How to use AI to automate & scale your content workflows, with Iman Oubou

Hey, it's Navid here, and in this session, you'll learn how to leverage AI to automate and scale your content workflows. I'm really excited to be joined by Iman Oubou. She's a serial tech entrepreneur, beauty pageant winner, author, and keynote speaker covering topics at the intersection of content marketing, strategy, and gen AI.

She's currently the founder of Vocable.ai which is an AI powered content marketing SaaS platform designed to streamline and automate content workflows for creators and teams. And I'm really stoked to dive further into some of this. So let's get into the session and warm welcome Iman.

Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be part of this amazing summit. Yeah. I saw you the first time on the Mindvalley AI Summit, actually, which is interesting. I know you have been doing things for a little while. You have a pretty inspiring story. When I did my research, like you came to the US, I think 2006 from Morocco.

Then you became, like, took a master's in bioengineering. You were a beauty queen and even became the Miss New York and I think the runner up as well, which is really interesting in the main competition there. So you have a pretty inspiring story and then getting into AI from this.

So maybe you can tell us a little bit about your background, how you got into all of this, Iman. Yeah, definitely. I have, I feel like I've lived so many different lives ever since we've moved from Morocco to America when I was 15 years old, and I think partly I was very driven by that transition.

I think it was an interesting cultural shock. I had never been in America up until then. I hadn't even seen Spoken English at that point. So it was a very almost sudden decision by our parents, my brother and I, to get up and just go chase after the American Dream. And a lot of it was driven by the opportunities here in America for education, for just entrepreneurship, for just being whoever you wanna be and working hard to get there.

So I'm always grateful for my parents to have made that decision, but I will say that it has. put a chip on my shoulder as far as always trying to evolve and become better and put my hands into different interests and really try and experience life to the fullest. And that obviously is a lot of it is on my career.

So I started off wanting to be a doctor. That's why I went to school to basically, I majored in biochemistry, bioengineering, and then actually went around the world doing medical missions, which was extremely rewarding and noble. But I That point I realized that practicing medicine was not really the right fit for my personality.

I, I was very sensitive. It was, while it was rewarding and was not really something I saw myself doing forever. So that's when I made the switch to potentially the going from medicine and practicing to actual R&D of the industry. So I then went on to become a cancer research scientist and led Preclinical and clinical trials for a startup out of Colorado, and then made my way to New York, to end up on the content, comms, and public relations of the industry.

Leading content strategy, communications for a lot of biotech startups, as well as other bigger pharma companies. And that's when I fell in love with the idea of storytelling, with content creation, and really saw the potential of using words and writing as a way to really express your message, even when it's something as boring as sometimes pharma or research or whatnot.

So how do you really take a great story and translate that into what people really resonate with was something I fell in love during that process. And so simultaneously I was participating in beauty pageants. And that was something my mom pushed me into. So luckily for me, I was able to win Miss New York within six months of moving to New York, which I thought was extremely interesting and a great opportunity to actually build a platform for myself and be able to.

Network with some really interesting people in the city, especially that I moved there without knowing anybody. So it was a great stepping stone to really building a network, that potentiallycould help me really find my true calling, which it ended up doing. So I ended up launching a podcast after, shortly after winning, because when you win a title like Miss New York or any other pageant, you basically become a, almost a change agent and a role model to a lot of the younger generation.

And so I thought, what would be a great way to, to really use my voice for something great. Podcasting at the time was not as popular as now, especially female focused podcast content. And so I launched, one of the very first ones that ended up being ranked as a top five podcast for women entrepreneurs.

And it was in a way a selfish move by me because it was a great way to reach out to women I admired. And instead of asking them, Hey, can I take you out for coffee and pick your brain? I'd be like, okay, come on my podcast. Let me share your story. Let me bring value to you. And by the way, I get to ask you all the questions I actually have for you.

And also I get to share your story and your answers with. other women that might be on the same path as me. Luckily for me, or surprisingly also that podcast really took off and that's how I ended up stepping into the entrepreneurial world of media. Because of the podcast success, I ended up launching a blog to complement the content on the podcast.

And that blog eventually became a, female forward media brand that really took a different spin towards women driven content. And so that's, that was the birth of Sway, which was my first company. Sway was basically a membership platform that helped women and underrepresented voices tell their stories and create optimized content processes so that they can continue tapping into the power of content creation to market themselves and position themselves in, a competitive way.

So that's how I ended up in the content space in a way. So I took a few turns and I think all of it just made sense. and as I grew into my role as an entrepreneur and a leader, I just started looking into how to potentially scale our efforts and our services to our members with Sway.

And that's how I stumbled upon AI in 2019. Gen AI particularly is. And at that time, we were thinking, okay, so how do we scale our members on the platform, but without having to hire more content strategists, more overhead, and really help give tools that are more technical, and more built in into our CMS, to these members instead of having to match them one on one with a content strategist or a ghost writer to help them with their content.

And so at the time, Gen AI was, not popular, but it's, it was still pretty advanced. I think it was at GPT 2 at that point. We actually, I remember my brother and I, who was my CTO at the time, was trying to figure out how to fine tune it. And I was learning on the playground. And I was just extremely fascinated by the technology because I knew that it has potential to not only automate and scale content creation, but really profound transformation on how we do business and how we work in general.

And so at that point, we started really building a new approach to our product at the time. So a built in AI powered CMS onto the publishing platform, which was really interesting. But when I was raising money for that specific company, it became obvious that this service or tool or platform could actually be beneficial to more people out there, not just our members.

And that's how I ended up moving on from my first company and then launching a new platform called Vocable.ai which is all about automating content for specifically solopreneurs who don't have that much resources, time, and also have to actually take on other responsibilities for their businesses.

So that's my journey. I know it's been a lot, but it's just to highlight. Really, the point is, don't be afraid to experiment, right? If you feel like you have some interest into an area, even though you don't think you're an expert in it, or it feels overwhelming, or you don't even go to school for it, you can still make a mark in it without having those credentials or that expertise or experience prior to that.

And that's, I think, been really the the common dominator between all of my career phases. Yeah, I love this because I have a similar journey in terms of the podcasting. I used it also to start picking the brains of experts I wanted to talk to. I love this approach and doing summits like this or a series where you can bring on an expert, I think it's a great way to build relationships and gain some knowledge.

But then, I think, yeah, you said in 2019, there was not any tools available, I think, back then when it comes to AI. It was like the OpenAI. We're using the playground only you said back then, or was there anything else you're using? Yes, I reached out to specifically AI experts because again, I didn't really know where to start.

And at that point, like I said, it wasn't anything that was publicly accessible. So I had a few, a couple of people that I knew that were in AI research area. for, out in Silicon Valley for a while. And I just started asking around, what would be a technology that is easily embedded?

Because we knew we weren't going to go out there and create a whole AI model, right? We were a publishing platform. We were not necessarily AI research scientists that were able to figure out how to build a model and an algorithm that was able to take on our members input and then turn it into great.

I see you optimized articles, but we knew that that technology somewhere existed. We just weren't sure how to get our hands on it. And again, that's why it took a while, I think, for everybody to be able to get that. And unless you're a YC Combinator company at that point, like Jasper's of the world, then it's very hard to get your hands on it.

So that's, again, why we took our time with, we built a few tools that weren't all AI powered. And then once we were able to really, Access to technology than we, we thought it would be better to just pivot into more of a SaaS model than embed it into a publishing platform because that could be a little bit more limiting again.

And then our members could easily use other tools that are in the market to do that. so that's, yeah, it wasn't accessible at the time, but I think the information around it and, and the educational content was there. And that's really what I was more focused on is just reading up on it, which is, I think, why I feel lucky to be a little bit ahead of the game and really more embedded into this industry now, when it finally made a splash is because I, , two years ago, I was already reading up on it and understanding how these models work and what their potential what their goals are and how to potentially integrate them into, public facing or consumer facing products.

Yeah, let's talk a little bit about this because you, the session is leveraging AI to automate and scale your content workflows. When you say that, what do you mean? And can you explain that to , what's the old way and may maybe what's the new way of doing things as you like to call it?

Yeah, so I think from what I've seen when I've worked or workshopped a lot of things with creators and solopreneurs is that a lot of them use content just for the creation part of it. So that's pretty common now. I think it's more mainstream, right? So being able to use ChatGPT or Jasper or Copy.ai to ideate blog post headlines or create an article or write an email.

So it's all really almost like on demand, last minute. Okay, I need to create this type of thing. Copy or content or graphic or video. And so I'm going to go to a tool to just do that, right? So it's a very task based, task driven integration of AI, which is great. But I think if you take a step back, especially as someone who's really trying to become more efficient and more creative, more productive, you really want to take a look at.

and audit almost your process. So map out what is it, what does it look like now when I have a project, right? So let's say I run a blog, and I want to create and get ahead of my content planning at least a month or two ahead, right? So what is my process when it comes to that? Without AI, right?

Put that together, map it out in a process and figure out what steps you Can you actually automate using AI? What input do you need? How frequently are you using that process? So that you're able to now dab into AI to also do audience behavior analysis. You can also create content strategies and outline content calendars and plans with auto populated briefs way ahead of time without having to do that manually.

You can also optimize your content for engagement and SEO. You can audit your current content and see where the gaps are so that you're able to actually strategize your content moving ahead based on what you're missing and not repeat content that hasn't performed before. I think very rarely I've seen, and I've worked with We have thousands of creators and solopreneurs around optimizing their content process.

And I would say 90 percent of the time, the way they approach content is, Oh, I have to create three blog posts for next week. And then they just go straight to that. There is no strategy, there is no planning ahead, there is no optimization, there is no audience analysis, there is no insight driven decisions.

They're not looking at their analytics to see, okay, what topics are my audience engaging with what is trending right now, what is the market trend, there is hardly ever that because they're so last minute with their content. Now, when you have a content process in place, and you know it very well, and it's optimized, you're always three months ahead.

You're always a few steps ahead. That's why you're able to churn out more content. So, instead of creating three blog posts for next week, this week, now you have planned out 20 for the next month and then you just have them drafted ready and scheduled. You can do that now with AI, so you don't have to actually do all of that manually.

You can also take your time and spend a day sifting through your analytics, doing an audit and seeing, oh, this is what my audience loves to learn about, or this is what top, this is, this topic is not really performing, so let me just. Put it aside and focus on this. So you got to be able to have a framework to work with.

And now thanks to AI, you're able to do a lot of that without needing experts in your team, without needing resources. And it's also very accessible and affordable, I think. But the first step for it is to know what your process is before we were able to know which tools and which AI automation do you need.

Yeah, no, a hundred percent. And I actually use. I mean, I use WordPress for my blog and site, I don't know what you guys use, but I would have, there's tools now, for SEO, right, that you can optimize, so you can know what keywords to add to the post with NLP keywords and all that, just optimize, give you a score, basically, that would be very, very difficult if you didn't have that, I think, I mean, I don't remember, How it was before, but I can imagine it was pretty difficult.

Now I can hand this off to my team. They go in there, they sprinkle in these kind of words that are like proven to work, and even they can see the length of posts that is proven to rank on the first page of Google, which is really interesting. But I wanted to get into a little bit, you said you need to know where you begin, right?

You need to start there. What kind of tasks you are doing, how to optimize this. If you would recommend a solopreneur, to create this for themselves, what, where would you start? Maybe that's a new site or maybe that's some, something new they are getting started with. What would be the first step there, Iman?

So I think the first step is figuring out what your objective or what your project overview is, right? So at the end of the day, if I'm launching this blog, what is my intent? Is it to, draw traffic is it to rank higher What is it that you want to focus on so that you're able to be very goal driven and also measure success at the end of the day?

I think most people know that also haven't been in the content space for so long, especially you mentioned people that are getting started. I think when I see a lot of new solopreneurs getting started with the content aspects of their business, they I almost approach it as I need to create content for the sake of creating content, because that's apparently what I need to do to stay relevant, but there is no goals behind it, there is no way of measuring it, whether you're doing it wrong or right, because then at that point, you're not just not being efficient, you're also wasting a lot of resources and time doing something that is not bringing return to your business, and having a blog post that is not ranking there, and you've spent that eight

hours writing it is not a good use of your time, as a solopreneur who is very limited with their resources and time. Who, is So, number number one. What is your goal? And then based on your goal, you've it got to map out the process. In order for me to have a well ranked, blog in general, like over the next three months or the next six months, then that means keyword research is very important for me.

And so now I need to figure out, okay, how do I achieve keyword research without the expertise of an SEO person? Because I also was not an SEO expert. And I think you, you would agree that SEO is probably one of the hardest areas of content to learn. Yeah. I think now with AI, you're able to streamline that without having to go deep into the SEM rush of the world and all these tools that create so many, you know, all these...

I don't know about you, Iman, but we're using like Ahrefs and all, I mean, I'm sure you were checking this when you started, right? Yeah, and I'm like having a, I don't know what I'm looking at. I'm like, okay, I see this, all this data in front of me, but what does it mean? We are not, we are not like Neil Patel, right?

Or Brian Dean of the worlds, right? I mean, that's where you can go down that rabbit hole if you want to. Yeah. But I think like, these tools are making it a lot easier for you. I think what is the most complicated bit aside, and I would be interested to hear that, have that discussion as well.

If you would recommend people actually start with a blog these days, it's very complicated to rank. And there's a lot of things that goes into that. But I think like, you know, knowing like the on page SEO, that's a lot of, that's probably the easiest component to master. I mean, that's what you have control of.

Oh, you know, the other things with the backlinking, that's a whole different ballgame. That's kind of how you get to rank your site, and I'm sure you got a lot of that organically. For Sway because a lot of you had a lot of contributors and they share it and things like that So you had people spread it and that's why you got a lot of traffic email I think exactly but that's being strategic again So for me also, I think even when you have a blog you can get people to contribute to it And besides just you writing for it and look I think not every blogs Goal should be just SEO and search engine ranking, you know, I think having a blog and being able to have a place to write long form content that you can also share on LinkedIn, that you can

send as part of the newsletters, that you can even pitch Forbes or entrepreneurs, like, look, this is what I write about. Usually could I become a contributor? I think it still has a lot of value. Thank you. Even if you're not ranking in the top pages, because it still is doing its job, which is to position you as an expert, to help you be relevant in your area of expertise, to also attract attention from other potential publications where you can contribute to and be more relevant there and have more audience reach and more distribution, but You won't get there unless you're consistent with the blog, and I think most people get discouraged because, oh yeah, I'm not going to rank on the first Google page on a keyword like content marketing,

right, if I write about that, but I could potentially use that article if it's well written, If it's great, if it has a great perspective that I can share on top of what else is out there, then I can use that to pitch other publications. I can use that to send to my potential clients.

Hey, by the way, this would be a great resource for you to read. You know, if you need content marketing services or something, reach out to me. Whatever your area of expertise, I think long form content like that. Always is very beneficial to continue building your brand relevance and also become a thought leader in the space, with or without ranking.

But of course, if you can rank, because that's how people find you, then you should definitely focus on that. It shouldn't be the only thing you do you focus on, because it could be discouraging, and I completely get that because I was there. But there are ways to hack around it.

It's like consistency, you also get more people in your industry to potentially contribute. to your blog and you contribute to their blog. You reach out to publications who write about this area and you offer yourself as a contributor. There are so many ways you can expand that without having to pay for it, bring on an SEO expert, rank for the top best keywords out there.

You just have to be strategic about how to create the content and how to use it to your advantage and be strategic. There's always distribution that is not just about search engines. And I think that's very important for people to know because I've heard it so many times when people are like...

Are people even creating blogs these days? Do you even have a blog? I'm like, actually, a lot of the time when I do even see a product that I want to use, let's say, a Jasper or even Vocable now or any other platform, I also always go to their blogs to see what kind of resources they have.

And same thing with an expert. If I'm working with a career coach, for example, I will always go to their website to see what they, what their expertise is, how they represent themselves, how they show their thought leadership in the space. And then. What kind of resources they offer outside of their services, and a lot of it is, blogs, podcasts, webinars that are free sometimes for lead generation, and other types of content, courses eventually, maybe some of them are free, some of them are not, guides, ebooks, those resources, Make your sale process a lot easier because you already, you let those resources do the selling for you because they bring a lot of value to your audience, your customer.

So by the time your customer is, you know, done through all the content resources, then they're already convinced, Oh, you know what you're talking about? Your content is great. I already found a lot of value in it. I can only imagine what it's like working one on one with you or buying your services would be like, because I feel like I learned a lot already and that's, Ultimately also, a big goal for you as a content creator is being able to create relevant, customer specific content.

And that's how you get to the high performance content. If your audience is not interested in what you have to say, or if you're targeting the wrong audience, then You're already spinning your wheels again in the void. So that's why I think content intelligence with content processes go hand in hand.

But you want your content intelligence to also drive your process. So you want to create a feedback loop. So you come up with a content strategy, probably when you get So, when you're starting, a lot of it has to be research based, right, so look at the current trends, understand who your audience is, what they're interested in, and come up with a starting strategy.

Then push that strategy, execute on it, push that content out, monitor it, track it, and use those insights to put it back into the feedback loop, and now create a new strategy for the next three months. And that's how I think an optimized content process really is, because once you master that, you can almost set it and forget it.

Yeah, no, that's a great way to break it down. And I think also people need to realize where are they spending the most time. Like, for example, I enjoy doing these video sessions. This is now in the age of AI. It's so easy to make this into, turn this into a blog post. It's very easy.

You can take a link, you can take the transcript, you can get a summary. I think that was the reason a lot of people didn't do it before at least, it was just time consuming. It was a lot of things, a lot of things in the process. I don't like doing the mundane tasks like adding descriptions on YouTube, adding the tasks.

Now all this can be automated basically, which is nice. You can make this part of your workflow essentially, even like cut this up. Let's say you wanted to post some things from this session on. Your social media, I can use like Opus or something like that to cut it up or, I mean, I could have a video editor.

I'm sure it might be a lot better, but let's say we were stressed on time. Then you can take it to an editor like that and you have 10 clips very quickly. I think that is just what's happening and you have, I think that this is the main piece of content. Then it turns into supporting pieces of content and that's how I see it.

A lot of my guests on this series I'm doing. They are basically, so they enjoy doing their creative, creative tasks, right? Doing things like that's what they enjoy, if they're a podcaster, or they're doing YouTube. But then bringing that into the other platforms. I think I see too few creators, or solopreneurs, who are on YouTube, who are creating, like, these micro blogs on social media.

They could actually turn this into long form content on LinkedIn or on your blog, even longer content. So I don't know what's your approach to this, Iman, and where maybe your tool helps with some of this as well. So we can bring that in as well to the conversation here. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.

And that's where the scaling part comes into play. I think a lot of people can easily scale their content by just repurposing old content into updated new content, into different formats, and just expanding on it. So like you said, having a video, maybe you're good at videos, maybe you're good at instead long form articles, or maybe you're good at podcasting, whatever that main piece of content is, go all in on that and then use those as assets to repurpose in a way that's quick and automated.

And like you mentioned, there are so many now tools where you can just plug a piece of content and it just generates a whole different type of a series of social media graphics, or it breaks down a video of 30 minutes into you know, 30 seconds clips or whatnot with the right highlights.

And it also not only breaks it down. It also finds the right highlights that are interesting from the conversation and pushes that out there as its own piece of content. So now you go from one video to 20 different videos of like 30 seconds that you can just plan for the next month and keep pushing out there.

And again, it doesn't have to be perfection, like progress over perfection. I think now I've seen a lot more videos who are very not well produced actually go viral. So I don't think people should be so concerned again about being like the perfect editor and the perfect captions and the perfect everything.

You won't learn to perfect it until you push it out there and experiment. And again, going back to that insight driven decision. So you go out there and see, oh, this performed a lot better than I thought. Okay, maybe I should double down on this. But I agree, I think it's really about being efficient and strategic with using what you have and doing more with less.

And a big portion of that is repurposing content, because you don't always need new content to capture your audience. Sometimes your audience just needs to hear what you have to say over and over again in just different ways. So you don't always also need fresh ideas and fresh original content to capture your audience.

You just need to have a very specific message and a few pieces of content already pushed around that and be able to repurpose that and update that and that's why evergreen content is really good because It's always relevant. So what you say about content marketing today is probably going to be somewhat still relevant to what you say about it in six months from now.

So you don't have to constantly push out like new, you're not a media company where you always need to have news related trending topics being pushed out because that's what people come to you for. You're more of a creator, thought leader, expert, coach, that people come to you for evergreen content around your area of specialty, your area of expertise.

And so a lot of that is actually it's easier content to create than trending content that you feel like you always need to be keeping up with. I know that's also been, it seems that's a challenge for a lot of creators to feel like they constantly need to be keeping up with the latest trends, with what's going on, and that if you're not writing about what news today is, or like what, what was trending on TikTok today, or was trending on Google today, then you're irrelevant.

I don't think that's true at all. I think I've seen most of the top successful online coaches or thought leaders or content creators have actually just mastered the evergreen content and rarely even contribute to the trending pieces because they know that's like a quick, okay, it's relevant today and then tomorrow it dies off, right?

So yeah, if you're lucky, you might get that attention because it's trending today. But six months from now, nobody's going to find you because of that content. So I think if you're thinking about trending versus evergreen, you should really focus on what is, again, your ultimate goal here.

If you want to be found constantly and just bring in leads and potential prospects through your content, then maybe focus on evergreen content, if you're trying to go viral and rank up likes and, followers and potential brand deals, then I think obviously the trending content at that point makes a lot more sense.

Yeah, totally. And we see this with the finance channels on YouTube, they are basically producing news related stuff, but it's not as evergreen, of course, but they are getting a lot of use daily. I think that's maybe a great way to stay relevant for them. But I'm big on the evergreen content myself, I was just checking some things I did on a previous summit on this building I hosted, and these sessions are still relevant, even in the age of AI, like things doesn't change.

Yeah, you might use AI for certain things. Maybe it helps you with the lead magnets. Maybe it helps you with certain parts in your list building strategies, but it's the same. It didn't say content marketing hasn't changed either. It's just the way you are producing content. Maybe you're optimizing things more with AI.

Maybe you can repurpose things a lot easier now, but the general things hasn't changed. I think that's, what's really interesting when you produce evergreen content. And I think that's the biggest takeaway so far. I think just to go all in on that. Yeah, I think what really is too is looking at your dated processes and reimagine them in the context of AI and modern tech solutions.

That's really what it is. It's not, you're not re imagining your entire process. You're just re envisioning it based on the tools that you currently have and where you can take away any manual effort and any tedious tasks, and you can just delegate that to automation and AI to not have to constantly be doing stuff that literally feels like monkey work.

That's it you know. Most creators want to be creative, right? That's why you are a creator. Because you're like, Oh, I want to think about awesome ideas or maybe let me reach out to people and do partnership with them and collab. That's where your, your brainpower should be focused on not, oh, I need to come up with, I need to use ChatGPT to come up with 10 ideas and then copy and paste that into a spreadsheet and then put, figure out a deadline and then figure out the brief for each one and then figure out the keyword for each one.

That is now being automated with AI, so that you can just come up with your project overview and goal, and everything is outlined for you, including briefs, deadlines, keywords that you need to use, types of content you should be publishing, when you should be publishing it, and then at that point, if you have resources to delegate that to, you can just delegate it to someone to actually carry on with the drafting side of it.

Or, if you don't have someone, then you can also use AI to finish the loop and draft it all. And that's actually one of the workflows that we initially, created on Vocable is just taking a very basic, simple process that even I used to it used to take me a few days to go from ideation to planning, and I'm a very organized person so I want to be able to not ideate on the go.

I take like a week sometimes or a few days to ideate and come up with at least 12 to 25 to 30 types of pieces of content ahead of time, and then come up with a deadline, and create a brief for each one of them, because I also want to do my own research and know how do I approach each piece, even if I'm writing it, or even if AI is writing it.

I don't necessarily have to delegate it to someone and then based on that, then I draft it all ahead of time, I edit it, and then I basically just schedule it. So now, I'm going into the next month, or next two months, with already my content plan figured out, outlined, my pieces are all drafted, and then everything is scheduled for the right day.

And that, to me, has been a huge lift of just manual, tedious work and that's not even just actually talking about the content generation or even audience analysis or anything. That's just a very basic process, which I think a lot of people are still doing in a way that's very inefficient because they're toggling between different tools, different platforms, different project management platforms.

They're still using floating spreadsheets and floating Google Docs to draft each piece of content separately. It's very messy and so the messier it gets, the harder you could, the harder it gets to scale. And so that's one of the workflow. And maybe I can show it as well. That's what I was going to suggest, Iman, why don't we showcase this?

Because I know people who might be watching this, they have seen a lot of different AI tools. Vocable is, what you guys are doing is a little bit different, I think, or at least you're approaching things a little bit different. I have played around with it myself in there and whenever you're watching this, it might be actually out of beta, but yeah, it'll probably be out of beta at that time so you can sign up.

Yeah, this is the beta look, obviously my dashboard is a lot more, I'm using it a lot as you can see, I have all of my projects here. I have my briefs here, so it's very well organized and then at some point, we're also going to have your team and collaborators here so that you're able to visualize all of your projects and briefs and documents and collaborators in one source of truth, if you will.

And so my favorite workflow right now is projects. You go to projects and you start a new one. You also have two different options. I know there are some people that just want the organization part of it and maybe are not really wanting to use AI. So we still have that option, a self powered project.

But I think most people we're seeing are here because of AI powered projects. So it's very simple. You go and get started. You, let's use a recent It's called Navigating Success Blog, let's say. And then you add a description. Let me just actually just copy and paste that so it's easy.

So here is where you add the description for your project so that you're, it's almost like you're prompting your AI. This is what I'm working on right now. This is the campaign I'm launching or this is a channel that I have and here's what it's focused on and so therefore I want a content plan specifically for this channel or for this project so it's very basic again the more detailed of course you get the better the output is but in this instance we'll keep it a simple paragraph here.

You also can choose the type of content you're looking for. Let's say you're just doing a content plan. This project is specifically for the blog, for example. So then you can select the type of content you want, or you can also say surprise me. Let's say you're doing a go to market campaign and you're like, I'm not sure what content I need for that, right?

So that's go to market campaign could be like newsletters, email campaign, you could have blog posts for it. So there's a little bit of a bundle of types of content to launch with. So you can also leave it up to AI for that, or you can just be more specific again with the kind of content.

I have a quick question related to that, you mentioned that you might, you are, you like to do, some of you would like to add some of your research and things so you ensure it's like, you know, in the way you want to do it. So you use AI as an assistant more, not just as a one click button, right?

So it's as a tool in your arsenal, basically. I think that's my approach, at least, to see as like an extension to amplify myself. Because I want to add my thought leadership and my experience into what I'm doing so it doesn't, otherwise you sound like everyone else, right? I think.

Exactly. Yeah. And that's, I think that comes, that's, and that's good because that's the only input you have to worry about is that the AI part does the heavy lifting of, for example, let's continue for it. It comes up with, let's say, you have a timeline. I'm writing you know for the next month right?

So the month of November, and this is just good to also help with timeframe and deadlines. And here you can also add more details so I thinks it's great to also to add your audience if you have it. So lets see here we'll do, this is a career blog so early you know professionals you can also add key messages.

This is again like you even said to personalize it. What messages do you want to convey? Maybe you have a specific approach to career coaching. Maybe you have specific messaging or copy that you want to include into your overall content plan and brand voice or whatnot. So that, you can always add here as details.

You can now generate the content plan. And to me, this is like the automation part, because the way I used to do this, is that I would use ChatGPT to come up with the ideas, and then I would copy paste each one of them into Airtable. And then I would create the brief for each one and then I would have to use email to assign it sometimes because I, they were not, there were freelancers that we were working with, and then I would have to copy and paste a Google Doc link into the Airtable.

So it was a scattered process. Now, with one click of a button, I have autopopulated briefs generated for each type of content, piece, and idea that comes out, and I can also edit it. So here it comes up with, it's already autopopulated. It gives you the headline, the description, the content structure, the keywords to use for this specific post, or article, or piece of content.

You can also add more, be specific here with the target audience, you can add the word count if you'd like, you can assign a different deadline, and then you can also assign it to someone else in your team, and have a status for it. And Now you can edit it too. So going back to your point around, okay, maybe I want to add more storytelling here into the description so that I can have a different spin so maybe my art of networking involves these specific strategies, make sure you include them.

But now at least everything is organized and you can also either accept it, you're like, okay, I'm good with these 12, or you can boost your plan. So you can create a just as big of a content plan as you'd like, so that once you're done with it, you have it all organized into your dashboard, and at that point, all you got to act as is an editor versus an actual content creator, a content manager, a content organizer, it just takes a lot of the manual work again out of your special time.

So now it's still generating even more and once you feel like in a good place with the content that was generated and the ideas, then you accept it, and then you just move on into the final plan and it's organized. Very cool. Because I haven't seen too many tools do it in this way.

So I think that's what you guys, maybe that's where you saw a gap, right? With the other tools in the market for, especially for creators and solopreneurs. So they can actually leverage this a lot easier that would be normally accessible for maybe people on enterprise plans and things like that.

And so now you, let's say this is good enough, right? At least it's good enough for now. That's about 24 pieces of content almost, or around that time. So you accept your plan and now, boom. You go into your project dashboard, you have here your overview, which is what you, any kind of, um, description you have around the project, your plan is already done for you, which this, just this, by the way, for me, organizing it into Airtable like this from ideating on another AI tool and then organizing it like this on Airtable took me a good two days sometimes.

Now you can also, again, going back to each one of brief, you can edit it as you go, you can assign it, and the cool thing about it too now is that you can go straight from plan to creating draft for each piece of content right away. But before we do that, let's also look at the style guide.

So you can actually, if you want to maintain, let's say this is a very, all encompassing blogs. So you want to maintain a very specific style guide for all the content so that you have brand governance and voice governance. You can also create or generate, you can either create it on your own.

So let's say you know what you want, because you already have this mapped out for your own brand, or you can use AI to generate your own voice and tone and Style Guide, based on the overview that you gave, since this is a career coaching platform, so again, the formality level should be more professional and authoritative, so it gives you like its own, obviously, AI generated thoughts around how the content should be written and how it should be formatted and whatnot, and so again, You can always edit everything, going back to your question around making sure that you have your input here along the way.

And now, every piece of content that is generated within this project will have the same brand governance, same voice governance a bit tied to this specific style guide. Now you can go back to your plan and just hopefully start drafting. Let's say, okay, I went through this, I read it, I liked it as it is, or I added more to it.

Now you can just go create draft. You can use AI, you can freestyle. Some people still want to write these days on their own, totally fine. Maybe you have something already drafted for it from before that you want to import, so you have that option as well. But most people are using AI to just create content straight from the brief.

So the different thing here about most of other tools is we use briefs, which are very detailed, as the actual prompt to create the full draft and the full piece of content, because it's a lot more detailed, and it's a lot more, I would say interesting, and you can also add in a lot more details and stories on your own.

And then here you have your on the go chat bot, or I would say this is your ChatGPT on the left if you want to add more, give me a headline, and so that's, and so now you can also insert it directly into your entry editor. Let's say I like this one better. Everything you need is in one source of truth, which I like, because I had to toggle a lot between planning on Airtable, then I would have to go to ChatGPT to draft, and I would have to create my own prompt for each piece of content.

And then I would have to copy and paste that into a Google Doc and share it with my team if I want to edit it, or take it and paste it into Grammarly to edit it even more. So this kind of has your whole everything from planning, ideating, all the way to drafting and then publishing as well, so you can integrate your channels, now this is in progress, you can say it's in review if you want someone else to review it, you can comment on it, you can also add, you can highlight certain sentences and you can also rewrite it in different ways.

You can exemplify, shorten, clarify, expand. You can add a comment if you're collaborating with other people. So it's just, you know, your a typical, entry editor with everything you need in it. So that once you're done, let's say you're done, you close it and then you also can integrate your channels here.

So I can add my WordPress here. Once I'm done, I can just schedule it or publish it directly to my CMS. Can you import from your platform to WordPress? Yeah, you can add. Or do you, how do you, or is that set up? I, because I don't remember when I played around, but maybe this is something you've added.

This is cool in that case. Very fast. Yeah, it's new. So we have now integrated WordPress, Webflow, and Wix. Amazing. That's, this saves so much time. As a writer and blogger, I had to like Google Doc and then there's some tools for it, but they were like, as you said, they're spread around, you know, you're not having one source.

Yeah, Yeah, you can also see it as a Kanban too, which a lot of people like it like this, so you can move things around. Kind of like a project management tool, like with AI features where you can do everything at once. That's pretty interesting. Yeah, you can add more people to project.

But like you said, so here now, everything you need in your, in your workflow is in this dashboard. So you have your overview. This is where you describe your product, your plan is here. Any content now you create goes in here. So you don't have to go like, where is that Google Doc that I created for that one project, which to me was like, I cannot that's like inefficiencies that you don't need to deal with.

So now if I have my blog, all of my blog content plans will be here. My content for that specific blog can always be here. My style guide for that plan will be here and the channels where I publish are here. So it's a really, and then I can tap into AI to add more so I can boost my plan.

So let's say I went through all of my, I'm such a fan of the list. I don't know why I just love this list view. So let's say you want to keep boosting your plan you drafted all of this and now you're ready. So now you go, you just go through one by one. So create draft, and now it just drafts it and adds it to your content.

So in probably less than 30 minutes, you would have had 25 pieces of content, drafted, outlined, and maybe edited even and ready to be published. Which this process took me probably at least three days. Awesome. This is amazing. I have one question regarding this. If you can actually take, let's say, a longer video or a podcast and then actually bring that into your tool and turn that into a blog post or a longer piece of content as we talked about earlier.

Yeah, that is actually what we're working on next. I was gonna say, this is amazing. I swear, this is what I'm looking for. Yeah, so the next, I think the next phase for us, that we're working on to add to the workflow is repurposing, so being able to either do it on demand, so it could be here as a standalone tool, so you can just do that on demand for one piece of content, or for example, you've already created this piece of content, right?

So you have it here. So now you can put this piece of content through a repurposing workflow where it may be, this blog post is going to be now turned into a potential podcast run of show and brief with questions and maybe even potential guests to use for that specific podcast. It can be turned into a LinkedIn post, a video script.

The only thing we won't be doing, at least not anytime soon, is to actually create a full video here, but you can definitely upload a video through a link and then turn that into written content, but you're not actually creating a video. I think with time we could... I had an idea of taking a YouTube link basically and pasting it in or something like this.

I think it's a good decision as well, because I think you don't need to be a video tool. I think that there's enough tools like that, and that's going to, that's a whole different ballgame, I think. I think it's good to focus on your strength. I think this is like, this is really useful, actually.

I didn't see some of these new features. It's really cool. It would be kind of the similar to tool as analyze where you upload something from the web or you paste it in here, or URL and then it basically analyzes all of it for you and breaks down the summaries, the tone to voice and whatnot, so that you can, if you wanna copy a piece from a competitor or something, that you analyze it here and you use that analysis to prompt AI to create something similar.

So it would be a standalone tool as well, but definitely it's own workflow as well. Where you have content that you've already created maybe in here as text form and you want to reverse repurpose it, right? So you want to actually create a video content from it, a video script from it, a podcast from it, a LinkedIn post, social media post, even an email newsletter or ad copy.

You want to boost that article on social media, what ad copy should go from it. So there's a few other ways you can repurpose one single piece of content depending on what it is. So I, yeah. What do you usually start with, Iman? Well, where do you start? In your workflow, like personal or for Vocable where do you start usually?

Do you start with a longer piece or do you start in the, in another direction? I always start to me because I've been a long form writer for a while and I've also managed a media platform that was all about articles and thought leadership. I always start with, as you could see, blog, blog, blog.

I start with long form articles because I think it gives me more of a, more copy, more meat to the concept, to the idea. And then I usually turn those into LinkedIn posts, even potential podcast inspiration. I turn them into social media and especially also email newsletters. So I always, to me, it's easier to start with a blog or if it's a project, I usually just have different, so for my, for, this is our, this was our go to market campaign for our blog and just in general for Vocable.

So as you could see, my team was on it as well. So there's here a different types of content, so video scripts, newsletters, blogs, social media posts. So we had a little bit of everything. Conceptualize that and then basically planned it in here in this specific project. And then there is like the channel specific projects.

So performance marketing blog, social plan. So there is just a few, again, a few different projects. So I think it depends on what you feel most comfortable with. For me, I feel most comfortable with long form content. I think it's just a lot easier a lot of times to start with a long form, whether that's a video or that's a blog, because you're getting all the content essentially for free.

You're getting all that for your X platform, Twitter, for your Instagram. You're getting all that. Yes, there's a place for just sharing something in a new story or something that might not be repurposed all the time. But yeah, you like the other pieces, the educational pieces, I think you can just take that from longer form content and just put that into news, like this series I'm doing, it's going to turn into also an AI for Creators Newsletter, for example.

And I can just highlight the experts, I can feature them. I think it's a lot more beneficial, like what you can do with the content if you're just sitting there collecting dust, it doesn't do any good, so definitely get use of it, yeah. Absolutely, yeah. And then I think for just a quick overview of the rest of the product is we have other on demand tools too, so you have your planner here.

Your planner shows all of your briefs across all projects, so as you can see here, I'm pretty busy creating content, but the cool thing about it is that it's all in here and I don't have to toggle between other pieces of, you know, spreadsheets and I can just come in here and look at all my content all at once and I can also assign it and I can see the progress of it.

It's like a universal centralized platform for everything that I'm currently creating, which I think is super helpful. My issue with other tools and platforms is that there is just way too many floating documents. It's the same thing as Google Docs where you just go into the dashboard and you just see untitled, untitled, untitled, draft, draft, everywhere.

I think the key to having great content success is being as organize as possible because you're able to visualize what you're working on and then that way scale from it. So that was kind of the core of how we approach this product was being as organized as possible, having a planner, and then having things in project format as well so that you can bundle your content based on the project or campaign you're working on or the channel that you're publishing in and your library as well.

So you have your actual folders, you have everything is organized in a way that you can visualize that. We also have on demand templates. So let's say you just today, I'm like, okay, I want to create a quick case study that someone brought up. That's actually interesting. So I can go on demand and just create using the template.

So it doesn't really take that much time and I don't need to plan for it ahead. And then similarly here, we have our research tools. So this is also talking about Keyword research, right? So this is a more simplified keyword research tool for people who are not as sophisticated in SEO, but still want...

Which one did you integrate for you must have something in the back, and is that keywords everywhere? Or what's, what do you work in? Do you know which kind of platform you, I've heard different platforms used. We're using one of the APIs for one of the best ones out there, actually.

I think it might have been SEMrush, but we simplified it. So the quality of the research is as good as a big tool out there, but it's more simplified and an easy to use interface. I just think that a lot of our customers, when we interviewed them or users, they weren't really well versed in the SEO world, so we wanted to simplify it, and we're still working through simplifying it to also integrate it as part of the workflow, potentially.

If you start from research, then maybe you can ID it from your ad to your content planner, instead of just making it a stand alone research tool with keyword variations, top queries. But this has been very helpful for a lot of people to just know, oh this is what my audience is asking about when it comes to my key topics.

So maybe let me focus my ideation process around it. So for example, what is a content marketer's interesting? Should I write about that? Let me ideate some blog post ideas around it. And then my goal here, and it's also gives you more tags too. So we have also built this in your briefs.

And whenever you're ideating, it always suggest other sub keywords and tags that you can focus on even more. Let's say content creation. So information, friendly, and then also here you're ideating on the go too. So this is more of an on demand tool. It's not part of the project workflow, but for example, you've created a whole content plan on your project.

And now you want to just ideate on the go and then add to your planner as well. So you're able to use this tool and go through all of your ideations and then either add it to your planner or you can open it directly to your editor. So again, it creates that connective tissue here between all the tools.

so yeah, these are all of your ideas. You can see it as you go and add to your planner opens up a brief, so you can add it there and add it, or you can open it into your editor. And then our writing tool is the same one as what we showed earlier, so you can either pick a template, import a draft, or freestyle, which takes you to the entry editor, and the template takes you to our template page that I showed you.

So it's pretty straightforward and easy to use, which was a big focus for us, is to really create something that's accessible, adaptable, agile, and easy to use for a lot of people who don't necessarily have that AI affinity, but are also looking to be organized and even maybe some people haven't really thought about their project workflows before.

They haven't thought about their content processes before. This is a great tool to start because it's not overwhelming. I think a lot of the content marketing platforms I've used before to get organized, like optimizely gather content are extremely hard to wrap my head around, especially when I'm a one person or two people show.

And it takes a lot more of a learning curve to really adapt to it. And we wanted to approach this in a way that was familiar. So a lot of the look and feel seems to be something that you've probably already used before, whether it's Asana or anything similar. It's very clean, it's not overwhelming, and it just really puts your content at the forefront of your visuals.

So you're able to really take a step back and think more of it as a strategist rather than a content creator who's so deep into the creation process. Now, you're moving over from that role to managing your content, to strategizing better. And that's the goal here, is being able to prompt creators to think more like teams and enterprise rather than oh, let me just scramble things right, like last minute and then push out some content that will make me relevant and then be surprised as to why their content game is not performing.

Yeah, no, totally. I think I've used so many of these tools and I think if you just start with ChatGPT, what is the biggest downside there? I think it's a great tool. I use it for a lot of things, but you cannot really search. You cannot organize anything in ChatGPT. And I have a chat of a lot of things right now and even with the recent announcement, with the Custom GPTs.

It's really interesting. It's like, I have played around, even we have created some really useful GPTs internally and for customers of a Creator School and things like that, they have a lot of stuff we have done, but you cannot find them easily either. There's not, that's, I'm sure that's launching, but you have to like toggle it.

You have to like save them in your sidebar and things like that. So I think that is like a really big opportunity for tools like Vocavolt and others, but to just have this component built in. I think otherwise people would go to ChatGPT, right? But it doesn't do everything you have just showcased.

Like it doesn't have like a project management. It doesn't have the air table functionality. I like these kinds of things and also like how clean it is. ChatGPT is not working and in some, in that way for doing blogs, I never use it for blog post writing, for example, I have used some other tools, but now I've been playing around a little bit with the beta in Vocable.

I know we're probably going to have some kind of deal for everyone. We have to see what that is, but you can find a link in the description when we have that finalized, you'll just click the link and get access, but I want to, yeah, So if anyone wants to jump in on the beta version while it's free for the next, until the end of the year, we're keeping it as free as possible because we always just want feedback and we want to also see how people are using it, what is the most valuable thing for, is it workflows, is it on demand tools, and really, again, I think my approach as a founder with most products, because I'm not a technical person, but I'm very user centric.

And to me, I'm just obsessed over user feedback. And I genuinely want to feel like we've built the product in tandem with the people that are going to use it. Otherwise, if it's me guessing what you guys need, or what you need as a creator, I think we're always going to fall short but if we're building it alongside people who are going to see value in it and use it, then I think that's really the bridge, that's the gap we're trying to bridge right now because everyone's going to either enterprise or patching together tools, endlessly toggling between a bunch of stuff, which is, again, does not fall into the whole goal of efficiency and productivity.

Yeah, definitely check it out. I think it's the only tool I've seen that have a free beta version that you can just go and jump in there and play around. So definitely check that out. And when that's over, you will still have some kind of deal for you. So whenever you're watching this, it will have something unique for you that you can't find anywhere else.

But Iman, I wanted to ask a little bit about your... I'm sure you have a few other tools that you have in your arsenal, right? There's certain things you do, especially when it comes to AI and simplifying your workflow, being more productive. What are these tools you're using? So I'm using, and I came across this recently, I'm using Gamma app for a lot of my presentations recently.

it's interesting because I think you can also use it for creating guides. It's not even just a slideshow. I think when you add more text, it actually creates almost like PDF looking products or, um, you know, content pieces. So it's incredible and it has the same approach to Vocable, where you're not just generating the content side of it, but you're generating into organized you know, sections, which I think is also, again, going back to the automation part.

That's really where the value is even more because you don't have to copy and paste it and create your own project management workflow. So you're getting the organization, you're getting the formatting and you're getting the copy on top of everything. So that's one that I'm using.

Obviously I use ChatGPT and going back to your points about that, ChatGPT versus other applications I think for me, ChatGPT has always been an on the go tool. I don't use it to plan as much. I don't use it to get organized. If I'm walking around, I'm like, Oh, I wonder what I should, Oh, I had this idea let me expand on it.

And I would use that on my phone. Or if I'm like just writing quick kind of copy checks and whatnot on, on my laptop, then I use ChatGPT on the go, but it's really messy, it's become messy now where all my chats are there, and I'm not keeping track of it all, but it's an on the go demand to which I will always be using, I think it's definitely something I will not just completely steer away from and then I use SEMrush, too, as well.

Sometimes if I want to go deeper into the keyword research and whatnot, and that's usually for bigger clients, it's not for me, so when I do content strategy and consulting for other people, especially bigger companies around content marketing, I tend to go a little bit more sophisticated on the SEO side, so I tend to use SEMrush for their specific workflows.

Let's see, what else have I used? I think those are the main ones, of course, Vocable that I use now for content. Well, before Vocable, I used to use Jasper or Copy.AI and then I used Asana, to get organized. So now I don't use those, or Airtable. I don't use those anymore because we have basically implemented a lot of that into Vocable, which is great to be able to bundle as much as I can into one platform.

I made it my goal this year, especially with I think the rise of AI tools and this market being so fragmented is that I wasn't get caught up into being a like one of those people that just toggles between so many tools. If I find some something that is able to centralize a lot of it, then I go there because I'm really prioritizing efficiency rather than just execution and so that was how I really approached a lot of this second half of my year is let me get organized, but I don't want to have five different subscriptions that I manage.

I don't wanna have to toggle between five different passwords and logins. And also for me, I would have to onboard my team to each one of them because I want to collaborate with them. It became a little unmanageable, and so that's why I tend to go towards platforms rather than tools.

Platforms that are really leading with centralization and consolidation versus tools that are very task specific. Another tool that I think would be great for you, I'm not sure if you have used it, but I checked it out. It's called Eureka, and it's focused on specific course creation.

So it's for course creators. I dabbled a little bit with it because we've done a lot of courses with a Mindvalley and I'm also doing courses with another company now. But they're more training and workshops than actual courses that are on demand and being sold online. So it didn't necessarily work for me, but I'm not sure if that's something you would, we would find valuable.

No, it's interesting take because I, I do. I do value a lot of AI when it comes to course creation, but I think where people sometimes get it wrong is that they are using it for an entire process. I think like when it comes to ideation, when it comes to outlining certain things, I think it's great.

You can even use it to come up with your script, if you have a script for your courses. But I think what people get wrong is they are using it for everything. Similarly, we talked about the blog. Why would you have an AI generated course? It's not gonna, I mean, can be, anyone could find that out there on the web, but it's not your experience.

I have, I'm very big on really having some tangible results whenever you are creating courses and things like that. I don't like to just create fluff out. We don't need more content and more education out there. It's already existing. If you have results for your clients, for your students, then go out there and create a course and use AI to amplify whatever it is that you are doing.

Now I can do a lot faster. We have Gamma, you mentioned it, right? You can create your presentations really beautifully fast. I think that was, and you can use Google Slides too, but I like when it's AI built in, right? So I think I like it when, to me, I just want the outline and the framework being generated and I can go in and put in my own content.

I've never struggled with the writing process. And I think most creators, funny enough, that's not their biggest challenge. They're creators for a reason because they're either good writers. They love creating content. They love writing. They love speaking on video. They love interviewing people.

So I honestly think that that's the least of creators concerns is to use AI for the creation part. That's why I always urge people to preserve that for the human touch point, and then actually use AI for organization, for workflow, for optimization. So you're not doing tedious manual tasks that don't require your creative brainpower.

And that's, I think, where the best tools I've seen so far are the ones that create a framework for you, and that you a workflow so you don't have to think about, oh, step one is this, step two, I have to do this, step three, it's already built into the product. And that's a very product, that's an elite on the product side versus elite on the AI side, because I think there is no tool that is going to compete with the GPT AI level, quality level, right?

So if you're leading with, hey, we're the best AI content creation, I think that's a little misleading because I think we know ChatGPT is already one in that game, but now if you're bringing something different, where you're packaging a workflow, where you're automating something, or even adding tools that give you more predictive analysis and content intelligence, where I'm able to digest a lot of my performance and data and turn that into content ideas or strategy, now you're bringing a little bit more value to the user because you're not just selling the AI writing tool, but rather a whole different way of reimagining a process that has been tedious and messy for a lot of creators who don't have the resources to do more.

Yeah, and I like what you said earlier about not needing as many tools there. I've seen lists with probably 6,000 plus tools. There were thousands of tools released just in a month, I think, this year or something. It's insane. I think that's also interesting. A lot of them will go out of business if they don't have a clear use case.

I think that's for sure going to happen because we see already tools that have been around for, they're not tools, by the way, they are platforms, as you said, like HubSpot is a great example. They have a great, they're integrating AI. Canva is not going to go out of business. They have been around for a long time.

They're integrating AI. Photoshop doing that. So I think a lot of tools that you already are familiar with, they are integrating it, and new tools like, or platforms, as you like to call it, with Vocable, they are coming out, and they are basically, doing things a little bit differently.

I think these platforms will succeed, essentially, but the other ones, they are, they're just building on top of the OpenAI's API. I think they are pretty simplistic in many ways. Some of them have been built in a weekend, which is interesting, at least. That's exactly it. And I think this is why I also appreciate this summit specifically, because you guys had a very, you know, just the same approach we have.

You had a very specific, customer specific approach to the content, meaning that there are ways of scaling content using AI for creators that doesn't necessarily apply to enterprises or teams and vice versa. And I think the mistakes that we're seeing a lot of actual resourceful, venture backed platforms make, and we talked about this earlier, is that they focus heavily on enterprises and teams because they think, obviously, maybe that's where the big money is.

But I think there's now left a very underserved, untapped market of solopreneurs that are on the rise, I think they're projected to be 50.9 percent of the U. S. workforce by 2027 is going to be solopreneurs, but we see that the traditional tech companies are not really focused on that market as much because obviously the pricing is a lot lower accessibility is a lot lower or whatnot.

But now I think that that's where the winning products are going to really emerge is when you figure out what is your use case, what is a pain point that is very specific to a market that is also large for niche that you can actually solve because you have domain expertise, you have an ecosystem that is also collaborating with you to build this product to be very tailored to their needs and be able to use AI just as just a leverage as a, almost like a foundation to re imagine a data process that can be streamlined and automated with a lot less resources.

And now it's possible more than ever because AI technology is able to give that accessibility to solopreneurs at a lot lower cost than before. Before that, when you look at content automation or just business automation softwares, a lot of them only cater to enterprises because it was very expensive and hard to build those processes and workflows.

It took a lot of power, but now with AI, it's easy to automate that without having to build a super sophisticated product that requires a higher subscription plan or an enterprise custom plan that solopreneurs can't access. So I think it's an interesting, really, time to be in this space because on one hand, there's a fragmented AI tools that are emerging every day.

But then I feel like they're not quite at that level where they've actually figured out what use cases they're solving. And we're just throwing a bunch of tools into the market and expecting under resourced, solopreneurs and creators to figure out which tool to incorporate into every step of their life cycle.

That's insane. I couldn't keep up, and I've been in this space for a while. Yeah, no, 100%, I agree with you, Iman and I think something worth touching upon, since you have been in the content marketing game for quite a while, is the ethical things, right? When you're leveraging AI for content creation, like...

You need to check facts and things like that, especially when you're generating content with AI. So what's your process for this when you're creating content for your personal brand, for Vocable now, for maybe for clients and stuff like that? Yeah, I mean, that's a big thing obviously, I think we're still struggling with AI's bias and hallucination to a certain extent.

Of course, it's only getting better and better and we're seeing less and less, I would say mistakes or fake information, or what not coming out of it, because now it also has access to the browsing feature, and it's able to really extract information in real time, but there's always still that low percentage of potentially creating content that is not ethical or bias or just not what you want to associate your brand with that's why I always say you need to implement a human review process, and I think weather you're a big brand or one person show or one person business, you need to figure out a very speciffic way to make sure that every content that is generated by AI or assisted by AI is fact

checked and double checked by a human in some kind of very thorough review process. I've seen many people just copy and paste that and push it into their blogs and then later on, realize that they left as an AI model. I can't, you know, that's not even a good look. And of course, there is a much worse cases where the content is just either racially biased or just there is some kind of bad kind of content that is not really a good look for your brand.

So you want to make sure that anything that goes out that was generated by AI goes through that review process. And I also advocate that AI content generation should always be just the first draft. It's not the final result. Even if, it gets more and more sophisticated, AI will probably never sound like you.

So the way I approach my content when I use AI to generate it is I use it as a framework, right? And so it gave me a nice little starting point. It's a stepping stone. And then I go back and then I add as much personal stories, as much personal voice. Maybe even add the first person instead of a more third person approach to my content, which just really make it more personable.

There are a lot of ways that you need to actually edit this to sound as human as possible. Because I think we're gonna get to a place where, as humans, we're going to already know what's been generated by AI and what's not. I don't think I need an AI detector now to be able to say that piece of content was AI generated and there was hardly any human touchpoint to it.

I don't think you want to fall in that category because now you start losing brand credibility. You lose trust of your customers because your customers are coming to you for your expertise. Yes, AI is smarter than us to a certain extent. But I'm coming to you for your expertise and for your human experience in that domain.

That's why you're going to coach me or that's why I'm going to buy your services. That's why I'm going to buy your products because of your human involvement in that industry. And if I see that the content that comes out of your brand is constantly sounding robotic and AI generated and it's just lazy, at that point you've lost me as a customer.

So I think for a while we will just have to think about AI as just a first draft content generator and not a final result. Yeah, no, 100%. This is what I say every time and I think it's interesting when you see all this. Really bad content coming out. No wonder you don't rank in Google.

Google doesn't actually penalize really AI generated content, penalizes bad content, and mostly robotic content is bad content. If it doesn't sound like you, or doesn't have any thought leadership, it's bad content. That's basically how it is. Usually any content coming from an AI directly is not worthy of ranking in Google.

So, I think that's a great thing, great point to share there. Just as we wrap up this session, I have a few more questions for you, Iman. So what's your number one piece of advice for creators to get started with AI and start implementing this in their business? So many things. Well, I think going back to, again, what I mentioned briefly before is before you get started into you're into bringing AI transformation into your process, and whether it's content or anything else, right, you really just want to understand and audit what your process is like now, and be able to understand where it makes sense to have AI automate tasks, and where you need to Reserve that human creativity because as you start using AI more and more, you have

to have almost a framework for yourself to maintain that balance between the human creativity and then the AI assisted content automation and intelligence. You don't wanna fall, you don't want that balance to be tipped too far over to the AI generated because at that point you've lost your own connection to your brand, or you also don't want to just do everything still manually and fall behind in the AI world when you can actually automate and be smart about doing more with less using AI.

So that's how you should approach it. It's not a, again, let me just use this tool on demand, be strategic about it, take some time with it, understand your process, understand its capabilities and where it can be beneficial from an automation, from a streamlining perspective, not just, again, the creation process, and then use that to your advantage because your goal as a creator, and I think we can all agree, is that we want to scale with more efficiency and less effort, and so that's how you should think about AI in content creation in general, not just a writing tool.

Yeah, and the next one is, I couldn't agree more with this either, this is great advice, because creators are struggling with this all the time, and I know when I started out I struggled a lot with this process, and I think building workflows and things early on would have helped me a lot to actually stay on top of it.

Now with AI it's a lot easier, when I started it was not really a thing, so now it's a lot easier with this and I would continue for me, like to, I love that you guys are coming with this to Vocable, that you can actually take a link and you can take your YouTube video. I've used before Content at Scale for this a lot because they can take a link and stuff like that.

But your tool has more of the workflow component built in, which I really appreciate. I think that's what sets you apart. But I have one really interesting one, putting you on the spot a little bit, I would say, Iman but imagine you lost everything for a second, hopefully it doesn't happen, you have, I'm sure you have been through your journey, different points of your life, but if you were to start over from scratch today, as a content creator or business owner, how would you use AI to get a competitive edge and advantage to build things up again?

Oh, that's a really good question. I think the first part is using AI to research what my area should be. If I lost everything, let's say I wasn't an expert in content creation or marketing anymore, and that was not my niche, or that I haven't built a media platform before, so that's not my niche, or I'm not in tech and AI now, I would, and I want to just be a self dependent creator who's achieving financial freedom and running my own business and running my own show with not that many resources, I would first spend some time using AI and even just ChatGPT, right?

I'm sure I would have access to it at that point if I don't have access to other tools. It is to conduct market research. See what people are looking for right now and see where my expertise and my story can bring value. And than specializing that niche and build my brand in that specific area.

So once I've done my market research, then I can actually do an audit of what my potential audience persona or user persona or customer persona could be, right? Am I speaking to women, professional women between the ages of 25 and 45 who want to figure out their life purpose and career?

Or am I speaking to people who want to have a fitness goal and become healthier. Like, what is my area and who is my audience? And then from then on, figure out what type of content speaks the most with that audience and start with that. I wouldn't start with five different channels.

I wouldn't have a podcast, a blog, and everything else. I would specialize in one area. If it's a blog, easier for me because I'm a writer and I'm better at that. I will probably start with launching a blog. The same way I did it last time when I got started, right? I launched a podcast first because it was easy for me to interview people.

I loved speaking to other women. I selfishly thought it would be great to just connect with them to build my business. And I went straight for one channel, which was the podcast and when the podcast became successful, then I complimented that and scaled that effort using a blog. And then when the blog was successful, then I launched a whole platform that also had contributors contributed to my content.

So you want to map out step by step. You don't want to go all in and you don't want to just also throw a bunch of spaghetti in the wall and see what sticks. The research phase, I couldn't stress that more. And I guarantee you, so many creators skip that step. They think they know.

They think they guess, oh, this content is going to work great. I think I want to be in the fitness area or I want to be in this area. But why? What was the research driven insight that led you there? So, I think with AI now, you can do market research like never before in a few hours.

You don't need to hire a person to do that for you. You don't need to be sophisticated in that area or a marketer or a business person to be able to know how to conduct market research. There are so many templates too, even on ChatGPT's extension, AIPRM, that gives you a very thorough market research based on one interest or one area.

I would start there. Yeah. No, that's a great answer actually. I simply really thought out. You didn't know this question before, by the way, for anyone watching, I didn't send it to her. So that was a really good breakdown and I need to ask you as well, since you're big in the AI space and you see a lot of things that's happening, what's your thoughts on the future of AI, where things might be headed?

Interesting. I think we are going to start seeing autonomous AI agents as the new standard. I think this year was really about the advancements of AI co pilots, right? AI assistants. There's a lot of still human input needed along the way to go from prompt all the way to execution, or from objective to figuring out the different sequences of tasks and executing on them, you know, there is, there needs to be human input at this stage along the way.

I think as 2024 rolls around, and again, we don't know what's happening with OpenAI, so that's TBD at this point, everything is moving pretty quickly, but from what I'm seeing, and also from the latest announcements of OpenAI at Dev Day, I think we're starting to progress towards autonomous AI agents, where now forget the prompt engineering skills that you learned this year, you're just going to be able to give your AI agent one single goal or objective.

So these are objective driven models and let's say I want to grow by 1000 followers in the next five months or so. And with that objective, then the AI is able to come up with a strategy and a sequence of tasks that need to follow based on a strategy and execute on it for you. And I think at that point, all you will need to do as a human is approve and move to the next step.

So it's like, okay, I just completed this task. Do I get your approval to move on to the next one, okay, so like, you come up with a strategy, I, this is the kind of content we need to create, and if you approve that strategy, then it starts creating the content. If you approve the content, then it actually figures out when to post it, and maybe even schedules it, and it actually posts it on your channels, and it monitors the performance of it too, and then brings it back into a feedback loop and iterates on it.

So now we have little agents running around doing everything that we need. And it goes from just not content also, but, even like booking a ticket. I want to go to London next week come up, and just come up with the right flight. It asks you to approve it, books it for you. Maybe has it even access to your chart, to your wallet So that's, I think, where we're headed now as far as the next standard of AI models and AI chatbots.

Yeah, I've had a lot of conversation around this. I think I spoke also to Conor Grennan. I know you're familiar with his work as well. He was talking a lot about kind of what the future is with this. I think that's, where we are headed actually and it's already with the GPTs and the actions that we can build into this.

I think it's coming and we already have like with the plugins like certain restaurant bookings and stuff like that. So I think all of this is getting really exciting and it's gonna be moving quickly, I think, rather than slow here. But the final thing I had for you, was there any question you wanted me to ask but I didn't cover or something you want to share with everyone before you wrap this one up here, Iman?

No, I think we've covered a lot and nothing comes up in my mind now. Yeah, I think we've really talked about everything from the importance of workflows and processes to future of AI and then how to think about it as far as like maximizing its potential and not being task specific.

I think this is very comprehensive. I don't have any, any, other comments. Yeah, that's great. And for anyone watching this or listening in, be sure to check out Vocable. We will put a link in the description and depending on when you're watching this, they might have a free beta.

Otherwise, we're going to have a great deal for you that you can exclusively get here on this session. Is there any other place you want people to connect with you, Iman? I think on Instagram, I'm very active when it comes to commenting on AI stuff every now and then, at least, when I'm not too caught up in my own business.

But definitely Instagram, at Iman Oubou I M A N O U B O U. I'm also active on LinkedIn, if you want to reach out to me for professional reasons, or collaborations, or anything of that sort. And that's about it. Yeah, for sure. This has been a really comprehensive session. We covered a lot of ground.

So thanks so much for taking the time, Iman. It was really valuable. And if you have any questions or comments below, be sure to leave it below and subscribe to the channel for more like the video, and I'll see you in the next one. Ciao for now. Bye.