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He Built a Startup using AI That Prints Money (Full Tutorial)

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Greg Isenberg


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Our analysis suggests that the Conversation is not clickbait because multiple parts address how to build a startup using AI to generate revenue, aligning with the title's claim.

1-Sentence-Summary

Greg Isenberg's conversation outlines innovative startup growth strategies, focusing on leveraging AI for content creation, targeted advertising, and influencer marketing, while emphasizing the importance of building a strong media presence and engaging directly with customers through various digital channels to drive revenue and brand recognition.

Favorite Quote from the Author

people buy from people not Brands 100%

💨 tl;dr

Forget the old marketing funnel! Focus on building brand influence, constant testing, and creating tons of content. Use cold emailing smartly, layer your marketing strategies, and leverage AI for efficiency. Build trust through content and consider programmatic SEO for better visibility.

💡 Key Ideas

  • The marketing funnel is outdated; focus on 'digital gravity' and building brand influence.
  • Marketing is a continuous process, not just campaigns; constant testing and updating are essential.
  • Volume in content creation leads to better results; more attempts improve success rates.
  • Cold emailing is a powerful outreach tool; specificity and problem-solution messaging are key.
  • Layer multiple marketing strategies to enhance visibility and reduce customer acquisition costs (CAC).
  • Build a media component within your startup to leverage negotiations and attract interest.
  • Use AI tools for efficient content creation and repurposing across platforms.
  • Influencer marketing and user-generated content (UGC) can drive engagement and test ad effectiveness.
  • Successful deals often involve building trust through multiple content pieces and affiliate commissions.
  • Programmatic SEO and scraping low-competition keywords can improve visibility and traffic.
  • Remarketing through pixeling visitors allows for targeted follow-up based on interests.

🎓 Lessons Learnt

  • Think Beyond the Marketing Funnel: Consumers engage with brands multiple times; they don’t just follow a linear path to purchase.

  • Create a Growth Flywheel: Reinvest revenue to build digital mass, attracting more customers in a continuous growth cycle.

  • Target a Smaller Audience: Focus on a defined audience for tailored messaging and better engagement; sometimes less is more.

  • Use Email Scraping Tools: Tools like apollo.io help you gather emails of potential customers for targeted outreach.

  • Make Yourself Famous: Building a personal brand can ease funding efforts; people connect better with individuals than faceless brands.

  • Cold Emailing Works: Tailor your messaging to solve specific problems for your audience; persistence pays off in outreach.

  • Leverage Content for Growth: Create valuable content that engages your audience and can be repurposed across platforms for maximum reach.

  • Transform into a Media Company: Establish a media arm within your startup to increase leverage and create additional revenue streams through ads.

  • Invest in Organic Growth Strategies: Focus on creating engaging, value-driven content and commit to long-term marketing investments.

  • Utilize Programmatic SEO Effectively: Analyze top-ranking content and leverage backlinks to improve your domain authority and visibility.

🌚 Conclusion

To succeed, think like a media company, target specific audiences, and invest in organic growth. Cold emailing and personal branding can open doors, while a growth flywheel keeps the momentum going. Embrace these strategies for a thriving startup!

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In-Depth

Worried about missing something? This section includes all the Key Ideas and Lessons Learnt from the Conversation. We've ensured nothing is skipped or missed.

All Key Ideas

Key Concepts in Modern Marketing

  • The marketing funnel is an outdated and misleading way to think about marketing.
  • The concept of 'digital gravity' describes building brand influence through mass on the internet.
  • Building mass involves creating content and marketing where customers are present.
  • The approach to marketing differs for bootstrapped startups versus funded companies.
  • As a brand grows, it gains more influence, leading to increased customer engagement and revenue generation.
  • Customer purchasing decisions are not linear; they involve multiple interactions with the brand before conversion.

Marketing Insights

  • Purchasing decisions can take a long time, influenced by multiple touchpoints over an extended cycle.
  • Marketing should be viewed as a continuous process rather than a campaign with a start and stop.
  • You need to constantly run ads and test for the most effective cost-per-click (CPC) to drive conversions.
  • A website or app is a living entity that requires ongoing updates and marketing efforts.
  • Email marketing is unique in that once sent, it cannot be retracted, requiring careful proofreading before sending.
  • The current trend focuses on volume in short-form social media marketing, emphasizing the importance of quantity in affiliate partnerships.

Key Insights on Content Creation and Digital Marketing

  • The importance of volume in content creation; more attempts lead to better results, similar to a batting average.
  • Older brands are still stuck in traditional thinking, limiting their digital presence and content output.
  • A tactical framework for growing a B2B company involves targeting a smaller audience and scraping their emails.
  • Utilizing tools like LinkedIn and Apollo.io to gather emails and target ads effectively.
  • Running ads on multiple platforms using custom match lists to reach the identified audience.
  • Creating UGC AI Avatar ads that resonate with the pain points of the target audience.
  • Testing various ad variations and reallocating budget based on performance, employing an Alpha Beta campaign structure.

Marketing and Fundraising Insights

  • Being famous can help founders raise more money and make fundraising easier, but it's not necessary for effective advertising.
  • People buy from people, not brands; leveraging personal stories and founder visibility can enhance customer acquisition.
  • The Hero Journey storytelling format is effective for marketing; it involves narrating a problem-solution journey.
  • Cold emailing can be a powerful tool for outreach; using specialized servers like Mail Reef can enhance cold email effectiveness.
  • Different types of emails should be sent from different domains to prevent core domains from being negatively affected by aggressive cold emailing.
  • Smart Lead is a cold email sending software that allows for multiple inboxes to improve email outreach strategies.

Cold Emailing Strategies

  • Create an infrastructure with multiple domains and email inboxes to increase cold email outreach effectiveness.
  • Use a problem-solution approach in cold emails, similar to the ads, to engage potential leads.
  • Hitting the same audience through both cold emails and ads can enhance lead recognition and response rates.
  • Cold emailing can work effectively if it addresses specific problems faced by the target audience.
  • Early-stage founders often underestimate the potential of cold emailing and worry about 'burning' their audience unnecessarily.
  • Success in cold emailing depends on the specificity and relevance of the messaging to the audience's pain points.
  • To grow companies exponentially, founders should layer multiple growth strategies simultaneously and automate or delegate tasks.

Marketing Strategies for Startups

  • Layering marketing strategies, like creating short clips for social media and connecting with industry peers, can elevate a startup's visibility significantly within a year.
  • Recording customer conversations and turning them into valuable content, like podcasts, engages the audience and builds credibility.
  • Utilizing email marketing with industry-specific content creates a top-of-funnel approach that feels educational rather than transactional.
  • Building a media company within a startup can provide leverage in negotiations with larger companies and attract inbound interest.
  • Monetizing content, like podcasts and newsletters, can turn a cost center into a profit center, contributing to rapid growth and reducing customer acquisition costs (CAC).

Media Strategies for Companies

  • Companies can leverage media to build fame for individuals and businesses, showcasing the flexibility of reality.
  • B2B companies should create a media business to enhance their reach and influence.
  • Aero Electronics has a significant media arm that contributes to its success, despite being primarily an electronics reseller.
  • Red Bull and Y Combinator are examples of companies operating as media entities alongside their core businesses.
  • Effective content creation can be derived from podcasts, turning them into various media assets for businesses.
  • The emergence of AI allows for streamlined content creation, reducing the need for large teams.
  • Short-form content is thriving, particularly on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, and can be repurposed for LinkedIn.

Marketing Strategies and Insights

  • Growing social media accounts, like Instagram, can be done efficiently by targeting specific profiles and analyzing cost-per-follower metrics.
  • The goal of growing these assets is to gain free impressions and leverage the visibility of larger accounts on social platforms.
  • The closer an ad resembles content on the platform, the less it will cost, indicating a strategy to blend advertising with genuine content.
  • Identifying content that feels organic but still drives revenue is essential, leading to multiple variations of ads being tested.
  • Building a comprehensive marketing strategy involves multiple channels, including remarketing, email lists, podcasts, and daily social media posts.
  • Many companies fail to invest the necessary time and effort into consistent marketing practices over a long period.
  • Successful email marketing can significantly reduce costs per click compared to traditional methods, illustrating the potential for high returns on marketing investments.

Marketing Insights

  • There are few people growth hacking traditional software categories, leading to significant traffic increases with the right strategies.
  • Podcasting serves as a powerful tool for building trust and generating inbound leads, even without selling ads.
  • Good marketing can outperform bad products, emphasizing the importance of both product and marketing working together.
  • Mental real estate is crucial; consumers often only remember two to three brands in a category, making it vital to establish a strong brand presence.
  • Creating new categories (like HubSpot did with inbound marketing) is challenging, so it's often easier to attach to existing ideas and evolve them.

Marketing Strategies and Considerations

  • Don't go into consumer; it's incredibly competitive and requires exceptional marketing skills to succeed.
  • Success in consumer requires a huge total addressable market (TAM) to target a broad audience.
  • Using AI can help in creating content, like eBooks, that can be used to engage a large audience.
  • Building an application that meets a specific need for a large audience is crucial for success.
  • A common pricing strategy is to charge $7.99 a month or $799 a week, which can lead to significant lifetime revenue.
  • Effective marketing often involves using Facebook and TikTok ads to drive conversions.
  • Influencer marketing, particularly with UGC creators, can generate viral content and test ad effectiveness.

Marketing Strategies and Tools

  • The intersection of entertainment and education is crucial for effective selling.
  • Utilizing multiple TikTok accounts to remix and generate variations of user-generated content (UGC) can enhance marketing efforts.
  • AI tools like ChatGPT and 11 Labs can be leveraged to modify scripts and produce audio for marketing content.
  • Installing pixels on a website allows for targeted advertising to visitors across platforms like Facebook and TikTok.
  • Building a larger audience through a pixeling strategy can create a more influential customer base.
  • Influencer outreach at scale can be a valuable strategy for affiliate marketing.
  • Scraping YouTube for creator emails allows for cold outreach and negotiation of pricing based on their viewership.
  • Identifying pricing discrepancies in an imperfect market can lead to arbitrage opportunities with creators.

Strategies for Successful Deals and Outreach

  • The structure of a successful deal involves buying a three-video package to build trust with the audience and offering an affiliate commission to create stickiness.
  • Competitors may need to buy out creators who are making significant recurring revenue from partnerships, creating a moat around the media relationship.
  • Strategies for outreach include scraping emails from Instagram and TikTok based on specific hashtags or keywords.
  • The average CPM for TikTok is about $10, while successful businesses may acquire traffic at a $5 CPM, creating an arbitrage opportunity.
  • Programmatic SEO can be used to improve domain authority and rank for low-competition keywords by acquiring backlinks.
  • Scraping content that ranks on page one for target keywords can inform blog post outlines, which can then be written using AI tools.

Content Strategy Insights

  • The best quality content is achieved by sectioning it out and using AI tools to humanize it, which can pass checker tests.
  • Publishing large volumes of articles (like 10,000) without initial human editing can be an aggressive growth hack strategy for those comfortable with risk.
  • Once content receives traffic, a human editor should refine it, focusing on what Google wants to rank and what humans enjoy reading.
  • Effective content includes a call to action after the first paragraph and multiple calls to action throughout the page, along with popups at scroll points.
  • Remarketing is key; by pixeling visitors, you can target them later based on their interests.
  • Traditional ad channels still hold significant opportunity despite the focus on short-form social media.
  • An example of successful app growth is the 'Sunflower Sober' app, which integrates AI for user engagement and uses a smart acquisition strategy on Facebook.

All Lessons Learnt

Marketing Strategies

  • Think Beyond the Marketing Funnel: The traditional marketing funnel is misleading; consumers don’t just enter and exit but interact with brands multiple times before making a purchase.
  • Build Digital Mass: Focus on creating content to build digital mass; the more mass you have, the more influence you gain in your niche.
  • Resource Allocation Depends on Funding: If you’re bootstrapped, you likely have time but little money; funded companies should market everywhere, while bootstrapped ones should be strategic.
  • Create a Growth Flywheel: As you generate revenue, reinvest to build more mass, creating a cycle of growth that attracts more customers.
  • Brand Visibility is Key: To make a brand famous quickly, increase visibility through consistent content and marketing efforts to attract your target audience.

Marketing Insights

  • Think Long-Term in Marketing: You need to influence purchasing decisions over a long cycle, not just in a short campaign. This involves consistent engagement across various channels.
  • Marketing is Continuous: Forget the idea of starting and stopping campaigns; marketing is an ongoing process. Treat it like a living entity that requires constant updates and testing.
  • Be Careful with Email: Email is one of the few marketing tools you can't take back once sent. Always have multiple people proofread before sending to avoid mistakes.
  • Focus on Volume in Short-Form Social: In platforms like TikTok, the key is to prioritize volume and consistent output to maximize reach and engagement.

Marketing Strategies

  • Swing More to Hit More: It’s a numbers game—if you produce more content (like swinging more in baseball), you increase your chances of success. Don’t stick to just one platform or method; diversify your approach.
  • Target a Smaller Audience: Focus on a smaller, defined target audience (like 50,000 people) to make your marketing efforts more effective. It allows for tailored messaging and better engagement.
  • Use Email Scraping Tools: Utilize tools like apollo.io to scrape emails of your target audience. This helps in directly reaching out to potential customers through ads and other marketing strategies.
  • Custom Match Ads: Once you have your email list, import it into ad platforms (Google Ads, Facebook, LinkedIn) for custom matching. This helps you run ads directly to your identified audience.
  • Create UGC AI Avatar Ads: Use AI tools to create ads featuring a digital clone of yourself addressing your audience’s pain points. This personalizes the ad experience and can increase engagement.
  • Run Multiple Ad Variations: Create a variety of ad versions (like 100 different hooks or settings) to test which ones perform best. This allows for optimization based on real data.
  • Alpha Beta Campaign Structure: Allocate your ad budget (like 80% to best performers and 20% for testing) based on performance. Always keep some ads in testing mode to find new high-performing variants.

Marketing and Outreach Strategies

  • Make Yourself Famous: If you're a founder looking to raise money, building your personal brand can significantly ease future funding rounds.
  • People Buy from People: When acquiring customers, personal storytelling and connection often resonate more than presenting as a faceless brand.
  • Use Problem-Solution Storytelling: Frame your marketing around a personal journey of overcoming a problem to connect with your audience effectively.
  • Isolate Email Domains: For cold emailing, use separate domains for transactional and marketing emails to prevent your core domain from being flagged and affecting essential communications.
  • Utilize Cold Email Tools: Tools like Mail Reef and Smart Lead can help manage cold email outreach efficiently, allowing for extensive email sending without compromising your main email domains.

Cold Emailing Strategies

  • Cold emailing can work effectively: If you approach it with problem-solution messaging tailored to your audience, you can see significant responses.
  • Don’t be afraid to reach out multiple times: People are unlikely to care much when you first contact them, so touching them through various channels (like ads and emails) increases your chances of them remembering you later.
  • Specific messaging is key: When targeting a niche audience, being specific about the problems you solve can lead to much higher engagement rates.
  • Layer on growth tactics: Utilize multiple strategies (like podcasts, newsletters) simultaneously to create multiple growth channels rather than relying on just one method.
  • Delegate and automate tasks: Focus on scaling by automating or delegating parts of your outreach and marketing efforts, so you can move on to other growth strategies.

Growth Strategies for Startups

  • Leverage Content for Growth: Create valuable content based on customer conversations and turn it into podcasts or newsletters to engage your audience and build connections.
  • Use Email Sequences Effectively: Import email lists into services like MailerLite or Beehive and send out podcast updates with key takeaways to provide educational content rather than just transactional emails.
  • Transform into a Media Company: Build a media arm within your startup to increase leverage in negotiations with larger companies, making them more receptive to partnerships.
  • Monetize Your Audience: Use the audience built through content to sell ad placements, turning your media efforts from a cost center into a profit center and subsidizing growth costs.
  • Achieve Negative CAC: By generating revenue from media, you can offset customer acquisition costs, leading to sustainable growth for your startup.

Media Business Strategies

  • Create a media business: Every B2B company should consider building a media arm to amplify their brand and reach customers more effectively.
  • Leverage AI for content creation: Utilize software like Swell AI to automate the creation of media assets, saving time and resources previously needed for a larger team.
  • Repurpose content across platforms: Convert video podcasts into various formats like transcripts, blog posts, and social media clips to maximize content usage and reach.
  • Utilize short-form content: Short-form content is trending; repurpose TikTok or Instagram Reels for platforms like LinkedIn to increase engagement and virality.
  • Strategic Instagram ads: Run targeted Instagram ads with a call to action in the caption to grow your following and increase content reach effectively.

Marketing Strategies

  • Invest in organic growth strategies
  • Create engaging content that feels natural
  • Be patient and trust the process
  • Utilize cross-channel marketing
  • Leverage email marketing effectively
  • Commit to long-term investment
  • Network with practitioners

Lessons Learnt

  • Focus on content strategy to drive traffic.
  • Use long-form content to establish trust.
  • Marketing can outweigh product quality.
  • Own mental real estate in your category.
  • It’s easier to evolve an existing idea than to create a new one.

Key Strategies for App Development

  • Don't go into consumer markets.
  • Focus on a huge Total Addressable Market (TAM).
  • Build an application that people actually want.
  • Use AI to create content efficiently.
  • Charge strategically to maximize revenue.
  • Utilize Facebook and TikTok ads for conversion.
  • Test different ad variations and use influencer marketing.

Marketing Strategies

  • Create content that provides value: Focus on producing ads that feel like content, blending education and entertainment to engage and sell effectively.
  • Leverage multiple TikTok accounts for UGC: Use several TikTok accounts to create variations of the best-performing user-generated content, enhancing reach and effectiveness.
  • Remix content with AI tools: Utilize AI tools like ChatGPT for script changes and 11 Labs for audio to remix UGC and turn it into engaging short videos.
  • Choose a unique name for your product: Picking a name that stands out helps avoid competition on Google, making it easier for users to find your website.
  • Install tracking pixels: Use Facebook, TikTok, or Google pixels on your website to retarget visitors with ads indefinitely across these platforms.
  • Build an email nurture layer: Provide a way for users to sign up or install the app on your website, allowing for ongoing email marketing and upselling opportunities.
  • Conduct influencer outreach at scale: Scrape YouTube for creators in your niche to reach out for collaborations, creating an effective affiliate program.
  • Identify pricing discrepancies: Analyze average views and creator pricing during outreach to find arbitrage opportunities in the influencer market.

Marketing Strategies

  • Use a three-video package for trust-building.
  • Implement affiliate commissions for stickiness.
  • Leverage domain authority through backlinks.
  • Scrape and analyze top-ranking content.
  • Utilize programmatic SEO effectively.

Content Publishing Strategies

  • Publish content aggressively without initial human edits: If you’re comfortable with risk, you can publish a large volume of articles (like 10,000) using AI to generate them initially, without human intervention.
  • Edit content post-traffic: Once a page starts receiving traffic, have a human editor (like an SEO specialist) revise the content to improve its quality and ensure it meets both Google’s ranking criteria and user engagement.
  • Incorporate effective calls to action (CTAs): Place a call to action after the first paragraph and include additional CTAs throughout the content to encourage user sign-ups, enhancing conversion chances.
  • Utilize remarketing strategies: As users interact with your site, pixel them to enter a remarketing funnel, allowing for targeted follow-up engagement.
  • Explore traditional ad channels: Despite the trend towards short-form social content, there are still opportunities in traditional advertising channels that can be effective if you identify what users are currently seeking.

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