Transcript for:
Exploring Innovations in Content Creation

and so all the free Su optimized tool that you would build you can rank for many many long T keywords and then uh sell your main product all the mini tools that we buil like I think I think we buil more than one per month so at the end we had like 40 SE optimized mini tools and all all them together was bringing like U were bringing like uh 70% of the of the traffic you just gave away a gem someone someone's going to listen to that and it's gonna it's going to spend the next 12 months of their lives just building mini [Music] tools you know yeah I I'm excited to have this conversation um I've been following you for a long time and when you sold uh when you sold tweet Hunter and and and you sold Tapo for $10 million I was like okay this guy is this guy is legit um and just seeing your process of how you come up with an idea uh how you name it uh how you come up with unconventional ways to grow it um how you care about design and copy I was like I need to get this guy on the podcast so thank you for uh thank you for coming on that's pretty cool thank you so what is on your mind these days um so yeah when you invited me I think I so I spent hours thinking about IDs and the thing is it always it always goes the same way like uh first of all you have this like blank page where you can just you have no ID at all and you just you just get one you you try to like go a little bit deeper on this ID and then it's like NeverEnding flow of IDs and I have I have one thing that I I find it very interesting it it may be something a bit boring but I I just stop I just can't stop thinking about um brand and influencers matching yep it's it's something that we we have seen over and over um and and I really thought that the space was dead because like you have hundred of startups doing that until I I noticed this new thing like passion fruits do do you know about passion fruits I do but tell tell people what passion fruit is it's it's an it's a startup that basically makes you able as a Creator to breed like packages of um ready to go sponsorships like you want you want you want to offer sponsorship for a tweet for a YouTube video or or anything else you can just build these sponsorships and brand can very easily book them like with payment calendar and what's what's very awesome about that is as brand when I start booking um like a sponsored tweets they open this channel of communication through like no signup uh email flow which is super super convenient for brand and creators to use and so I I noticed that I noticed them as a client first and I just just I couldn't stop thinking about that because to be 100% honest before I started doing any any startups I thought about this like I thought about brand and influencers and for me the space was 100% saturated like we couldn't innovate in in that like there's just nothing to do and you know you know what just when it was it was in 2015 and just so many things was like were created in this in this space since that time and so my my point here is that there's just so much things to do to to do to do here like when you think that space is saturated you can just do 100 more things yeah I mean I'll be yeah I'll be real with you too so I thought that the spage was saturated too there's there's there there is like a hundred of these Marketplace startups I think what was interesting about passion fruit is they focused on creators like me and you so like the B2B type creators and the other thing that they did was they allowed creators who had newsletters to create almost like a um link tree but for sponsorships so it it was like a really easy way to create a profile where it's like okay Greg Eisenberg decom is an you know is a newsletter there's 75,000 people a sponsorship cost x amount of um and it was just like a beautiful web page so I think the question I have here is okay I buy the point I I I I I agree that sometimes you can look at a space and it's overloading with startups um and that's the Creator space right now but what what would you build if you can build anything in the space so I I think you've nailed what they what they've nailed like they they just they just build the super simple to use portfolio that will just make creators money and I think that you can just you can totally reverse reverse the this page like do it not for creators but for brand like find find a way to create this link tree like page for Brands where uh as a Creator I can just go and I can just see what kind of SP sorship a brand would like quick ad break let me tell you about a business I invested in it's called boring marketing.com so a few years ago I met this group of people that were some of the best SEO experts in the world they were behind getting some of the biggest companies found on Google and the secret sauce is they've got a set of technology and AI that could help you outrank your competition so for my own businesses I wanted that I didn't want to have to rely on markk Zuckerberg I didn't want to depend on ads to drive customers to my businesses I wanted to rank high in Google that's why I like SEO and that's why I use boring marketing.com and that's why I invested in it they're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30-day Sprint with 100% money back guarantee who does that nowadays so check it out highly recommend boring marketing.com and find a way I think I think the hardest like the the hardest to do here is cation and moderation because obviously you would have like a chunk creators like shitty creators uh applying but if you find a way to use AI in a good way to rank uh sort and grades the creators coming in you can just make the life of of Brands and agencies super easy by just by just creating this INB flow of creators so that's really interesting so something happened to me for the first time ever recently where I had a brand reach out to me I'm just going to pull up the email so Logitech reached out to me and they're launching this new Pro product and they want to like send it to me and then they're like we want like a text based post and a YouTube video obviously I didn't do it cuz like I don't use any Logitech products and it's not really in my like my model like my model is to give a lot of value away for free and in the future hopefully that pays back to me somehow but I think it's really interesting that you have Brands what are Brands doing they're either going to marketplaces or they're going to agencies to find to to find these creators and Deals or they're just cold dming people like they're just saying like hey you're an interesting YouTube channel so I think what's what you're suggesting is to flip the bottle on its head what you're saying is Logitech should actually create a page and say like we're really interested to do this right is that what you're saying it's it's it's exactly this and I'm I'm suggesting this because I we we kind of did it with um tweet Hunter like uh I think I think it was like at the peak of our growth uh we we realized that it made a lot of sense for us to sponsor a lot of people because because we are Twitter product obviously it's super relevant to sponsor uh Twitter creators but we were like missing out on we're missing uh good creators to sponsor and so we open this page saying hey we want to we want to sponsor creators this is a rough just plug plug your Twitter and this is a rough calculation of how much we would pay you if if this is uh good enough for you just apply we would get an email and we'll start the conversation there it was super simple product just one one page uh the calculation was super dump I think you can do something very good because it it just worked like when we just tweeted about that uh we got hundreds of application that it became a nightmare to sort them and to to spot the good ones so that's that's the real issue to solve so what what would the business model there be so if you if you want to align interest uh you can maybe um take a cut on the sponsorship that you make the brand able to sign but obviously I would not do that at the very beginning because it would it would just make everything more complicated uh if you want to just sell the sell the shovel just a regular subscription based on maybe the brand size would be maybe the the easiest to begin with what do you think yeah I think uh obviously what a lot of marketplaces do is they charge for access but you can't charge if you're just beginning you can't you can't go to L'Oreal and say or Logitech and be like hey it's going to be $500 a month for access to this and we're going to take a cut of whatever the transaction is going to be because when you're starting out starting out you are no one like that's the reality and that's the thing that a lot of people don't say is you're you're starting off with like no credibility or very little credibility your goal right now is to prove that you can create value so I think what you do is initially You just prove out that you can actually do this thing so get the brands on board don't charge anything once you get the brands on board you're going to get the creators on board which is beautiful right and then eventually you can take a cut eventually you can take a 10 to 20% cut and some of these brand deals like I think Logitech wanted to pay me like 10 grand for like a text post you know it's like and but yeah just let let me suggest slightly different way like you as you said like you you make it very easy for both people to just jump in you make it easy for Brands to just create the space uh they have this onepage beautiful page where uh creators can just book a sponsorship but then what what they realize is that it's super messy they get hundreds of applications and the service that you offer is moderation sorting and like AI creation of all the inbounds um offers that they get and and you charge for that like you you you charge for the handling of the of the moderation and and booking of the sponsorships which is the hardest part of any sponsorship like you the the back and forth of how of like the brand wanting to uh the Creator to respect their guidelines to validate the that's that's the hardest part if you can just provide value on these steps that would be awesome and how would you how would you go about getting the brands like how do you go from having no Brands to 25 Brands um what's interesting is you you can probably scrap I don't know like uh Facebook Twitter uh Instagram and and try to find um many many many contents which H sponsorships the the the way I would do it I'm I'm pretty sure that on Twitter you have keywords that are like in in 90% of sponsorships like something like sponsored by or together with things you you have you have these stuffs on newsletters so it's I I guess you can build a list of uh Brands who sponsor stuff right now and just reach out to them with coating yeah I I think you I mean use a couple of those tools I think that that's great I think one of the things I was thinking about is you do you do really need to Niche down a little bit like you can't be like the Creator you know Network for everyone so I think I'd probably start if I was building this in the B2B space so I'd probably look at passion fruit you know I'd probably go on passion fruit and say like who's you know who who are the top creators and on passion fruit they like list the top creators um they list like you know you've got Ali abdal you've got islo the notion guy you've got you know Dan go who's a high performance coach um all these people so I'd reach out to them and then I would see I'd make a air table or or Google sheet of who are the over the last 12 months who has sponsored an Ali abdal newsletter or YouTube video and you create this list and they create this database which by the way you later use as a lead magnet right super cool yeah so once you scrape all of passion fruit and sorry passion fruit if you're listening to this and you're like that's a good terms of service so you know this is you know I don't I don't know if it's against the terms of service but let's just say you can go and do that um then you create this uh this database and then you say to people like hey do you want to see who's who's sponsoring the world's largest newsletters you know you you put some Twitter ads behind that all of a sudden you're you're getting leads at 50 cents to $150 a lead I I would do I would do something something yes like Bas based on just what you've just said I would try to do a a tool because like as a as a brand if I want to sponsor a Twitter Creator to promote my AI products I want to know I want to like not mess up the tweets and so I want to have like a a library of past sponsorships uh which could be like tweets YouTube videos stuff that worked very well and because I want I want to get inspired and So based on what You' just said I would try to build this library and to make it a tool because if you if you make a tool and you you build like a tool which would rank for best sponsorship in marketing or best sponsorship in AI or best sponsorship in like e-commerce you can rank for many many longed keywords and then uh sell your main products and would you charge for that tool no definitely not like I would I would try to make a SEO optimized Tool uh with many many um super um super specialized page Pages like one page for e-commerce one page for coordinating Etc like list just libraries just libraries of uh the best sponsorships that you can find on uh on any Niche yeah dude this is actually a good idea you want to build that yeah I mean kind of I I I do think um I like it cuz it's one of those ideas that you can see how you'd connect the dots like you you start with the Twitter account that is just showcasing who's sponsoring who and what sort of click rates you're probably getting and how much money they're making and and you you tell those stories on Twitter Maybe YouTube also then you convert those people to uh to the to the lead magnets really to to the tools to the databases you get you you you get them to uh well you just segment them between um Brands and creators so you essentially create two different lists and then your goal is to nurture both sides of the list and then you create a simple product for them to uh connect connect them connect them so I like this idea but what what I love with um with this kind of products is that you can like all the link tree products they generate a lot of um basically static web pages for clients and if you have things like custom domains and and uh clients have pretty good domains by offering your service for free you can generate a lot of back links by just linking back to your main product on uh the the many many web pages that you create for your clients so you can you can build SEO very fast that way and so all the free SEO optimized tool that you would build would would be able to rank very fast too was SEO a part of your strategy for Tapo and tweet Hunter it was it's it shifted like for the like the first I think the first half of the journey content Twitter and Linkedin was everything and then uh it was just not enough and all the mini tools that we built like I think I think we built more than one per month so at the end we had like 40 SE optimized mini tools and all all them together was bringing like uh were bringing like uh 70% of the of the traffic yeah that's a common thing I hear is like using content to attract initially and always doing that in the background and then using SEO and ads to supercharge as you scale so that's that's yeah but was I think what what what I found the the craziest was like every like we know nothing basically because among all the tools that we built the one that was super well thought like research didn't perform and that the crappy thing that I did an evening based on an ID without even talking to my co-founder about it it just it it it performed above everything like our our best performing mini tun was something that we gave as a test to a developer that we wanted to hire we had no hope no hope on this on this tool and it what was that what was that what was it it was it was download download video from LinkedIn post and and and it it ranked first for this so it was a very low intent uh keyword for Tapo but super high traffic a million per month uh visitors super crazy so people would they would see uh so they download a video and then and then we would say just SCH schedule this on top or schedule this on tweet enter uh to to post twe that's right yeah and for those for people who don't know Tapo is like a is a an AI assisted or an AI tool to help you schedule and manage your LinkedIn so like that makes a lot of sense right the people that are downloading videos are the people that are creating content so you just have to figure out like the prompt for people is whatever it is you're building you have to say what is a free tool that I can go and create that is going to generate a lot of top of the funnel and it's a natur natural for them to use the tool and then use your tool that's that's a strategy that's um a few players were doing that a few years ago like some a company that re inspired us was vi. this this video editor uh what what I what I find Crazy with um how they are doing is is that they have I think they have like 50 tools like things like a crop a video or compress a video but what's what's crazy is that every single one of these twool they take your inputs which is like a video file and then when you upload the when you upload your video they redirects to their main tool like vid doio and you are actually inside the tool without even signing up without paying for anything so it's like it's very cost efficient because it's super easy for them to build a new tool since it's just it's just a feature of their main tool and they and and then you are just like you are inside vi. iio so you just want to use it a little bit more and when you when you want to use a video editor you just think about them you know totally you just gave away a gem someone someone's goingon to listen to that and it's gonna it's going to spend the next 12 months of their lives just building mini tools but I I I hope they are not doing it in the in the video space because I'm going I'm going hard you're going after it's okay I mean there there's room for everyone and I think like everyone has a perspective on it and um but something just just let me add something to this story because everyone out there is saying that Google is dying because of DPT and like perplexity and stuff like that I don't know if that's true or not but one thing that I know for sure is that it's going to be less true for request that are based on an action like if you want if you are looking for a tool uh to compress a video or to download a video from LinkedIn it's very unlikely to me that you're going to query that on tgbt because you are looking for a tool and so you're going to do that on on Google to then be redirected to another tool because that's what you want that's why I think the me tool strategy is still something that I would just double done on I also think that my prediction is tools will be embedded within a lot of these platforms so right now when you use perplexity or use chat gbt really what you're getting back is mostly text you know sometimes you're getting some links or some images and over time what you're going to see is it's going to be more and more rich media from from from these platforms images videos and stuff like that but I think you're really going to start to see tools so you're going to you're going to go on to chat GPT and say you know hey I'm thinking about taking out a 30-year mortgage at 7% my down payment is $150,000 um do you think I should do this or or you know here here's my net worth you know what do you think I should do um today that response is just going to be mostly text um tomorrow what that response is going to be is mostly Tech or some text some image some video and a calculator um that TBO created and you know and then it's going to link back to whatever startup tbos created thus getting him more traffic and then also introducing that person to tbo's Brand it's it's possible but I I don't see an easy way to get there because um because the that like the they they did that with plugins and then they did that with custom gpts and I have no numbers to support what I'm going to say but it seems to me that it's it is a failure and that no no no one is you have slight you you have small use cases when you will use a custom GPT but in most uh most cases you will not totally what do you think I think uh I think it's really I hear what you're saying I mean what have we learned from chat GPT and perplexity is that they scrape a lot of information like llm scrape a lot of information if we assume that they are scraping information I got to think that they're going to scrape tools in the future if and I don't know how they do it and and when I say tomorrow this is going to happen I don't really mean tomorrow but I do mean like within the next five years I think where search engines generally go is where the best possible experience is and I just happen to think that if you embed a tool within a search engine experience IE if you search for something if you have something that you want uh you have a question and you want an answer for it only makes the EXP experience way better if there's a tool to help you figure out the answer to your question what's very true is that Google had absolutely no incentive for doing that before because they they want people to click on links uh which is not the case anymore with with platforms like perplexity and like this the coming search DPT so we'll see maybe you're right yeah in the in the in the past Google was you know fat rich and happy just doing status quo uh but things have changed and now it is a game of user experience so I think knowing that you know why does this matter to the people that that are listening and to me and you is just that okay well if we know that they're going to try to increase user experience what are the things that we need to create such that we get ranked and you know one of those things is tools so I think that's a big insight and uh B based on what you've just said I would I would heavily invest in replying to corra questions and Reddit questions because that's probably where a lot of llms are going to get their their answers and so if you if you're able to be like to the question what's the best um what's the best uh I don't know sushi restaurant in Paris yeah what's the best sushi restaurant in Paris if you able to just plug your restaurants and have it as the top up voted answers on reddits you're going to imagine that imagine that this is gonna pop when people query anms with this with this exact same question that's going to be super powerful yeah and and the mistake I think a lot of people make is they use AI 100 % to answer those questions and going back to user experience that's probably not the best experience because a you know you've seen some of these comments like you you could tell you can tell right now at least um if a if a comment is is AI generated or not I think like the ones that have like stories associated with it I walked into this you know this um the sushi restaurant and in the you know basti neighborhood in uh in Paris and I you know at first like the smell was like horrible and I was like what am I what have I gotten myself into but then I sat down and someone approached me and her name was Jenny and we had this long talk talk about how you know I was in nashima and there was another suan and then I had you know this Toro that was sent to me and it was incredible and it was mouthwatering The Human Experience in in creating content I think is undervalued right now that doesn't mean you have to be 100% uh human generated it just means that combining AI with humans I think is going to be the path forward and I do agree that answering questions is is UN is underrated it's super funny that you're saying that because we I had I had these debates um very short time ago and my my first reaction to this was like it's it's this is just that AI is not good enough for for now but I don't see why with even even without better LMS but with proper context and prep proper instruction I don't see how you would not have a a better system that would reply exactly like you just said the the key thing is to have like a human touch human emotions and um um errors like you have you have to make it super super willing to do to to go in crazy ways in like very original stuff but I don't see how this would not happen so it'll always be a cat and mouse game between the llms and content my I don't know if you notice that but I like I'm I'm following very closely this guy like level CEO on on Twitter and and he's started doing something that's I find a bit crazy is every time he thinks that someone answers with an AI reply to his tweets he just block and and I I just couldn't stop thinking like what's what's his error rates like how many how many people he blocking thinking that they are like Ai and they are not I mean I think that he the a I mean there's the average person if the average person did that you know they would probably be a lot of mistakes or a good amount of mistakes Le you know Peter levels probably not I mean there's this one guy who follow who has a well-known podcast who was an executive at one of the biggest tech companies in the world and he replies to all my LinkedIn or a lot of my LinkedIn posts and Twitter posts and it's 100% AI generated and I've been meaning I've been thinking about I've been like should I reach out to this guy like I've met him twice but should I re reach out to this guy and be like hey dude like it is so obvious that you're using some AI tool and it's like really really hurting your brand like you are an executive of like a multi hundred billion dollar company I think in the in the B2B space don't do like it's very just don't do it I don't think so I don't think it's worth it being 100% but so okay going back to what I was saying cat and mouse number one number two is okay cat and mouse and and and and text becomes so good that it's almost indistinguishable well then photos and videos are going to be valued highly so not only will you have to create text about that sushi sushi restaurant experience but you'll have to actually take a photo of that Toro and they're going to be able to tell is that a photo taken from an iPhone at this point 20 an iPhone 20 and and were you actually sitting there um or was it you know created with Dolly 8 at this point yeah but like even that I so I I was I was super surprised when I saw this tweet of someone uh sharing m j prompts and and he said that by by adding like iPhone photos you get you much more realistic contents from M Johnny but not not in a beautiful way but like more like in a crappy way like the the crappy way that you would take a photo at a restaurant because it's like the you are moving or uh it's not properly cropped things like that like it's it's a little bit um I don't know how to say that but in Reverse or see my point yeah yeah anyway any I I I just I I don't know where we are going with this but uh it's going to be fun to watch it's going to be fun to watch I think where we're going with it like we'll move on to your next idea but I think it's just like you kind of want to the upside of of you doing sorry go ahead but maybe that's that's the next ID because like imagine imagine building a suite of tool where like the the content the content that you will publish is like certified no AI like the the product itself is an anti- AI uh positioning because using this tool you are like certified to be a genuine human using a tool by hand yeah I mean Scott bsky the chief product officer of adobe once told me that uh just this idea around when you walk into a grocery store you see uh labels and on the labels you could see what's in the product right you can see if there's seed oils you can see if there's water you can see how much sugar there is all these things and when it comes to social products and digital products we don't really have nutrition labels and when it comes to content we definitely don't have nutrition labels we just see the content now Instagram is doing and Tik Tok is are doing uh you know this video was made by with this filter so there is a little bit of you can see this video was made by this filter so there's starting to be like the nutrition label but it's very just tip of the iceberg the idea that you're talking about which is like essentially organic content just like how we have organic food and non-organic content um which is AI generated is really compelling I just don't know how you create a business out of it it's it's a good question like I I I was just wondering if you could have like a some kind of it it would not be a a label but some kind of like Twitter scheduler like like twit was like which she would enjoy promoting publicly because it doesn't have ai I I'm I'm wondering if we'll not see a suite of products coming in the next few years which are like no AI in that no no AI in them but they still need to be grds but but by not having AI to gener to generate contents people would just be happy to promote them because they would be promoting themselves as no AI users I think one of the reasons why we saw be real hit like 20 million Deus or whatever it was was because you were seeing the rise of filters and AI content exactly and that that product was you know it ended up not really working out but it the reason I think it took off is there was like this feeling Collective feeling that we all had that we were getting sick and tired of of filters and and AI content so that Insight I think is really good how that manifests into a business I think probably probably there's probably a social app idea like there's probably a another version of a social network that exists that just encapsulates everything that we hate about social networks today which is a generated filters uh negative places so just you know when I go I was just on Twitter right before this and it was just like I'm seeing like video like horrible videos of war and and and people arguing about politics um and 100% organic content I think uh would be would be the answer so I think the way I think that there's the ideas I have for this is you either create a social network um hard to do have to raise money um so good luck um or you build Services businesses that help companies create organic content subscription based um content type type of ideas um for people I I can't I'm you know off the top of my head that's all I got yeah but this this ID keeps me keeps me very buy you know because I'm I'm working on this uh tool I don't know if you notice like it's called superx do so it's a it's like a Twitter extension for it's a Chrome extension for x and I think it has like the the best analytics uh features like I've I've never I've I've not seen anything uh closing enough to Super X but then since is a Chrome extension comes this idea of generating replies with AI and if you do that you are instantly categorized as a gray hat tool that speed shady and that will uh that will um make make Twitter way worse by just having more shitty contents and so I really I really I'm really thinking about like having this antii positioning yeah totally anti positioning that's a key inside I got to think more about that one um I think I think you are right on that I don't know let say I I think so I got a good feeling about it because um like I said it's people are thinking about it and there's going to be benefits to there are benefits to going anti- aai just like there's benefits going AI right I'm not saying like going AI is bad I'm just saying there's some places that it it makes sense and some places it doesn't and there's so much competition in the AI assisted AI Le landscape that there's probably a lot of opportunity in the human stuff and and and because of this competition people are burning outs like Lev and Danny posma posted about this on on X they they said that for sure the their next product will be like a no AI product just because of the insane competition they have just by talking about their the AI products the day they do so you have like 10 competitors for sure that will jump on the ID exactly you know you're not having a lot of you know you're not having 10 uh competitors in in anti- AI human stuff that's for sure yep so that's that's where the Arbitrage is always look for the Arbitrage always look where there's opportunity um so I like that for this I would I would have a look at what uh the people people behind behind um base camp are doing like uh Jason freed yeah exactly uh th those guy like the they did this um once Studio charging onetime fees for uh products I would not be surprised if they continue doing no AI tools and I would be very interested in what their I I I would look for what their next product will be totally yeah I'm I'm I'm following them and I I do think they're really good at sniffing out how people are feeling IE yeah and and doing these like anti- positioning yeah anti positioning is just it's so so underrated so underrated cuz you know when you're posting something on Twitter if everything looks the same you're not going to stop and and you're just going to keep keep scrolling but when you see something that's in the zeitgeist and just feels smells tastes different then then you're stopping you're sharing you're replying you're engaging so that's where the Arbitrage is tibo this has been really fun you're a legend where could people find find more more about you and your products uh the easiest is on X I'm tibo and thecore maker there um and my um my best products like the the the one that keeps me busy right now is revid doai it's a video editor to BR short form videos I hope that uh people will like it cool yeah check it out uh obviously you know what time it is go to YouTube like this video comment on video so people hear more about t TBO and his great ideas um hope this has been fun and tibo good seeing you and uh hopefully next time in France or here in Quebec I would love to welcome you here thank you GRE it was very awesome later [Music]