Transcript of How to Build Your Own AI Software (Without Knowing How to Code)

I got to a point where I saw this AI writing on the wall of everything will be able to be automated. Do I sit back in my business that I'm already burned out on and watch this slowly dismantle everything that I've built? Do I take the chance? Do I be an early adopter? Do I bet on this being a technological revolution? And, and try and be a leader, create something early that helps people, risking cannibalizing my business. That was the decision that I made. It's a never-ending grind, man. And then you feel behind if you take that rest time, or at least I find myself doing that. That's exactly it. I'm in a pretty— yeah.

Yeah. It's like, how do you marry How do you marry this, this desire to achieve and grow and get better with the fact that, you know, you, you can't just go all the time. And I, you know, and I think we all probably know too, I'm sure, you know, I'd be interested if this is the case for you, but when you are on that full tilt, all the time, always on kind of thing, you're not doing your best work all the time. You're just not. And you know, that's a, that I struggle with that harmony, you know, finding harmony there. I struggle with quite a bit.

Yeah.

So there we go.

That's better. Cool. Okay. Awesome.

All right, dude. Pertinent to the moment, hot on your brain, a story that just came out, something that's happened recently that I wouldn't have picked up in all the research in your materials that you're like, you know, this would be really cool if we talked about it today, or I'd love to talk about this today, et cetera.

Well, the book is a big one. How deep do you want to go down the AI rabbit hole?

We can go as deep as you want. Because as a completely— I think that could be a really interesting— I don't want to do everything nerdy AI, but I do want to do some nerdy AI because I know, like, not being a technical guy, so I'm not technical at all, like, don't know how to code, et cetera. but was a math major, so I understand how the logic works behind these things, and I'm kind of trying to download as much as I can. And like, I have my own, uh, OpenClaw that I set up that I've been learning, learning the hard way, uh, on that, uh, learning a ton. Um, use Claude code to build multiple applications that I'm not, uh, haven't commercialized, but I'm using for like personal stuff. Um, or, you know, personal in my business stuff. And, you know, one of the things that, what, what was really funny about what happened this week is, uh, so I do growth acceleration consulting, right? Uh, that's what I've done for 10 years. And I, and obviously right now everybody wants to talk about how those concepts now apply through the lens of AI.

So I ended up, but the workshops I did this, this week, um, what ended up happening was I threw out the entire presentation, sat up at the front of the room, and literally just asked, so what it was, was it was a large group that they broke up into groups of 50, and then they cycled through 4 times throughout the course of the day. So I got 4 different groups of 50, um, which was cool. And I would just yell out to the audience, essentially like, what's a problem that you're having in your, in your marketing or your sales? And we would just, I'd either pull up you know, Manus, Claude, or OpenClaw, and I would just solve the problem for them, like, in real time. And it was so much fun. I know I could have done it a million times better, right? Because it's not like my area of expertise. But what I can— this is where I'm going with this. I know that even hyper non-technical people are starting to play with this. And I think how we frame our conversation is like, Here's how you don't like fuck your whole world up going down this path, right?

You know, uh, how to avoid the chasing shiny objects to how do you make sure that your claw, your open claw doesn't spend $10,000 on your credit card to buy, you know, whatever. Like, you know, how do we, and then, and, and then I really wanna take it to kind of your book and. Get into, like, I want to finish future casting. Like, not so much, you know, where, how do we start positioning ourselves today for what's going to, success is going to look like in the future? Because I think the last thing I'll say, and then I'll shut the fuck up because I'm supposed to be interviewing you. Oh, good. The good thing is when it's your show, you can do whatever you want, right? So, you know, I think the last thing Yeah, you got it. We're going to cook. Let's go. I'm doing all this prep, but there's really no reason for that. So I do a little preamble, so it's all good.

Yeah.

So we'll just start going. Appreciate you.

Appreciate the opportunity, brother.

Yeah, dude, same. And I think this couldn't be more timely. What we're going to talk about today has been on my brain, and I have been doing so much dabbling, so much hobby AI-ing, you know, strategies that I've used for growth consulting in the past. And, you know, now I'm looking at these things and like, as a non-technical person, I can see it, right? I can see there's, there is, it's not just like—

And I'm non-technical. I'm non-technical too, by the way. I just got in pretty early.

Yeah.

I love that. I'm, I'm just a marketer and an opportunist and, uh, got into the software game pretty early on and interested in AI and it's changed my life. But yeah, I'm, I'm with you. I'm not a coder.

Sweet. Okay.

Journey though.

So for the audience, the context of this conversation, guys, is going to be, I wanted to spend this time with Austin to talk about, um, like level set where we are today. I want to then get into some of the obstacles around things like Claude Code. Um, you know, what, what agents are and how we should be thinking about them in our businesses. Um, you know, what is this OpenClaw thing and why has it taken the world by storm? And whether OpenClaw ends up being the tool or the platform, the set of agents that, that lives or dies will be a different story. But the technology seems undeniable. And then, and then I wanna get into kind of, uh, your book and this idea of leveraging AI in ways that are actually gonna produce real results. 'Cause I see, man, and this, and this is where I love what you're doing and I kind of love the way you approach it and I was so excited to chat was there's so much slop on how to use this, like AI slop on how to use these tools. I really wanna get into like, where can people place some bets that have the best chance of producing real results?

So with all that said, how did you get into the marketing game? Why the marketing game? And what was it about AI in particular that has really caught your interest lately and diving so deep into this technology?

Yeah, well, Ryan, firstly, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for the opportunity. I'm excited to nerd out with you. I, I feel like I was born for marketing, to be honest, as lame as that might sound. But I stumbled into social media marketing when I was 14 years old on MySpace. This is now 21, almost 22 years ago. Crazy to think. I had hundreds of thousands of followers. I was able to monetize it in multiple ways. My mom thought what I was doing was illegal. Some of it might've been, but I got caught up in that grind really early on, and I sort of never stopped. Fast forward to about 11 or 12 years ago, I moved out to Orange County, California, which is where my professional career really began. I got started in an unpaid internship in a video production, video marketing agency, really worked my way up from being an unpaid intern, paid intern, part-time employee, full-time employee, ran that company, started my own marketing agency about 7 years ago, and That's when I started to grow my personal brand pretty heavily on social media. I wanted to practice what I preach, absolutely fell in love, got in early with TikTok, and what I started to notice, and this is gonna lead up into the AI game, is my organic top of funnel content that was attracting my prospective leads of business owners, entrepreneurs, or aspiring business owners or entrepreneurs.

Was useful websites for them. So I created this series, Useful Websites That Feel Illegal to Know, and I was sharing software tools, productivity tools, marketing-oriented software. And it was a very natural pivot for me. I've always been an early adopter and I saw in the market shift, some of these AI tools start to come out. ChatGPT really early on before it was even public. I got involved with Jasper, which was Jarvis before. And I, and, and I just really went down that rabbit hole pretty early on. I got to a point in my company, at my agency, where I'm like, I'm a little burned out on this. And I'm really interested in this software game. I'm sharing these websites. I'm also an affiliate for these websites. I'm making pretty decent money from affiliate marketing recurring with not as much work on a hands-on basis with agency clients. And so that led me to starting my first software company, which is, uh, it's called Syllabi. It's a little over 3 years now. It's an AI software company and I'm non-technical as we were just kind of chatting about it as well. So that's what kind of led me down this entire path from agency work, organic work, organic content creation, to software, to AI.

And now I've— it's just exploded. It was one of those early bets that really has paid off and frankly changed my life. And now we're on this endless rat race of, of new AI tools coming out. We were talking about OpenClaw just yesterday, and I have it running in the background right now as we're talking. Perplexity's computer, which is a safer, more user-friendly competitor to OpenClaw as well. We can go down that rabbit hole if you want, but I just want to open that up and that's kind of been my fun journey over the last 22 years.

Yeah, I love that. Similar in some regards in that was non-technical, found the marketing space. 2009, but was probably more LinkedIn than MySpace. This is back when like you couldn't even reply to posts on LinkedIn. Like it was just like literally just cards floating down a timeline where you still had to click the load more button just to give everyone context. It wasn't even infinity scroll invented back then. And kind of took a similar, took a similar path into marketing and have always been on that side. And You know, I have a question. You, you said you were an early adopter and, and one of the things that I get particularly from, we'll say service businesses, main street businesses that reach out, uh, I think a lot of owners, operators, executives, uh, maybe second generation family members. So you, you, I also seemingly get this a lot and maybe you see this from, you know, the, the sons and daughters of business owners who maybe tend to go operations versus the hard grind of sales. Um, I think they struggle a lot with how do I, how do I stay out on the front edge of what's coming while still doing the day-to-day work that it takes to actually operate one of these businesses?

This is a big mental struggle for people and they, they constantly seem to be yo-yoing between I'm way out ahead, this isn't really producing results, I'm spinning my wheels, I'm wasting time with, oh my gosh, I'm behind. We don't have the right tech. Our competitors are getting out ahead of us. So as someone who tends to skew early adopter, how do you filter out while also being a business owner where to spend your time without getting too lost in this new tech, new ideas, um, that doesn't actually maybe produce a, an ROI right away?

Such a great nuanced question that my brain is going in a million different directions. So that is definitely the trap that business owners find themselves in, right? And it, and it really is the question of why they hired a marketing agency in the first place is because they are too immersed in their, their own company. And they need to focus on the company in order to grow it. So they don't have time to focus on all of these new marketing opportunities or AI opportunities. And so they hire an agency or trusted partner. And that, you know, that, that, that whole back and forth there. Delegation is my answer. So I understand where my full superpower is. In business, and that's where it's, um, it's in research, it's in testing, it's in content creation, it's in public speaking, it's in doing amazing podcasts like this, it's writing books, it's being the face, it's leading the vision. And so I don't need to do everything myself, nor do I want to do everything myself. So I personally, to answer that question, bring on amazing business partners that I outsource my suck to. I have team members that are able to do a lot of the day-to-day nuanced things so that I can experiment and stay on the cutting edge and find and experiment some of these new early adoptive opportunities that are out there.

And I thoroughly test them. And then if I see traction, if I see ideas, then I'll bring it into my team internally for some use cases, or I'll do some marketing strategy on it. Like I said, I'm using Perplexity's computer right now just to thoroughly test it. I've been using OpenClaw for a while. I'm using OpenClaw personally, but I haven't pulled it into my business yet because I think there's some risks and security issues there. But that's how I personally focus on it. I'll give it pretty thorough tests amount of time test different use cases and see that cost-benefit analysis of if, is it really worth the time to go down it or do I let that shiny object go and focus more on, on what's actually working? But I do a lot of testing when I'm home.

Can you describe your process for setting up what a test may look like, how you determine what success parameters are for what you'd say, hey, this, you know, I, I, I could see it as like 3 buckets, right? So you try something, you're like, ah, I just don't see this working. I see this working, but maybe not now. And I, this is working, like this is something I wanna package up and put into the business. How do you set those parameters up? How do you set the tests and how do you determine what success looks like for things that you actually wanna bring into your business?

Yeah. So, um, time and, and money. Are the two biggest KPIs that I focus on. What are the current steps or current software or current processes? How much time am I doing? And I'll give you an example, thumbnail creation. Right now I have this new tool creating thumbnails for me. I was manually creating them in Photoshop for most of my YouTube career. Canva made it a little bit easier, right? So that's the natural progression. It saves me a little bit of time, the last probably year to half a year with Gemini's Nano Banana. Now it's even faster, right? And so I compare that where I can upload an example thumbnail, a headshot of myself and an idea, and it will give me a thumbnail that's faster than I would've been able to create it in Photoshop or in Canva. Saves me time, saves me money. Now with tools like OpenClaw or computer, there's a lot of these agent tools out there. It's a little, it's, it's a little bit faster and that's exactly what I'm testing right now. So I had, I'm doing this test exactly right now. I said, go do some research on the top AI tech thumbnails in the space.

Here's a headshot of myself. I want to create a new video tomorrow demoing this tool. Create 5 thumbnail variations for me. And it's doing that and it's, it's learning and it's proving. And so it's a little early for me to assess if this is the perfect workflow, but if it saves me time and it saves me money and it's faster compared to the previous steps, then it's, then it's worthwhile for me to continue and go down a little bit deeper in that rabbit hole.

One of the things that I realized this week when I was working with this group What, you know, we were talking about, I think I mentioned to you before we went live. So, so I had guys 2 days before recording this, which is why I feel a little sluggish cuz I did 6 hours of workshops. I was only actually hired to do 2 hours of workshops and then someone else bailed and I ended up doing an entire day's worth of workshops, which, which was exhausting, but also phenomenal. Right. And I, and I wanna explain why and then I'm, I'm, I'm, cuz I wanna put this in front of Austin. So what we ended up doing, because instead of a formal program around kind of growth acceleration in these businesses. I have this human optimized model that I talk about, uh, different story unless you're interested. But the idea was, you know, I didn't want to go too down, too far down the AI rabbit hole 'cause I knew this particular group weren't AI natives. Okay. So that was kind of my initial premise when I showed up. And then every question the entire day was about AI.

So what I ended up doing was literally just kind of tossing my slides or my formal presentation away. I just Screen shared my computer, uh, and I had people throw out problems that they had in sales, marketing, or some, you know, some sort of flow now. And, and we kind of built them on the fly. All right, cool. Very cool. Very fun. Here's the thing that I realized, and, and I wanna get your take on how I go through this is very similar to what you just described. I will literally pull out my whiteboard, which is about 10 feet off camera to my left. And I will, you know, write out the process in detail. Like this happens, then this happens, then I have to go to this tool, right? And I'm, and if it's 7 tools, it's 7 tools, whatever it is. And I go start to finish. This is exactly what I'm doing today. And then similar to you, I start going, okay, like what could I replace in here? What I found on Tuesday that I thought was very eye-opening, not judgmental, but, but eye-opening was how few individuals in that room could articulate the full process, not just the way they do it today, but how they would actually like it to happen.

Like I would say, okay, if that's the problem, what would you like to have happen? And you would get like this deer in the headlights, like, uh, just better.

Right.

So, um, you know, okay.

All right.

But so I guess my question to you is like, you work with a lot of clients, you have an agency, you're dealing with a lot of business owners, like, How do you help them? Like, is there a framework or a model that you use to start to actually scope out not just what you do today? Because I think we, most of us could do that with a little bit of thought, but how do we start to think about what we actually want? Because that feels like a huge unlock is like, because just because it's the way we do it today doesn't mean it's the right way to do it. And you can get some time back just by kind of rip and replace. But if we really wanna take AI in particular to the next level, it's almost building a more optimized process. How do we, how do you get your clients to make that transition? Or even how do you do it in your own business?

Yeah, I got, I, I love this and I think you'll probably, uh, uh, appreciate this from a, a, a whole life optimization. Uh, time inventory is what I've been doing when I, when I learned the power and what a time inventory is, that has completely changed my life. And I really just learned about it from Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell. Yeah, great book. Fantastic book. But if you don't know how to think through that step-by-step process of what you want, document the entire process from the moment that you wake up Or you can focus on your work, whatever, however you want to do it, right? The task, how much time it takes, the start time, the end time, your level of enjoyment of that task, the ROI on that task versus how much you value your time at every individual step. So if it's like thumbnail creation, for instance, step, you know, I spent 5 minutes going to YouTube and researching what the best thumbnails were. And then I opened Photoshop and then I uploaded an image of myself and I removed the background, you know, going through the step-by-step process. And you'll find by doing this for several days to a week tops, I mean, you can do it for 2 weeks, but you're going to find patterns really quickly from doing this of these are the exact step-by-steps.

This is where The time annoyance is I wish this thing could be sped up. This is my annoyance. I don't like doing this thing. I do like doing this thing, you know, and just going through that, you'll find so much clarity in all of the steps that you can then take to now agentic AI or find an AI software solution to a task that takes you a large amount of time, find somebody, a virtual assistant, an executive assistant, or, or somebody to do that task. That has been just the biggest life-changing thing for me for processing and outlining step-by-steps that applies to AI and it applies to just improving everything about your life. And your business.

So I couldn't agree with you more. I hate that my best AI advice is do a fucking time audit. Like, I hate that that's what it is, but it really is. Like, it works, you know? Like, I got, you know, it was funny. So again, I'm just, this is just fresh on my mind the last two, these two days I spent this week. So obviously, you know, that's where my mind is. But like the look on people's faces when I would start my AI growth acceleration talk with the first thing you need to do is a time audit. And you know, like they'd look at me like, what? I came here for like, you know, machines taking over the world. Like, what are you talking about? And I was like, well, we, we don't know if, if we're trying for efficiency and effectiveness, right? At a, in a broad stroke, if we don't know where we need to apply those things, it, you're just, again, you're just chasing rabbits, you know, or shiny objects for the for the purpose of what, not having FOMO or, or, or, you know, creating a new death scroll habit, you know, which, which look, I have unfortunately like prompt Instagram prompt, uh, channels like have taken over my brain for a period of time.

I'm just, I'm like infatuated by, you know, the, the psychology and the phrasing and the setups and most of them I bookmark and never go back to, but You know, it is what it is. Okay. So I get it. I get it. We can all chase these rabbits, but this idea of a time audit, in my opinion, is so incredibly important because it allows you to go, just like you said, like, I do this, like, one, when I do it, I find, I'm like, oh my God, I didn't realize I did that thing as much as I do it.

Holy crap.

And then, and here's, here's, here's where my next question goes is the last time I did a time audit, which probably, uh, was in the fall. I try to do them at least twice a year. Uh, if, if not more, if I'm feeling off, it's like a, almost like a, like a, like a recalibration hack if I'm feeling like, like my schedule's off, but try to do it every, every year. But so it was probably the fall was the last time I did it. And this question popped into my brain when I started to look at some of the things that I was doing. Some of the things were most likely replaceable with an AI system process, an agent, et cetera. However, in evaluation, I was like, either I do actually enjoy doing that thing, like it brings me joy to do that thing even though AI could do it, or the friction in that process was actually a feature, not a bug. So if you understand where my question is going, how do we actually choose, right? Because we could just over-optimize our entire life and take the humanity right out of our business.

And now all of a sudden we hate what we do. We're completely detached and our customers feel no connection to us because we just went hyper-efficiency. Okay. I actually think we need the human in the loop. I call this a human-optimized business. Um, how do you determine those places where the human is actually a more effective, uh, uh, I mean, I don't mean to go like completely anti-humanity, but like a, a more effective utilization than an AI tool that could do that job.

Yeah, it, it's a great question. And, and just to kind of take it back to the, the time audit, the time inventory is that row of level of enjoyment is so important to add to there. Because if you like to do something, you don't need to outsource it. You don't need to find an AI for it. I love posting on social media. I could automate it, but I like to post. I like to spend my time on social media. Yes, it's a time suck. Yes, I'm probably addicted to it. It's my socially acceptable addiction, but there are other aspects that I can outsource that free up more of that time so that I can stay online more where my networking happens in the DMs. To me, having a hand on the pulse of my trained feeds where if a news report comes out, I see it very quickly so that I can jump on it and maintain my status as a, as a early news source in AI, for instance. So AI helps me with research. AI helps me with some of the actual content creation, image generation, thread generation, outlining of some videos, but then I actually enjoy the creation process.

So I'll record videos myself a lot of the time. I do, I own an AI video company, so of course I use some AI video. But sometimes I edit them because I like to. Sometimes I outsource them because that I, you know, if I don't have that time, I have that option to outsource if I want, or if I have a little bit more time, I still like to do video editing on my phone. And I like the process of uploading and posting and publishing and responding to comments. So yeah, I could absolutely just set up automations to find content, create content, schedule and post content, respond to content. But then it's just the dead internet theory in play of bots creating content, responding to bots and posting. But that's just for me. So do more of what you love and what you enjoy and find AI solutions and automations or the things that you don't like to do. That's where I would focus. I mean, yeah, life is all, life is short. Like focus on what you love doing.

And I, I wanna take us back to just something you said, uh, early in our conversation, which was you kind of were evaluating your business and you decided that out of the things that the owner or the founder needed to do, right? You could have gone whole hog into agency work and been the, you know, the BD guy, the, you know, be the, but you chose, hey, I'm gonna be not necessarily the agent, the owner that works in the business, which is perfectly fine. I think there's a stigma against working in the business cuz of all this work on your business, not in your business stuff. I think you just have to choose one path. So I, I guess, um, I wanna transition our conversation from, uh, kind of this setting the stage, which we've done quite a bit and I think a good job of to, uh, how we actually, you know, more of what your book does, like the tools that we use, et cetera. But Before we get there, I just wanna frame this and, and for, for the rest of your responses, right? Maybe, maybe you could give us kind of a dual answer for partially for that business owner who wants to work on the business like you do, right?

Loves the posting, likes writing, likes creating, likes researching. Okay. And then I'd also like us to try to frame a path, 'cause I know there's a lot of, um, uh, business owners and executives who are gonna be in this camp too. Who don't wanna do that stuff, but they appreciate how important it is to their business. They would rather be head of BD or, you know, running the team. They, they wanna work in the business and have their hands in it, but they do appreciate that we need to have our marketing message. We have to be telling stories, we have to be building on, et cetera. So, so if you're cool with that, I'd like to just, yeah, maybe be able to talk those two paths. Cause I know we have a pretty equal set in this audience of in the business, on the business, uh, guys and gals. So, Um, with that said, I wanna transition over to kind of your book and your business, um, and talk more about how do we actually start to use these tools to get our message, our audience, our brand out in front of people. And you use the word viral a lot, which I know, like, depending on what side of the cynical spectrum you sit on is, is either completely acceptable or this like kind of like a slop word that everyone, you know, hates on.

I have no opinion on it and certainly don't have a negative opinion on it at all. So like, why is viral important today? And how do we start to set the stage, set our business up, our messaging up? Like, what are the building blocks to actually be able to go viral?

Yeah, so such a great question. So yeah, virality is a controversial word, right? It's also subjective. So viral for me is different from viral for you versus viral for, the local plumber, right? You, if you go viral in different niches, it unlocks different things. And I also mean strategically going viral. I don't mean cat videos and dancing. The whole thesis of my book is don't be a content creator, be a business owner who creates strategic content. You have to have the backend systems in order to, execute as, as well as capitalize on it as well, because you could just—

Very glad you made that clarification, dude. I'm very glad you made that clarification. I think that's very important when we talk about this, because like, you could post a video of one of your employees kicking you in the nuts, and it would probably go pretty far, especially if you had like some trending music around it and like a doink sound or something, right? But like, that's not actually— well, depending on your business, I guess— that's not necessarily helping And I would say the predominant amount of people that are certainly listening to this podcast, that's not gonna really help them grow their business. So I appreciate that quite a bit. Uh, we're talking about getting, we'll say, maximum reach and exposure on content that builds brand and real audience.

Yes, absolutely. Specifically in your niche. So I love— think about a content funnel, right? At the very top of the funnel, you have the broad awareness-oriented content. This is at The furthest reach is touching somebody and bringing them into your ecosystem that could be a customer or could eventually be a customer. Just to broad— I brought up this example earlier, right? When I was growing my personal brand for my agency, I was sharing useful websites that feel illegal to know. All of those, you know, powerful opening hook. I'll get into kind of framework stuff if you want. Love it.

Yeah. No, let's do all the nerdy shit as far as nerdy as you want to go. Yeah. Yeah.

Cool. All right. All right. And how much time we got? So there's broad top of funnel oriented content. There's middle of the funnel, the nurturing, the how-to, the authority building oriented content. This is where you go deeper on individual topics. And then there's the sort of FOMO conversion oriented topic at the bottom of the funnel. I love to stay at that top of the funnel. This is where virality happens because it is the most broad appealing. It reaches the most amount of people. Couple of— another great example of this, shout out to Roger Wakefield. Just an example that comes to mind. The expert plumber, massive, massive social media following, millions of followers in the plumbing niche, was a local Texas plumber, actually sold his practice because he was so successful. Now he teaches other plumbers. He had a lot of great how-to content, how to fix a toilet, how to, you know, change the spark plug or, you know, the whatever plug on, on back end, you know, whatever. But his viral content is comparing, uh, popular, uh, tools, or plumber reacts to, um, you know, um, uh, septic tank explosions or something like that, right?

Like, it's very niche-specific, it's broad appealing, it's interesting, it's going to Home Depot and hoping the person doesn't buy the large brand name thing that everybody thinks about, but is actually just a scam because they're really good at marketing, right? Like Real Plumber Reacts, that is top of mind. That's broad awareness-oriented content. That's gonna attract people to follow you. And then that's where real conversions can happen, right? So now we have Living in that broad awareness-oriented funnel. Think about that. Structuring your content will really help you stack the odds in your favor. And so I have a framework in my book, for instance, that anybody can follow. It's called the START video framework. The S stands for stop the scroll with a powerful opening hook. The T stands for talk about a problem that's related to that opening hook. The A stands for align. This is where you can briefly talk about yourself and build authority. The R stands for resolve that problem. This is going to be the meat and potatoes of your actual video. And then the T is tell them what to do next. This is your call to action at the end.

So if you, you know, have a broad topic in mind, you have a strong opening hook associated with that. You're expanding on it by talking about that problem. You're building and extending the the view duration, then you're talking about how you are the perfect expert for this. You're giving information away and resolving that, and then you're telling them, follow me if you wanna learn more about this particular topic, et cetera. And if you follow a framework like that, you're gonna stack the odds in your favor that it's gonna go viral, it's gonna convert and hold attention, And then you're actually going to generate leads and sales for your business.

We break down two aspects of the START framework in particular that I see a lot of people who don't spend time in here struggle with. First one is, uh, the S for you, the, the, the opening hook. I know just about everyone has probably heard this term and knows that hooks are important, but just butcher this. Even pros butcher this a lot, you know what I mean? Like you'll see great ones and then you'll, you'll see them miss. So I'd really like to dig into what makes a good hook. How do we, you know, if I, if I'm a, a, a not a marketing person who thinks about this all day, but I do wanna put some content out, like how do I start framing?

Okay.

And then the other piece, and, and this one I think is sneaky, but, but is so often missed, is the A. Like, why should, what is it about my experience that you should actually care what I'm telling you? I, I see so many people just blow past this, not do it at all, or butcher it in almost like it— when they do do it, it comes off as like braggy or egotistical and it gives you almost the opposite feel. So love to talk about the hook and then how we do that kind of authority part, the why you should care part, um, really well.

Yeah. So the other nuance here as well is short-form content tends to go viral faster than long-form content. Keep that in the back of your mind. With that said, the infinite doom scroll on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook Reels now, YouTube Shorts, all of these platforms, we have to capture attention immediately or the next piece of content probably will. There is an endless supply of content now, and that is the importance of the opening hook. You also have to remember that nobody is doomscrolling on social media for you specifically. They are there for entertainment, for education, edutainment, distraction, time killing, whatever, right? So you need to have all of those components in mind. What I see a lot of people get wrong is placing that A, that authority, that alignment at the beginning. That is not a good opening hook. You can save that for later. It's important to mention who you are, why they should trust you. There's different ways that you can do that. Stop doing it at the beginning. Nobody cares, right? So think about it from newspaper headlines. You should be able to read it in, in your head in, in 1 to 2 seconds.

I think you have the grace of 3 to 4 seconds if you're really good with it. You can also stack this with series as well. This is a little bit more nuanced, but so, uh, a series, for instance, I'll give you some examples of opening hooks that I use. So I said earlier, these 5 websites feel illegal to know. Takes 2.5, 3 seconds in order to say that. It's a recurring series because I can swap the 5 websites in there each individual time, but it stops the scroll. What are the websites? Why are they, why are they illegal? Are they actually illegal? It's a curiosity gap. Another series that I have recurring right now, actually variable, is ChatGPT Secrets You Should Know Part X, Claude AI Secrets You Should Know Part X, Gemini or Google Gemini Secrets You Should Know Part X, right? It creates that curiosity gap. It's, if it's something that I'm interested in, I'm going to continue to watch. And, um, and I, I can fill in the blanks every single time. So think about it from that perspective, over-sensationalize it a little bit, create that curiosity gap. And then the A, the align, there's different ways that you can do this as well.

By the time you're in that process, so we stop the scroll, you have your opening hook, talking about a problem, so you're expanding it a little bit. Now you're maybe 15 seconds into the video, right? This is a really good view extension retention hack that if you can, if you follow that strategically, especially in a short-form video, much more likely to go viral with that content. Because short-form content has that drop-off point immediately if you're not hooking them, right? That align, keep it brief. You've earned their attention for 12, 15 seconds or so. You can say, hi, my name's Austin. I'm your friendly AI expert. Or I've seen one recent, I love horror movies. I forget his name offhand, but he's like, hi, my name's John, I'd love to be your, your, your movie guru, right? That's, um, that's, that's his, uh, authority in there. Or, um, another way that you can do it and save the time is having your credentials listed on there as well. So when I owned my agency, we worked a lot with, uh, therapists and psychologists. Um, so they had to put like, um, their name and, um, uh, LCSW, licensed clinical social worker, under it, or PsyD, or if a real estate agent, mortgage broker, you have to put your license number on the video, you know, on there as well.

And so that builds authority as well. And it can literally just be your title. And that builds that trust factor online as well. So, you know, know, like, trust is a little cliché and I think it's even expanding past that. But it really adds into that as well. So you build a little bit of trust after holding their attention and then you can go into the rest of the framework.

And with all, um, you know, just to be clear with the audience, I am not a, I do not teach, uh, this type of stuff, but I do get asked questions and, you know, somebody will be like, hey, I created this. What do you think? Right? What do you think about it?

Okay.

And I see, I, I really, I just want to stop on the alignment authority piece for one more second. Cause I do see things where like, I see sometimes it's like this big brag, oh, I've done this and this and I've done this thing and, and, and it goes too far, right? And then, and like you said, other people blow right past it. Like, what is like a good stat? Like, I know when I'm doing, uh, I found when I'm doing a post about like a communication method, I, I, I nerd out so hard on the psychology of communication. I just love the idea that like if I know how to spin a certain set of words in a certain order, I can literally hack your brain to do what I want you to do, and visually it works as well. I'm just fascinated by it. Um, and I found that when I share a communication-oriented, uh, piece of content, particularly short form, that if I say, hey, my name's Ryan Hanley and I've done over 400 paid keynotes as like my alignment piece, right? So one little stat that kind of gives validation to I've done this for a while.

That seems to work. If I go farther, I can literally see on the Instagram thing, whoop, like right at that section, I'll get— and guys, uh, I'm— if you're watching and you can see me doing hand gestures like a crazy person, but essentially the graph in Instagram's retention, I've seen it like in that section. If I go more than one stat or I spend too much time there, it literally drops. Like people are just scrolling away. So how do you determine if, let's say I'm, uh, again, let's go Main Street. Services businesses, like an insurance agency, a plumber, you know, whatever. How do, what are the stats that they could be thinking about? Uh, maybe beyond just like their license or I'm a licensed whatever that could add credibility without sounding too much like you're bragging or being egotistical.

I think you absolutely nailed it. Right. Um, one line about something that you've achieved or something, or, um, how you've helped somebody. Particular to that video. So try and tie the alignment to the topic of that video, right? So the plumber route, right? Like, I'm Roger Wakefield. I've helped 10,000 people in the state of Texas over the last 20 years. Boom. You know, just move on. You can get a little bit more specific, right? Like, I've, I've, you know, if it's 5 best toilet unclog strategies from, from Home Depot, you can be like, in the last 20 years, I've unclogged over 20,000 toilets in the state of Texas. Boop. You know, and then you move on from there. Like a stat achieved based on the opening hook. Uh, again, yeah, like you've got like 2, 3 seconds in each little segment here. Um, the resolve, you can, uh, that's where your meat and potatoes are. You can, um, put more emphasis there, but specifically for this alignment, remember, like Again, this is discovery-oriented content. They don't care about you. Sorry. Sorry, everybody. They don't give a crap about you. If they want to learn more about you, they're going to click on your bio.

They're going to click on the website. Maybe they'll DM you. Maybe they'll go to the website. They're going to do a little bit more research. This is the user journey. Stop making it about you and always make it more about who you're trying to reach. Give your best information away for free. Just have that 2 to 3 second alignment piece in there associated with a, um, a stat or, um, a number that you've helped. Again, tie it into that opening hook. That's all you need.

Yeah. And guys, I, I don't mean to spend so much time here and I, and I wanna move on from this particular topic, but I did think it was incredibly important because when, when, when you guys send me your posts and you'll say, hey, can you just take a look at this? Right? And again, I, I I don't present myself as a viral expert. I'm, I am not. Um, but the two, the reason I, I, I had Austin spend so much time is that I feel like we go right to the, the info that we wanna barf on people. And while that is important, right? It is. Unfortunately, you can't skip these two steps, guys. Like, this is, these are the two things I see kind of, we'll call them more amateur or non-professional marketers make is that This is where you psychologically hook people in so that they do give a shit about the stuff that you're actually gonna teach them. So, you know, they're never even gonna stop and you'll be in that like 200 view, you know, death valley forever if you can't get past this point. So I just wanted to spend a little bit of time.

I appreciate you letting us languish there for a minute, but I did think that was important. Um, you know, so now you, uh, hadn't had an agency. And now you start, uh, uh, AI tool that does video marketing, video creation, video editing to a certain extent. Like, aren't you cannibalizing your business by doing this? Like, why would you, why would you, um, you know, go out and, and get into this? And, and I think the tool is wonderful and please like dig into it, tell us about it. Um, guys, not, not, not a paid sponsorship or anything. I just think it's wonderful and I really wanna think through kind of taking your business, an ad agency, and going, we can turn this actually into an actual product that people can use. I wanna think through that whole process.

Yeah. Uh, it, it did, uh, cannibalize it and that was strategic. That was, that was on purpose. So, um, to one degree, I was completely burned out in agency life. I was, I was stepping away. Um, I tried to hire. People to run the company for me. I ran it into the ground. I'm just going to be frank and honest there. I was in the marketing agency space for a total of about 12 years and I got really burned out on it. But I still wanted to help people. I love what I do. I love social media so much. It's changed my life. My whole purpose and mission is to provide the tips, tools, and strategies to help change other people's lives and make money online. With social media. And so I, I needed to find out a way that I could do that, that wasn't, um, burning me out and that I could help even more people at scale. And so I really just, over the course of 2 years preparing for, um, uh, creating this tool, Cylabi, I talked to a lot of our customers. I, I talked to a lot of, um, business owners of, um, why they hired a marketing agency in the first place.

What were the problems that they were facing that needed to hire a marketing agency. And the core problems that I came across when I really broke everything down is they know they need to create content for social media, but they don't know what topics to create. They don't know what to say on camera. They need help staying consistent and accountable. They don't know how to do video editing or they don't want to do video editing. They don't have the time to create and edit videos and schedule and publish it across every social media platform. Or maybe they don't have a son or daughter that can do it either. And so it's this chicken or the egg problem of them being so focused and not having time on their business, but not getting the word out enough. So not enough new businesses coming in. That's why they hired a marketing agency. And I got to a point where I'm like, oh, when I break this down, all of these steps can be done with software. And so Cylabi started as an internal tool. Really? Um, 'cause I look, I did that. I've been doing this time inventory thing for a couple years now and, um, um, I looked at what was taking me the most amount of time and it was the content strategy.

So I was going out and doing competitor research. I was doing keyword research on topics to create videos on for our customers. Um, and then studying competitors and, and outlining this big content strategy. So we started with that. And so, um, that's, that was really the main first feature of Syllabi is enter a topic, enter a service, and it shows you all the topics and questions and keywords that your customers are searching for online. Because I also believe that within this viral landscape, social media is a search engine. The discoverability engine is so good. These algorithms are so good. They're going to put content in front of you based on your needs because of your viewing patterns and your search history on social media. That's a long-winded rant there. And then they don't know what to say on camera as well. So we came up with this whole interview process, like when I was at my agency, this whole interview process where I looked at, you know, main keyword that you're trying to create a video for. And then what are the logical questions that make this a longer video all within the same the same topic.

And so now with AI, the last couple of years, script generation just follows that format. So we have our topic. Now we have a script that is based on my framework of the start video framework that I mentioned, but it has, it's based on tens of thousands of video scripts that I've handwritten myself and have studied as well.

That's alignment right there, folks. Do you hear him just align?

It works.

Because now you believe what he's about to say. I didn't mean to call you out, but that was perfect. It was one stat, one line.

It's so ingrained.

Yeah, right now it was perfect. Like, literally, you guys, he just did what we were talking about before, right? So now the next part, and I didn't mean to interrupt you, but it was like so perfect based on what we were saying. Like, now, like, I know I just said, I go, oh shit, he knows what he's talking about. He did 10,000 scripts by hand. Like, okay. Like, I literally, I like felt myself leaning in. That's why I didn't interrupt you. I'm sorry. But that's, that's what it is. Oh, I love it. By setting the stage there and saying, I did 10,000 handwritten scripts myself, I can tell you from blood, sweat, and, you know, uh, blisters on my fingers from holding the pen, you know, what this scripting process looks like and what produces a good script. So just wanted to point that out. Thank you.

Yeah, yeah. No, no, great, great catch. I don't even, I don't even catch myself sometimes. It's just habit now. Um, and then, so what's the next step? So you have your video script, right? Then it's the actual, um, video creation, and that's gone over through a lot of iteration processes. And so by an image generation based on the context of the scene to now AI video generation with all of the models based on the scene, edits everything together, and then you can connect all of your social media platforms and schedule and publish it out. So it's basically all of the steps that I was doing manually at my agency charging a lot of money, multiple 5 figures per month in some instances. And it's self-serve, it's automated, it just helps a lot. And I don't mean to be self-promoting, but I just thought that, you know, I got to a point where I saw this AI writing on the wall of everything will be able to be automated. Do I sit back in my business that I'm already burned out on and watch this slowly dismantle everything that I've built? Do I take the chance?

Do I be an early adopter that I've historically been? Do I bet on this being a technological revolution and try and be a leader and be and create something early that helps people and risking cannibalizing my business. And that was the decision that I made. And I think it was the best decision that I possibly could have made. I'm in a better situation mentally, physically, financially, in my relationship, everything because of that decision. But yeah, I cannibalized my own business. Shut that agency down. Um, but it was worth it for me.

I mean, I love it. I think it's, I, I, one, I love that it's a product that you created out of your own business. And I want to put a pin there just for a second because I want to come back to this concept because I do think this is where we're headed with some functionality. However, um, I'm okay with just one to clarify here. I'm okay with you talking about your business being a little self-promotional. And the reason that I'm okay with it is because One, you built it, you're on the show. Um, two, there are so many tools that we're getting bludgeoned with every day. I think it's important to learn how you thought through these tools, how you thought through creating your own tool so that the audience can start to create their own filters as to what tools they choose. Because $20, $50, $100 a month subscriptions to these tools can stack up really, really quick if we're not smart about the ones we're using and actually using the tools that we pay for, which is a whole nother conversation. All right. I want to get into this idea of kind of thinking about our business and creating solutions for just for us, right?

So this is Claude Code. This is Manus. This might be OpenClaw using these different, you know, Codex if you're an OpenAI guy. Um, I'm almost completely off OpenAI and ChatGPT, by the way.

I kind of am too. I'm with you. They really dropped the ball.

I'll be honest, Manus AI. Have you played around with Manus?

Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, I love the direction that you're going here cuz I've been super into vibe coding the last year as well. So, I have great answers for what I think. Yes.

I wanna know like, okay.

But yeah.

So I'll give the audience, I'll give the audience an idea. So I, just, just to, I'll set the table and then I want you to run with this. So two things, guys. So one, Um, the first thing I did from a vibe coding perspective was I am terrible at personal finance. Terrible. Like I just, the idea of slowing down at the end of every month, downshifting into second and like, how much did I spend on this? And what did I spend here? I'm just like, my ADHD crazy brain hates doing that. However, I'm not a dummy. I logically understand how important it is to understand where your money is, where it's going, et cetera. So I just vibe coded this little tool. That allows me to upload my bank statements and my credit card statements. And then it acts as, um, I told it to act with, uh, uh, um, like Gordon Ramsay style, even though I know he is a chef, like his style of aggressive, like, I want you to yell at me when I do the things that I told you I didn't want to do.

Right.

So like, so I have this little thing and I get this little report once a month. I've had this for, this will be my third month now. And it's just like, you said you weren't gonna spend more than $300 on DoorDash in a month and you spent spent $500, like, you know, you know, write me this like nasty gram. Okay. So that's an idea. That's one idea. And then, uh, for my business, guys, just to set the table here for, for how I'm thinking about these things is I went down the OpenClaw path mostly because I was super interested in it, but I had a real need for this podcast. Um, I've— the podcast has grown to the point where I'm in that in-between stage between doing it myself and hiring a, a, a team member to come in and manage all the admin stuff. And the, what I said was, I wonder how far I can get with, you know, I chose OpenClaw. I could have done Cloud Code Agents or something like that, but I just went with OpenClaw. How far could I get with a tool like OpenClaw where I built out my own systems for doing this without having to hire somebody?

Right? So, so I'm, I'm thinking about simple things in my business, like, when I get a pitch from a PR person, which I get 5 a day to be on the show, right? Well, I gotta research the person. I gotta click on all their links. I usually do like a wide research on ChatGPT or OpenAI, and it's hard. You don't always know. I mean, some people, you know, just aren't good fits. It doesn't mean that people are bad or wrong, but like, that takes a lot of time. So now I have a simple, you know, um, um, group in Telegram for my Open Claw. Uh, I call him Maximum Effort. He's Max for short. Uh, if you get that reference, you're one of my people. Um, and one of his tasks is I forward him an email from, from PR pitches and he does this full build out and then gives me a score. Uh, if the score is over, is 7 or above, he automatically responds and says, hey, we'd love to have insert person on the show. Here's a calendar link. Have them schedule. Okay, great. That alone, just that 2-step process saves me probably 2 hours a week of work.

Mm-hmm.

That's it. And, and so how do you, how do you start to think through this? So just table setting for the audience. How do you start to think through this and go, here's something that I, that not that I need to go, I don't need, I don't wanna go look for a tool for this. This is something I could actually use Claude Code or another similar tool to actually create this functionality? How do you make that determination? What are your filters for the things you can create versus going and finding a tool? And what are the advantages to creating it yourself versus going and buying a tool?

Yeah. Um, well, firstly, uh, thank you, Max. I'm glad I made the cut in the, uh, PR outreach process. Thanks to, thanks to maximum effort.

I think he said you gotta get this asshole on the show and cuz he curses like a sailor. He didn't mean that in a negative way.

I love it. Yeah. All right. F yeah, Max. Okay, so it's a classic build versus buy perspective, even in, even in business. What is the cost investment and savings of building it yourself and internal versus just outsourcing it and buying an out-of-the-box solution? This traditionally has been a much more expensive cost-benefit analysis because you'll have a technical team that Yes, you can build this internal, you know, feature, but it's going to take, you know, 20 hours of developer hours at $50 an hour. And then maybe you'll see a total ROI in that from that investment over the course of 6 months. Well, maybe it's cheaper to just buy a $20 tool, outsource it. Right. But now With VibeCoding, that cost difference and that time difference is drastically different. I literally have, um, uh, Agent, um, Agentic AI Perplexity's computer coding me a Calendly alternative right now so that I don't have to spend, you know, $50 a month on Calendly, uh, anymore right now in the background. That's a tool that I'm using. Um, and then I'm also able to sell it. That's the other benefit here is creating tools for yourself that guess what?

Probably other people are going to have that same problem. So you can sell it too. It's a great example of what I did recently, about 7 months ago, actually using Manus. I was— so to set the stage here, last year I did about 1.4 billion organic views on Facebook. Woof. Okay. Organic. No, no dollars spent behind it. 80%, it's actually 79.3% of those organic views came from text posts. These long text posts that were, uh, rest in peace Photoshop. These 5 new AI tools do it faster. Kind of that structure. And then in the comment section is One tool at a time, what it does, what it costs, overview, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. These posts went mega viral. I used to do that research manually on Google and find the tools, write the headline, write individual posts. Then I went and started using ChatGPT tasks last year to do that research and automate it for me. And I still was just copying and pasting. And then I had the idea about 7 months ago, well, I want to just streamline and automate this whole process. So I used Manus to create this tool called ThreadMaster that does all of that.

It stored all of my top performing text threads that got those billions of views. I can enter in any topic that I want and it automatically generates the thread in that format that I can then copy and paste it. That saved me so much time. Time and effort from how I was manually doing it. And then because of the cost of it, I'm like, you know, and I'm sharing my results in my marketing. I'm like, I bet other people would be interested in this too. And so I charge $5 a month for it for unlimited use. It has about 2,000 users right now. So that tool, and it's like 95% profit margins. So I used Banis to create an internal tool that saved me a lot of time that was helping me go viral on Facebook. Facebook's paying me because I'm monetized, but then I can sell it as a solution that genuinely helps other people achieve the same results as well and save them time. And this tool has made like $60,000 so far and it's profited $52,000, $53,000. It done. But it's an internal tool that started with me and then I just put a small price tag on it to sell it as well.

And so, you know, it kind of goes back to the time inventory as well. Yeah. But also just like, also do it, do a price audit like you were saying to, you know, what's that tool that it tracks your, tracks all your subscriptions? I forget. You just like sign into your Gmail.

Rocket Money is one.

Rocket Money. Yeah. Rocket Money. Yeah, exactly. So just, you know, sign up for Rocket Money or just look at your bank account statements and be like, okay, you know, I'm actually paying for 10 software tools right now per month. And it's, you know, they stack up. It's, I'm paying $500 a month in software. Look at the ones that you're using only maybe specific features of, not the entire suite. Use a vibe coding tool. However you want. You know, there's, there's Manus, there's Lovable, there's Replit, there's Claude Code, there's Codex. Pick your poison. Doesn't matter. Right? Vibe code that for yourself. Get it as efficient as it can be. Very simple process. You don't have to be a technical founder to be able to do this either. Get it to a point where it works. Cancel your subscription. And if you want, You can add your own subscription on top of it and start making money instead of just saving money.

Guys, this is like, so I, I, uh, I had another tool that I created because, um, scheduling, time blocking is basically how I run my life, right? Uh, uh, kind of similar to the time audit. If it's not on my schedule, this is the thing I get in my family. I get an issue with my family all the time. I'm like, guys, you can't just text me. And like have that be it. Like my calendar, for a whole bunch of reasons, my calendar runs my life. If it's on the calendar, I will be there. I promise. It's not on the calendar. I, there's a good chance I don't even know. It doesn't matter how many times you told me. Okay. So I created this simple tool that anytime I needed to do a project, uh, I would type in the box and I'd tell it what the project is. Say it's, um, hey, I, uh, so I'm working on a book, uh, I wanna get I want to get the next chapter of my book done. This is what it is. I'm starting from scratch, so I have to do research phase. I have to do all these phases for this particular chapter.

Okay, great.

And I'd hit go. And what it would do is it would, um, basically figure out, is it creative or is it tactical? So it would either schedule morning for creative, afternoon for tactical, and then it would say, based on, and what's your timeframe? Well, my timeframe is a month for this chapter. I'm just making that up.

Great.

So then it would go and say, based on your current schedule and the amount of time we believe it will take to do this and the amount of creative versus tactical, it would then go out and schedule those time blocks into the calendar to get that particular project done. So now it's not, I'm hoping to get it done in a month. I've literally got the time scheduled in my calendar to get this project done. Okay. So I kind of messed up a bunch of stuff before it goes, because it was the very first thing I ever did. Like, I think about that and I always come back to that and I go, this was me, literally. And this is why I mess it up, is I want to get into— I want to be respectful of your time and I want to kind of wrap up with the audience here, but I want to kind of get you to break down what this realist— it feels overwhelming to a lot of people. Everybody that I talked to this week when I was talking about some of the things I was doing that are out on the edge a little bit, they're like, that That seems too far.

You know, I, I, that feels intimidating. That feels overwhelming. I, all I did to get that was tell the, talk into the text and put the talk-to-text file though into the computer. Exactly what I just said, basically. Now there's more to it to make it really work. I messed up some things. I got some things I gotta fix, but it's not much more than that. Just telling a Replit or a Lovable or a Manus, et cetera. What you want it to do. So for the audience who maybe has some of these things in here and really wants to start playing, what is starting to spin up your own vibe-coded application actually look like in reality? Like, is, you know, do you kind of have to dedicate a significant amount of time? What is the nerdiness level? How accessible is this?

I think it's extremely accessible if you're willing to put in a little bit of time. I also want to say that it's not that expensive either. You can get a fully deployed product up for less than $200, um, maybe even less than that, depending on how much back and forth that you do. It's quite simple too. Uh, using a tool like Replit— Replit's a personal favorite of mine— um, you can take a screenshot of a website. The URL and say, code this. It literally is that simple. You can go to Calendly, take a screenshot of Calendly, paste in the URL of Calendly, and Reflit will gather all information and code it for you. It gets a little bit more, and you know, you want to iterate with it. But if you're able to talk to ChatGPT, you're able to talk to Claude, you're able to talk to Gemini, You can create your own software now. There's really no barriers anymore. You test it. It's in a visual window next to it with you. You say, this is broken. Talk to it in natural language, get it to a point where everything pretty much works. And again, you're just using it and saying like, this doesn't feel right.

You can self-deploy it. In these tools, host it on that tool, map it to a domain, connect it to a Stripe account if you want to charge. You don't have to if you want to use it as an internal tool. You can now publish it to the Google Play Store as well for mobile apps. Everything is self-hosted in these tools and they're getting better and better every single day. So realistically, It can take a couple hours. It depends on the complexity of the tool as well. It's also a thing to remember that you're not going to just recreate GoHighLevelCRM that has 10,000 features, uh, in, in 2 hours. But if you just need a tool that does 3 or 4 simple functions, you can get that online in less than a day, in just a couple of hours. Just going through it. You might spend tens of hours working on something, and if you're a perfectionist, maybe a little bit more, but it's simpler than most people think. I think everybody, including their uncle, has had an app idea, but they've never had the resources, the money, or the know-how to get it out there into the world.

And that barrier is no longer there.

To me, this is one of the greatest unlocks of the next 3 to 5 years in business is, is figuring out, and, and I'm a big FAFO guy here, like build a couple things that don't work and just delete 'em, right? Like you said, it's gonna cost you $20, $30 to mess around, see what works. It doesn't work. It looks ugly. I don't like, okay, great. Delete it. Start again, right? Like play around with this a little bit, but I think the ability from a leadership perspective to see these nuanced repeatable tasks that you can bring internal, maybe strip out the 17 features you don't need and just have the 2 or 3 that you actually use saves time, money, especially guys, if you have a larger team and you're paying 15, 20, 30 user seats, I mean, that really adds up for some of these tools. I mean, I built, I built, uh, for a little side hustle thing that I have, um, I built a Slack replacement. Doesn't do, it does 15% of what Slack does. It does everything that that little side hustle needs from like a message board communication standpoint.

That's it.

It does everything we need. None of the other stuff. And, uh, I was actually doing it for a client and, um, it took 17 user seats at $15 a user seat off of their books. And now I think it costs them maybe $40 a month total in like API costs. That's it. So it's like, I mean, and now they have all the messaging they need. It's not too much. 'Cause their thing was like Slack was too much. It was too much. It's just overwhelming. We get lost, blah, blah. I was like, all right, well what do you actually want it to do? And, and, and guys, you know, like I'm not hype, I'm nerdy. But I'm not technical, guys. Like, I'm not a technical— I don't know how to code. I, you know, like, I'm learning some of this stuff, but, but I'm not— I didn't walk into any of this. I walked in with zero intrinsic knowledge about how any of this stuff works. To be honest with you, coding and that whole side of the game has scared the crap outta me for such a long time. 'Cause I felt like I didn't speak the language.

It was like scary, you know what I mean? Like, I've worked with tons of devs, I've been on product teams, but like that side has always been scary to me 'cause I felt like they were speaking a language I didn't understand, so I could never be fully invested in the conversation. And now with this ability, even if you do have a more technical person or more developed, you can, you can be much more engaged in the process because you don't have to understand C++ or JavaScript or whatever language. You just have to understand what you want it to do. And that to me starts to become the skill.

Huge unlock.

Yeah. Austin, dude, this has been absolutely phenomenal. I could talk to you all day. Tell us about where people can find out more about your AI video tool that you've created, and then also how they get deeper in your world. And obviously we'll have all these links, including a link to your book in the show notes, guys, whether you're watching on YouTube or listening, just scroll down, you'll find all this.

Yeah. So the name of my company is Sylaby, the video generation tool. It's sylaby.io. And basically automates everything for video marketing to help you drive leads and sales, saving you 70% of your time and budget. My book Virality, you can find anywhere you buy books, Amazon. You can search for Austin Armstrong on Amazon. You should be able to find it in there. It is everything that I know about marketing, helping you go viral in the right ways for business-focused. I'm not gonna tell you to dance or to kick your employees in the nuts in order to go viral. I'll teach you all of the frameworks and nuances for every individual platform as well as psychological triggers that will increase your engagement, things that will have an immediate lift for you in your organic content. And I just hope that it helps you. And I'm very easy to get ahold of if you search for Austin Armstrong on social media. I'm everywhere. I am the nerdy with AI and glasses Austin Armstrong. I am not the defensive line coach of the Florida Gators Austin Armstrong, nor am I the 6'2", uh, curly-haired, uh, relationship vlogger in LA, Austin Armstrong.

I'm that business nerd right in the middle. Um, I'm very easy to get ahold of. Please DM me.

I love it, bro. This has been great. I appreciate your time. Guys, check out Soliloquy. Absolutely get the book. The way that the, the reason I wanted to have Austin on versus so many other people that talk on this topic is the fact that he has dialed in on this idea of strategic right? Strategic virality. It is so incredibly important. Going viral means nothing if you're not doing it for the right reasons. Appreciate the hell outta you, man. We're outta here.

Peace.