How We're Using AI to Dominate YouTube and X in 2024

he everyone welcome to the next wave podcast I'm Matt wolf I'm here with Nathan L and today we've got an exciting episode for you live from HubSpot inbound 2024 so a little bit of a different special episode we don't normally do these in front of an audience uh but we're going to talk about the AI powered growth that we've used for our own businesses in both Twitter uh our podcast our newsletter the various platforms that we have we're going to share some tools we're going to share some workflows should be a fun session it's just going to be me and Nathan sort of having a offthe cuff conversation but yeah let's go ahead and start by uh talking a little bit about YouTube growth so as Nathan just mentioned I do have a YouTube channel right now I'm hovering around 640,000 subscribers the channel is really focused on AI but surprise surprise I actually used AI quite a bit to actually grow the YouTube channel so some of the ways that I've leveraged AI to grow my YouTube channel number one is probably the most obvious way that I've used AI to grow my YouTube channel is the the thumbnails so all of my thumbnails are created with AI right now and I'll try to quickly walk through the the workflow of how I make some of those thumbnails and they're they're awesome by the way that's like the first way I noticed you is like these crazy AI art thumbnails nails so the way I've actually done that is I use a tool called stable diffusion for the AI art and stable diffusion has all sorts of like plugins and add-ons that you can use it uh use with it and one of the add-ons is a tool called dream booth and dream Booth actually lets you upload about 20 images of your face it learns your face and then you can go into stable diffusion and say generate an image of Matt wolf in a field of strawberries and it will generate that image yeah right and it'll generate an AI version of my face I'd say about 75% of the time they look horrible 25% of the time they actually look decent and that's kind of how I I generate my thumbnails um one of the ways that I like to do it now to get a little bit more dialed in with those thumbnails is I like to go and use either a tool like mid Journey or Leonardo um they make a little bit higher quality images in my opinion so I'll generate an image of like guy standing in a field of strawberries to go back to that same example and I'll get that image generated and then I'll pull it into stable diffusion and I'll sort of uh mask out my face and say replace this space with my face so I get the the main image generated in a different AI image generator that's awesome and ask out the face I was going to ask you cuz in mid Journey obviously you can't put your face in there so that's how you do it awesome yeah yeah so that's been one of the like biggest sort of like growth hacks I've had for my YouTube channel is I'd like to make these bright thumbnails and a lot of times the prompts are like super bright super colorful man standing in a field of strawberries strawberries vibrant colors brilliant greens you know things like that I try to make it as colorful as possible I want these thumbnails to really really pop when people see them on on YouTube I want it to stand out among all the rest of them and mid journey and Leonardo are the two best at that in my opinion yeah and so I use that sort of face swap technique now the other ways that I use AI is I really really love using clad from enop um for helping with like title generation and one of the things I like to do is I'll create my whole video so I'll make a video that's explaining how to create a with chatbot trained on your own information something like that right I'll create a tutorial on how to do that right when I'm done making that tutorial I'll pull it into a tool like descript and get the whole transcription of that video I'll take that entire transcription plug it into CLA and then say help me come up with 10 titles that will grab a lot of attention based on this transcript that that that works pretty well it works pretty well it'll give me it'll give me close right sometimes I'll change the words a little bit like the titles will be I don't know if I'd actually say that in real life but for the most part it gets me close it gets me a lot of ideas to use for those titles and I'll use that as like the sort of rough draft the beginning of that title ideation phase and so that's worked really really well as well um another thing you can do with Claude is they have have this uh this this tool called projects and projects lets you upload additional information into it that it can use as context and so what I'll do is I'll go find other YouTube titles that I really like and I'll make a text file and I will list out 30 different titles that I came across that I'm like this title works really well this one got me to click this is a really good title I pull all those titles into a text document and then upload those into a clad project and then say use these as example of titles that have worked well and then Claud will sort of do a decent job of finding titles that are sort of similar to the ones that I gave it as example I've done the same kind of thing with with the Twitter um do so you show it examples of things you you like do you show it examples of things you don't like or just things I like I mean you could do that as well you could just like in the same text file here's the tit titles that I like here's the titles that I really don't like use this information when creating new titles yeah and that kind of stuff works really really well I also use clad for scripting one of the ways that I use clad for scripting that has been really effective is almost the same idea is the title generation idea where I will go and find maybe 10 to 15 different YouTube videos that I really like the flow of the video they have like a beginning a middle an end and it's just a a perfect flow I watched the video it grabbed my attention the whole video I didn't want to click away so what I'll do is on YouTu YouTube you can grab the transcripts from those videos I'll grab the transcripts from those like 15 different videos pull each one individually into a CLA project and then tell it this is the style of script I want to make for my video make a video in the similar style and then I'll give it the topic I'll say I want to talk about the new open ai1 model yeah write me a script about open ai1 model here's some information about it write it in the style of the scripts that I uploaded do do you modify it or you just do what it says no I I modify them heavily but it gives me it gives me that flow right what I'm really looking for is the flow I don't need a word by word for word script I don't actually read a script when I make my videos it's very off the cuff but I like the bullet points of like here's the yeah I like like there's always like a you know a hook in the beginning to grab the attention and then once you grab the attention then you want to move on to you know showing what the end result is going to be and then you want to move on to getting into the tutorial and you want to move in you know and it gives you that flow of where you want the video to start and where you want it to end and you know the little bits in the middle and it sort of helps me find that Arc of the video and then I'll use that as the sort of rough draft outline for my video because I will upload information about the the the topic I want the video to be about and it will sort of give me the Beats to follow based on the scrims yeah I wonder how many YouTubers know about all of these strategies cuz it seems like your team is way leaner like for the size of your Channel like I know other YouTubers who have like way larger teams for like the same quality output that you're doing I I have taught one other person in my process who was making thumbnails for me for a little while so it is very sort of teachable duplicatable anybody can follow that flow yeah the shorts is the same flow right so I will go and grab the the transcripts of shorts shorts is a brand new thing I just started doing I've done like 10 total shorts on my YouTube I think you said with shorts you're allowing it you're like kind of following what it says a little bit more following the script a little bit more on the short and the reason I do that for shorts is cuz you've got to hit 59 seconds or less right and you got to hit it like right on that time right and so if I try to add lib too much I tend to ramble I mean I've already been talking about my YouTube stuff for 10 minutes here you keep going on yeah I'll keep going so I kind of need that script to keep that 59 seconds or less on my YouTube shorts right but if you go and find a short on YouTube that you really like if you go and you see the youtube. com/ shorts slash you know a long string of letters and numbers right if you replace the word shorts with video it'll actually take you to the video landing page instead of the short landing page and you can grab the transcript from that page so for shorts I'll do that I'll go and pull in transcripts for inspiration so that I know I'm hitting all the sort of Beats that I want to hit throughout my video right have you tried any The Faceless kind of YouTube stuff or do you think I haven't yet but I do want to explore um I was watching the the haen session yesterday yeah um at that really made me want to play around with some of that see if I I want to test it put a video up on my channel where it's um I I want to do the haen where it's my face it sounds like my voice and then put some like B- roll over it and then see if anybody noticed this I don't think I'll do that for like all of my videos but I kind of want to test it just be like is anybody going to call me out and tell if it's an AI generated version yeah I think you know I'm considering starting the AI video agency with l. com and and and the two guys I'm working with it on they showed me a workflow yesterday using make.

com where we could like script out an entire YouTube video and then use AI video to generate all of the stuff and uh it's amazing like you probably could like grow a pretty large channel oh yeah once you get into some of those make. com workflows it gets really really fun but yeah those are some of my main YouTube strategies that I've used AI to grow on YouTube um but let's let's talk a little bit about Twitter because you've grown a pretty big uh following on Twitter as well yeah yeah I mean so probably I mean I was like a Twitter lurker for like five or years like I would use Twitter like mostly just read Twitter you know now X whatever and I I never really tweeted often and then uh I still had like 5,000 followers just because I did startups in silon Valley and ra cap you know rais VC funding and stuff so so I had like 5,000 to start with um and then I start getting really excited about hey I obviously like write my newsletter and I was like well how do I grow the newsletter yeah I was like okay well I guess uh use Twitter and like share whatever you're learning about and so I started doing that and then quickly I learned that I could use AI there so many different ways to grow the Twitter um and a lot of it similar to what what you said like I would I would teach uh chat BT like what are the kind of uh Twitter threads that that work like what are the kinds I like and what are the kinds I don't like um and it probably it would save me like two or three hours like doing threads and I'm not as active right now I've been more focusing on getting our podcast going for the last five months um but when I was like doing it every day like I could consistently get at least 300,000 views on tweets every single day look in the next 30 seconds I'm about to let you in on something that will completely change your marketing strategy with AI back when we met with Greg Eisenberg he summed up the widespread fascination with AI perfectly everyone from your Barber to Jeff Bezos is interested in AI so if you want to drop some AI knowledge during your next haircut HubSpot has a new trend report that is packed with original research and data on all the AI Trends to watch for this year this PDF is the ultimate resource for you you'll learn the top five AI marketing tools every 's talking about the tools that are driving significant return on investment and it answers the question on everyone's mind is AI helping or hurting your career trajectory you can steal the research findings from this report to revolutionize your business strategy and transform the way you work so if you want it grab your free copy from the link in the description below now back to the show and so how we using AI to do that like what was what was the the workflow well so what I would do I use this thing this not an AI tool it's called Uh tweet Hunter it's like a a Chrome extension so I would use that and what tweet Hunter would do is you can look at like who are the top people in your category right so it's like okay AI or creators or or whatever you can look up those people and then you can see uh what are their top tweets ever right so I would do that and I would make a list like here's the people I really want to not copy but I I like their style you know and so I would look at and I would look i' get their top one or two tweets and I would put that into uh chat BT and say Here's the kind of tweets I like right I'd use AI as an editor not as like the writer cuz like the writer I found like there's only a few Niche use cases where you can actually use it to like write the content right and I think it works a little bit better in LinkedIn I'm not sure why maybe like the quality of the content is a little bit different on LinkedIn on Twitter I felt like it writing the content for me didn't do that well so I would write the content myself and then use it as an editor and it I felt like it saved me probably like two hours or so cuz like editing a Twitter thread to make it like really go viral can take hours like I'd be sitting at a coffee shop in Kyoto like just sitting there like yeah okay let me look at it again let me look at the hook again and uh and then having the AI Recs like showed all that and um and get feedback saved me so much time and actually I found like when I was doing it myself I was getting a lot less views and as soon as I started using AI as like an editor like the all of a sudden like oh every every time I tweet it goes viral oh that's that's great yeah yeah yeah now you were telling me a story about um Nal rocon right yeah a lot of things came from me growing on Twitter I mean like in a way like cuz like very quickly I went from like 5,000 followers to like 50,000 I think in like three months right I like slowed down since then I started focusing on the podcast and other things but uh you know a lot of stuff came from that like I went on TV two or three times and talked about AI Elon must started responding to me uh you know uh Jeff Bezos followed both of us right that's kind of how we connected is because Jeff Bezos saw one of my tweets and followed both of us um which was cool well I think it was a tweet that you put that was like here's the people to follow in Ai and you listed a bunch of people and my name was one of themes just followed that whole list the idea for that thread came from AI so I was like here's the kind of stuff I see other people doing in different categories I do that in the AI category like oh here's the top people to follow or here you know um and those kind of you know threads don't get as many views but they would like a lot of people I would mention they would all follow me yeah right so um but in terms of the nval that was that was the one use case where I found with the Twitter that you could actually use AI to uh actually create the content to give people context uh so nval ravik on the the founder of Angel list uh in silon Valley he's one of the most famous people in silon Valley he did he did a great uh podcast episode with Joe Rogan uh it's one of my favorite podcast episodes ever because it talks all about like everything from business to like life right how to good live a good life and so I literally just like fed the transcript of that episode into chat BT and said and and it already knew like what kind of threads I like and all that so I had that context and I just sped it the transcript I said make me a thread put that into TW you know Twitter and uh yeah you know got like maybe like 500,000 views Nal retweeted it right I didn't write any of of it at all I literally just like fed it to chbt entire thing do you remember what sort of prompt you gave to just to get that kind of output for it uh it was literally just like me giving you the context of here's the threads I like and the ones I don't like okay right cuz like yeah I want to have like a good hook and all that but I don't want to be like too cheesy I don't want to go too like click baity there's like a fine line there right like a little bit but not too much right and it is literally just providing the context kind like the same thing you do with YouTube right like giving it like here's the kind of titles I like or you know the flows I like right same kind of thing works for Twitter probably works probably works better for LinkedIn honestly yeah yeah and I mean something like that works if you're trying to grow a podcast or grow a YouTube channel or even grow a newsletter right you can go and plug the content from the the YouTube video or the transcript from the podcast or the the entire newsletter that you just wrote up plug it in the chat GPT and say hey summarize this into something that would work well on as a Twitter thread and at the end add your little call to action and yeah I think there's a lot of ways we probably be using AI more right like we both have ai newsletters you know he's got Future tools I've got lore. com and I used to do more like pre-call actions and post calleded actions to promote my newsletter it's like okay can you define that what's a what's a pre pre called action is like okay my newsletter is coming out tomorrow here's what you might learn in this newsletter issue right okay and then the post is yesterday so and so you know you know 20,000 people got this newsletter you know the lore newsletter here's what I learned here's what you missed out on basically God in subscribe and so those typically don't get tons of views they make get like 10,000 views versus like one of my other tweets getting like over 100,000 views um but they convert really well and so yeah I think you probably we probably should be automating that right like we probably should just like be like feeding our newsletter into like a system and having it like just generate those tweets and like schedule them through the Twitter API or something yeah yeah yeah I like that idea I think when it comes to Twitter personally I still really like it to be me right going to be my voice but if we started like a next wve podcast Twitter I could see like trying to automate that with you know here's what we talked about in this episode every episode gets fed in like you can use something like make.

com right and I'm just sort of spitballing ideas here you can use something like make. com where whenever you make a new podcast episode it watches that RSS feed pulls it into um like descript or some sort of transcription tool right or we can make a newsletter transcribes it and then automatically uses the CLA or GPT API to then turn it into a Twitter thread and then automatically post on a Twitter account that actually is something we probably should do with the wave yeah we we we yeah we could make a newsletter right we could like what are like the the key takeaways of every issue uh you know um and then you could also automate the promotion of as well yeah we should that maybe we should add yeah well I mean let's let's talk a little bit more about some of these newsletter strategies to like grow a newsletter right we've both grown fairly substantial size newsletters in the AI space you've got lore. com I've got the Future tools newsletter um so we've used obviously AI to help grow those and manage them and maintain one of the ways I've been experimenting with growing it is actually using AI to to create this sort of lead magnet to to bring somebody onto the list in the first place and with these AI tools it's so easy to create really high value lead magnets right now right like I can go and take some of my YouTube tutorials that teach really valuable Concepts that people really want to learn have those transcribed pull those transcriptions into something like Claude or chat GPT and say um this is a transcription make it read more like an ebook or make it read more like a blog post or you know that sort of thing so that it feels more readable than just reading a transcription right and now you've got a PDF that you can offer as an optin to get people to join your newsletter another thing that's got really really easy now is even easier now with the open AI 01 platform is going and creating a simple software app yeah right like so some of the things that I've seen I've seen like in um the real estate industry people making like fairly simple you know mortgage calculators and things like that make really simple tools where you ask for the email in order to use the tool and you put a little check box below saying would you also like to sign up to my newsletter when you know what do you use this tool yeah that that reminds me of the stuff that uh Greg eberg was talking about when you came on our show like uh creating widgets for like SEO and stuff right like youed through widgets you had to like hire a team and go build that like now especially like with 01 that just came out like uh open AI recently released 01 uh it's not clear if it's a new model or what it is but it's it's it's way better at coding and like creating ABS right than before and so I'm pretty sure most of these widgets now like a single Creator can create like 10 useful widgets and like get tons of SEO traffic there's so many things like it's hard to figure out like what to do CU like there's so many opportunities now you can really dial it in towards whatever Niche you're operating in right so you can you can create something like really really customized just for the people that you're speaking to and there's another tool that's fairly popular lately called cursor which is like a fork a visual studio code uh but it's got like AI scripting directly built into I I use cursor it's it's amazing like I I'm like an amateur coder like I've been in Silicon Valley for a long time so I used to code more and now I don't code a lot but but now it's like easier to go back to coding because like it can look at your entire code base and like suggest changes or like oh here's a bug in the code and like it knows the entire code base it's right right yeah you know in another way that I use AI for my my news letter is I let it to be my proof reader for me it's essentially become like my editor right I I actually have a team that helps me with the newsletter as well now but I still write a bunch of it my team still writes a bunch of it but the final pass we let AI look at it and we usually plug it into um I was using chat GPT in the beginning now I'm using cla a little bit more but I'll plug in the whole newsletter and I'll I'll say proof read this for grammar spelling and readability and it will look through it and it'll tell me all the grammar and spelling looks pretty good but you might want to you know move this sentence down a little bit move this sentence up a little bit it just makes it easier to follow what you're trying to say right and it's really good as sort of rearranging some you know little Nuance stuff in the email right to make it more readable for for the the newsletter subscribers yeah I found the same thing like I tried to have ai write part of my newsletter and like it's really clear when like you're using the AI to actually write the thing right like I I tried that one issue and like people like responded back like what what what is this yeah like okay that's obviously not Nathan like okay and so I use CLA to like edit my newsletter yeah for sure for sure and then we also talked a little bit about about the Twitter threads right like I'm I'm assuming is is Twitter the way that you've grown your list the most is it mostly because of the yeah yeah it's it's it's mostly been Twitter like uh used to every time I do a viral [ __ ] you know you get like 100 to 200 subscribers every single time yeah right you know of course some people unfollow you might lose 10 or 20 people but like yeah and it's it's pretty consistent yeah yeah yeah right my my newsletter's mostly grown off the back of the Future tools website a little bit from the YouTube channel I found that a lot of people like I always have a call to action at the end of my YouTube video to go subscribe to the Future tools newsletter I find that most of the traffic that goes to the newsletter does not actually come from YouTube it mostly comes from the the Future tools website which is a tool that I built to help sort of organize it's hard to convert like different mediums right from like video to text and and vice versa yeah that's that's really the way that I've grown my newsletter I'm at about 160,000 subscribers on mine now but it's mostly come from basically building a tool over at Future tools a tool to help you find tools yeah you were talking about widgets earlier so so have you actually created the widgets yet or is is that like an idea you're thinking about using AI for or you already have done it so I've I've messed around Crea a few widgets but I actually haven't used them as an op in yet so that's it's something that I want to play around with more I mean if you look at Future tools as a tool that helps find tools that's the biggest and growth for my newsletter right but I you know I mess with vs code a lot I've been using Claud for coding I'm going to probably start using open A1 for coding a little bit and I've made little like widgets and stuff that I use internally for myself but I haven't actually given many away yet yeah um but I think you should cuz like you said that Future tools so so Matt has Future tools it's basically the top AI tools directory and my understanding is like when people search for AI tools you're often like the top two Google rul most the time right yeah yeah with Future tools yeah it's it's really well SEO and all of the descriptions of every single tool on Future tools but generated with aict so basically uh the way that works is perplexity goes and looks at the tool gives me a description of the tool all of this is through a make.

com automation right so yeah um we're not sponsored by make. com we're not but basically the perplexity will go in look at the tool give me a description of the tool send that description over to clad clad will write a single paragraph of it and then feed it into web flow which is what the whole um database is built on top of so that that workflow is all all all AI every single description on that entire site is AI and if anybody says that you know you can't rank for AI generated content I'm proof that that's false because it's usually the tool that's number one and then the Future tools listing for that tool that's number two for a lot of AI tools yeah I know I mean so we had Greg eberg on like several times and uh I know he has like an AI SEO agency and he said it's like killing it like they're like they're doing it really well and I think they're mainly they'll do stuff where they have like AI generate like thousands of pages of content and they rank and then what they do is then they'll see they'll you know because obviously the quality will be a little bit lower with the a content right and so what they'll do is they'll generate like thousands of pages of content and they'll see what ranks and once they find what's ranking then they'll go in with humans and edit the ones that are ranking to make them really really good oh smart right and uh yeah so that's if you have like one key takeway that's one you probably everyone who's in doing SEO should be probably doing that right now yeah what one thing I want to share before we wrap up because we've got a couple minutes left here is if you don't have a newsletter it's probably easier than ever to have a newsletter because you can use AI to sort of help you out at least at the very least outline the newsletter if you still want to write it yourself right so if you're in like a specific itch like we're both making newsletters in the AI ditch I can go and find you know the seven biggest news stories in the AI world for the week take all seven of those stories plug them into something like Claud or chat GPT and then say you know either write up or outline a new newsletter for me with all of these news pieces worked into it and you can even feed it some of your your past content so that it'll try to write sort of in your style and now you've got a a quick and easy newsletter at least at the very least you've got an outline or a rough draft that you can go back in and sort of add your own voice to but it makes it really really easy to consistently put out a new newsletter just pick your Niche make sure you're keeping an eye on the news in that Niche and then feed that in once a week or twice a week or whatever the Cadence of your newsletter is yeah and I think it works for like curation focused newsletters I I do Wonder though like in the next few years if that's going to die off because the AI tools are going to get so good that you'll just be able like have your own custom newsletter of like created information and then I think yeah yeah so like that's why I'm trying to do like more editorial to like actually writing what I think about stuff ver this is just like here it is you know yeah yeah no I definitely think that's where it's going to go um unfortunately that's probably going to sort of devalue newsletters but we still have a window opportunity right now we still have a podcast so so I you know I feel like people should always capture that window of opportunity while you've got it and um oh me it's helped us so we started our podcast with hpot maybe five months ago we got I don't know three something thousand subscribers in the first month and now the episode was it first episode oh yeah that's right yeah and then now we're like 10.