going to learn in that podcast episode. And again, this is 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 like, oh, it's a podcast episode about something in my industry and I'm getting free education, they don't look at that as spam. Even though technically, this is probably a gray hat spam email that's happening. So anyways, what that does is that creates an immediate download that comes from that.

48:38You also, we're seeing people pair SMS groups. They're using one of those softwares that basically, Clavio has this, right? Where you can have a list of phone numbers and do bulk texting. It's basically just marketing, right? So they're sending emails about every time a new podcast episode drops. With again, that link, like the newest episode of XYZ Podcast is live, linked to the podcast episode. We're seeing 90 % open rates, like 40 to 50 % clicks on those text messages that we're sending. A friend of mine is starting to experiment with this with WhatsApp. He's in Europe. So that's why he's doing it.

49:09I 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 is all of the podcasts. So if you Google top US marketing podcasts, what's going to come up is 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 Charterball is showing you, it's just those podcasts just scraped directly from apple.com.

49:48So all of those websites, those aggregators 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 like more free reach through all of these tools. You get more, again, and it's just like, we're just trying to create growth flywheels with everything that we're doing. So as we get more downloads, we get more podcasts as we get 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.

50:21So that's how we're pairing it together. That's how we're seeing people have an effectiveness with this. So how about for a newsletter? So at CIP, 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. 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 slash subscribe. We have about over 50 % open rates for six months straight. rate and we're sending daily, seven days a week, 51%, 52%.

50:57And these are long emails. 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. A couple hundred-ish a month, probably 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 100 a month, maybe 1 ,000. But I want to supercharge it. I want to go from 33 ,000 to 330 ,000 subscribers. How would you do that? Yeah. Sam Parr built the hustle off of Facebook ads alone. But how could he do that? Could you do that now? I don't think so in the same way. He was getting dollar signups to his newsletter. And so you work that math backwards. Okay. I'm going to spend a hundred grand and I'm going to get a hundred thousand people on this newsletter.

51:34How much more money can I make per month if I had a hundred thousand 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. 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 like, I just found this newsletter. It's unbelievable. It's basically like wraps up everything that's happening in AI for you in a day.

52:04And it's like super easy to read. It's basically some 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 dollar dollars. 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 cross promotion between newsletters.

52:31So newsletter owners basically sign up and then they have newsletters 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, seven days after they sign up for this company. Again, I can't remember the name off the top of my head. 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, whenever I'm thinking about a company, and it depends on the level of capital you have. You're starting from either having zero money, but it's a way different position.

53:01But if you have capital to deploy, 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... Especially for your audience, like Millennial, Gen Z, how do I start a business, et cetera. 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. Where's the cheapest signup coming from? So I'm going to compare all the data, the signup data against each other.

53:28And then I'm going to look at that number. Okay. Again, it's costing me a dollar. And if you can get a dollar subscriber to a newsletter, again, Sam Parr with the hustle sold that 40 million. He did that in two years with just Facebook ads. Of course, you have to write good content and all of this. But if your open rates are good and your readership is good - Yeah, we got good content. 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 signed ups at a dollar. That means I need to spend a million over this time period or whatever.

53:58And of course, there's knock-on effects that happen. As you get bigger, you'll get more word of mouth, to get more natural inbound, etc. But I would do basically paid ads and then pair that with this company that does newsletter cross-promotion for you within it. So those two things together, that's what I'm seeing working right now based on the conversations I'm having with just founders. Awesome. Well, 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, drop your resources, your company, anything you want people to go online and find, let me know and we can put it in the show notes.

54:34Love it, man. Thanks for the plug. I always love it. Yeah. So I'm just at my Twitter handle. It's Cody Schneider XX. I basically am just like wide tweeting as me building 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 swellai.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 right. So yeah, those are the places. Awesome. Well, I'll put those below in the show notes for everybody that's interested in checking them out.

55:02Cody, thanks so much for taking time out of your day to join me. I really appreciate it. Appreciate it, Robert. Thanks for having me, man. All right, guys. That's all I had for this week's episode of Millennial Investing. I'll see you again next week. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to We Study Billionaires by the Investors 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. This show is for entertainment purposes only.

55:39Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

From the publisher

Robert Leonard chats with Cody Schneider about all things digital marketing and online business.
Cody Schneider has held various Head of Growth roles at startups, helping them scale rapidly, and has now founded two successful SaaS businesses, SwellAI and Drafthorse AI.

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:
00:00 - Intro.
09:33 - What niche sites are and how they work.
12:06 - How AI is impacting content generation.
30:44 - If niche sites are still viable with AI hitting the scene.
33:26 - Why you should be posting content on Twitter.
41:23 - Why brand is so important.
44:10 - How to grow a podcast.
51:44 - How to grow a newsletter.

*Disclaimer: Slight timestamp discrepancies may occur due to podcast platform differences.

BOOKS AND RESOURCES

Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Kyle and the other community members.

Buy Then Build by Walker Deibel.

The EXITPreneur’s Playbook by Joe Valley.

Related episode: Listen to Building an Online Business Empire w/ Jacky Chou, or watch the video.

Related episode: Listen to Investing In (and Building) Online Businesses w/ Mike Vranjkovic or watch the video.

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Check out our Millennial Investing Starter Packs.

Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here.

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Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services.

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SPONSORS
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Connect with Robert: Twitter | Website
Connect with Cody: Twitter | Website
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