How Jasper Uses AI & Live Streams for Marketing

In this episode, I speak with Austin Distel, head of marketing at Jasper. Jasper is one of the best copywriting tools that uses GPT-4 to generate short and long-form content.

We talk a little bit about how exactly GPT-3 works and how all the new AI tools that have popped up over the past year work.

But the main reason I wanted to talk to Austin was to break down the live trainings he does featuring members of the community who share their knowledge on how to use Jarvis better.

This video strategy creates both community engagement and is a free way to build up a powerful video library to train future customers.

Show Notes

• GPT-3
• Jarvis
• OpenAI
• Boss Mode by Jarvis
• Useproof
• YCombinator
• Silicon Valley
• Slack
• Rachel Pedersen
• Sean Vosler
• The 7 Figure Marketing Copy by Sean Vosler
• Google My Business
• Dan Kurtz
• SaaS
• Demio
• ActiveCampaign
• Zapier
• StreamYard
• Restream
• Webflow
• Webflow University
• Sunny Lenarduzzi
• Molly Mahoney
• Casey Neistat
• Scale or Die podcast
• The Beard Club
• Austin Distel’s website
• Subscription Secrets by Austin Distel
• Darby Rollins
• Grain.co
• If you want to do reverse engineering on your competitors, you can use a tool like ZeroGPT to detect if content was AI generated*

Transcript

[00:00:00.000] – Joey
So, cool! Thanks, Austin. Thanks for joining me. Before we kind of jump into Jarvis and video strategy, I wanted to get your explanation of what exactly GPT-3 is, because for some of your previous videos, you sort of had the clearest explanation that I’ve seen of what it is, what it consists of and what it can do and what it can’t do.

[00:00:20.500] – Austin
Yeah, so, I kind of think about, you know, GPT-3, which ISO, the underlying AI of what Jarvis is built on. It’s kind of like your friend that has read most of the internet and can kind of consolidate all of the blog, post, tweets, and things that have been read into its own new language. It’s completely original and will not duplicate itself over and over and over again, which is pretty cool because if you are a content creator, that’s what you want. You want to be able to have a kind of global view of a topic, and then you can inject your own creativity in it by using things like tone of voice and by giving it structure.

[00:01:06.750] – Austin
And, like, here’s where I use a story, and so kind of what it does is enables you as a creator, or a content writer, to be promoted from like a junior copywriter into like more of a director-editor. And, and I like that. It’s like you’re kind of outsourcing the lowest or the most task-ful job. Because we know how much work it takes to research alone, much less than to get the first draft. And honestly, the biggest procrastination moment is the- is the blank page. So many of us have a hard time going from blank page to first draft.

[00:01:46.590] – Austin
And so that’s what Jarvis really like measures the gap on. And then after that first draft is written, now you can go back in and spruce it up with, you know, your own industry knowledge or creative stories or, you know, personal experiences. And so that’s kind of like why you’re able to- to get a finished blog post or, you know, social media post or email, or whatever it is you’re at writing, done in, like, two to five times the speed.

[00:02:18.580] – Joey
Yeah, it really does help you, like, sort of just like a- like an exoskeleton for your mind, like, speed things up. Now, I did one- with the underlying tech with Open AI or GPT-3. I think one video explained that it was- it had, like, scoured 10 percent of the Internet from content previous to 2019. Is that accurate?

[00:02:41.580] – Austin
Yeah, that is accurate. Yeah. And you know, when we thought- think about what 10 percent of the Internet is, like, I would reckon to say about 90 percent of the Internet is private. So, private being, you know, behind a paywall, behind a member login. And so, you know, when- when they have to say 10 percent of the Internet, it’s most of just the public Internet.

[00:03:07.230] – Joey
And does that include, I mean, aside from obviously, like, articles, blog posts, does that also include video, video transcripts, like, what- what- what’s- podcasts? I mean, what does the 10 percent consist of? Do you know?

[00:03:18.600] – Austin
You know, I don’t know about the podcast. I would assume if those podcasts have been transcribed and put on a blog post, then absolutely. But I don’t think it’s like, ‘listened’ or ‘watched’ everything, but anything that’s written, it’s- it’s gone through and scraped.

[00:03:35.340] – Joey
Okay. And another kind of just general GPT-3 question. So, I mean, Jarvis is built on using this technology. There are a lot of other companies that also popped up that are using it. How does one company use it differently than another? Like, I guess, what’s the sort of secret sauce between the companies using this Open AI tech that, like, makes the outputs work better? Or like, this is kind of like you an explain like I’m five- or how does that work?

[00:04:04.050] – Austin
Well, you think about, you know, it’s kind of like, I don’t know, to make it easy. It’s like a programming language. And just because you have access to the language and the platform, you can build it, you know, in different ways. You know, part of it is, how do we just make it easy enough for, you know, any- anybody to use? And so part of our job is to give the visual construction a- a really intuitive way to go about it, an organization. Secondly, if you want to think that there’s, you know, AI, and then there’s what is created, there’s actually a middle bridge that we do.

[00:04:48.340] – Austin
So, if it knows all of this, all of the internet, then what we do is, ‘Hey, how do you give Jarvis some bumper- bumpers so that it can actually create what you want?’ So you need to have some rules around that. And so, that’s what we have, over 50 different use cases. We call these templates. I like to call them skills, because I think it’s the most accurate description, because the skill is like a tweet. Well, a tweet versus a blog post. What’s the difference in the rule base would be?

[00:05:18.930] – Austin
Well, tweets have to be, what, 240 characters or something. They’re often punchy. They might use hashtags. Different than what a creative story might be. You know, sometimes- to have a creative store, you want fiction to be boosted. So, you don’t want to pull from factual evidence as much, whereas, you know, if you’re doing a, you know, a report, you might want to have that setting for creativity. If you wanted to think about it as a dial, it’s not exactly, but there’s some tweaking that we do. There’s a bunch of tweaks that we do to get it to create the result that’s expected from each of these skills. From cold email, blog post intro, creative storytelling, you know, ad headline, subject line, stuff like that.

[00:06:14.840] – Austin
Like, we uploaded all of our best, highest- highest opened subject lines for emails. And taught Jarvis, ‘Here’s what good behavior looks like. Find the commonalities.’ And then, and, you know, we also are friends with the guys at Digital Marketer. And so we’re working with them. You know, and we’ve consulted with a bunch of copywriters and content creators that are kind of like, influencers, maybe they’re authors. Maybe they’re, you know, just influencers in the blogging world and said, ‘Hey, what is like, good behavior, look like? What are your highest performing’- you know, or ‘What’s your best work?’

[00:06:54.660] – Austin
And so, when you give patterns like this, Jarvis starts to connect the dots, and then the last layer. So, that’s what our magic sauce is. The last layer is, you know, what you input. So in order to get a great output from Jarvis, you need our layer, and you need your layer, which is, ‘Tell me about your brand.’ ‘Tell me about your goals.’ ‘The keywords you want to include.’ All these things that are kind of like the sprinkles that create your unique cake, because it- it really- it would just be, you know, maybe pretty basic or- or general if you didn’t do that.

[00:07:39.320] – Austin
And so, yeah, it- it’s important that the quality of Jarvis is also dictated by your quality and putting it in. And you can’t be lazy there. But I recommend that you adapt it, maybe change the tone of voice, maybe change the keywords, and then you’ll find better results.

[00:07:56.070] – Joey
Yeah. I think that’s an important point of- and thank you for the explanation. That really did clarify, sort of a lot of like, what the secret sauce is behind everyone’s, you know, all the different platforms out there. And, you know, Jarvis, I’ve always been impressed with sort of the- the content it produced. But I think that is an interesting- yeah, interesting thing to note as well, where it’s not magically going to write all these things for you. It’s not going to spit out a fully formatted, perfect blog post, like, you got to give it some good inputs. You got to massage it, you got to kind of steer it, give it some direction of where you want it to go. And it really just amplifies something that you’re doing, but it’s not doing it for you.

[00:08:30.640] – Austin
Yep. Yep. Exactly. And, you know, one thing I didn’t mention, but I think it’s now worth mentioning, is there are different licenses for Open AI. And so the license that new companies get today, is not the license that we have. We have a more expansive license. So there’s limitations on new companies, and there’s actually more limitations on our competitors than there are us, because we’ve acquired the companies that have the old licenses. Some of these limitations also include the length of output. And so we’re the only company now that can produce long form content using Open AI, and that’s, you know, in a public, user-friendly setting here.

[00:09:23.190] – Austin
You know, I know, like, for example, Microsoft has, like, one of the first licenses but they use it internally. So it’s- you know, if you- if you want to think about something that the general public can use to create blog content, you could use the competitor and do it 400 to 600 characters at a time. Or you could use ours that produces 1200 characters and looks back 3000 versus, you know, 600. And so that’s part of it. And then recently, we acquired another company that had this ability to command Jarvis where, you know, for most of the time, pretty much all the other companies will have, you’ll have to write something, and then Jarvis finish your sentences.

[00:10:08.520] – Austin
And so, you begin writing, and then it follows up with the next sentence, and you kind of play this back and forth. Right? And so with our recent acquisition, we are able to get the license and technology to be able to tell Jarvis what you want written, and then it will go out and write that instantly before your eyes without you having to actually write the first sentence of the paragraph. So that’s a- that’s a huge improvement. And that’s called what we’ve named Boss Mode. And- and- and Boss Mode is- is pretty freaking cool.

[00:10:43.420] – Austin
When you start to think about the use cases, you know, you can just say, ‘Hey, Jarvis, write a blog post’, or, ‘Write a blog intro’. It’s not going to write the whole post. You still- there’s human involvement here, okay? But you have to- you know, if you want Jarvis to write the intro paragraph, you don’t need to write the first sentence. You could just ask him to write it.

[00:11:04.370] – Joey
Yeah, I, I have- on the channel, I have a demo of Boss Mode. I was messing around with it. Yeah, it’s been- I’ve still just been dabbling in it. But so far, I mean, it’s really just been amazing in the sense of- like, I mean, I barely- the- the templates you talked about, which were like, ‘Write a -‘ The templates are very specific of, like, write a blog post intro, write a blog post outline. Now all that stuff, I- I- I barely touch them anymore. It’s just like, ‘Okay, I can just go into Boss Mode and just write out.’ Actually. I mean, later on, I do have some questions that Boss Mode generated that- we’ll get to that.

[00:11:33.720] – Joey
I’m just like- ‘Jarvis, you know, write out some questions for podcast, about video marketing.’ So we’ll jump to those. But yeah, it’s really been- you guys are going to get very meta. Alright, so let’s talk about- I just want to backtrack a little bit of like the origin of- so, recently the company changed names to Jarvis, but previously was called Conversion.AI. When did it start? And sort of- what was the sort of initial formation of Conversion.AI?

[00:12:03.730] – Austin
You know, as many entrepreneurs are, we are sitting on a ton of unused domain names. 2016, we bought Conversion.AI because we thought, ‘Hey, one day maybe, you know, we’ll figure out something to do with this thing.’ You know, our- our- back then, the- our main company was useproof.com. Proof is the brand name. And- and still today, that’s a great company, trucking along, leader in the industry. And as we started thinking about, like, you know, how- how do we continue chipping away, you know, building tools for marketers and content creators? You know, the first one is social proof.

[00:12:54.240] – Austin
It’s a- it’s a tactic that works literally in any industry and niche, so- to increase conversion rates and, you know, build trust and authority. So that was like, our firs- you know, not our first tool, but one of the- the most successful tools we’ve created. Now we were thinking like, ‘Well, how about for copywriting? How about for content creation?’ And honestly, like, we’re direct response marketers as a team. You know, you can see the whole team behind me. Like, we’re- we’re all, you know, mostly from the marketing world. Half the team has owned marketing agencies in the past. And now we’re applying that- the- this knowledge and- and understanding of the industry to Jarvis.

[00:13:41.610] – Austin
So we’re just trying to figure out how do we do it more effectively ourselves? How do we create better content and write copy that converts. And so when we started playing around with OpenAI, we decided to apply for the license. And we- we actually- with Proof, went through YCombinator. It’s a large startup accelerator out in California, and- and we raised a few million in funding after that for Proof. That- then kind of like spun into, you know, a lot of relationships in Silicon Valley and thinking wha- maybe we should think about trying to create an interface for OpenAI and- and see what- you know, or for GPT-3 and- and see if that works.

[00:14:27.770] – Austin
And so, in January, when we launched Conversion.AI, it was kind of just like we built something cool for ourselves, and maybe the public would like it. It was a total experiment. And within 30 days, it was- it’s super clear; people wanted this, and they were getting great results, and they were super happy. And that was just built on the shoulders of our list at Proof. So, that audience, same audience. You know, we keep helping the same audience, these marketers and copywriters and conversion optimization guys. And now we’re really happy to invite the content writing community.

[00:15:02.700] – Austin
As, you know, part of that. So it’s- it’s been kind of growing over the last eight years of- of building different products that stack up over on top of each other. And now Jarvis is- is our- our gold- our golden child.

[00:15:18.030] – Joey
Yeah, I feel like its a good- talking about eight years of- of- of evolving, but also the tech in existence. So it’s kind of a good example of, like, the tech evolving with, like, what you’re trying to achieve. But now you have the tools that make it easier to do it. And it’s interesting that you mention about communities, so that sort of leads- now we just- in January. That started January 2020. Correct? It just started this year?

[00:15:41.270] – Austin
Last January. Yeah

[00:15:43.410] – Joey
Oh it- Oh okay, I didn’t- oh okay.

[00:15:45.570] – Austin
It’s July now. Right? So it’s just 6 months-

[00:15:47.820] – Joey
It is July- Okay. So you’ve only been around- Conversion.AI has only been around for 6 months.

[00:15:53.560] – Austin
Yup.

[00:15:53.560] – Joey
Okay. So that’s even more impressive, because my other question is, there is a very active and thorough community on Facebook. So can you tell me about the origin of that community and how it grew and became so active so quickly?

[00:16:07.640] – Austin
Yeah. Well, honestly, it started off. We actually have done a Facebook community before. Back when we had, we built a membership community called the Entrepreneur Alliance. That was in 2015 and 16. And, you know, that was like our first step into ‘Wow. We can- we- we really like this.’ We really like talking to customers, and- and Rah! Rah! You know, that, like, idea of we can- we can be super close with them and unders- and like, build relationships. Well, we kind of, like didn’t do that at Proof, and we began to miss it. And so when we launched Jarvis, we wanted to, like, build a tighter bond with our customers from the beginning.

[00:16:56.340] – Austin
Secondly is, we didn’t know what the future roadmap of the product exactly looks like. So, we decided we wanted to have it built by customers, built on their feedback. And rather than build something that we think they want, why don’t we just ask them what they want all the time? And then whenever they ask for it, we’ll build it. And so that’s kind of when, in the beginning stages, like the Early Access launch, and then, you know, there’s the- you know, we would close it up, shut it down, you know, figure out pricing.

[00:17:30.920] – Austin
All of it has just kind of been a back and forth dance with customers to build something they want. And over time, you know, you might see in the community how fast we push out updates. And, you know, when- when users ask for something or they give recommendations, like, everything is a feedback loop. You know, we have little feedback loops inside the product where you can, like, flag stuff and that notifies us on Slack that maybe we need to update some settings or something changed. Why is everybody flagging this template?

[00:18:02.730] – Austin
You know, and so it’s like creating all these little mechanisms for customers to help create the product is why- you know, and the Facebook group is one of them. I think that’s why we’ve been able to scale so quickly is people love being a part of a company that listens to them.

[00:18:18.470] – Joey
Yeah, for sure. I mean, it’s been very active, and it’s interesting because there’s also a lot of active people in there as well that, I mean, I don’t think they work for Jarvis, but they just are big fans and also help out a lot and- and share a lot of tips and share a lot of insight. Now, we haven’t talked about video yet, but this is leading to video. So, can you explain the video strategy that you’ve been doing so far with your webinars?

[00:18:43.300] – Austin
With the webinars? Yes. So honestly, two things. One, I like to do the easiest way possible to get stuff done. I don’t want to try and create extra work on me and so one way that would create a lot of extra work on me is to try to figure out how everybody wants to use Jarvis. All of the different ways, then become an expert in that way and then try and figure out how to communicate it and- and teach that. That sounds like a lot of work. So instead, I thought, well, rather than it being from the company down, why don’t we pull content from the customers up and put our customers on a pedestal and showcase the amazing work that they’re doing in their daily life.

[00:19:35.810] – Austin
And these are experts in their field that also have audiences that we get to leverage, but not always. You know, I don’t require that they email their- their list and all this, but often they are also affiliates. So you know, they are, you know, like Rachel Pedersen, she’s AKA the Queen of Social Media. And she uses Jarvis to create- to co-create her content with her. She writes her own stories. But then that is reformatted, transcribed, put into different ways, you know, for social media, for blog posts, for videos, all of the stuff, with the help of Jarvis.

[00:20:16.570] – Austin
And so her training, we don’t really call them webinars because webinars have this idea that there- there’s a sales pitch at the end. And if you’ve ever attended one of our trainings, there’s not. There’s a soft ask, like, ‘Hey, if you’re part of the community that hasn’t bought yet, you should, now you see what it can do.’ But honestly, it’s mostly about training our existing users on how to- how the experts are using it and get some tips. The fun part about it is I also end up learning.

[00:20:47.730] – Austin
So I don’t- I don’t know exactly how Rachel Pedersen created three months of social media content in 3 hours, but she did. And so I want to figure out, how did she do that with Jarvis? You know, Sean- Sean Vosler is crazy. You know, mind, he wrote The 7 Figure Copywriter. And the way that he builds sales letters with Jarvis is pretty unique because, I mean, he has a structure and kind of like a formula, but the way he like, copies and pastes stuff and like, uses inputs from Jarvis, or outputs from Jarvis as inputs again.

[00:21:28.830] – Austin
And then, like, builds it down the page, it’s just pretty cool. So, I mean, that’s kind of how- that’s what our strategy is. We just use- you know, we can talk about the tech. But, you know, every Thursday, I bring in a customer from the community that’s an expert. And the order in which I’ve pulled these is I polled the Facebook community and I just said, ‘Hey, what are you using Jarvis for?’ What do you wish you could use Jarvis for? What are, like, you know, where are your holdbacks at?

[00:22:02.170] – Austin
And if there’s not already a training to refer them to, then, you know, whoever has the most up-votes on this training will win. And so, I’ll be like, who wants to use Jar- who wants to figure out how to use Jarvis for Facebook ads? Or how about for Google My Business or SEO meta descriptions? Like, all these are different use cases. And so how do I find the SEO expert to talk about Google My Business? Well, that’s. See, he does this professionally for a living, and he has, like, all of these clients, and he has, like, 30 VAs now that use Jarvis, and they can now- they don’t have to speak perfect English because Jarvis speaks the perfect English.

[00:22:39.210] – Austin
So if they can just do the research on the client, feed that into Jarvis. Now it can output with, you know, a right Google My Business listing. So these are the kind of things, like, I didn’t know how people are using it. I don’t think I would have ever thought about that, because as a SaaS guy, I don’t need Google My Business. But yeah, these are- these are kind of like the- the strategy behind it. And we do collect leads. But I actually will explain it a bit why I think that we might switch platforms and no longer collect leads.

[00:23:10.980] – Joey
Okay, the thing always struck me was that it was really interesting because a- my self perception of time has totally been off in the past year and a half. So you’ve only been around for seven months and you have an extremely active community and that they’ve also have such, like, a really great use cases already in such a short amount of time and that you’re able to source from them and that they put together a, you know, a really good presentation. See, I- training probably is a better word because to describe this, it’s about an hour long live session where you are hosting the guest, whoever’s doing the training.

[00:23:49.700] – Joey
There’s- sharing usually like a PowerPoint or, not that, or like a slide show and a live demo sometimes. And then there’s a live Q and A at the end for anyone watching live. And then you turn that video into a recording that people can watch whenever. Yeah, it’s just really impressive. So, all- everyone has been sourced from the Facebook group that you’ve gotten to share their knowledge or to create a presentation? They’re all Facebook users? Yeah, that’s awesome. And so you want to walk me through the ‘behind the scenes’ tech of what you are currently doing and then thoughts of, you know, how this might change.

[00:24:25.220] – Austin
Yeah. So, you know, shout out to, like, my friends at Demio. Grew up with one of them. The other guy’s also a close friend, and they have built a pretty impressive platform, especially for- I think they have the hands down best platform for the community aspect of a webinar, interacting with that chat channel, throwing in call to actions, adding in helpful handouts. I think it’s so easy to use as well, and I really appreciate the automatic email follow-ups that everybody gets. So they have to opt-in for the webinar.

[00:25:11.340] – Austin
They get followed up with, you know, 24 hours, 1 hour, and 15 minutes before the webinar, and then they automatically get the replay link at the end once it’s published. And so, honestly, I don’t have to manage, like setting up ActiveCampaign, doing Zapier integrations. It’s just- it’s just kind of you get what you get. The downside is that recording quality is at 720. And when, for a product like ours, that you’re writing, text, maybe 16 point or whatever, it’s hard at- at 720p to see that in the recording.

[00:25:55.080] – Austin
And so that’s been our biggest challenge with it. And with those leads, you know- about every- I always poll the audience. What percentage is- is new, or not using Jarvis and that are, and it’s between 50 to 70 percent are using Jarvis or current customers. So between 20 or 30 and 50 percent aren’t. That’s, you know, not to say they’re all new leads either. You know, they’re just not using it so far. So they might already be a lead in our database somewhere else. So really, it’s not a lead generation tactic, but more of a community building. Because we get free trainings from experts.

[00:26:34.200] – Austin
We get to associate ourselves with those experts. We build, you know, community. And most of those leads also are probably from the expert on the training. It’s probably not from our own marketing efforts. It’s probably they have brought in their own audience to watch them and they have their affiliate link on the backend. So, really like, it’s not a marketing effort. And if I want to impact as many people as possible through our trainings, I think that removing a- an opt-in wall will be best. I also know that since our Facebook group is so highly engaged that if I could somehow stream it right into our Facebook group, I will get incredibly high engagement and people won’t have to be like, ‘Well, where is it uploaded? Is the- is the recording up yet?’ Like, I- I answer that question a billion times a day. And it’s frustrating.

[00:27:34.220] – Austin
You know, because it’s like if you just like search in the group, then you find it, but I get it: people are lazy, and they want the content not where you’ve put it, but what- where they are, and they are in the Facebook group. So, listening to that feedback and understanding it, I believe that we’ll probably switch over to StreamYard. No, sorry. Restream.

[00:27:56.810] – Austin
Restream, I believe is that- let me make sure if I’m-

[00:28:00.300] – Joey
For hosting the stream as well. Restream, traditionally was like a- multi streaming. Like, you send your signal to them, they send it to Facebook.

[00:28:09.070] – Austin
Restream.io

[00:28:09.960] – Joey
Are you using that to host webinars as well?

[00:28:13.280] – Austin
Yeah so using that to host the webinar. And then what I also like is like it- I can post it in our Facebook group, on our Facebook page, on our LinkedIn and on YouTube. And I could also have a private room if I wanted on Zoom and have those, like all going simultaneously. So the reach is magnified. And then I like the production, that the recording quality is- is pretty good. I like that it has a branded look around it. There’s a frame around the guest, their screen share, the host.

[00:28:51.460] – Austin
It all interacts really well and kind of like you can do this real-time conductor board of like, you know, ‘Hey, we’re going to screen share here, highlight this person, highlight the guest.’ And then you can also see the stream of comments, are actually the real comments on Facebook, on Instagram, on YouTube or- not Instagram, but on Facebook, on YouTube, LinkedIn, and they kind of come up on the panel, and I can actually highlight those and then do it as like a featured commentary. So, I like- I like all these little features, and I think I can get more reach that way.

[00:29:28.060] – Austin
I think the production quality looks higher. So, that- that’s where my mind’s at.

[00:29:33.560] – Joey
Yeah, I think those are some good points. And it’s interesting of- going back to when you first said, okay, that 70 percent of the people watching. The current webinars are already existing customers, so it’s a good- for support. It’s probably also good to help prevent churn because now people know, can think of other ways to use Jarvis that they might not have thought of. So, then they remain customers, but they’re not. It’s not reaching unknown people. So, yeah, getting it. Because right now it’s like you currently have to register at a registration wall, and then you get the link.

[00:30:07.760] – Joey
And then I guess after, at the back end, people could still discover this on YouTube, but that’s already after the fact. So, now that they can- you can stream it to multiple platforms and have a better look and possibly have higher resolution. I’m assuming also the screen share is high resolution. People can read the text now?

[00:30:29.130] – Austin
Yep. Yeah. And, you know, I want to do some creative stuff, like, you know, have the stream on our Facebook and then run retargeting ads with that. As like a post in the news feeds of our prospective audience because we run a lot of paid ad spend. I can also use, you know, YouTube and all that. So, I think that’s part of it. I know, like, if people are sharing it and commenting it, I can acquire new audiences as well, since it’s social media and public. It’s not behind an email gated wall. There’s down sides, of course, though. Like, I’m not collecting any emails.

[00:31:11.250] – Austin
And then if, you know, for sales presentation, like, there’s no global call-to-actions, you know, across, like, all. I wish I could have, like, a comment that shows up in all of the common threads where I just type it out. Or I have, like a some kind of like CTA, but that’s what Demio does, and it’s- the conversion rates are really high. You know, I’ll- I’ll have like, 50 percent of people click on that. If I do, like a, ‘Hey, start your free trial!’, like, super high conversion rates of people that will click the call to action in Demio, which is cool. And I can’t do things like polls or give out handouts without it being easy.

[00:31:52.660] – Joey
Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, there’s always trade offs for- there’s no one perfect. Well, I mean, this isn’t one platform, because now you’re going to multiple platforms, so it’s not. You got limitations with all of them. Have you thought about other types of formats that would be more reaching top of funnel type people? People that aren’t current users who might not be aware of Jarvis. Have you been thinking about other types of video formats for that?

[00:32:16.920] – Austin
Yeah, for sure. So we actually hired a, like, a expert video personality, if you want to say, like, he produces his own content in his basement for us, though, and it’s super high quality. It’s witty and it’s punchy and short, but they’re going to be, like, more concise trainings. So one of the top feedback that we’ve gotten about the training that they’re just too long, at 1 hour. You know, they- they 2x speed it. It’s still 30 minutes.

[00:32:53.160] – Austin
And I’m sure you learn a lot of tips here and there, but my goal of the training is not to just be a demo of Jarvis, it’s to really get them to the end goal. Their goal is a finished blog post. Their goal is Google My Business. So I think it would be a disservice if I shared ‘Well, here’s how you use the Google My Business template.’ It’s like, okay, that’s part of it. But what is the real result they want to get? Like, make- make a Google My Business that beats your competitors in your local area and you earn all of the business, and you get at the top of search results when people search in Maps, for example. So, that’s kind of what our trainings are for, it’s to deliver real value rather than just being a demo, the technical demo of the product.

[00:33:38.680] – Austin
But people also want that, they want the short answers when they’re in the moment. So how do we give- how do we create content that is relevant at the exact moment they need it into the context of their situation, is probably inside of the software. You can probably have a play button. So, like, how do I use this? And why do I use it? You know, in the moment, rather than trying to go to our YouTube and watching. So, you know, how do we create these, like three to five minute, witty, punchy videos that create, like, great brand value and are entertaining to watch?

[00:34:17.880] – Joey
And these are kind of targeted for, like onboarding, getting people up to speed quickly using the product, yeah.

[00:34:24.050] – Austin
I think it’s also to give them confidence if they are, you know, dragging their feet on getting started because they are daunted, that they’re about to use artificial intelligence to write their copy for them. You know, that could be scary for some folks. So they want to do a little, like, due diligence. And, you know, I did this, for example, when I migrated our sites over to Webflow. I went through their University and that is actually part of the inspiration for this training content, is because they made that migration just so seamless and amazing.

[00:34:59.940] – Austin
So, yeah, that’s what I think that our future video content is going to be about, you know, and that’s more on the education side. Of course, we’ll have, like, sales videos and the things like that in the future, already created. But, yeah.

[00:35:16.110] – Joey
When you re-post- when you’re posting the videos up on YouTube, is there any YouTube specific stuff you’ve been doing as far as titles, description, SEO? Have you seen any traffic from YouTube?

[00:35:27.100] – Austin
Yeah. I mean, I would say in, it’s been six months now of having a YouTube channel. We’ve grown to like 2500 subscribers, which is pretty sweet. You know, we just basically post weekly content every Thursday. I think that’s going to grow a lot when we start promoting the YouTube live rather than our Demio opt-in. So that will be exciting. Do the classic SEO stuff, right. You want to have the keywords people are searching for in the title. Actually, I choose my titles very specifically. I have the description, you know, that is key- it’s keyword heavy, but it is not repetitive.

[00:36:14.100] – Austin
So, you know, talks about their desires, talks about their fears, introduces the expert. Why are they an expert in relation to this subject? And then, of course, you have to have all of the mentioned tools and then all of the call to actions. And then I have like a set of hashtags, or what are they called? They’re basically hashtags-

[00:36:39.630] – Joey
Ah yes. Keywords?

[00:36:39.630] – Austin
Yeah, keywords, right? That- I think you could put up, like, five or ten. So that’s what I do. I do it on all of them. I took, like, Sunny Lenarduzzi’s course on YouTube SEO a couple of years ago, and that’s still- those little, like, nuances are what stuck with me.

[00:36:57.130] – Joey
Now, are you using Jarvis to write out your descriptions? Are you feeding it stuff, or are you just doing this from hand?

[00:37:04.230] – Austin
Pretty much. I’ll just tell Jarvis the title and I’ll have it write the YouTube description. But I’ll make sure that sometimes I have to do some editing because I know what the- the actual person, the expert talked about, and what also got responses. So, I sometimes will end up changing the title after the production. So, like in the beginning sell it is one thing, but then come to find out, people were here for the training for a different reason, and I’ll make that the headline point. And my original idea is the sub headline.

[00:37:40.140] – Joey
So, is that sort of based on the webinar or- or the training was going, the live training was going, and then you saw, like, a spike in people sharing comments and being like, ‘Oh, that’s awesome!’ Or- okay. So that’s- that’s also, I guess another awesome reason for having that for live streams where you can really get that, since that real time feedback of what people responded to.

[00:37:59.070] – Austin
Yeah, we- something I learned from the Go Live expert. Molly Montgom- Molly- oh, my gosh. I’m so sorry, Molly, if you’re listening to this. But go look up on- on the Academy and you’ll find her. She’s- but she taught me whenever you’re going live, you want to have a Molly Mahoney. Molly Mahoney is The Go Live expert. And she recommended that whenever you’re throughout the webinar, she introduces everybody and says, ‘Hey, if you get a gold nugget, I want you to hashtag nugget and then tell me what just stood out to you.’ And so that is a really cool way to go back and look at the comment thread later on and see what resonated with people.

[00:38:50.060] – Austin
And then you can always like, go back and retweet that or- or highlight that person even throughout the webinar. And I plan on doing this now with Restream. It’s like, if somebody hashtags nugget, I could just bring them on screen and showcase their. I can overlay that comment and show everybody, ‘Hey, this person took away a golden nugget!’

[00:39:10.630] – Joey
Yeah, that’s an- yeah, it’s an excellent tip. And I feel like another great way to, like, get that real time feedback and then apply. So you’re also- because you focus a lot of time on the title, and your video titles are very kind of specific on, like, the output that you’ll get from this. Is that sort of something that you’re trying to focus on when you write the titles?

[00:39:28.980] – Austin
Yeah. I mean, ultimately it’s like also an SEO play for us to rank. You know, I would love to be at the top of, you know, how to create a great blog post, you know. It’s like, all of these, like, very hard to get keywords. But as we continue building that, I’m setting my seeds. So, you know, recording content, getting it transcribed, and then eventually, like, we’ll create more and more formats of that. We’re just, you know, only a team of seven people. So it’s not like we can. You know, ‘Oh, we don’t have an endless amount of time.’ But I try to do the things in the most effective way with the time I do have. And so, yeah, focusing a lot on the title, and the first few sentences in the description are our key.

[00:40:17.990] – Joey
Yeah, yeah. Okay. And so I did say at the beginning I had Jarvis write some questions out. So, one of those questions was ‘What was your biggest learning moment about hosting videos online?’ That was an AI generated question.

[00:40:31.860] – Austin
Biggest learning moment from hosting? Honestly, it is- so- in when I was 24, I’m 28 now. So four years ago, I- I recorded 120 hours of content. The year before, I had recorded, like, 1 hour of content. And so I just remember that year, it was a hard year, kind of at the end I kind of felt burnt out. But, you know, all- like, hundred recording- being on camera for hundreds of hours. You just get comfortable in front of the camera. It stops becoming irky. And I think you just gotta roll with the process.

[00:41:12.360] – Austin
Enjoy the process. And, like, just kind of commit to a specific period of time. I did twelve months. I’m like, hey, I’m going to do this for twelve months minimum, and I’m going to learn about audio, color grading, visual effects, editing styles. I started studying, you know, all of the top people, like Casey Neistat, like, you know, trying to find a style that meets my style. And like, how do I want it- you know, I look at movies differently now. I look at, you know, all these production qualities. Like, I appreciate your production quality. I understand how you thought about setting the scene-

[00:41:50.380] – Joey
Thank you.

[00:41:50.380] – Austin
You know, and the, when we did our podcast, that was the next year. So first year was like a year of video. The next year was a year of podcast. And we got our Scale or Die podcast up for seven weeks in a row as the New and Noteworthy for tech and apps.

[00:42:04.970] – Joey
That’s awesome.

[00:42:06.620] – Austin
And so, it was, you know, that learning lesson as well, doing 25 episodes of that. And what I- what I like personally doing – this is an Austin thing, but I like having a finite period of time, so I like to do seasons. I don’t like an ever – ongoing, endless treadmill of content, because it’s- it’s just daunting to me. So I’d like to say, ‘Hey, season one, we’re going to focus on this. Here’s, you know, the topics that we’re going to talk about. So, like the SEO series, or the- the Ad series. So yeah, I like- I think people appreciate that, too.

[00:42:46.980] – Austin
And- and you can even- what we do is we do a series and, you know, batch now. So we’ll try and batch as many as we can for podcasts, put them all together in like, a week or two, and then drip those out for six months.

[00:43:00.210] – Joey
Yeah. I think that’s a good tactic. Batching, and yeah, I mean, that’s a good- that’s also just a good mental way to look at it for- for seasons, instead of, like, ‘I’m going to start a podcast. Oh, my God. How am I going to do 100 episodes? What am I going to talk about.’ If it’s okay, I’ll just do a season of ten episodes and that’s a bit more manageable, and then you do it. And then I guess that’s where either could be an end, because you said you’re going to do a season of ten episodes or you continue when you shift focus and do another season. When you said you were recording for 100 hours, what were you recording? Just stuff for your YouTube channel?

[00:43:31.690] – Austin
Yeah, basically, we- we had a membership called the Entrepreneur Alliance. It was a paid membership where they got- for $30 a month, they get, like, online marketing, tutorials and trainings where I would like, pull my friends in the room and say, you know, ‘Hey, you know, how- how’d you go- grow Dollar Beard Club, you know, so fast? Show me the actual funnel metrics and the ad creative that’s working for you. So like, just doing that, it’s a video training. It’s kind of what we’re doing here. It’s kind of prepared me for what we’re doing with Jarvis, similar kind of content.

[00:44:08.800] – Austin
But also, like, I would make it more robust, include a lot of swipe files and giveaways and all of that. So that was what the 100 hours of- of recorded content was.

[00:44:22.560] – Joey
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well, I want to be respectful your time, so you know, we’ve been talking for a while, so I really appreciate it. Thank you, Austin! Yeah. Do you want to share where people can go learn more about you and about Jarvis?

[00:44:34.960] – Austin
Yeah. So they can learn more about me at www.distel.com D-I-S-T-E-L I mostly talked about, like, Jarvis a little bit, mostly like, travel hacking. It’s like, a passion of mine. So I go- I’m here in Austin for three weeks every month, and then I go either out of the city or out of the country for a week every month. And then let’s see, I also talk a lot about subscriptions. So, I wrote this book called Subscription Secrets, and it is my insights on the subscription economy and actually a tactical way to get your first thousand raving fans that are paying you monthly.

[00:45:23.000] – Austin
And so it’s something that I- I very much believe in. And that’s why I wrote the book alongside with Jarvis, actually. So Jarvis wrote part of the book, and I thought that was pretty cool.

[00:45:34.890] – Joey
That’s awesome – was this part of the- the seven day book writing – jarvis, I know that someone the community has a seven day book writing course for using Jarvis.

[00:45:43.240] – Austin
Yeah. Darby Rollins helped me write it. Jarvis, and so he basically helped extract my knowledge about the subscription economy, put it into a timeline as series. You know, here’s the chapters. Then we use Jarvis to pull in, like, kind of industry information and stories. So if I’m like, ‘Hey, I want to include the story of how Netflix grew’- like, ‘what’s the origination story behind Netflix.’ And so like, Jarvis can help expand upon that. And there’s, of course, editing and all of that. So it’s a pretty easy read. It’s like, a hundred and- it’s like a hundred pages.

[00:46:26.450] – Joey
Cool. And I’ll link to it in the show notes. Is there any overlap, anything you want to share from the book, that any overlap between getting your first thousand subscribers and video or any- anything you want to share in- in regards to have an overlap?

[00:46:39.980] – Austin
So, we have used the same one- I think it’s a 40 second video, as our sales video, for the past seven months. We have epically high conversion rates on our site, and I don’t talk about the product all that much. I highlight our customer reactions to the product. And the way I got those reactions, those sound bites or video bytes, is when we onboard it. So we had- we did this founder-member launch or, like, an early access launch of Jarvis. And it was like, every day we would let in, like, ten people.

[00:47:23.220] – Austin
And so, that really built up a lot of hype and a lot of demand for it, which is cool. But then that also allowed our team to individually onboard and welcome new users on Zoom. And then we recorded all of it, and we used Grain.co- I think it’s called? It’s like- it’s a Zoom extension plug in. And so what it allows you to do is allows you to kind of, like, highlight bits and pieces from the Zoom and export them as individual clips and transcribes them. So you can actually highlight the words.

[00:48:04.610] – Austin
And then it’ll chop the video where those words are. So I can, like, highlight a testimonial, and then it’ll export that testimonial from the video. And so- then I just stitched together all of our best testimonials and made the video out of that. It was pretty easy to do, and it works really well. And so, yeah, I- I’d recommend that. I think the more that you can highlight your customer and the emotional, visceral reaction to your product and like how they describe it, listen intently to the words they use because you can use that in your copy, then it’ll- it’ll perform pretty well.

[00:48:47.090] – Austin
I- I can’t imagine a world in which if you use customers voices and testimonials, it won’t perform well. Like, I don’t- that would never match up to me. So I think it’s a pretty sure fire way to at least create a great attention-grabbing moment for prospects.

[00:49:04.800] – Joey
I think it’s also just a great way to add social proof as well. And you’re just getting that on video. And another video way to get social proof. But that- that’s a great tip. So thank you.

[00:49:14.400] – Austin
Yeah.

[00:49:16.110] – Joey
Thanks so much, Austin. Really appreciate it.

[00:49:17.960] – Austin
Yeah. Glad to help, guys. And look forward to see you on the inside of Jarvis. Come on into the Facebook community and say Hi.

[00:49:25.480] – Joey
Thank you.