Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hello. Welcome back to Rogue Startups. This is episode 334, and today I'm going to be talking about how I'm using AI in my business for myself. Because this is the first of a series of episodes in which we're going to be talking about the reality of how the heck we're using AI to make ourselves better, make ourselves more productive, grow our business, make more money, make more profits. Right? And I'll just be straight up. My thoughts and belief and passion on AI have kind of waxed and waned a lot over the couple of years. Last couple years, Right. So I think it's fair to say AI kind of jumped on the scene. Everybody's like, oh, my God, ChatGPT is amazing. There was probably a bit of a lull after that and everybody was like the. Like, I just, you know, whatever.
[00:00:43] I definitely see it now where I've been around long enough and people I really, really, really respect in the space have been around long enough to say, yo, pay attention. This is like the second coming of the Internet. And when I hear a bunch of really smart people that I really respect say things that powerful, and I know they have the belief in the fact that this is something that is going to be transformational, not just for ourselves or for our business, but like the world and society, I really take notice. And I, to be honest, have kind of forced myself to really embrace and adopt AI. And I just want to talk about how I'm doing it. And then looking forward in this podcast, I'm going to be talking with folks for the next, I don't know, few episodes about how they're using AI in their business. And so if you're interested in coming on the podcast and talking about how you're using AI, I would love to hear from you. Hit me up on LinkedIn or Twitter. I'm DCRae Hewitt on Twitter. I'm on Bluesky too, but I don't check it very often or on LinkedIn. Just hit me up with a DM or email me podcastogestartups.com but I'd love to talk to you because I think that one thing that I feel is lacking a little bit, or I'm lacking, and maybe that's a good segue, is seeing good examples of how folks are using AI in reality, in practice, on a regular basis in their business. And so I'll just share a couple of ways that I'm doing it and then would just love to hear from y'all. So the first one is I'm Using it for content, Right? So talked about, I think, in some recent social stuff. I'm using a combination of OpenAI and Claude to create some use case pages. And this is programmatic SEO for Kastos, right? And so what we're doing is we have a list created by ChatGPT of use cases for people to have podcasts or to start podcasts. And so I wrote up the first of these use case pages. Um, and it's like why startups should start a podcast as thought leadership, for example, right? So a bunch of, you know, kind of keyword heavy but appropriate kind of content.
[00:02:58] This is a landing page on the site. And the goal of this landing page is to get long tail SEO traffic, right? So really specific, why start a podcast as a gardener? Why to start an internal podcast for your sales team, right? So we have a whole bunch of these pages. So I wrote this page. I then mapped each of the kind of fields in this page, if you will. So like, it's got an H1, it's got an H2, and it's got a next section that has H2 and it's got a sub header and then it has some paragraph text and all that. So I took all of those, I mapped them out, I pulled the text from each of those into a Google sheet. And then I plugged this Google sheet. So it has, call it 25 rows, right? Each row is a section. And then in the columns I have, hey, here's the hundred use cases that I want you to see what I did above, right? So see this, the one that I did myself. And then do that again for each of the hundred use cases. And so I did that. And so that content is done. And now we're kind of working on a way to programmatically and easily get that into the website. And that's just a little bit harder. If we're using webflow, I think it'd be super fucking easy. But we're not. We're using WordPress still. And so we're building a page template and stuff like that. But that's like a really concrete example. And so we're going to do this, we're going to do it for a couple of other applications like this. So you might think about, you're a digital marketing agency, right? Why don't you have digital marketing agency in Florida and in Rhode island and in Hollywood and in Las Vegas and in, you know, Brooklyn or whatever, right? So you have a landing page you might think about, okay, I have a landing page.
[00:04:38] How can I adapt that landing page, to be specific to people searching for a thing in their general area. And I think these landing pages have a mix of static content, right? So a lot of this is just like, hey, you, as a digital marketing agency, stuff that you want to talk about. And then the keyword or the thing is, you know, Brooklyn or Las Vegas or Florida or whatever. And so to me, these pages have a bit of a mix of static and variable content that depend, you know, whatever, for each of the pages that you want to create. Okay, so that's one thing that we're doing. The other one is using a custom GPT that I put together to script our YouTube videos for the Castos channel. And so, spoiler alert, I'm not coming up with the ideas or the content really for a lot of the stuff on our YouTube channel. And we've had some pretty successful videos recently. But what I'm doing is maybe I'll come up with the concept for a video and. And I'll do that largely by kind of looking at YouTube in my space and saying, like, the heck are other people who are successful? What are they doing right? And I use a tool called Vidiq that shows me, like, what are the outliers in my space? What videos in my space are doing really well? And I go, oh, they did a video about this thing and it did really well. Well, I sure as shit could do a video about that too. But I don't wanna, like, come up with the concept and script the whole thing out and put it on the teleprompter and all this kind of crap. So what I do is I have a GPT that says, o, Craig, what's the topic you want to talk about? And I give it to it and it says, cool, do you have any examples of similar videos like this that I can use as reference? And so I go and I get the transcript from those videos, I input it into my GPT. I have up to three, I think, examples, and then it understands a lot more about this in kind of more recent context than kind of the whole of the knowledge that OpenAI has. And I say, cool, based on the topic and the examples I gave you, please create an outline for a video that I could shoot. And it does, and I tweak it and I modify, and then I go, cool, okay, so make a script out of that. And I have a more advanced prompt than that. But, you know, it focuses heavily on what it knows about me and my experience and Kastos as a brand, because these videos are for Castos. And the goal is to have a topic or a video around a topic, but also freaking sell Casto stuff. Right? So how can we weave the Kastos narrative into this topic that we're talking about? And the script is usually like 90% good there between five and 10 minutes, just because I think for me that's kind of a sweet spot for most videos. And then I put it into a notion doc and I massaged a little bit. I think this is kind of where AI is currently, right? It's like it's getting me 90% of the way home, so I don't have to spend a bunch of mental energy thinking about what the heck I'm doing here. I can kind of be dumb a little bit and then save my mental energy for the really, really, really super hard things which are coming up with a concept at the very beginning and then really refining it to make sure that I inject my personal story and my personality and things like that into it. The next thing that we're doing is. And these are, it's funny, these are all marketing things, but I'm using a lot of AI for marketing. The third thing we're doing is we're creating some additional free tools. So we've talked a lot about engineering as marketing or free tools or whatever. And we have some. And some of them perform really, really well. They are the most talked about things for our brand on Reddit and we just see that they get a lot of traffic. They rank really well for certain keywords. So if you go to kastos.com tools you'll see what we're talking about here. We have like a podcast name generator. We have a look up your podcast RSS feed. We have a free kind of canva esque design tool that one of our team members built. And so I'm building some of these things with AI. Some of it's just like straight up, like a little Claude project that we then embed on a page. And some of it is using replete, replete reply, whatever, R, E, P, L I, T that tool to create a little application. Then we just embed it on this page and I'm starting to use cursor a little bit to build slightly more complicated tools. You would imagine things like, hey, I want to take my podcast episode, plug it in here and have it create really good social posts for me. Right? Like if you're not super savvy with ChatGPT and OpenAI already, and I'm not talking about you, I'm talking about like our customers. Right? So maybe your users or customers aren't really savvy with this. Is there a way for you to extract a piece of value out of a free tool, Give it away as a way to lead gen. Right? And that's the key with these free tools for free. Right? And so this is going to be free on the site. When you put in your stuff and ask it to generate social post for you, we're gonna have like an email pop up, say, hey, to get your results, enter your email address and then we're gonna market to these folks. So that's the third way that we're using AI is to, is to build free tools. Because I'm not a developer. Our developers are building, building, are busy building like core shit for Castos. I don't wanna take their time and energy away from that. But I'm technical enough and I'm learning. Right. I think that's a big part of this is like I'm leveling myself up quite a bit with this. I'm learning how to build software tools with it. Whether that's just like Claude building a little interface or replete building a little tiny application or using cursor and actually writing code to build a slightly more complicated free tool or add on or internal tool maybe for you and your team. And of course you guys are gonna say like, oh, just use Bolt or use whatever. Like, okay, fine, I think the tool you use maybe isn't as important as the concept is. Like engineering is marketing and free tools is great for marketing. If you're not a developer, use one of these tools to build them. Cool. And then the fourth one is, internally we're using AI a lot to document processes and we're doing this primarily through Loom.
[00:10:43] So Loom, hey, I'm going to record myself walking through how we triage tickets or how we do this thing with our ads, or hey, how we review PRs or something like that. Record just turn Loom on. I talk through what I'm doing and then Loom has this thing where it just documents it right there. It's amazing. We're on the business plan with Loom. I don't know if it's available on the free plan or not, but even if it's not, I think Loom would give you the transcript and then just plug that thing into chat. GPT say, hey, I recorded this thing. Please create a step by step process document, we call them playbooks, for someone to follow if they wanted to do this thing in the future. And then you have the video and you have the kind of step by step workflow right below that. So that's another place that we're doing it. The thing that we're not doing that I would really like to do in the place I'm looking forward to a little bit is like automating processes internally around sales.
[00:11:38] So we're not using AI to outreach to folks. We're not qualifying new leads, we're not, we're not doing a lot of these kind of busy tasks. And I think, you know, if I, if I pat myself on the back a little bit it is because we just don't have a lot of busy tasks. Like we don't a lot of, we don't do a lot of kind of bullshit in the business at this point, which I'm really grateful for. If we did, the first thing that I would do is figure out how to have AI do it. I don't want to delegate this to someone else. I want to just like have it be done. And so that's kind of the next place I'm looking is how can I use things like make and you know, Airtable and web hooks and all that kind of shit to automate like a process. So like maybe a thing happens. I apply a tag in Gmail that fires off to make, make, understands the email, does a thing and then replies to the person or sends me something in slackers. Like how can I, how can I automate that Again? Like the goal for me is I want to reserve my mental energy for the really important shit that I have to do, which to me is all like sales and marketing and like high level ideation. I want to offload the lower level execution of this as much as I can so that I can reserve myself and my time and energy for the things that really matter. And I think if we kind of wrap up here, like that's the goal is it's just like, you know, in the, in the four hour work week, Tim Ferriss stuff, it's like hey, how can, how can I, you know, automate and delegate to, you know, a four dollar an hour person in the Philippines?
[00:13:10] To me that's like hey, how can I just have chat, GBT and AI and automation just do this thing for me, right? So like not even how can I outsource and delegate this but just how can it just be done to where I don't have to worry about a person and their human errors and their people problems and their time off and all that kind of stuff. But like it's done. It's done like 90% right, instantly, automatically, every time. And I just don't have to worry about it. So that's just a few ways that I'm thinking about and using AI currently in my business. But really I just wanted to record this to get a little bit of a taste out there and, and a call to action to you all because I want to talk to people about how they're doing this and that's kind of the theme of the show going forward. And I like that we've had themes for the show because I think it lets you decide, like, hey, I want to, I want to engage or I don't, but I hope you do because I hope this is important to you because I think it, it's super fucking important. I mean, AI is probably going to put some of us out of business. Hate to break it to you, I don't want that to be me or you. And so I am putting an enormous amount of my time in that like high level mental energy into adopting and putting in place systems for AI in, for myself, personally and professionally in my business and would encourage you to do the same. So like, if you're not doing it already, maybe this is a way for you to start thinking about it. And if you are, I want to talk to you about how you're doing this. I want you to come on and give me the handful of examples that maybe you think folks haven't thought about and that you're really proud of and that you want to share with folks. I think this is a way where we can all kind of level up together to adopt AI and put it into practice and create systems in our business to let us operate at that next level. You know, I think Sam Altman said there's going to be a one person, billion dollar business with the use of AI. And that's kind of the, like, we're already not a one person business. We're also not a billion dollar business. But like, hey, can we be a, an eight person, $10 million business? I think with AI we probably can. And so that's kind of like the, the vision and the path that I'm on here. And the series for the podcast here is all about helping us all understand and think about ways that we're using AI professionally and personally to level ourselves up, to just be a better version of ourselves. So if that's you and you want to come on the show and share, hit me up on Twitter. I'm The Craig Hewitt podcastogestartups.com if you want to shoot me a message. If you're watching on YouTube, comment down below and we'll get in touch and would love to hear from you. And I can't wait to hear the stories and examples and use cases of folks using AI for themselves and their business in future episodes.
