SPEAKER_01
I'm Cody Schneider. This is the In The Pip podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Swell AI.
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Go to SwellAI.com to get started for free. Let's start today's
SPEAKER_00
episode. Cody, what up? How you doing, Cody? I'm good, man. How's your world? I'm good, man.
SPEAKER_01
I was like so hungover. We had day night last night and I got a bottle of wine and it was a
SPEAKER_00
poor decision. So feel it. Do you know UNSF? Do you know UNSF? You're like one more week.
I leave all on the 27th and then I'm flying to freaking Latin America. I'm so fucked. Oh, hell yeah.
Where you going? Starting in Colombia and then I can go to Mexico City and then I don't
SPEAKER_01
know about after that, man. I love it, man. I love it.
That's sick. Why are you leaving? Is your rent
SPEAKER_00
done in SF? Yeah, rents in SF. No, no, no. I'm leaving my spot.
I'll show you my Airbnb later. It's fucking insane. But yeah, I'm just tired of San Francisco, man.
I've been here for four years. Cities, done city stuff. I shouldn't say on a recorded atmosphere, but yeah, I'm ready for a change is what I'll say there.
No, I feel that, brother. I feel that. It's kind of like we ended
SPEAKER_01
up at Denver, but I think we're, I'm getting itchy feet. We're going to start traveling like come
SPEAKER_00
this new year. So do calm down. I think it's a good place to build.
This is, I keep thinking about this. Like why, why do we live in like one of the most expensive places in the world and are like, this is the best place to be capital efficient and to like say, like to be scrappy and to like build a huge thing. I'm like, I'm kind of like, how, how do I go down south and live way cheaper than in a freaking 3000 a month apartment and just like save money and build shed.
And yeah, anyways,
SPEAKER_01
I think it jump starts your career. Like if I was young again, I would go out there. Cause it's just like, it's an easy way to like build that foundation.
And then suddenly it's like you get to this tipping point and like your, your newsletters, an example of this or like all of the things that you built where it's like, okay, cool. Like now I have reputation and like, I can be wherever the geography is less important. So anyway,
SPEAKER_00
yeah, yeah, like I'm an SF type worker now, you know, and like that, that's gonna stay even if I
SPEAKER_01
leave. So yeah, you also just understand how the ecosystem works in a different way. But anyway, what's sweet brother cold email, I get so many questions about this.
I imagine you do too. And I just wanted to basically hear what you're seeing work and I'll tell you what we're seeing. We're trying to, I'm trying to land like a hundred thousand emails and inboxes right now.
I think we're doing about 50,000, but is that a month? Yeah. Yeah. 50,000 a month. And then just trying to scale that up.
But are you guys still doing a ton of cold email or what's that looking like?
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I think we're doing like 400,000. Thomas, Thomas just pulled a report for me. Yeah, I'm not actually insane.
How many is this one? Like, okay, what we do is like, we, we clean it like money, you know, where we started small and we just like kept building it bigger and bigger and bigger and just like adding people to it. So once they like, once they engage with it and open and start clicking and you like, you weed out all the bad emails and you just add more on top and it's just like this continuous cycle of like, is this the newsletter or what's the yeah, but the newsletters all came from cold, right? 100%. Yeah. I mean, all these podcasts.
SPEAKER_01
So this podcast, I have a lit that newsletter is like 5000 people right now. It's all seed and hay founders. So like this will go out to them.
Nice. I'm growing it like 4 to 5000 new subs a month. And it's that same thing, right? It's like literally just like adding them, providing content for them to like learn about gross stuff.
And that's the whole strategy, right? So it's the same thing applied. But so you see what you probably have like 100,000 subs then you're doing four email or doing an email week, that type of thing on the newsletter side or
SPEAKER_00
I think we're doing like two a week now, long as we a little heavy, but yeah, something like that.
SPEAKER_01
I love it, man. That's insane. So a question I would get at like, there's maybe let's just define like the different types of like cold email and honestly, there's just the different types of email and how it fits into all of like just marketing.
So I feel like there's so there's cold email where it's like I'm sending from like a Gmail or one like a, we'll say like a Microsoft account, right? Like an omni or whatever. And that is like, I'm using like instantly AI right now and really liking it just because you have unlimited aliases. So you can be warming constantly.
So that there's this other thing that we were just talking about where it's like, okay, I have a newsletter. And then there's like cold email where it's like very high touch, like an SDR or a, you know, an AE, basically, you know, doing research and trying to build relationships. And then I think there's this whole, yeah, I think that's probably the majority of the time it says two things.
Are there any others that you think about or like you're focused on? Not really, right? It's like we,
SPEAKER_00
you, you either have like an SDR person that's like going through people, you are either like building out like a central newsletter, it just starts with like cold, cold, or you're like running it through some sort of like automated sequencing. I think what's really interesting is what becomes like the value of the SDR or a sales rep when you're just like trying to sequence people is something we've been working through really heavily with Ruba is like, is, is, is what like, is the value of having a human in the mix, like actually worth the salary, which, which is like a sincere question because we're able to like automate so much of the process. Now you know, where the email goes out automated, even like the phone calls, if you're, if you're like calling them and like, like B2B sales motion, you can like, you can use bulk dialers, you can use like automatic voice mails, where you just like press button and it like leaves the voicemail.
So it's
SPEAKER_01
using for the voicemail one. That was something that in the past I was looking at, but just
SPEAKER_00
kind of figure out a solution. And I like pure transparency, we're trying to get that set up like where I guess how much can I say, if anyone's looking for a role, we're hiring for rev ops right now. So like we've, we've hit, we've hit this like critical, this critical point in our company where we like have so many sales reps and just like all of these different sales processes.
And it's like, how do we connect the cold email plus the phone calling plus the voice mails plus the text messages, we send out like handwritten notes. So like we have like all these like processes that are part of our sequence. And then like, how do we tie these together to get metrics for them?
SPEAKER_01
Like how do we know what? Yeah, at all. Or what's the, what's that like? No, we're just
SPEAKER_00
on what platform we're just starting anywhere. Yeah. So I've just been testing this recently,
SPEAKER_01
specifically on Twitter. It's been ridiculous. Kobe. So like, I swear to God, like having this, having followers is one of the craziest growth hacks on Twitter. Cause like you DM people and like almost every time you get a response because it's like a larger account.
And so then I'm, then I'm thinking like, okay, well, like how do I, how do I get every SDR or like every person at my company to like, yeah, basically have a larger account. So this is something we, like at one point we were tossing around was like, could you build a solution where it's like, okay, we make a Twitter account for like every one of our SDRs, we automate the posting that's happening on there. And then like a marketing person or growth person is basically like managing that.
It could be even just like, you know, an EA, right? Just wait, Cody, are you, are you doing
SPEAKER_00
that yourself right now? Like you're messaging your followers as they follow you. So I, I don't
SPEAKER_01
have an auto, like I, I did a test initially with one of those like auto, whatever senders. Yeah. And it was like, join my newsletter and stuff like that. Crazy response rate.
What this was was like finding target customer prospects and then like just cold DMing them and with some type of offer. Like, Hey, can I make podcast clips for you? Or like, can I repurpose this webinar for you for, you know, whatever that is. And then the, basically the strategy there is like, okay, cool.
I give them this offer. Like they give me some media file back. We go and we do this thing for them for free.
It's really the software that's doing it. And then my call to action is like, Hey, like this, like I, like I'm making an account for them. And then I'm like, what's the email like, like that you want this account associated with all the content in here.
And so it basically creates a sign up, right? Anyway, yeah. So I guess what I'm trying to say is like, I'm feeling like DMs are like about to be this way bigger thing, like in the whole, especially when the account has authority. Like if I was an SDR right now, and I was 21, I'd be like, how the hell do I give my LinkedIn to have like 10,000 followers and like have notoriety? So that when I reach out, there's like this social proof that, Oh, this person is like trustworthy in that number.
It's so stupid. But like, we're just, I'm just seeing it in the data that it's working.
SPEAKER_00
So anyway, wow. So many thoughts on the poll on there. First of all, I want to tell you about my new favorite thing.
I hired this guy, shout out to a C. I have this like, old social media manager over in Bangladesh right now that is going through and basically running my Twitter account for me. It is the best thing I've ever done in my life.
Like, so I've combined him with, do you know the chat GPT for like build, build your own like chat GPT that just around is wild. So I took through like all my blog posts and all of my tweets and I like, and I put it into this chat bot. And because like a Sikh barely speaks in English, but he's now using this chat bot.
It's like 500 bucks a month. It's amazing. Yeah, a little bit more than that.
But yeah. And he's, he's taking, he's taking that now and he's like, we're applying to people and answering DMS. He, I haven't figured out how to get him to tweet from me yet, but like he was going through and like following people for me.
But he basically just sitting on my account all day, just like engaging with my followers and stuff. And it's like this beautiful combo of like an assistant meets AI. So anyways, your, your DM thing got me
SPEAKER_01
thinking thinking of that is just like, oh God dude. Okay. So holy shits. You have all this public.
I just pulled all of my tweet data yesterday and I made it public just so it like, I had people make GPTs with it. It was hilarious. One of them was, I can't remember the dude's name, but it was anti Cody Schneider was the one.
And it was like, you basically get asked it questions and it would like all the, like all the responses were just like shitposts, but the opposite of what I would say. I was dying like playing with it, but I'm just thinking about what you just described. It's like, so anyway, this is what we're building as swell, right? It's like, okay, I have like this corpus of knowledge of information, like a library.
And then I basically query against that to create whatever content I want. And like what you just described, like this GPT you just built is like exactly that, right? Just at like this smaller scale. Like, you know, we're trying to work with like multimedia and that type of thing.
But anyways, I think this is like, like every person is probably going to do a version of this, because suddenly again, to your point, like they don't have like this, it's like a coach in a way of like, here's how to run my social account for me, but now apply that to every SDR or whatever, like, Oh, I'm got this response from a person. How should I respond to this? Like so that I can like get a meeting set up or whatever. Anyway,
SPEAKER_00
I'm like, okay, so I finally come to the dark side of this whole AI content wars, Cody. I don't know. I just had a revelation like two weeks ago.
AI is better than 99.9% of humans are writing. Like, like, you might be smart.
You might know things that isn't public knowledge, but you are not a good writer. Like, like, there's maybe three people who will ever listen to this that are like a better writer than GPT. And just the fact of the matter is, is like, it can know so much more than you.
And it is so much more of a stronger, more engaging writer. And once you can start training it and giving it personality, so the personality matches what you want to see, it's just going to create better content. So we've we I've I've broken down, we're starting to introduce AI into into all of our content and stuff.
We're still we're still we're still pulling in experts who are going to like create like thought leadership pieces. But all of the like SEO questions of like, okay, someone searching for like optimal TSH levels, how do I create like the best fucking like article that's like everything you possibly want to know and then engaging like useful format that's like, like super useful information immediately. And then so like the way that we're I see this going
SPEAKER_01
forward is like cool, like I go interview 10 experts about whatever those levels are, right? Yeah, I take those transcript files. And then I'm like, cool, now make a blog post based off of the skeleton outline, right? Or whatever the structure is, and you have the voice to tone the style to find. And then suddenly it's like, I just have this output of like the best content that could exist written in the way, because like, traditionally, it's like, okay, we would go and we would hire a writer, and they would come in and they talk about that thing.
But that's just a single individual number one, number two is the tone by off the style and voice would never be right. It would never be as you optimize, it would actually get traffic. And so you're having to do all this layers over the top of it.
But if you just say, okay, expert talk to me for 15 minutes, and I have those conversations again, five, 10 of them, you're going to get, you know, 99.9% of the nuance around that idea captured, and then be able to transform that not only only in just into blog posts, but like also I can turn this into tweets, I can turn this into LinkedIn posts, I can turn this into YouTube videos. I just found this thing, I'll send it to you, it's called like knit on or something like that.
But it's, it basically makes like a animated YouTube video based off of a blog post that you write. And it's like five to seven, it'll do like a five to 10 minute video. So it writes a script based off of the blog posts, it like has the tone and voice, and then you can like change color schemes, etc.
So that it matches the brand. But like, it basically like makes this animated video. And it's like, they're using pre made animations.
But like, I mean, for if you're a small team, right, like, you're not like, you don't want to like, you're just trying to zero to one something. I mean, all day long, you could do this. But I'm thinking about it for like every piece of content that I publish, right? Like, how do I make a video version of that that goes on YouTube as well.
And then I have that cross like promotion that's happening. So anyway, just Cody, wait, I miss working with you just to talk about this stuff. I'm so glad we're doing this.
Okay,
SPEAKER_00
Cody, Cody, have your video guys like throw this up over our faces or something. But check out our new two work videos by Dr. Kate. They're not actually Dr. Kate. It's an AI Dr. Kate. Oh my god. Like, I don't know if I'm allowed to say that.
But yeah, no, I thought that the articles were going to be the first thing that we're able to get like AI versions of us. But it's, it's actually the video. And that's that's what I'm saying.
It's just a voiceover or is it like a no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's her. Oh my god. Wait, wait, wait, we don't we don't use her we use the the the tumor form it's all animations.
So it's not actually her face. And yeah, look, we just got the AI to be able to do it just as good if not better than she can do it. And I and this is what I was saying is once the prices where AI can do it better than a human is where AI is like truly going to win, like all this stuff that uncanny valley where it's like almost as good as a human can do it.
Like that's not good enough yet. Like it's going to have to be better than human. But there's so much of the content right now, where it's like, there's no way that Kate is going to be and she's a doctor, like a really good second doctor.
But there's there's no way that she's going to be able to know like more about tumor than is all of the medical knowledge available currently on the internet. So taking all of that putting in her voice. And then I think the thing that gives us differentiation is we're editing it.
So we have doctors that are going through and
SPEAKER_01
like the experts come and they curate like that. Yeah, yeah, it's like, dude, man, because it's like, okay, raw materials are the experts. All of the heavy lifting is done by the AI in the processes, some SOP that your team creates right for content production.
And then the final product is basically audited by the expert. So they're only touching 10% of that whole process, right? It's like the initial and then the end, but everything in the middle is just like, you know, an average human can go and do that without any domain knowledge or expertise.
SPEAKER_00
I would say for medical content, it's a little bit one depth, especially on articles, because we source everything, because the AI will come up with like stats and like this is this. Yeah. So we're going through we're fact-checking we're like showing okay, where's the study?
SPEAKER_01
It's basically like it's really good. It's sourcing information like that. It might be something for you guys to look into to basically like fact check your stuff.
Like here's this fact like is it true and like it'll go and it'll try to it'll like scour the internet and try to find that and then it will pull back actual links that like prove like yes or no on this. So that's cool. I love that.
SPEAKER_00
Okay. Thank you. I'm going to DMs throw that up here.
I'm into you. I'm into you about that. Wild. But yeah, it's so freaking exciting. Yeah. I we're we're trying to add in images too. So we have some contract designers and basically taking like charts and graphs and like layering in everything we can to make it more than just the output of whatever AI spits back to us.
So we're focused like super heavy on like differentiation where the editing is the differentiation. The prompting is differentiation. The sources of differentiation and then like any images and visuals or I think also like for now, differentiation.
Eventually, I think the AI is going to be able to do them too. But but but currently I think it's still like in the on-game value page
SPEAKER_01
space. Totally. I think I think that's like, I mean, all the feedback that we're getting from clients that are using and we're starting to have like marketing teams use us now, which is like, I just talked to a talk to a marketing team of AP people last week and the VP was like, yo, why like, why is this different than chat? Yeah.
I'm like, okay, well, like all those workflows that your team is doing right now, you can build into a template and then you just give us like the analogy I've been using is like we take raw oil and we turn it into gasoline, diesel and plastics, right? And you have these like same raw materials that you can just are trying to turn into other people. Like that's all content marketing really is, right? And so we like in the con like in the in that meeting, the VPS that I'd say, you know, blah, blah, blah, you can build these templates and all you do is you provide the raw materials and it spits out what you're looking for. And the junior team members like I'm spending hours each week right now, like doing that, like I have this prompt chain that I'm doing and I basically like I'm living in this thing and, you know, I'm having to do this for everyone, every, you know, piece of content that we're generating.
He's like, this is going to save me hours of time basically. And I'm like, I'm looking at that and I'm like, okay, cool. Every marketing team in the U like every marketing team is going to adopt some type of version of this.
Like they want to build content workflows. Everybody is realizing that like they can do this now. They're just trying to figure out like what
SPEAKER_00
is the system to actually accomplish it. Yeah, I don't think that open AI is ever going to niche down on content like this. And there's a whole ecosystem of like integrations of like, okay, cool.
Like the AI is really good. But like building all the workflows, building out all the integrations, just like connecting to everything. There's a huge amount of stuff that can be built
SPEAKER_01
there. I think excited for you. It's gonna be cool.
Yeah, we'll see. But I mean, all with all this, we have no idea. But I agree.
Like I think they're going to go to the center of the bell curve. And like what's the most interesting to me is like, you know, I've a, say I'm an early stage company and I have a team of 10 people, like how can I produce more content that a Fortune 500 company, right? And like AI is the vehicle for that. I mean, you guys are doing that.
How big is your team right now that's like working on the content stuff?
SPEAKER_00
We have like 10 full time people cream comp right now. Like, and that's not even like the
SPEAKER_01
contributors like for the magazine. That's why 100% 100% has that like, I mean, we totally digressed away from from email, but I don't even care because this is way more interesting. So with something I've been thinking about a lot lately is like, like the leverage that media gives you within negotiation.
I mean, we use this a lot. But like my friends in the biotech space and we helped them kind of zero to one podcast. And now like, I mean, like they're basically going to PR agencies and they're like, yo, like we like, if you want us to have people on, let us know.
And like also introduce us to like the companies that you're representing, like the founders, right? You know, it just gives you these tools. Like, are you seeing that? I guess, like what types of media are you seeing the most leverage come from? Like, is it podcast? Is it YouTube? Is it webinars? Is it blog posts? Like what, what, what, what does that look like?
SPEAKER_00
Oh man, that's such a good question. I think we've seen a couple different ways. So I mean, our, our Facebook and our Instagram are really huge.
So building those up initially, I don't think drove an insane amount of direct acquisition, but it definitely helped us with partnerships and like getting people to take us seriously. I think that all of the SEO and the content long term is going to be like super good for like unit economics, like, like really cheap acquisition at scale. There's this weird thing that's happening right now that I don't even know where it comes from where we just like exist in people's psyches now.
And I like, I think this is like the broader brands, which isn't tied back into any specific media channel, but we're beginning to get like more and more like super credible doctors that like start posting about us and creating concepts around us. Like on LinkedIn, there was just this like Stanford, I want, yeah, I want to say Stanford MD that like had this post about big box medicine and like insurance versus catch pay labs and like how ridiculous the insurance model was. And that, that's just fascinating.
So like we've now, we've now like planted this flag around like lab testing and people think, people think of labs and then they think of Rupa and then all any content around that, like we're seeing that on like random Twitter people. We just started our Twitter, like it took us, we've been focused, but we just started our Twitter account like two weeks ago. And we started doing research or like, Oh, what content do we want to produce? And there's all these people making content around us already.
Like people are talking about like lipid levels and heart health and share, which is even realize is happening on
SPEAKER_01
like Reddit and stuff. This thread, oh my God, dude. Ladies, this is the ultimate arsenal for age defying vitality 10 powerhouse supplements for lifelong well-being.
It has 18,000 pressings
SPEAKER_00
already. It's five hours old. I don't, I, we got it.
We got a, we're working on, I don't, I think content is a muscle and you got to exercise the muscle to get it better. I want them to be like a little bit more scientific and factually based a little bit farther away from the supplement, just like a brand point of view. But yeah, it's, it's some of them pop off, man.
It's wild. Like Twitter, Twitter is so good right now. I don't, I have literally no, it's gonna, I literally know it's gonna happen once the AI gets good enough to be able to start tweeting for people.
But in the meantime, it's doing good. Totally, totally. So I'm curious to, yeah, okay,
SPEAKER_01
there's so much there, but to kind of put a pin in this, the cold email thing, like the, you know, I just want to talk through like the actual structure, like how at least I'm doing it and then I hear how you guys are doing it. So like what we do is we basically like, I go finds like a directory that has all of our target ICP customers in it. A lot of the times it's Apollo now, but there can be other places like Google maps, wherever.
And then basically find all the emails that are associated with those people using tools like Hunter or Snow or again, Apollo. And then at that point, like using an instantly, and I set up like 10 different aliases or 20 different aliases that are all sending like 200 emails a day from them. And that's the cold email where it's like, I'm just bulk marketing, right? It's like, I'm just trying to land emails in inboxes because it's to me, it's an impression.
So are you guys doing any of that anymore? Or is it like mainly like, I'm just trying to get them on a newsletter that it's like, like, I see them over
SPEAKER_00
and over again. I want to say we're more targeted. So we're not sequencing everybody.
Instead, we have, we do have like that newsletter that we just built up, like this is all of our ICPs, but into a newsletter that's receiving our content. Because instantly we're, we're actually focusing much more on like, how do we get our sales, our outbound sales reps focused on like much more important accounts. So, oh man, dude, I wish I could show you, we're doing this like analysis where we're tying in so much more data.
So like before we, I think when you're working with us, we had like the Google plus reviews, right? We're tying in domain age, and we're tying in social media followers, we're tying in like specialty license types. And we're, we're like
SPEAKER_01
pulling those leads based on public signals that you can like scrape or whatever.
SPEAKER_00
Scraping their website, using AI to go through it and tell us things about it. And then we're
SPEAKER_01
like comparing that to like our top accounts. Talk to me about, talk to me about, so, so scraping the, like having AI go in. So you're doing like using like a, like a scraping beat, basically pulling all the body text content from a homepage.
And then like, is this person good based on these criterias that I provided, like rank, rank them out of, you know, one out of 10 or what does that
SPEAKER_00
look like? Yeah, like, like tell me things about this person. Like what type of medicine do they practice? What's their specialty? What are the services that they offer? There's like sort like, like hormone pellets. We take that, right? And now, and now we're like, populating our entire database off of all that.
And then we can segment our leads much better by like, priority of like, who's super important for us to go after and then send our sales reps after them, like introduce like direct mail campaigns, like expand direct mail from just like a postcard to a package to like a whole certain gift basket. And yeah, it's, it's, what's really interesting is there's like a cutoff where like, can't get, I mean, I gotta figure all the things I can say. There anyway, like if the count is too big, then eventually we don't have features that can serve them.
So like figuring out that cutoff of like, what are the data signals that is like, this is going to be a good account. And then what are the data signals that we're not going to be able to service them really well. And then using that to like, hyper target the list and then sequence it.
But yeah, it's, it's, it's a crazy world, man. What does that workflow look like? Do you have,
SPEAKER_01
is like a marketing team member basically doing like collecting all that data organizing it, and then they put it in a CRM and then a, you know, a BDR, a, a is like querying over the top of it
SPEAKER_00
or is a way looser than that. Yeah. Shout out to my EA and Italia, but it's, it's, it's a combination of a couple of different things. Our energy team helped us with the AI piece.
And then yeah, Adrian plus my year, both like going through and adding in more data. And it's one of the, one of the other reasons why we're hiring a rev ops and you rev ops people is that we, we need someone to come in and help us build out this database of our leads and keep organized and updated with all the data signals and draft is just helps us with all the targeting.
SPEAKER_01
I love it, man. It's amazing. Hell yeah.
Well, right. I, we're like eight minutes over and I know you're busy. So where it can be able to find you when they want.
Also, we're going to do this,
SPEAKER_00
like on a weekly basis. I think it's, yeah, subscribe to Cody's channel and you'll get one.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. All right. Kobe, I'll have you soon, man.
Thank you again. We'll talk to you. Peace on me.