How I Run A 0-Employee Marketing Agency With AI Tools

hey everyone I just had a incredibly mind-blowing experience I just had a solo entrepreneur who's running a six figure business by themselves with AI walk me through exactly what they did the tools they use their workflow their exact prompts and their sharing it all with you that is today's show you're going to want to stick around we've got an amazing guest Barbara from startup cookie is going to walk us through everything if you're looking for inspiration for starting an AI business this is the perfect show for you let's get Today [Music] show I guess to

just kick us off like where did you get started like if you're somebody out there and you're like hey I think I want to run a solo business with AI like how do you even get started doing that and like where do you start from like a tooling and process perspective when I started this agency we uh just got Chad GPD it just launched and I was working for a YC startup as a head of content and I've been kind of struggling for a few few years just kind of managing an entire team of people

just in order to sustain like honestly a pretty mid content schedule just like your average once a week blog post social media post you know it's like creating all of that different resources I wasn't doing anything any of the content creation I was just managing people communicating with people and it cost a lot of money it took a lot of time and it wasn't the most fun work it was just managing a lot of people and when I saw what AI I could do even in the early stages if you prompted correctly I was like

wait what if I can just do this myself without hiring anyone started off pretty small but already with our first client I realized that this is completely doable and now when you just like look at the last 3 months and the improvements and things that open AI launch and everything that's kind of progressing uh in the AI world you're realizing that you can effectively scale your agency exponentially just by using these tools I love that you started the company because you had the realization that managing people that's really a horrible horrible thing to do it

is because it takes a lot of time uh now I go into Chad GPT and when it doesn't do what I say I just like turn my caps lock on and just absolutely myb exactly you don't you don't have uh you don't have all of the messiness that comes to managing humans the only thing that might be uh worse is your holiday parties might be a bit odd with just you and a bunch of Agents they're great it's just me here in the hot tub like in the mountain it's fantastic Mark andreon was on next

freedman's podcast and he talked a lot actually about the fact that he's like really excited to see when we have the first kind of companies either where the CEO is just managing a bunch of Agents or the uh agent is managing a bunch of agents and the human is supporting those agents like your your version is like hey I'm going to create a company and just have all of these agents to do these use cases and actually one of the interesting things is Sequoya had a report out recently and it showed the differences the Stark

differences in AI usage if it's built into Services versus AI usage if it's a consumer app it's actually been much more successful in Services businesses what was the very first use case content like thing you did that worked really well like what was the very first content agent you built that you were like this is actually better than a human because I feel most people's experience of content in AI is the opposite where it's like this is like much worse than the human and I actually think that comes down to being able to prompt in

tallent ly versus actually the the the AI capabilities hot take incoming here I've worked with a lot of freelance writers while I was working for startups full-time and unfortunately most startups just don't have the budget to pay the actually exceptional writers that I would still fully pay today most of them were just around $200 $300 per article and my experience was giving someone a brief extensive detail context to write a piece that piece would come back to me and I would essentially have to rewrite 60 70% of it and that was just kind of the

process and we called that efficient because we weren't willing to pay for each piece like that like if you're trying to sustain a certain schedule it's difficult to set up like a 100K a year for just like your blog to be active but it was a lot of work on my end and it just it didn't feel creative in anyway it didn't feel Innovative it was just kind of what you know the best that I could kind of get out of that quality of writer and then as soon as I tried chap gbt I was

like not only is this better than the usual draft I get delivered I can work with it and I don't have to wait two three weeks for it to be delivered to me so I can just kind of unfortunately cut out that part of waiting and communicating and putting all of this work ahead but not getting a result that I'm remotely happy with and like you mentioned it's all about the prom so the first time it clicked to me is when I started using our webinar recordings transcripts I started using that for Block post so

I was like let me see what kind of block post we get if I have this transcript and if I you know explain our brand guidelines any like writing styles what what happens when I do that and it was exponentially better uh because you had a genuine piece of content and insights and knowledge that you first gathered and then used to create a piece instead of just going into chat ggpt and prompting it write an article on this topic like we all kind of know that that just doesn't work anymore so that was the first

time that it clicked to me it's like okay if I have something to work with I can just repurpose this across different channels uh Social Media blog email we can try new growth channels like this pretty easily so it's like it's kind of endless if you have that good starting piece and honestly that's still what I do today we never start with just like prompting AI just by itself to do anything even a simplest social media Med post we always have something to start with whether it's a transcript from a webinar a podcast episode kind

of like this just download the transcript and use that I actually started my agency with a co-founder so now he's here only to interview Founders and CEOs because if they don't have a podcast if they don't have a we webinar series he just gets on a call with them and just talks about different things that they're excited about what are they building what are their views on you know AI is popular right now but like anything anything they don't want to talk about personal views hot takes anything they want to communicate but just can't do

it themselves and then we basically manage their personal accounts as well but we always start with that transcript so we have someone's actual insights and actual knowledge and we also have like you know the tone of voice the writing style the phrasing to work with so that's what you kind of need in order for the actual result to be in any way good and then of course you have to kind of fiddle with it and play with it to get it to the Quality that you want you know each founder gets one interview a month

it's an hour that's totally fine and then other companies have webinars and such that we use so that was the first time that it like clicked to me that I was like oh this is actually not only providing great results it's fun to do for both us and the companies and the founders the founders love it they're like oh my God this was like a therapy session for us like a monthly one they get to explore different topics that sometimes they don't get to explore and like product meetings because sometimes you just need to talk

through different concepts in instead of just like kind of telling your team what to do and what the next steps are you just need someone to kind of listen to you and you know kind of get that get that concept and get that product messaging out and test it and just see how it performs it's been working really great so far and as AI is getting better it's just getting easier and easier so I think that step is like if you were going to suggest how people could follow that it's really get context and the

context really matters and one of the things Kip and I were just slacking on is actually having someone interview people is a pretty good way to get additional contacts it's not available elsewhere because you get all the meeting transcripts yeah and especially if you work with uh a company for quite a while our average client has stayed with us for a year and a half already so we have a lot of content already and we have teams kind of reaching out being like especially for busy Founders you can't go and ask your Founders like hey

what's your take on this social media thing that's going around right now and we want to like create messaging around it so they often send us a message and they're like what do you think he would say to this and what would be his phrasing and then basically I just put in you know 10 20 transcript that we have from him and I just asked Chad JP I'm like did he mention this were we did we talk about this topic at all you know just like let me know and yeah then we just work with

the team as well so it's it's very interesting it's like kind of creating a Persona of someone and having that available in your chat gbt yeah we we do that both in like Claude and chat P where you can just have a project have all that context and you can kind of just interact with that project to get that Clarity right that you're looking for and so if step one is getting the context and that's either publicly available transcripts or doing those conversations and recording them like you talked about then step two is doing stuff

with it and prompting and engaging with that and we were hoping maybe you could show us some prompts like walk us through some of how you're actually doing this so that somebody who's at home they're marketer they're running an agency like hey what do I do do you want everything that Barbara is talking about in this show we've taken Barbara's insights from this episode and we've actually created this incredible full stack AI marketing toolkit just for all of you it's packed with things that you can copy and paste right away like all of the AI

prompts we talked about are loaded right down here in this guide it is packed with copy and paste ready AI prompts prompts that are going to solve your biggest marketing headaches we've included use cases customiz tips how you can do quality control so you can just like copy and paste everything into a one killer AI workflow you're going to want to get it right now it's at the link in the description below or you can scan the QR code and uh now let's get right back to Today's Show okay so I created this a while

ago just to have an overview for myself so the before is basically everyone that I had to hire when I was working as a head of content full-time I made a calculation how much that would be per year based on different salaries right now full-time freelancer obviously you don't need you know five writers full-time working for you it's more money at the end of the year than you expect it's always one of those things like oh we always have reviews we always have like another uh request for the writer and then it all adds up

and then when you introduce like SEO copywriters video editors audio editors they're all very expensive and all of their kind of like contract periods are at least six months so you're kind of you have to commit and that's a bit it's a bit difficult when you're just kind of trying to test different channels and test what content works for you if you have like a proven Channel then it's worth obviously investing in it but when you're still testing like as a startup I've only been working for startups so I'm just my mindset is very like

Scrappy I'm like how can we test this as fast as possible in good quality without like spending a bunch of budget on it so this is basically the whole list of people that that we needed and you know copyrighted marketing designer all of these like different roles that you either need full-time or you need to get Freelancers but then you need someone like me who is ahead of content but instead of creating content I'm just managing all of these people and it's not very efficient uh so basically now I just have that team in AI

I put my entire tool stack here but none of them are unheard of people usually don't know about granola granola is very excellent for for meeting transcripts and you get to chat with the meeting transcript afterwards so instead of uploading that transcript into chat GPT and getting it to tell you things you can immediately be like wait what was talked about what did he mention there and you can just do it right there and it it works really really well and then yeah Riverside mid Journey descript super whisper open AI Claud that basically replaces all

of these roles even some kind of more technical ones like a data analyst like obviously for marketing that's not you'll you'll be fine you can get away with just like your social media analytics like go to buffer but for a lot of roles like you I remember we had like a data analyst on the team and it was just like this guy who knew how to work Tau like that was his only thing like it was just like working full-time for us just looking at Tau and then you're like hey can you give me these

numbers and then he does so it's but yeah there's like a full role just for that and you need them full time so now you just have ai stuff for that one of our clients actually built uh data uh analytics and visualization tool that lets you like upload your data set and just like you have in chat GPT you have a chat for it and you just ask your data set anything that you need to know you're like okay tell me these exact numbers for this quarter and how does that compare to like the last

year or whatever and I'm like wow this is amazing like non-technical people couldn't do this before I couldn't knew this before and it it can cost you less than 1K per year like that's my cost of running an agency that's crazy it's a sensitive topic what what what you really have here is a stack to go from idea to like final piece of content like you still don't have any email service provider or like the kind of or any cost you're paying to distribute the content ads or anything like that but this is a you

know 400x cheaper uh way to do hey I have an idea and I need to get that idea to a finished piece of content which is pretty wild right yeah yeah and sometimes you need to get through all of this in order to test a new channel like email so that was kind of the issue one the the biggest friction that I felt when I was working with teams before AI is that just to test something you know you get that energy you get an idea and you're like oh my god let's see how that

performs let's test it out and then when you actually delegate that it's like two months after that you're actually testing it it's yeah it's it's not ideal and you also you know spend money to test an idea that's potentially going to fully flop so yeah it's it's a bit of a an investment and I feel like it prevented us testing different channels in a lot of companies that I work with just because of uh lack of budget or lack of resources in terms of like people but yeah I have a full like just our workflow

with AI just what we were talking about a few minutes ago go so you start with obtaining authentic insights yeah once you have that unique Insight whether it's from a webinar podcast episode your founder and I often tell other Founders I'm like if you don't have the money to be paying an agency uh for my own content I often just turn on super whisper and I record myself talking I don't need someone to interview me uh so that's how I create my own content so it's like you don't necessarily need to have someone interviewing you

if you're like a Founders that's just starting out you don't have anything you nobody's inviting you on podcast and stuff like you can also do this yourself so just talk about what happened during the week talk about what you learned this month how the team is doing how's the product doing do you have any challenges how did you overcome them and then you just use that transcript so it doesn't have to be an interview I will also link later all of my prompts in a sheet so that you can link it under the episode I

feel like people love kind of going in and just copy pasting and they can just use that it's uh always public but yeah our first prompts are usually just extract all of the insightful topics that we covered in this conversation because it's an hour I often you know sometimes I sit through it and if it's like an interesting founder I'm like okay let me listen to this like a podcast but the reality is you just don't really have time to do that each time so you just need to ask Chad GPD to tell you about

what topics were actually discussed like LMP them in which ones were interesting which ones were like fully covered and flushed out and you just it just gives you a list and then it gives you can ask it for um time stamps and then you just go to that part of the conversation I still often manually uh just listen in a little bit because no matter how much you work with AI sometimes it just misses I don't know that part of the conversation where you were like oh actually that was a great Zinger that was like

that was great I see a lot of Personality there I still haven't gotten it to give me each and every one of those uh kind of talking points uh so you have to work with it a little bit you have to be present if you're just trying to prompt Ai and you know not trying to like kind of be involved and actually think about a Content piece it's probably not the best strategy and then once we have a list of these insights I just go one by one and I tell her to summarize it I

tell her to look at the entire transcript and basically fill in any gaps at context uh make sure that it's only taking information from the transcript this is important because sometimes it starts pulling things online that are just kind of relevant but weren't really sad which is difficult when a Founder is talking about a product you kind of need to be accurate and you need to use their own phrasing uh because they have like different features they have their own branding and then I basically just instructed to create a social media post from it the

interesting takeaways is there any kind of like promp in or anything you're doing to extract I know you can like add the time stamps and you can say like what are some of the most interesting takeaways but for example one of the things that I played around with is figuring out like what types of content perform well on different platforms and then templatized them and then asking it to look for talking points that Ma one of those templates I'm curious like did you do did you do how did you like how did you have it

understand what are interest and takeaways it kind of depends on what they want to talk about online in general and what their kind of persona is we kind of help them in terms of branding a little bit to just like have some of the the topics that we regularly come back to but it's all about prompting Ai and not expecting it to deliver a full list if you just ask it one question one thing that has really helped me is I very rarely type into chat GPT I only use super whisper so I use just

my voice I talk to it and the results for whatever reason are infinitely better because I add more context the way that I wouldn't when I'm writing I kind of tend to make it shorter make it more concise you're thinking about the senses that you're writing but when you're just talking you add more contacts than necessary and Chad GPT performs much better when you give it as much contacts as possible so I can kind of go in and be like okay so this founder wanted us to uh talk a little bit more about the product

their product is XYZ we want to find something interesting for this particular Target group extract any insights that they shared in this particular transcripts of that and then I see that and then I kind of just read through it and see what kind of looks good an unfortunate part of well not unfortunate but a part of prompting and creating content with AI is having good judgment and having a sense of what a quality piece of content is and that's a little bit more difficult to cultivate and explain and put into a prompt so you have

to be it's like Focus mode you like just because you're prompting AI it doesn't mean that you're not focusing on what is actually going to produce uh an interesting whether it's a tweet or an email or a blog post so you have to be present and you have to kind of look at that list and think critically does this sound interesting does this sound like something that can be turned into to a bigger piece if not let's move on to the next one and you know sometimes from these transcripts I get like one or two

insights that's just unfortunately what happened that month and then other times it's like oh my God they're really like in the flow they sh shared a lot there's a lot of knowledge here to be uh kind of Taken and turned into different social media posts so you know sometimes we just end up with a little list of social media posts but other times we're like oh my God this can be a much bigger resource this can be a full email like newsletter series that we can just turn so it's like we sometimes we get more

and sometimes we get less but you just have to kind of work with it and be a bit strategic and also harsh you know sometimes I'm like okay that's not really interesting you know it's been said before let's move on let's not use it just because it was discussed in the transcript so I prompted a lot it's not one long prompt it's several smaller ones so I'm basically just having a conversation with Chad GPT but I highly recommend people especially when they're starting out to try to talk to Chad GPD instead of right especially if

they're creating a bigger piece like blog post works much better yeah you're you're basically saying I I don't know if you're saying the same thing but I I talk to it about what I want to do and then have it create the prompt I don't know if you want to show some of your prompts cuz I think it's really hard to like to understand what that means without seeing it I think if you're if you're listening along might be easier if you could actually show some of them yeah what I love is you'd mentioned that

you were going to share share the link in the description uh in the comments below to the spreadsheet so that people who want to use these prompts can go and and use them directly but maybe take us through a couple of your core like power prompts for co-creating content with AI so let's we're going to assume we've gone through the workf flow us outlined we've got great context on from our subject matter expert and now we're going to use these to bring that to life right awesome so like I was saying when you take uh

A Unique Piece of content and download a transcript for it or whatever you have it can be written content as well it doesn't have to be well transcript is written content doesn't have to be from an event you can also have like maybe a resource guide like a huge one that you wrote so you can use that as well uh and then this is basically the main the starting prompt that I'm using so the text below is a transcript from a conversation your job is to do the following and you basically are asking it to

list the main ideas from the ation that I can repurpose into an insightful blog post doesn't have to be a blog post can be anything else focus on the most unique and insightful topics and insight shared it should capture the real meat of the information not a vague useless summary you can be a little mean in your promise that's okay you can be a little mean we'll call it direct you want to be very direct with what you're looking for right exactly and that's how you start and then once you see that full list just

think about it in a very uh critical and honest ways like is if you saw this on social media if you saw this as a blog post would you read it would you click on it would you interact with it if not might not be worth creating I feel like people often uh fall into this Rabbit Hole of like oh I can now make a lot of content very easily so therefore I'm going to do that but I think we can use AI to really zero in on the most unique and interesting and insightful types

of content instead of just going for the for the quantity which I'm sure we've all been seeing on gosh especially LinkedIn it's really it's rough out there I was looking at the LinkedIn comments in one of my recent posts and I'm like these are all AI generated 100% And then once you find an idea that you like tell it to focus on that you have to go one by one if you just tell it take the whole list and make me social media post from it it gets very messy and will be it's difficult to

then figure out what part it hallucinated yeah which it does much less now that was a bigger issue before but it is a little difficult to kind of figure out where it was pulling the information from but you essentially take one idea and tell it to craft and engaging in sful social media post based on that topic it should use the full transcript so not just that part of the conversation because often time when you're having a discussion about something especially when it's uh product related you kind of talk about it through different points in

the conversation you might be coming back to it you might like have a realization later on you don't want to miss those those things you want to kind of connect everything and that's why I love using chbt fored because it has much better pattern recognition than me so it can kind of connect those points in a conversation better than I could if I was just sitting there listening in on the conversation use the information from enti transcript not just one point craft together a narrative about this particular topic make sure that that it's following a

format of a social media post instructing it to be Punchy still seems to be one of the main ones that perform great works better than concise works better than to the point so I would recommend using these exact words that I used here like Punchy training engaging because they they have worked really great consistently for me and then I usually instructed not to use metaphors catchphrases jargon because it kind of makes a cringe I even often write in caps loog just don't be cringe don't be cliche and that works great honestly and then I just

I usually keep this list of words updated don't use the word insure don't use the world uh the word in the realm of don't use sentence uh question sentence as a segue it does that a lot it's like the goal question mark and then it writes the rest like okay this is all terrible and it's we all know that it's AI so if you just prompt that from the start you can remove a few steps for yourself down the road and another thing that I found really helpful with one of the recent updates uh let

me share that as well so the projects thing you can see we have uh basically a project for each client and for each of their deliverables so like blog post social media it's it's it's slightly different content so I I prefer to have different projects for it but maybe later on the prompts are going to get kind of better and it's going to get better at using the instructions and project files right now it like misses about 50% of the time which is uh not great since that's kind of the main functionality of it but

when the projects came out everyone was like oh yeah that's a that's a neat feature and I was like you guys don't understand this just sure I can scale my agency because of this even further it's it's fantastic so for example this is also in one of my prompts but I just want to share so for example for one of our clients we write weekly blog posts for them so in the project files I have literally a Google do that I downloaded uh with writing style samples to base voice and tone from so I asked

the founder what are some of his favorite writers what are the blogs that he uh reads on a regular uh basis whose style does he like and then I just added all of that in here and when we create uh a piece that he's like that was great love that love that style that you established I also just put it in here and then general information about anything about the company anything about the product anything discussed so that we basically have this huge document of everything that you could possibly need to know about the product

that instead of prompting it just has it right here so once we start writing something it already has a lot of context on the product and then in the instructions this is arguably a more important part than the than the documents you just instructed how you want it to behave every single time I still find that I have to instruct it in the chat to make sure that it's following instructions of this project which is a bit annoying because I'm like it's right there but you know we might be a week away from that just

being what it does all the time so I don't want to complain too much but it's this is the promt that I kind of found that it works the best for basically any kind of blog post social media post you just change it the pending on the content piece write in a direct non nonsense style use Clear simple language short sentences focus on concrete details or abstract comp skip the startup buzzwords it loves to use those a lot I don't know why cultural references keep it brief and I always love to tell her to stay

honest like just let let's be let's be real here don't uh remove parts of the transcript that talk about like challenges or anything like personal sometimes it tends to like not include that which is interesting share specific examples data points been relevant and then this is probably the most important part of it never use questions as transitions between topics it does that a lot avoid any sentence structure uh structures that negate expectations you know this isn't just about it's a very standard one that AI does and then just list any words that you don't want

it to use this is a this is a great one that works for me sometimes I have to instruct it further you know it's like if you instruct it to use these instructions and then you kind of go through a series of iterations you have kind of have to start repeating yourself essentially but you know you can do that in caps lock and you can really just let all of that frustration out so yeah it it it works it works good very excited about the projects tasks too I have a task for every single morning

to get a list of the latest news in for example Tech uh most of our clients are in fintech and healthtech so I have an each one for that as well just so I can stay up to date without scrolling Twitter endlessly uh cuz before I did that I was like well I have to be on X every day because it's my job to know it's lowkey ruining my mental health but I have to do it no I don't uh especially now that we have Gro and you can also search within X so yeah that's

kind of my my favorite use cases right now apart from just the other prompts okay that's amazing first of all thank you in advance for sharing the prompts with everyone and so I I want to kind of recap what you have taught everybody you've taught essentially a master class on how you go from having a big coordinated content team to a smaller agile content operation you're doing it as an agency but you could certainly do it inside a company anything you you might want to do and and the first thing you did that I think

was really important is that you have a very clear workflow like you know the steps of your workflow and you have that documented and you kind of know what tools and what process you have at each step there and what you're also doing is you're really using the native functionality of those tools very very deeply like you you're using way more of chat GPT than the average person and that's where a lot of people are falling down right now is they're not getting deep enough in the tools that they are using and uh you are

you're doing the exact opposite you're really deep in not just the features but even the prompting and the language you're using with the models to make sure that you're getting this like this really remarkable output and I think the key Insight here is like you're like I never start from a blank page I always have context context is everything I need to either take existing context or go and have a conversation and get that to in order to have a great starting point I guess as we close out the show if you were giving advice

to people who are like who were looking to make this transition who really want to automate how they create content share stories online anything we haven't covered anything you're like you should go start here to to go and do that today I think it's very important what you just said you never start with a blank page and if you're if you're someone who's just starting out with this not just chat GPT but using it for work you you don't have to create each prompt by yourself all of uh our prompts that I use for agency

management uh which is also in the sheet so we kind of have the content one and then the agency management I don't write them I tell jbt what I need and then it writes The Prompt for me it's much easier it provides better results I often cross reference it with Claude but it's sometimes easier for you to sit down especially if it's a workflow if it's a uh if it's a task that you do often uh that you want to Outsource automate whatever you need sit down record yourself talking through what your process is currently

and where you want it to be because sometimes you don't even have a process for something which is why AI is great it kind of makes you reassess your processes on a very regular basis because you have these like prompts that you're using so you get to like think through what you're actually doing day-to-day which before AI I feel like I had like an established process and then I used to just follow that Until It Breaks until I realize that like oh I I literally don't have time for this so now I have to kind

of reassess what I'm doing whereas now I feel like I can just revisit that every week if something takes long I just sit down and kind of like regurgitate that into chat GPT and tell us like okay tell me where I can be more efficient tell me where what I can Outsource tell me what integration I can set up with like either zap here or something that makes this easier and then it just creates that workflow and it creates that prompt for you so you don't have to do it yourself I think people are often

kind of like oh I don't I need to go and find a prompt like just tell it what you needed to do and it will create the prompt for you and that's probably more powerful than you like Scavenging Twitter for or X sorry for different prompts and something that has worked for someone else because you might be able to create something that works uniquely well but just in your unique case I love that it goes back to the point of being really deep in the tools you have you don't need more tools you need to

use the tools that you're having you're using much deeper and having chat GPT Claud whoever do prompts like we mentioned the start of the show I'm a pro user of chat GPT and 01 Pro writes amazing prompts I just did a show where 01 Pro wrote a prompt operator went and executed the prompt and then I came back in 01 Pro and it wrote the code and everything necessary to do that and it's something that somebody would have taken hours previously we did in like 10 minutes you know it's it's it's a wild transformation well

Barbara I really appreciate you joining us on marketing inst the grain today thank you so much for sharing the behind the scenes of how you've done all this and uh thank you so much for joining us thanks for having me all right see everybody next time this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of HubSpot HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated W I can see the client's whole history call support tickets emails and here's a task from 3 days ago I totally missed HubSpot grow better