SPEAKER_00
I'm Cody Schneider. This is the in the pit podcast. Today we're talking to my friend Curtis.
He's going to talk to us about the companies that he's been building in the print on the man space. It's all software businesses and he's going to share how generative AI is changing the space and how he's growing his companies through B to B influencer marketing. This episode is brought to you by swell AI.
Swell AI is a content repurposing tool that helps marketing teams make content for all the channels that they're trying to do distribution through go to swell.com to get started free. All right, let's get started with today's show.
Curtis, what's good brother? How you doing? What's up Cody? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on. Dude, stoked to have you.
You know so much about the print on the man space and I can't honestly, I'm just excited to download all that knowledge from you. You've been building software in the space for forever too, which is sweet. So, yeah, can you talk to me a little bit about that? Like, so I think for most people, they don't even know what like POD is or like that.
It's this massive, massive industry. I think print if I just raised like a ton of money is one of the kind of probably the biggest ones, but talk to me about that. Get me educated.
Yes. So print on demand.
SPEAKER_01
Basically, it's a very risk free business models way. I like to put it create income streams. And essentially what you do is you connect vendors will automate your order fulfillment.
So printing and shipping of the products or let's T shirts mug stickers, there's literally hundreds if not thousands of product types that you can choose from and automate the fulfillment for. So essentially, you can go, you know, create these products, put them on Etsy, put them on Shopify, Amazon, different marketplaces and connect to your vendor that will automate the fulfillment. And you don't pay for anything until an order happens.
So that's the key there. It's like why I said it's risk free. You pay for an order as soon as it comes in.
So you make the profit on whatever you're charging based off what costs are. And it's a really fun model. You know, create passive income streams.
It's getting easier.
SPEAKER_00
And that market's growing really quickly as well. Totally, totally. So like, can you build brand in that space just to like understand it? Like do people do that well? Or is it more like, you know, I'm looking for the specific mug and this random company has it and I buy from them? Or what does that look like?
SPEAKER_01
I think that's a great question. So you can definitely build a brand now you need a vendor that can support those type of features like the inside label, high quality products, different types of print types. But a lot of people would I see, especially on my side, are creating like one out products are going up to Etsy, you know, they're hitting different niches, targeting all kinds of different niches or trends or events.
And just getting on these organic marketplace isn't getting sells that way. But yeah, there's definitely people are doing brands, especially through Shopify, running their own paid ads, they already have an existing brand tapping into print on demand to offer more products to their
SPEAKER_00
product. Oh, cool. Cool. So it's almost like expanding their like their product offering like I'm going to increase my amount of skews like I have trust within the specific product category and here's the all these other things that I can start to offer as well. Something like that almost exactly super interesting.
Awesome. Yeah. Well, how are you? I it's been a minute since I've talked to you so I tell me everything I know the company's going crazy.
SPEAKER_01
So yeah, things are going well. I'm busy really busy. Are you all right? Are you sleeping? Not really.
Try to not get a sleep here now. You're coming up on a year right now, right? Yeah, we're coming up. We're coming up on a year towards the end of this month since we officially launched my designs now we're going to work nearly two years before that.
SPEAKER_00
But yeah, it's coming up on a year being officially launched. Amazing, amazing. Just for the audience, talk to me like what's the my designs one liner.
How does that? How does that fit in?
SPEAKER_01
So my designs enables you to create and sell print on demand products on Etsy Shopify, Amazon's becoming very soon in bulk. So we're in the business of saving creators time. Basically, if you have you know 1020 30 hundreds of designs that you're looking to turn into t shirts, mug stickers and various other product types.
Instead of doing the traditional route which you go through and do that one by one. It takes a lot of time. You can just set them in our cloud generate mockups in bulk generate data in bulk using Fraser AI.
Train on best selling Etsy data for instance, and then go and publish these in bulk and not only during the process one of the other things I really like. We have a concept called multi product publishing. So if you want to add a t shirt sweatshirt hoodie, maybe a mug to the same list for all 100 listings of your publishing.
You can do that.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you could like single design multiple products. That's insane.
And of course, I'm just spinning these companies up overnight with with you guys is basically how I'm seeing it. Yeah, it's evolved so much since we talked last. This is awesome.
And I'm so stoked.
SPEAKER_01
One thing I'm really excited about we've been working on this for almost five months now it's our internal canvas editor. Okay, all the all the graphic design editors in the space are all of our competitors they just suck. Yeah. And what we did is took it to the next level it's a really high end graphic design editor similar to Canva. Yeah, way more specific for print on demand.
Cool. Beta versions already pretty much ready we have it released but now we're incorporating into all the different processes in my designs. And the exciting thing is you can be able to, you know, publish 100 personalized products and literally insane.
That's insane. When an order comes in on the orders page of my design you pop it up add the personalization and hit approve.
SPEAKER_00
People using sorry I'm just going to go all the way down on this thing but like our people I imagine like they're using AI to generate these they come into my designs drop these in and they're just like bulk publishing 1000 products to any of these, you know, ecom stores like
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, most people because one thing my designs does to the other print on demand platforms, doesn't do is we offer digital products. So you probably should sell digital products to us as well. Interesting.
A lot of people I see on my designs are typically publishing between 20 to 48 listings at a time. Now there are people are doing up because we have a cap at 120 because there's rate limits with these markets. Yeah, of course.
But yeah, most people are doing between 2048 time doing batches. So you're not so much time doing it that way versus you know one by one by one. Through all these different platforms.
But what was the question going back to that.
SPEAKER_00
Oh, sorry. Yeah, I was just curious on like how like kind of the workflow. I mean, I think there's this audience that they're like, you know, how do I create my first income right like we have some like 20 year old listeners right where they're like, you know, how do I get my first 10 grand a month so that I can go and you know basically live off that and then build my software or something like that, kind of that that that that vision.
So you talk to me about that like if you were, you know, start starting from zero right now like what would that process look like.
SPEAKER_01
If you started from zero, I think one of the best things to do is to come in and offer personalized products on a marketplace like Etsy. Trying to think about the quickest way you know, a big marketplace has a lot of organic traffic to know for personalized products, especially print on demand. Mail the streamline that and automate the majority of that.
And that's what we help you do at my design. So I think it's really just getting in on certain trends like you know upcoming. We're going to miss the Halloween trend, but you got Thanksgiving you got Christmas so obviously only four you see anywhere from three to eight X increases and sells across the board.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I read somewhere. I'd love your thoughts on it, but I read it was like 80 or like 60 to eight depending on the industry but like 60 to 80% of online sales are occurring in like November and December for like most of these shops which is insane. I agree with that.
Which is wild too. I mean because when you look at Etsy as an example is public company when you look at their revenues it's like all in Q4 basically like their entire like they're just existing the rest of the year and then in Q4 it's like they make all of their money.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think a lot of companies in the ecom space make you know, like you said around 80% of their their revenue in the month of the year.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, how is he calm right now like I feel like there was this kind of, I don't know, like gold rush and building products that serve ecom like customers like business owners. Is that still kind of happening like I mean clavio just went public that was a huge one. I'm curious like is there still a ton of development or like has most of the things been built or has AI kind of shaken this up or what does that look like right now like landscape wise.
SPEAKER_01
I think AI is shaking everything up. I mean, I know you're you're deep in it. I mean what we're building right now what we're seeing like possibilities coming.
I want to share too much but there are some absolutely incredible things AI is opening up across the board for ecom I think it's going to completely change it and shift the way that people obviously buy and sell online.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, massive way like are you thinking is it mainly like, like, just the ability to like, I'm just thinking like product listing descriptions is probably way deeper stuff but like all of these manual tasks that used to be like a human would have to go and do is that type of things like kind of automating these things that previously that you know would just be a massive time suck like a massive resource sucker like what's the or is it more on the product generation side like figuring those things out so yeah from the seller side you know creating a product listing.
SPEAKER_01
I think we did my designs with Fraser eyes like you can basically give the keyword for all the listings and generate that data your titles and tags and bulk with descriptions coming soon. Amazing. That's trained in open AI with actual real Etsy data from best selling products.
And it's really good and it's getting way better. Yeah, now on the on we and also my designs we have dream AI which is based off stable diffusion SDXL and also dollars coming to that as soon as that's released. So you can generate graphics plug into our editor add text, etc.
Different effects, save them. So there's a person like product. And then we're automating that personalization side to but then taken to the step further you know all the AI start and take all these time consuming process especially when it comes to you know writing and optimizing listing data, creating high quality graphics to base your designs around.
It's just kind of taking all that work out and enabled everybody essentially.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, come in and start to actually have a level playing field for the first time ever I think now. Do you think it's easier than it's ever been to kind of start these like I just from the outside looking at and just for context like I at, you know, at one point this is what I was like this is actually how I made my first company was like a POD company right and I'm just thinking about like starting it then and starting it now it's like two entirely different worlds like you could zero to one these companies in 30 days and you know and get them off the ground and paying your rent it feels like in a way that you could never
SPEAKER_01
before previously but yeah I think it's I think it's easier now than it's ever been now there's an issue with saturation right now we're getting first to market certain trends and whatnot make a lot of money quickly. There's all kinds of obviously have evergreen niches that do well, especially have expertise in those particular niches, then you can take it to the next level so people that already are familiar with this know what they're doing. They're always going to have an advantage AI is just going to help them do things quicker.
SPEAKER_00
And then taking like those kind of feels like affiliate like it's funny like a, you know, there's not like a real brand, you're selling this like product of a product. You know, it's it there's more high touch, I feel like, like less transactional, but I don't know it's just kind of one of these spaces that I feel like is just a whole print on demand world. I like is this is this it feels like one of those this is probably one of those first businesses that people start right.
Is that your kind of your target customer my designs and like what you're you're building on the SAS side.
SPEAKER_01
We have a mix of you know people have been doing this for years. Yeah, because our platform k does that people can have the experience already because now they already have lots of power users they're trying to automate these workflows, etc. They automate the entire workflow and do it all with one platform men's entire business from that platform.
And there's also a good mix of new users have never done this before. Yeah, that's exciting to see. And I think a lot of that is coming from, you know, the mid journeys dollies and stable diffusions.
People find the same Oh, you know, they're starting to do graphics and like okay how can I, you know, you to turn this into T shirt and buy it or sell it as a T shirt.
SPEAKER_00
I think a lot of that happening right now. Super interesting. So it's like almost.
It's like, it's, it's almost, you know, I hate this word except everybody uses it like democratize access to graphic design skills. And it's like basically made it so that they can just like, they can think it up or you know, basically generate that man. If I was 20 this is where I would.
There's two opportunities right now like if I was, you know, was young and trying to figure out like how am I going to make my first 10 grand there's I'd either like make an agency like a clip agency that like goes and eclipse podcast for people for people, you know, like and like creates like viral clips that they can post on social, I would do like that, or I would go and I do something like this right where it's like, you know, basically some print on demand thing where it's it's your upfront costs I think that's the thing that people don't realize with this too. You can get a mid journey subscription for whatever it is 20 a month, produce all the graphics that you can imagine and basically throw those up on, you know, a POD store and start making like passive income. So just crazy.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. How's that how's the sass side going. So this is your second product you built right just a.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, started with Merch Titans.
SPEAKER_00
Man, seven years now. Nice, nice. And Merch Titans, are they a print on demand company or what how do they fit into the ecosystem.
SPEAKER_01
So we started as a product and keyword research tool. Okay, Merch by Amazon. Okay, interesting.
I quickly spun it off into another product called Merch Titans automation, which basically allow people to set up an Excel spreadsheet link into their design files, their titles descriptions and tags, and then automate those uploads to a different marketplace. So like your red bubble, T public T screen, as well, print full Merch by Amazon obviously being the main one. And that blew up.
And then taking that same concept because I started seeing this overlap happening at the time between Kindle Direct Publishing and started to be a lot of people taking their designs and turning them into notebooks, dream diaries, different things. So the inside of the book was the same material file, you know, like 100 pages of just certain lines of different prompts throughout, and then just take the front cover and just do thousands of these. So I built Kindle Direct Publishing Automation.
And I'm quite certain KDP Kindle Direct Publishing put daily or weekly limitations in place because of that, because that software absolutely blew up. We had people publishing 3000, 4000, 5000 books a day.
SPEAKER_00
So like, what year was this? Oh my God, I didn't know this.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, this, that was one of our actual most successful products. It didn't take much work. He says very similar to Merch Titans Automation, but more Kindle Direct Publishing.
So yeah, it became, you know, it was a good couple months there until Kindle started to say like what the hell's going on. And then they put rate limits on. Yeah, they had weekly rate limits they put in place, which they never had before.
It wasn't just us. There's some other people. Yeah, what you were doing.
This was 2019, I think. Amazing. Amazing.
Amazing.
SPEAKER_00
So, what, like, was it just like AI generated content or what were they publishing? Like, I'm mad, you said 3000 books a week.
SPEAKER_01
There were some people were doing like 30,000 books a month. Holy shit. Holy shit.
And then some people that do, you know, burst seven like three to 4000 a day. But because we enabled paralyzation and KDP had no limits, so you could open up if you had a powerful enough computer, you could say, okay, I want to open up because you got to control this in our app. You know, 100 tabs and upload 100 books.
It's normally a 15 minute process. So you have that happening across 100 different Chrome tabs.
SPEAKER_00
Like it was, yeah, it's pretty nuts. That's insane. That's insane.
So, so this talk to me about that world, like that, that business world of like direct publishing on Amazon. So I know, I know a little bit about the merch. Maybe we come back to that, but I'd love to learn about this, like the direct publishing world and like, I mean, I've, you know, I've read case studies and never actually seen real data of like these people, you know, doing millions a year selling these ebooks basically from through like, like Kindle Direct.
Can you talk about that and like what you've seen like from a company standpoint?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so the way we were doing it is we had a lot of people have a lot of assets for their most of our creative or t shirts. And then they would make some modifications and turn them into book covers. And again, it's just a journal with that design on the front of it.
Now you can see that's not very, that's not very appealing to Amazon, obviously, you know, long term. But there were people making a lot of money off these journals, like, you know, listings with thousands of reviews over a couple years, things like that, because they blew up. But in terms of the actual book publishing side, that's, that's not the way Kindle puts some limitations.
Now there's different restrictions in place. It's not really as easy as it used to be.
SPEAKER_00
But they're just like fine keywords, like XYZ book, like keyword and then basically up, you know, build a piece of content and upload that, that direct publishing Kindle like to sell. And you know, make it a dollar or something like that. Or what, you know, what was the kind of like the really tactical pieces of it is what I'm curious about.
SPEAKER_01
Yes, so they would have they find a long tail keyword. And that was the book title. And then have a certain design associated with it was relative to that.
And it was just a journal. So you'd have the same interior for thousands of books. So people buy it, you know, the inside is the same.
It's just a lined page. Oh, my God. You know, that was the concept.
Now, you know, people, people got really creative with it, doing dream journals, prayer journals, all kinds of different diaries, different prompts throughout, and even different graphics throughout. And those are the books that obviously end up doing much better. There's a much more personalized type of niche and book for the for the buyer.
But yeah, that's kind of the overall flow of it is we that's crazy.
SPEAKER_00
Is Amazon merch still like viable? Like if you try to go in right now, like would you still be able to kind of like build something from zero to one? Or is it is still, you know, I remember the last time I touched it was probably in 2015, 2016. And it was just, it felt like the Wild West, like you just, you know, overnight start getting sales, which was crazy. Is it I imagine it's way more competitive now, but it's more competitive now but still a fantastic platform.
SPEAKER_01
If you can get in, they have a review process. So you have to get in when you get in, you have to visit your system as well. Okay, so you have to upload up to 10 designs, I think only allow one or two a day.
You have to get up to 10 plus cells and there's every like week or two they'll bump your tier up. So it just takes quite a bit of time to get to the level where you can put up enough volume, which a print on a man is a volume game for the most part. Totally.
SPEAKER_00
But you have more listings. Like for it, you know, say you wanted to again pay your rent, we'll say like three grand a month or something like that. Like how many, how many listings do you think you'd need? Like a thousand, 500 or what would that look like to kind of get to that number.
So there's a key to assuming assuming there's people searching for those keywords and you know all those things.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that's where that's the key right there is you got to do good product research. You got to optimize your listings and of course you're designed for that particular niche. If you do a good job of that, you don't need that many listings.
But again, if you do a good job and you do volume two, then you could get there off thousand, two thousand listings easily.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, definitely. Do you have companies outside of the software companies like you're like you have your own print on demand stores as well that you're like doing all this. Are you are you mainly just focused on the software side now.
SPEAKER_01
Mostly on the software side, but obviously like my designs a test Etsy, you know, make $1,000 profit a month off of very little work, mostly just testing stuff that we're building internally. And with the personalization stuff, I mean, actually do a use case where I miss how fast I get to $100,000 a month. Using my design with personal product.
So I've been waiting for us to get all these features in place.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, and then you're just gonna do like a public public. Oh my God, I tell me when you do that I will like share that with my entire audience because they would they will know I'm gonna eat that.
SPEAKER_01
I'm gonna aim to do it within six months or less. Amazing. Amazing.
I think I think definitely if any year I'll be doable to get over $100,000 a month revenue. That's insane.
SPEAKER_00
Very quickly. Yeah. Margins on these things like what does that look like like 20% probably it's probably lower if you're if you're doing like those higher volumes. I think the markup I used to do and trying to remember I buy a shirt for like or I get it out the door for like nine.
And I think I try to sell it for like right under like right around 20 is what I'm guessing but I don't know what it is still.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, Etsy a lot of shirts go from anywhere from $20 to $30. And you know printing and shipping through my designs depending on the vendor you're selecting will be about 1313 to $14 depending that's on for like about $3,000 or more of a high end shirt. Yep, you can get you can get on stand about 13 to 12 in some cases 11.
So yeah, profit most of my shirts I make about $9 profit. Super interesting after everything. Yeah, it's kind of the price point that seems to work the best.
SPEAKER_00
No, that makes total sense. Okay, so on the distribution side on the software side. How are you guys doing that is it like a lot of influencer stuff are you doing like cold outbound because I know they're I mean you could probably find like all the shop stores that sell right and like have a I don't know whatever integrations but you know and obviously I don't want to go too deep to give away kind of all the tactical stuff but just more like high level like what do you see and work with this type of
SPEAKER_01
software. So what's working the most is we do have affiliates. So it's mostly on YouTube.
We have gotten into the tick tock side yet I know that work and Instagram will as well. Yeah, you've been great. Having a couple affiliates there that push product content around the product and they love the product.
Absolutely love the product. So it's easy for them to go create content and one thing about my designs is you could create unlimited content. There's so many different things you can do with it and so many possibilities so it makes it easy for them.
So that's been one of our keys.
SPEAKER_00
And then to the content it's not like it's like they're doing the same video over and over again it's like they can do like all these different right yeah that makes a little sense. That's been the hardest part we've been trying to figure out with swell like how do we do like influencer focused content we're on like you know for content marketing like really like showing content marketing workflows and here's how it fits into that. But it's just like figuring that out has been the hardest hardest thing honestly and also just the influencers to partner with on this process.
Yeah. But anyway, you guys are funded right or yeah we're start up we raise capital nice nice family brands around and that's where we're at right now.
SPEAKER_01
Awesome. We successful round everything as we hit the we raise the maximum and we'll probably be gearing up to do another round early next year. Nice cool cool cool.
SPEAKER_00
That makes a little sense. So you I think what's really interesting about kind of the business journey side is you really like parlayed each of these companies I feel like into the next one. Yeah. So it's like I built this thing it's all this problem I saw this new problem I built this thing it's all that problem and they new problems I you know I built and it just I feel like like entrepreneurs that do that like that's like half of it right is just like yeah getting out and like moving in any way. Like you're gonna you're gonna see these things and you know I want you to start doing business you see all these ways for you to make money and then it's just like you're turning into how do I pick the right thing to go pursue.
But do like do focus on anything outside of the current demand or like you just like you were you know we're hyper focused on this whole niche and just like building products within that space.
SPEAKER_01
It's all it's all print on a man. Yeah totally. I used to juggle so many projects back before Merch Titans and even during some of those Merch Titans days and I was like just just you spread your focus way too thin.
Totally. And you just move too slow in every area. So it's figured out just focusing on one thing primarily just that makes all the difference putting all your time energy everything into that.
Totally. And with my designs though I was so excited about the original idea I had it for a year and finally started building MVP. Yeah my current CTO.
And you know within a year it's like we had an acquisition offer and we weren't even launched. It was a pretty big acquisition offer too. Yeah. No revenue no customers. Totally.
Just showing them showing them what we built and turn that down and that's why we took the start of approach but I feel so good about this company because it kind of encapsulates everything it builds an all in one platform for people to really quickly start to create these passive income streams and manage it from anywhere in the world.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Which is like a massive.
It's still working well but it's pretty hands off once you get it. Totally. But I think you can sell that too right.
Like yeah this is the way like you want to create passive income in the next 90 days like this is the vehicle to basically do that like for and for a lot of people like that's you know one of the biggest searches online is how do I make money online right. Yeah. It's like that keyword phrase is like one of the highest search volumes in the world so if you can sort of have any product that services them like you are and you know you're going to figure you're going to win right so yeah but that's super interesting. So your team is all remote if I remember right.
How do you guys structure that like if you force time zones that everybody has to work or what does it what does that look like.
SPEAKER_01
We some some of the engineers so engineers remote some of them are more close to my time zone will stay up late and like a growth market we just hired he'll stay he's on my time zone work directly with him a lot right now. But all the engineers are on their time zone. Cool. They have been the morning work and they'll stay late to you know get several hours in with me the end of the day. So some kind of crossover that's happening during the day where it's like we can have live comms if we need.
Yeah. Yeah. Which happens every day. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
No that makes sense. And then more of those like we'll say softer roles that are more collaborative like that's where you're like hey we need you you know these time zones to work. How are you sourcing engineers on it like it was these people that you already had relationships with or were you you know what did you where did you go to kind of find these these this group that you're working with.
SPEAKER_01
So so half the team I had relationships with. Nice. And Phil for instance he's my CTL nominal incredibly talented engineer. I've been working with him since he was 1213 years old I was 16.
And we were building World Warcraft Private Service together. I love it. It's where everybody started.
Yeah. So we had so much fun doing that man. That's what got me into that whole that whole side of things.
I was so bored. My I think it's my freshman summer after high school. I was like what am I going to do.
And I was playing World Warcraft at the time. I'm like all right. We got to dig in like I always heard about private servers.
So I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I've always been pretty tech savvy. But within three days I had to serve up on my local computer.
The computer was complete garbage right. But I had a server up and I did a little bit of advertising just posting these different forms and had 3040 people online within like an hour. Oh my God.
And computer crash. No that's so far. Of course.
Further how to get a dedicated server and eventually that's why I ran into Phillip.
SPEAKER_00
That's amazing. That's amazing. I have a friend named Kobe who's literally like same origin story.
He was like doing World of Warcraft basically just like selling you know digital products through it like for physical money like for fiat like. With it. I've talked to so many like really just like people that are in startups that have have some origin story that's so similar.
We're like yeah we were doing something with video games and it was like we were selling something through it and then that just evolved into like OK now I'm going to sell real physical products to the world.
SPEAKER_01
Exactly with with us we got to point you know being at that age. There's no way anyone. This is like my mindset at the time there's no way anybody would donate to a server for points on the website that they could buy in game items with.
And so we set this donation system. All right we'll try it but in my mind I might as no way anybody would do this. So we set this system up got it polished you know within a couple weeks had it released you could buy you could donate donate for points basically credits and then you use those credits to buy in game items that show up in your mailbox.
Kind of a pay to win situation. It blew up man. So my Max days we had like seven eight hundred dollars coming in and donations.
So I was like pretty. So that kind of just set that you know first off for sure.
SPEAKER_00
Never assume. I always tell me when it's so important to I don't know like looking back like I my first company I was I think I was 19 where I made it was it was kind of the same thing right like we were doing. Yeah what nothing even credit I think I did when it was at its peak it was doing like around 10 grand a month and this is back in like 2014 2015 and it was I mean you just get hooks you know like you like.
And then so typically something happens to like the environment changes and you lose it all like that. Yeah I feel like they also a part of the origin story of like all so many others and then you're like OK how do I get this back and then that's how you start to build brand and you get like way deeper into the business side rather than just like some hacky money making scheme but.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah exactly what happened to us. That's amazing. What what happened.
So it's like we hit the trend early for like like when you look at World Warcraft training private service training on Google. They hit it like the perfect timing it was training upward tons of players just got to point where seems like that fell way off. Yeah. And things just were we like have much better servers much better infrastructure and just the player base wasn't there. No. Things just slowed way down and obviously you know I was after four or five years and we got out of it. But that was just a really good learning experience.
So about everything that we do now to this day basically totally database networking web development programming. I hope thing it just kind of gave us the foundations for all that.
SPEAKER_00
Totally. I want to come back to this B2B influencer marketing thing. When you how are you part or how are you structuring those relationships.
Like is it like hey we're going to you know it's a monthly sponsorship. We expect XYZ amount of videos per month. You can make it about whatever content that's related to the product or like any error.
What does that structure look like just to understand kind of your your your view on the best way to do it.
SPEAKER_01
So we have affiliates that came in and signed up. They love the product and they're just creating videos without being paid. That's actually happened a lot.
Now we did there are some that absolutely just kill it. Which is insane. Obviously we work on deals with them and we pay them for video to but for the most part most of them come in and just love the product want to build content.
So that's how they start now.
SPEAKER_00
Are you targeting affiliates like this is something I've been playing with lately is like targeting people that have an interest in affiliate marketing and then driving them to sign up for our affiliate program has.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. Sorry I meant to cut you off. No no please.
Really the system you set us up with early on when we first started this kind of outbound. We're reaching out to affiliates on YouTube like that are in our niche. Amazing.
That works really well.
SPEAKER_00
So how have you just cold emailing them and do this is something people don't talk about like you can literally get all YouTubers emails like their public. Yeah. Scrape them like it's crazy. And they can't even like you can go and like just called out about them.
It's I've wanted to build a product for YouTubers for so long just because of that. But it's like I can't figure out a thing that makes sense for them that like provides a ton of value besides like a Tube buddy or some like you know like some analytics tool. Even then it's like I don't know.
Anyway, there's there's something in there. If somebody figures it out like there is an audience that like you can market to is just figuring out the product to sell to him.
SPEAKER_01
But yeah, I think it's a phenomenal idea. And with AI to you can do so many interesting things. I haven't jumped into this yet but I read a story from a guy on Twitter.
I remember his name but I thought it's so fascinating. So he's a he's a Shopify app developer. Okay. Build apps for existing Shopify businesses. Yep. Design for certain use cases. He set up like his templates and chat GPT and just took like 3000 emails a day all these different Shopify shops and it would create the idea and chat GPT he didn't ever even review anything.
We create the idea for the app for their store and how it could help them boost revenue and send out a cold email and people would reach out. I think at one point he's getting 10 to 15 leads a day that we're converting to paying customers for him to develop apps form. Oh my God.
SPEAKER_01
He wasn't reviewing anything to set up a good template based template of the right instructions and that was pretty much it.
SPEAKER_00
That's insane. That's insane. So basically he's like taking the web the homepage copy and then just like being like chat GPT what could I build them that would make them more money.
Like how could I improve this or what did that look like? Exactly.
SPEAKER_01
He would like analyze their websites exactly turn and have chat GP do it. So he just do this at a mass scale 3000 4000. Gotcha.
SPEAKER_00
Gotcha. And then he would create an annual just automated his process yet. Yeah, so that's he would just do it all.
SPEAKER_01
He didn't even review anything. It just analyze the website. He had the instructions in place to basically how to pitch it and it's just an old email.
SPEAKER_00
You know, Harrow. They're like it's like helpful reporter out. It's for a lot of people use it for like backlink building.
It's basically like the journalists are looking for sources and you can like respond back to them as a source and they'll like include you in an article and then link back out to your your company. Right. It's like how it's used a lot. I just saw this demo where this guy basically like chain together an email account and linked it up to Harrow.
So that when the journalists like, you know, basically like, you know, we're looking for sources on XYZ. They had like chat GPT basically write a response email. And this like perfect format that typically journalists are looking for and he was just like put this thing on autopilot.
And it was just building links for his company. Right. Which is like just increasing his domain. Like that was his whole thing was like, oh, I'm just trying to like get our domain authority as high as possible so I can rank for all these long tail keywords like related to my niche.
But anyways, it feels like that like all these things that we used to do manually like front and we used to pay agencies for right like or a human would be doing this. Let's just like take those processes and like how do I just inject it's you know the AI writer into that that flow as much as possible.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, anyway, but there's so many possibilities now it's ridiculous. And this is just this is like at the point we're at now is the worst it's ever going to be. Yeah, it turns out the AI technology and it's insane to see what happened over the last 12 months.
Oh, it's crazy.
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I swear it like it feels like, you know, every week is like a year here. Like the things we know today we didn't know like three days ago, right? It's just constant.
SPEAKER_01
I feel that every day it's like I used to be able to feel like I'm on top of tech and know what's going on everywhere. Yeah. Now it just feels impossible.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. And this demo is for I think it was called chat dev or something like that, but you basically can make a group of agents that like work together. And it's like in its super infant stage right but one of the things they did was they made like a software engineering department.
And so it was like a couple software engineers that were agents. It was like a designer. It was a product manager like they basically created a whole org.
And then they're like, okay, we want to make this snake game, right, that like go, you know, like a functional snake game and they just like had the team like work on this. And the team went through product iterations were like, you know, it like went through Q&A and like send it back to like to the engineering team and then they rebuilt it based off the Q&A and like they did it. They did all, you know, basically like what a traditional sprint would look like.
And then they built, you know, it's a this functional snake game like it's small, right, but I feel like there's these things. I don't know. I'm looking at from the marketing perspective to like traditionally like we'd hire this whole group of like team members that would handle all this like social media management as an example.
It's like I have, you know, people designing the creative we like we have people posting and we're analyzing like all of those roles could be these agents hypothetically in the future. And it's all hype right now, but it's like you're starting to see these inklings where I'm like, oh my God, like, you're going to see startup founders plug into these guys. And it's like, yeah, your social media is running now.
Like just give us raw materials and like we get to work, right? Like, it's crazy. So anyway,
SPEAKER_01
it always makes me wonder, you know, always think about the future like with the advancements of this and how fast it's happening and what things are going to look at like in five, six years. Yeah. I think within my space, I'm always thinking about that. And I think it's not even that far away because we're building technology already to kind of do some of this.
It's definitely really exciting about and we'll offer to our creators to basically throw up a front end. Yep. Have this experience for the customer side where they can just run searches for whatever they want almost generate near real time. Oh my God.
Very specific to what they're searching for even if the product doesn't exist.
SPEAKER_00
It would just invent the product for their whole.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, create it and they can buy it. Yeah, you should feel from that point and we also have no, like if you want to view a very niche store, you build your own templates or you train our models on your own data, your own designs and then have it be more specific to that or certain templates like you see over at So you like taking your dog portrait turn it to watercolor oil painting thing like that. We have a lot of those technologies already build at my designs.
So that's going to actually tie into the first one. Inside and then their future when they get the rest of these updates out. But yeah, it's it's it's changing fast.
SPEAKER_00
That's insane. I've been seeing these. I'll call them like self propagating blogs, or basically like they write themselves and then based off the data they like come back and they'll write new content.
Right. Like, and it's just this is almost as you know the ones I've been seeing is like experiments of like, can a blog write itself right like we don't know. But it's looking like yes.
What's interesting is when you have you get you constrain it to source data. So it's like you could say like, oh, like, you know, when it's writing from the general knowledge of the LLM, you're kind of getting this like commodity content. But when you niche it like when you when you give it constraints like hey you can only write from our corpus of information.
Like this is this like, you know, here's the sources you can pull from that we think are trustworthy. Then it's like this whole other layer where it's a. I, we just had a person reach out actually, and they were like, hey, I want to like write I want to write content based on my book.
And we're like, oh, that's like kind of an interesting idea. Like they have all this like ideas here. And then they just want to give like a target keyword phrase or like a title outline.
And then based on that, like write a blog post from that book as the source material. And if I don't know that just feels related. So I just wanted to throw that out.
SPEAKER_01
It's a really good idea. Yeah, you already have the content you've already put all the work in and totally spend that off an individual long tail keywords for blog posts and the whole thing totally.
SPEAKER_00
Totally. Totally. Yeah, we're starting to experiment with this with podcasts where they have like an entire back catalog and then they can just like give like, hey, we're looking for an article about this like here's the title and like, you know, imagine like a little briefed and then it goes and it mines the entire back catalog of your transcripts and it pulls out information from the conversations that you had and it can like link back to that sourcing.
So anyways, just things that we're experimenting with where I'm like this, I mean, that's what that's work is super interesting where the AI then is like actually like what you're talking about where it's trained on their style of design. Yeah, like it's that same idea. It's trained on the things that like that only they, you know, really have access to.
I guess it's not them only though because like podcasts are public so it's like kind of this weird. Anyway, we'll see what happens with it like who owns that like who has the rights to that etc. But anyway, awesome man.
I appreciate your time. Thank you for coming on. Where can people find you if they want to reach out and you know just connect with your on Twitter LinkedIn or what's best.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you can go to Twitter and get the link for that. Yeah, I'll put in the show notes so make it easy but find me on Twitter. I think that's the best place or just go to my designs.
io. And now we have a community built in there so very active lots of people also discord community to go to go with it.
SPEAKER_00
I love it. I love it. Well, I appreciate it man Curtis always awesome to chat with you.
We'll talk to you soon man. Likewise Cody thanks for having me on appreciate it. Of course.
Talk soon. Talk soon later.