- Duration: 57 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JVAVD58TKGJ2SNMA931EM8K4 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JVAVD58TKGJ2SNMA931EM8K4)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: There was that one guy, I forget his name. This was like maybe a year or two ago. He built a bot that looked at everyone’s social handles and also their email addresses, if it could find them. And it then inferred what their Calendly link would be and made a search database of like anyone that was actually correct. Oh my God, that’s crazy. [Devan Sood]: Crazy, wow. Wow. That is quite the hack. When I was in college, I discovered a similar hack where if you, when somebody, this is, I think it’s still true, so be careful. When somebody signs up for an event using your calendar link, it automatically marks them as going. Right. Have to re-go in. So if you were to put somebody else’s email into your calendar, it would show up on their calendar as going. Yeah, I’m pretty sure that would still work, right? [Michael Houck]: Because the UI is, you can read anyone’s email. [Devan Sood]: Yeah, me and my friend almost got on a call with Mark Cuban for 10 minutes before he rejected the invite. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: It was a good time. [Devan Sood]: Back in college, you know. I mean, hey, do it today. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: You know, who cares? [Devan Sood]: Yeah, dude. [Devan Sood]: I mean, that’s that’s one way to get in. I can tell you that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Yeah. I feel like one out of every 10 of those, you might actually get the call. [Devan Sood]: Yeah. I bet you’re right. I bet you’re right. [Michael Houck]: Because a lot of these guys, Mark, Mark in particular, I think is very active on his calendar. [Devan Sood]: But no, but I bet people are not. I bet people are just going when according to whatever’s on the list. [Michael Houck]: My assistant put this on here or whatever, so I must be going. [Devan Sood]: So yeah, that’s so funny. You’re probably right. Yeah. A new fundraising strategy coming soon. [Michael Houck]: That’ll be an interesting use for an investor database. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool man. [Michael Houck]: How you doing dude? I’m good. I’m in, uh, I’m in Utah right now. Hanging with the Mormons as one does. So interesting. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’m in Provo, like actually with the Mormons. [Michael Houck]: Oh, wow, you actually are. Yeah, that’s crazy. [Devan Sood]: What was the impetus to go out there? Oh, I’ve been nomading for like, five months. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, been all over. [Michael Houck]: So I don’t know, like, I’m looking for the new home base. [Michael Houck]: And I’m not LDS. But I have some friends who are And so they invited me out and it’s really nice here, honestly. Yeah, I bet. [Devan Sood]: I’ve heard it’s beautiful, actually. I’ve never actually been, but I’ve heard it’s nice. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, I think, I don’t know if I could live here because I, as someone who is not LDS, like you’re just 90% of the people, you know? [Devan Sood]: Yeah, surrounded. Yeah. It’s like, it’s like being in SF and not being in tech, like kind of feel bad. But I’m glad that you’re here. My friend bought a place in Salt Lake City and has been telling me, oh, you’ve got to come out. I’ve got an extra room, blah, blah, blah. I just haven’t made my way out there yet. But I have a really nice place. He’s a heavy skier. So he’s there mainly for the skiing. [Michael Houck]: He’s on the basketball team, that’s for sure. They suck. Yeah. [Devan Sood]: Well, I would hope not. Yeah. Um, yeah, he loves it. He like is living his life. That’s dope. Yeah, I can see it. [Michael Houck]: I mean, it’s, it’s a good place. I’ve been around here. I’ve been in salt Lake. I’ve been to park city for Sundance one year. Like there’s stuff to do, but yeah, I think longterm, I don’t know. I’m leaning towards Charleston right now, but we’ll see where, where we go. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: South Carolina. [Devan Sood]: Interesting. [Devan Sood]: Been to Charleston once, South Carolina. It was interesting. I mean, I just drove through. I flew into Greenville, and we just drove through Charleston for like a quick minute. So I didn’t get a chance to see it too much. But my experience of outside, the outskirts of South Carolina, It was like his first Gary very quickly. And, uh, and like to stay in the city. That’s my recollection. [Michael Houck]: Greenville is beautiful. [Michael Houck]: I was up there for a bit too. Very, uh, very nice little downtown they have. Um, but no, Charleston’s great, man. Um, well, great weather, good people. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I don’t know. Nice. [Michael Houck]: We’ll see. What’s new. What’s going on. [Devan Sood]: I’m the blind man. So I launched this video thing a couple months ago, I think two months ago now. And like two weeks in, I fell through this deep rabbit hole and was not intending to build something that was like, you know, billion dollar outcome intended VC route. Like I was not planning do that at this moment. But the thing I landed on just felt like, maybe you’ve seen this, a lot of the top founders I’ve interacted with, the best founders in the world, the commonality that a lot of them have is they feel like they’re working on their life’s work. The thing that they’re doing is so them that probably only You know what I mean? [Michael Houck]: That’s required. Yeah. That’s how I felt early days with Launch House before my co-founders even felt that way. Yeah. And with what I’m doing now, it’s a good business, but I don’t see it in the same way. [Devan Sood]: Yeah. And so yeah, so then you totally understand because I fell down this rabbit hole, landed on something, and I was like, holy shit. Can’t not try this like I can’t I I would be an injustice to me and the world to not go do this. I love that so, um, so I kind of Fallen down that um, I started, you know, four or five weeks ago I’m like almost done with my view ones like very close like 70 80 done nice and um, just moved to san francisco last week I’m in North Beach right now. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Nice. [Devan Sood]: Yeah, really sick co-living house and it’s a grind but you know, it’s fun and Yeah, dude, it’s I feel like I’m adapting to SF still, you know the kind of you know, I feel like living here is like It’s like living and breathing and sleeping the exciting, I don’t want to say work, because it’s not all work, but it’s like the exciting part of the work, like the innovation part of the work, and like that energy and everybody’s doing something really incredible, like that whole kind of vibe. I love being in the middle of that. So I’m excited to be back. This is the first time. As I said, this is the first time I’ve ever actually like lived in SF. So this is like I’m getting to experience that for the first time. So it’s pretty cool. [Michael Houck]: That’s dope, man. Is a is a very unique and great place. You know, it has its problems for sure. [Devan Sood]: But yeah, you know, it’s getting better. I will say. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was just here six months ago and I feel like things are already changing. [Michael Houck]: It’s pretty crazy. Hmm. That’s interesting. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Pretty impressive. [Michael Houck]: I mean, it had been like that for like 10 years, so it’s about time. Yeah. Yeah. [Devan Sood]: Good to know. I mean, I’m talking about it with some people that know what they’re talking about cause I don’t. And I guess they’re talking it up to the new mayor who came in like three, four months ago. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Who’s the new mayor? [Devan Sood]: I think his name is Daniel Lurie, if I’m not mistaken. [Michael Houck]: They had the same optimism about the last one because I lived there during the last mayoral change. But she ended up not making as much progress as I think people thought she would. Yeah. [Devan Sood]: I think there was a lot of momentum and activation behind this movement. Interesting, look up this guy. Yeah, yeah, check it out. [Michael Houck]: Good stuff though, I will say. [Michael Houck]: So, okay, so what’s the, what have the four or five weeks been like, [Devan Sood]: Like, what’s, what are you building? So, I am building AI marketing employees. Have you heard of Devan from Cognition. Totally. I’m building Devan for marketing. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so like for specific marketing problems or just like generalized marketing? [Devan Sood]: The idea is I’m going to build an army of specialized marketing agents that are employed by a CMO agent that can go work for any company and knows exactly how to do everything at the top percentile skill level. I love that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That’s killer. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that’s gonna be insane, dude. [Devan Sood]: Insane. What’s the first piece that you’re gonna launch? Yeah, so first one is an influencer marketing manager. It works for your brand, sits near Slack, feels like a human, you can ask it questions and stuff, but it can autonomously strategize, source, email, negotiate, execute, and analyze an influencer campaign. [Michael Houck]: There’s a lot of the influencer campaign work is actually just like coordination and ops and like sharing this piece of data with a bunch of manual bullshit. [Devan Sood]: Yeah. Yeah. And right now like you basically got three options. You can go to an agency where you can overpay. You can go to like one of the platforms where you know it’s a double option. In marketplace where like influencer sign up and you sign up and you can like negotiate on the platform, right? Um, or you can just like manually look which takes forever manual deals and Um, you’re not gonna look you’re not gonna find everybody So our agent takes a totally top-down new approach It goes through 10 000 profiles to find the best 10. You know what I mean? Um, it’s it’s like going through all of the engagement data And it just can do so much more, so much better, so much faster than we can do it. So it’s doing a lot of the heavy lifting. [Michael Houck]: And then does it, it reaches out proactively and like it chooses the best path and is like sort of relentless and it’s kept calm? Yes, I mean, it acts like an employee, right? [Devan Sood]: So it lets you know, hey, I found these options, here are the ones I think are good. And then you can say, okay, I like this one and this one, go for it, reach out to them. And then it’ll reach out to them. It’ll go back and forth and I’ll say, okay, here’s the final rate I agreed upon. Does it sound good to you? And you just keep going just like a normal employee would that is super cool. I love it. Yes. [Michael Houck]: Yeah It’s the shit you can do now. It’s just absolutely nuts dang Well, that’s dope Thank you. I was so I was My POV has basically been, until I think recently, I’ve been a little skeptical that a lot of the stuff people would be building would actually like save time versus add time, even if it would take like traditional tasks off their plate, you’d end up having to do so much optimization and reprompting and all this stuff that it would just end up taking nearly the same time. But I think that like, with the way with the quality models are now and all but also with like the workflow workflows that have emerged and can be pretty standardized. I think you actually can do it now. [Devan Sood]: Yeah, totally. And you can go, I mean, the fact that you can go back and forth and make adjustments and ask questions and be random, have a side tangent and then have to go back on topic and handle all that out of the box is really insane, dude. [Michael Houck]: Dang. Well, look, I mean, keep me in the loop. We definitely we don’t run a ton of influencer campaigns for ourselves, but we have started running them for our users on Megaphone. Nice. So maybe there’s a way for us to do this would basically do the job for you. [Devan Sood]: I imagine that there will also be agencies that offer this as a service and just add a human layer on top of the spot. Well, I mean, that’s what I’m thinking. [Michael Houck]: Like we’d pay you for the tool and we’d resell it to our existing clients and users. Totally dude. Yeah, you’re welcome to do that. [Devan Sood]: I would love to have you as a tester for that if you’re down for that. I would love to do that because we’re trying to think what the best way to do this is. [Michael Houck]: And right now we’re like, you know, we’ll optimize the UI, but we’ll still need to get buy-in on both sides and share back and forth. It just, it seems like it’s going to be a little bit of a headache. So I’d much rather have an agent just handle all that stuff. [Devan Sood]: Yeah, dude, it’s pretty magical. I mean, can I share my screen? Do you have a second to check out? Go for it. Wood loves you. It’s pretty insane, dude. [Michael Houck]: Oh, this is my guy, Mark. [Michael Houck]: You named him Mark? [Michael Houck]: Yes, Mark the marketer. [Devan Sood]: Oh, man. He looks a lot like Mark S. From Severance. You can tell it’s not him, but it’s certainly not him. It kind of looks like Bob, too. Yeah, I kind of see that, yeah. OK, so yeah, you can ask, what is an influencer? You can ask it questions. You can ask it, are influencers are you good at finding influencers? Okay, wonderful. Let’s see if it knows. Oh, it knows. Yeah, so that’s exactly right. We’ve set it up to specialize on YouTube creators. YouTube seems to be like the hardest platform to crack for a lot of influencer campaigns. [Devan Sood]: Yeah, you can’t DM them like you can. [Devan Sood]: DMing is hard, searching for creators and categories is hard, assessing their data. It is more difficult. There’s actually more hurdles, but it’s a very powerful platform. It works B2C. It works B2B. There’s so many things that it’s applicable for. So starting on YouTube, that’s kind of how we’re starting. So let’s make a new campaign for Megaphone. They help brands, creators, amplify. Social posts with influencer mentions. What else do you need to know? Okay, great. All right, yes. 10K, 10 influencers. Starts tomorrow last two weeks. No specific goals, but looking for creators that other creators follow. Great. Might have to have social distancing. Yep, yep, yep. Everything looks good Yes find creators Okay, so now let’s do this thing, uh, it’s gonna take a second But he’s gonna come back having gone through Right now it’ll probably go through like a thousand different options And I think I said 10 so come back It should come back with 10 to 20. It’s possible. It comes back with like five because it’s how it’s set up right now Sure, the idea is that it comes back with like the exact number or more to give you some options And then you can choose. Okay, I really like this one this one this one and then you just tell it and it just starts emailing it goes back and forth, it updates you when it has an update, and it acts just like a normal employee would. [Michael Houck]: Interesting. Yeah, I mean, I feel like this would save me from like, I could do this in five minutes, whereas I would have had to have a person on the team go and spend hours doing this. [Devan Sood]: 100%. This used to take me, a top marketer, days And so, you know if we’re doing this in like a few minutes now It’s just like totally different Totally different, uh possibilities open up Yeah, look for more but show me john Gosh. Send me the link. Oh, this is a challenge one. I don’t know if it’s going to look for more first or send me the link first. We’re both. Yeah, interesting. Interesting challenge. We’ll see what it does. But yeah, you can just go back and forth with it. You can adjust. You can tell it, no, I want this type of creator more. You can have it go look at, specific types of verticals. I mean, you can, it’s dope. It’s insane. It’s insane. [Devan Sood]: How, and you’ve only spent a couple of weeks on this, which is the crazy part. [Devan Sood]: This is five weeks. This is, yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, I think it’s super cool because it’s very clear. Like, okay. I think what you’re going to run into is like, do you build Mark indefinitely? Like does Mark become a business? Around himself or do you go and build sort of other marketers like an SEO marketer or you know whatever? [Devan Sood]: I think ultimately Mark is the CMO and he can call every sub-agent underneath him that has expertise in those specific things. So if he has access to the SEO expert he has access to the influencer expert and he can do all of them at the right times. [Michael Houck]: I’m laughing because that’s like literally how you would build a team. You have one guy, a senior guy, he knows how to do everything a little bit, then he hires a specialist. [Devan Sood]: Exactly. Exactly. That’s why I say when I open up, I’m like, yeah, I’m building AI marketing employees, because it literally is like just going down the stack and like augmenting 10x and replacing however you want to look at it. It’s not like that. [Michael Houck]: What’s your what I mean, I just I assume you’re going to raise for it. [Devan Sood]: What’s your timeline? So I’m showing my face around the city right now. That’s partially what I’m doing here. I want to do two things. One, I want to see if there’s anybody that will preempt something bigger that I can do. So I was talking to somebody at DST who’s very who’s trying to make intros for customers for me. Things like that would be huge. I know some folks over there. [Michael Houck]: Who are you working with over there? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, his name is Anubhav. [Michael Houck]: I don’t think I know Anubhav. No, I don’t know him. [Devan Sood]: I think he’s only been there like four or five months, I want to say. But I met him, there was an event where the managing, what’s his name? Managing director, oh my gosh, it’s really gonna bother me, what’s his name? DST. Swarub. Swarub Gupta. He was giving a talk at PAIR. And I know some folks over there, so I went to talk to him. The talk, got to ask my question, and the way I introduced myself was, I’m building AI marketing employees. And so, Anubhav came up to me afterwards, he was like, hey, I heard you’re doing AI marketing, I’m very interested. Ended up chatting for like 45 minutes, he gave me his number. I was like, oh, do you know, I literally said the same thing to him, I was like, do you know Devon? We’re building marketing for Devon. He goes, oh yeah, I know them, we’re an investor. And I was like, oh. [Michael Houck]: I would love to talk to them, because like, you know, Kind of did what we’re trying to do and he’s like, oh actually they do a lot of influencer marketing So I’m like happy to make the introduction like whenever you’re ready and I was like, okay like All right soon Literally this morning I had um, I was catching up with uh with tim draper Uh nice And he was saying that because he knows that we do a lot of stuff with creators and with people who are interested in influencer marketing and stuff Um, and he was saying that they’re looking at some some things in the sort of AI marketing space as well. I’d be happy to connect you guys, probably to Andy on his team, who’s like his only other GP on the fund. We’d love to. Yeah, I’d love to. [Devan Sood]: I’d love to meet everyone. In fact, like one of the things I’m asking everybody while I’m out here that I should ask you, I can’t believe I haven’t yet, is like, please introduce me to the three smartest people you can think of in SF. You will not believe it. I met the coolest people by asking that question. And yeah, make the interest. I mean, I can I can definitely send me something I can forward over to. [Michael Houck]: And then do you know, do you know Dave Fontenot? Yeah, I met him a couple of times. [Devan Sood]: Really cool guy. Yeah, he’s cool, dude. He’s smart guy, too. Yeah. I don’t think that they’re doing a new batch right now. [Michael Houck]: But probably over the summer, they will. [Devan Sood]: So I mean, we’ll work No, that kind of is my timing. [Devan Sood]: So right now my estimation is be done in May. For June and July, just catch traction. August, I don’t think anybody will be around, so it’ll probably just be a traction month also. But August, September is kind of when I intend to enter fundraising mode. And hopefully by then I have enough valid traction to do it on my terms. And the goal is actually to go pretty big pretty quickly because there’s two other companies that have already raised around in the space, not released the public product yet. I can’t tell you what it is, but I know that they’re going to be, you know, we’re fighting and I would rather be cursor than Windsor, if that makes sense. [Michael Houck]: 100% makes sense. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Okay. [Michael Houck]: Well, yeah, look, I can, I mean, you know, I’ll intro to Tim and Andy and we’ll see if they’re excited, but I’ll hook you up. That’s good, dude. And then I’ll think of some more people, too, because we’d love to help support. [Devan Sood]: I appreciate that, dude. Yeah, we just applied to Speedrun in case you didn’t know anybody there. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh, yeah. [Devan Sood]: Andrew was our investor at Andreessen. Oh, OK. So I sent Andrew a note because I’m obsessed with him. And I obviously saw the Vibe marketing article, and I am just so obviously aligned with that so I sent him a note I was like dude you’ve taught me so much and now I’m literally building the thing that you and I could not agree on more and he actually got back to me and he was like oh this is cool I will make sure the team sees it so maybe uh send send him a note on me that might help uh more than anything yeah I am I’ll I’ll shoot him a little whatsapp later just saying that you’re sick and uh yeah okay That’d be really dope. I appreciate that, dude. [Michael Houck]: Of course, man. If you do open up a safe, also, let me know. I’m just writing small checks. [Devan Sood]: I’m going to do a little family and friends thing, I think, later this month, so I’ll keep you in the loop on that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. We’re probably going to raise a new fund later this year, probably end of the year. It takes a while to raise a fund, so probably realistically into H1 next year. So I’m trying to write small checks until then, just because I need to anchor the fund. But yeah, I would love to be part of it for sure. [Devan Sood]: Love it. Love it. [Michael Houck]: Definitely will keep you in the loop on that, man. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Um, cool. Yes, video, dude. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So video and also would love if you could give me Oh, dude, let me show you. [Devan Sood]: Let me fucking show you this shit. You are gonna get a crack out of this. All right. So I was just doing this for a new company I just signed on. Where do I start with you? OK, so this table is basically extracted videos of posts that I am then dissecting into each part of the script. I’m taking the actual video, in case I have a model one day that can understand the video. And then basically what I’ll do, so for a brand I signed on recently, these were the creators they said they wanted to emulate. They want to go after people like this, and they want to talk like Huberman, they want to talk like Sahil. I took a bunch of posts from all of these creators, which, by the way, is just hilariously easy also. The way I did that, because we’re in Airtable. Airtable has a little clipper tool where I can I can literally just click a button and it sends it to this table. It sends this link over, and then in here I’ve got a couple of automations. So as soon as I get the new record, I’m downloading all of the media from the social media post, no matter what platform it’s from, through an API. Then I’m taking the video that I extracted, running it through Whisper to extract the text, and then running that transcript through another model that’s been trained to identify a hook, a value, and a call to action. So it’s basically taking the media and then dissecting it all the way down to its specific parts. And then what I’ll do is I’ll take all of these scripts, so 80, 90, 100 scripts pretty easily. I can do that in a couple hours. Um take all these scripts feed it into another model actually what I’ll do is I’ll give it to a pro reasoning model So now I’m on the you know gpt pro level tier and I get access to o1 pro and o1 pro is really good at doing this where I tell it like Here are a bunch of scripts that are emulating people that I want to write scripts like you’re an expert script writer create a characterization of how to write scripts like these what makes a good script include examples, blah, blah, blah. And then I come back to my back end, where I’ve stored all my clients, and each client gets their own master prompt. So for example, the one I think I just created this one. So I gave it all of those scripts, and then it specifically goes into how to write each of these things, and how to emulate those specific people for that specific audience. And some of these you’ll see like, I’ll give it like, here, like, I literally give it examples of what is a good hook, what is a good call to action. And then it can take whatever idea that I’m using, and try to emulate in the same style as the things that I’ve trained it on. [Michael Houck]: One quick question. It’s crazy to see this all happen on Airtable like this, because what I’ve been doing is writing these basically clawed project docs that are very long and very detailed. I’ve been spending my time to do that, right? That’s crazy, dude. I know, it’s nuts. The reason I was doing that was because I feel like if you’re… How do you get it to not overfit? So, for example, if you’re like, these are examples of good hooks, and like two of those hooks talk about cheese, then the hooks that output will, you know, 40% of them will talk about cheese or something like that. [Devan Sood]: Right. So I’m not telling it, give me the exact hooks and write them word for word. I’m telling, I’m asking the pro model, the reasoning models to help me identify why those are good hooks and then use that reasoning to inform and the smaller model on how to write the right hooks. Does that make sense? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it does make sense. Basically, you’re asking it a higher order question and then having the output of that inform the execution of the cheaper model. Exactly. [Devan Sood]: And the reason that giving the smaller model a bunch of examples alongside that reasoning is so that they can identify the reasoning and then have examples of that reasoning action, not necessarily as, oh, I’m going to pull these few words from those, but more so of like proof of why the reasoning works. [Michael Houck]: Got it. That makes sense. [Devan Sood]: Yeah. It’s kind of a nuance between giving it a bunch of words and being like, write like this versus giving a much smarter, much larger model, the same words and being like, teach another model how to write like this. Right. Right. [Michael Houck]: Interesting. By giving it more authority, you sort of force it to be smarter about what it’s pulling off. [Devan Sood]: And there’s some like manual adjustments that you have to make, but on 90% it is incredible. [Michael Houck]: I can’t believe we did all this in Airtable too. [Devan Sood]: Like we were, we’ve been looking at. [Devan Sood]: Airtable is absolutely ridiculous. If I showed you how this whole thing operates, my entire video agency runs off of this Airtable backend. So every perspective idea gets assigned to the client, every completed video gets stored in here, every client gets their own templates and voice IDs and master prompts that all gets pulled, and Airtable’s being used as my backend, so it all gets pulled live into my frontend development internal tool. So I mean, it’s just, it’s crazy. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that’s nuts. Yeah, we were looking at like, like Lindy, you know, like the workflow tool. [Devan Sood]: I almost went there as head of marketing, dude. [Michael Houck]: Oh, no way. That’s cool. Yeah. Yeah. It seems, it seems like a pretty good, pretty good tool. We’ve been underrated. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I talked to Greg Eisenberg like a week or two, I guess two weeks ago now. And he was saying that he has totally automated, like a hundred percent automated his SEO agency with Lindy. That’s crazy. [Devan Sood]: I believe it 100%. The boring marketer guy does the sales calls and then literally everything else is automated. [Michael Houck]: That’s sick. [Devan Sood]: I’m trying to do that to my mom’s business right now, but damn, so much friction when you’re fighting an uphill battle with somebody who does not want to change. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I feel that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I feel like SEO agency is probably pretty easy to do it for relative to like, it feels like it. [Devan Sood]: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a good, you know, it’s this whole, this whole, this idea of doing that is coming. It’s, it’s this close for so many different people, like normal normies don’t understand. And I feel like I’m on crazy pills sometimes because I’m like living in a completely different world. You know what I mean? [Michael Houck]: Part of me is I should cash out from the ghostwriting agency and build a new content agency and do the same thing, but just fully automated from ground zero with AI. Because I think it’d be harder to retrofit the existing thing and loop out the rest. [Devan Sood]: Actually, I’ll play devil’s advocate for that, because I think I would push back. I think that When everybody has access to the same tools, you are asked to differentiate yourself. And in a services business, it’s going to come down to the humans who are operating that business. So rather than like, oh, just build it from the ground up with AI, I think actually you should figure out how to use the current existing tools as the highest lever possible for your humans and make them 10x faster and better and smarter and more creative and blah, blah, blah. And that should be the differentiator rather than like, we’re cheap and do it quick. Because everybody will be able to do it cheap and quick. [Michael Houck]: Right, but I guess the way I’m thinking about it is like, I agree with that. The way I’m thinking about it is we have like, you know, we have our editor-in-chief and we have like maybe two writers who we think are like amazing. And then we have like five more writers who we think are like very good. Yeah. So maybe what we do is I feel like it’d be easier to get the win and then make the team smaller, just raise the quality bar for being on the team, basically. And just instead of integrating AI into our existing workflows, just build a system that they can use to serve their clients. I don’t know. [Devan Sood]: No, I think you’re onto something there. There’s gotta be something that, and these tools, you can build custom tooling now that’s just so easy to do. It’s a crazy time, man. [Michael Houck]: It’s a crazy time, it is. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Where are the moats? [Michael Houck]: I still think about it. [Devan Sood]: I asked the DST guy that, because he’s an investor in Cursor too. I was like, what is the moat? And he’s like, every line of code that somebody writes in Cursor, Makes the next line better. And so you build a data flywheel and that can be a remote that you rely on forever As long as you have that data flywheel Right. I’m like, okay, like I guess for for the first mover that’ll work Uh, nobody else has that advantage right that they all kind of lose out because the data flywheel is a winner takes most kind of uh effect, but um So what about everybody else. And I think that’s what you’re saying. Windsurf is getting acquired and Bolt and the others are kind of going more consumer-y and you know, everybody’s kind of splitting off now because this realization is happening. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, and also I think it lengthens the time to really see the benefit of that. Like, you know, if Datafly whale is the moat, then you’re not going to accrue any real advantage there for, in some cases, years, right? It depends how quickly it grows. But it could be very tumultuous until that point. Totally, totally. Interesting. Oh, yeah, I mean, we’ll see. [Devan Sood]: It is a crazy time. It is a crazy time, I will say. Crazy time. [Devan Sood]: Well, cool, man. [Michael Houck]: Look, I appreciate you showing me under the hood. Yeah. I guess, yeah, I mean, what should we do here? What are you thinking? [Devan Sood]: Yeah, so I mean, if you want to test out your own video your own avatar I think that’s a great idea um like seems like a no-brainer for what you’re trying to build also and then if you want to offer this up as a part of your agency like another offering definitely more than welcome to white label it I’m like pretty amenable to you know something whatever fair agreement we can find I’m like I haven’t done this before with anybody else so I’m pretty flexible What are you pricing right now? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: It’s like $3,500 a month or something? [Devan Sood]: Yeah, so actually I just reduced a little bit. So right now I'm pricing right around $100 a video. So $3,000 for 30 videos, somewhere there. And then if you want fewer videos, I’ll try to do a little bit more. If you want more videos, I’ll try to do a little bit less. But it’s kind of the average. [Michael Houck]: OK, cool. [Michael Houck]: We can probably figure something out then. I’ll think about it more and I’ll send you some thoughts. [Devan Sood]: Cool. Sounds good. Yeah, let me know. And yeah, if you want to get started on your avatar, we can do that too. [Michael Houck]: Just keep me in the loop. Yeah, I think probably yes, because I’ve been inactive on social for like, honestly, in terms of regularly posting, really like two years, which is crazy to think about. Yeah. But I just started posting daily again. So would love for it to be a major part of that. [Devan Sood]: For sure. And especially like LinkedIn Twitter both pushing video. Hello right now, so it’s a good time to be doing video Yeah, I’m banned on Twitter. Actually. Oh, really? What happened? [Michael Houck]: We sent too many DMS Yeah, I used a drippy, you know drippy nah, I like this AI DM tool that you can use Anyway, I used it and it was working for a bit. We got some clients from it. It was solid and But I guess I hit some threshold and no warning just cut off and I have messaged. I went through the correct like proper channels. I tried to talk to people that way. I even texted Shriram from Andreessen who’s like Elon’s homie. No dice. Damn. So I’m off Twitter for the foreseeable future. Oh, that’s booty. [Devan Sood]: I’m so sorry to hear that. [Michael Houck]: That’s absolutely Tragedy, you know, so I’m now I’m doing LinkedIn. I’m gonna do you and Threads as well. [Devan Sood]: Oh Okay, I’ll see you on threads my guy You know Facebook’s always on to something Cool. Well, yeah, definitely. Let’s do that. I would love to test it with you I think LinkedIn will be an absolute killer for you, dude. I Like I would be surprised if it did not outperform like Most other posts that you could make like that’s how good they’re getting and like that’s a powerful videos on LinkedIn right now Like I think it’s very very doable and then like what’s your what’s your plan plan for it? Like I imagine, you know if mark takes off This whole thing is AI it’s why 90% AI except for the The editing is still 100% human. And I still partner with really high quality human editors. And it still takes them multiple hours to actually get it done. That said, as soon as the editing is good enough through AI, this is a bot that’s already ready. And so I’ll basically just transfer over the tech to a back end that Mark can access. And that’s that. Cool. Okay. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I just want to make sure it wasn’t going to be something that you just sort of like let, you know, cause. [Devan Sood]: Oh no, no, no. I’m personally running this for like cashflow. Cause like I have no income right now. [Michael Houck]: So I’m surviving off of this. Um, well we can, we can help with that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, please. [Michael Houck]: Um, did you want to do ghost writing on, uh, on X or LinkedIn? Yeah. [Devan Sood]: If you’re, if you’re down, I would be down to like do a trade for, for ghost writing as well, including. And we can figure out the details and all that, but I would definitely be down to include that. [Michael Houck]: OK, cool, man. I think all sounds good on my end. So I’ll think about the white labeling stuff more. But I think probably yes, because we have clients who are already asking for this. And the ink that we used for reels and stuff before is actually more expensive than this, which is crazy. [Devan Sood]: That’s crazy. Wow. [Michael Houck]: Um, so yeah, so we’ll figure I’ll let you go. I know we’re over but um, no noise all uh, All sounds good. I’m pumped about it Hold it. [Devan Sood]: Sounds good. Yeah. Can you mean you have my number you can just text me? [Michael Houck]: I’ll make sure yeah, send me send me. I don’t think I have your number but um and then Uh, send me something I can forward over to the the draper guys because they they’re actively actively looking Yeah, we’ll do it. [Devan Sood]: I’m gonna write up like a very brief memo kind of thing and I’ll start sending that around Cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sounds good, man. Good to catch up. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, you too, dude. Good to see you. See you soon, hopefully. See you. Later. Later.