The proven AI growth playbook for creators, with Matt Wolfe

Hey, it's Navid here. And in this session, we'll give you a complete AI growth playbook for creators. And I'm really excited to be joined by futurist and AI expert, Matt Wolfe. He helps marketers and content creators embrace the future. His AI focused YouTube channel has more than 525,000 subscribers.

His site futuretools.io curates the latest AI tools and news. He also has a weekly newsletter and a lot of other stuff. I've known Matt for a very long time and now he's all the rage with AI and his YouTube channel has blown up. In this session, we are going to take a peek behind the curtain and see how Matt is using this in his business.

He's going to share some screen. He's going to demonstrate some stuff as well. He even shares some real numbers, which is really exciting. So there's a lot of good stuff he's going to share in the session when it comes to using AI tools to grow his YouTube channel business. And a lot of strategies for creating viral content, generating ideas, optimizing workflows, and so much more.

So without further ado, let's dive right into the session here. Warm welcome to the session, Matt. Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited and it's been a long time since we've chatted, so excited to dig in with you. It's been a wild journey. Like you have, I think I got into one of your early products with learn to blog or something like that back in the day.

I mean, that's a long time ago and you have been in the evolution. You had the podcast with your business partner. I think you were part of another summit I did As well with him talking about podcasting, but now we are all about AI, right? That's kind of what you're all about with FutureTools and everything there.

But tell me a little bit about the evolution into things. Now you're a big creator on YouTube, like growing into 500k subscribers soon. I mean, it's amazing to see, but what was this journey like coming into this and getting into the world of AI? Yeah, I mean, I never expected it to take off like it did.

But yeah, as you mentioned, I actually had an old company called Learn to Blog. I sold that company back in 2015. I took a little bit of time off and then in 2017, Joe Fear and I, we made a podcast called Hustle and Flowchart. That was pretty much my main business for years and years and years.

Joe and I just ran Hustle and Flowchart. Joe and I actually started talking about AI on Hustle and Flowchart back in 2020, I want to say, maybe early 2021. We were talking about AI and GPT. This was before ChatGPT, but we were talking about GPT 3 and back then conversion AI, which became Jarvis, that became Jasper.

So we were talking about those kinds of tools back then. but back then nobody really cared that much about them. we had our podcast, we interviewed a whole bunch of marketers and authors and you know, a few celebrities here and there, and that was a fun show. But then towards the later end of that show, maybe 2020, end of 2021, beginning of 2022, I started to get more into the AI stuff.

I started to uh, learn about the like GPT 3 that was available and the various AI models that were out there. And then I wanted to talk more and more about that. So I just kind of started doing my own thing on my YouTube channel, right? At the time I had a thousand subscribers. Most of my videos were just like random things like an interview here and a tutorial about how to set up an automation in Gmail and just like a bunch of random stuff.

And I was getting more and more into AI, so I went, I'm going to make a few videos about this AI stuff. And at the end of 2022, the AI stuff just exploded, right? Midjourney came along, Stable Diffusion got more popular, ChatGPT was released in November of 2022, all of this stuff started to bubble up in the AI world, and I already had a handful of videos about AI on YouTube before anybody was talking about them, so what ended up happening was ChatGPT came out, within a week of ChatGPT coming out I made a video all about some of the really cool prompts and cool ways you can use ChatGPT, and it just hit it like the right time.

That video ended up getting like 1.2 million views and within a single month my YouTube channel went from like 1,200 subscribers to over 100,000 in just like a one week, or a one month period because of this AI content. And so, I went, you know what, this stuff is really really hot right now, I love making content about it, YouTube seems to love it, so, I'm gonna lean in on this, and at that point, I went to Joe, and I said, man, I really need to step away from the podcast and go all in on YouTube, look at what's happening with my channel, every time I make an AI video, it explodes, I just need to focus on this, and you know, Joe and I were still really, really good friends to this day, he understood, he's

still running Hustle and Flowchart, the podcast we had, and I sort of broke away and went, I'm going all in on, on YouTube. I built the FutureTools website around the same time I started making AI content. And the reason I built that was just for my own personal purposes, right? Like I was coming across all these AI tools and I just wanted to organize them.

I wanted to , I had a Google sheet that I was putting all of these different AI tools in, and it got overwhelming. It got to the point where there was 80 or 100 different tools on this spreadsheet, and I couldn't find the exact tool I was looking for. So somebody would ask me, what tool is good for this?

And I would go to my spreadsheet and hunt through it and I couldn't find the tool because there's just too many tools on it. So I literally went and made the FutureTools website as a way for me to organize the tools and find them myself. I went and made that website, I shared a link to it on Twitter, said, hey, I made this for myself, but if anybody wants to use it, here it is, that tweet ended up going viral, it got spread all over the internet, and all over Twitter, some big AI influencers and tech influencers, shared that around and all of a sudden FutureTools exploded in back in the height of AI when back in spring of 2023, AI was so popular that that website was getting 1.2 million visitors a month and

it was just it was just going insane. It exploded because it just went viral on Twitter. So I went, all right, I've got the website going viral. I've got my YouTube videos going viral this is my thing now. I'm just going all in on it. My question on this, did you have affiliate links on that website and make some money as well?

Or was it more costly with the Webflow build? Well, when I first started, it wasn't, there was no affiliate links. It was just, again, it was just for me to sort and organize. I didn't think it was going to get any traffic. So I didn't have any affiliate links when I first started, but maybe four or six weeks in when it was actually really starting to pick up steam, I started going back through the tools going, do any of these have affiliate programs?

Cause if they do, I'm signing up. And so now I actually have a full time VA who literally goes and looks for affiliate links on the tools, on the website. Signs me up for them and then swaps the links out. So I'm actively swapping out with affiliate links to this day now. So now I would say, I mean, most tools still don't have affiliate programs.

I'd say maybe 25 percent of the tools on the site have affiliate links. But, now a a big chunk of them do have affiliate links. Okay, that's that's great. I mean, I'm sure we get into that, but like before we do, I wanted to ask you, have you always seen your, because now you're this big creator or you're growing very quickly, have you always seen yourself as a content creator or have you seen yourself more as a marketer first?

I'm just curious to know, like what kind of, what spectrum do you come from? I mean, I feel like I'm, if you're looking at a Venn diagram, I feel like I'm like right in the middle. I've always probably associated myself more as like a content creator, I started out blogging. My first money I ever made online was from creating blog content and selling advertising on my blog.

And then I moved into podcasting after that, my first course was learn to blog. Then I moved into podcasting. We had a course called Pod Hacker, so I was always the I was always into various forms of content creation, blogging, podcasting, video creation. And then I would turn around and go, well, I've got these skills.

A byproduct of that is I could sell education on these skills. So I always made courses off the back of them now I don't really have any intention of making a course around YouTube or anything because I just, I don't have the time and the YouTube stuff has become lucrative enough that I don't feel it's necessary.

But, yeah, I've always seen myself as a content creator, but I've always loved marketing as well. At the end of the day, I just love, I love deep diving on like tools and software and stuff. No, I think that's what I've seen from over the years following you and, you know, being , you know, in your circle basically.

I've seen that you've always been like early adopters of certain tools. When ThriveCart came out, you were like very quick to promote that. Of course, you were friends with the founder, but still you've always liked tools and technology. I think it's just this perfect match that you got into AI.

So I think you have it. I mean, you talk a lot about AI, of course, everywhere, but I think what's interesting when you bring someone on who's like, you're an AI content creator. A lot of these people that I talk to that might just, you know, they create content, let's say on LinkedIn or different platforms, they talk about AI.

It's not always, like, what they are using. This is what they're sharing with the audience because it gets views and it's great information, it's news. But what, how do you use it, Matt, in your day to day and your business, to run this, what's becoming more of an empire soon, like a media company, essentially, you're building up.

So I'm interested to hear that. Yeah, so there's actually quite a bit of AI that I use, so I'm not one of those people that just shares the AI but never uses it myself. You know, admittedly, there's a lot of AI tools that I come across and I'm like, this is a really cool tool. I'm gonna make a video about it.

I make a video about it, share how cool it is, and then never touch it again. There's definitely stuff like that that I do that I'm just like, this is fun and cool, so I'm gonna show it off. But the stuff that I use on a daily basis, I'm using the GPT 3.5 API, to run the FutureTools website.

The way the FutureTools website works right now is whenever I come across a new tool that I want to share on the site I actually take the URL of the tool, I put it into a Google Sheet, and then using Make.com, which is similar to Zapier.com if anybody's not familiar with it, I use Make.com, it actually takes the URL, scrapes all of the content of the sales page on that website, plugs that content into GPT 3.5, and then summarizes it down into a single paragraph for me, and then it takes that single paragraph and summarizes it down into like a seven word quick description.

So everything you see on FutureTools is, I took the URL, plugged it into the spreadsheet, and then these AI automations wrote the description, wrote the short link, it grabbed the, the open graph image from the website, it grabbed the title tag from the website. And so, I'm pretty much grabbing URLs, putting them into spreadsheets, and then the website's being automated through AI beyond that.

So, that's uh, that's one of the main ways I'm using AI in the business on a daily basis. I do have a VA who goes and manually looks at those links to see if there's affiliate links, and then sort of swaps out the links for me. But the process of adding them is all AI. My YouTube channel, every single thumbnail is generated with AI.

If you ever look at any of my YouTube thumbnails, they've always got some sort of silly reaction of my face, but it's always sort of a little cartoony, a little off, right? Because all of those thumbnails are generated with ai. So I'm using Midjourney, I'm using Stable Diffusion, I'm using DALL E-3.

I'm using Adobe's Photoshop, generative Fill. I'm using all of these different tools to get the thumbnails to exactly what I want them to look like. I use ChatGPT a lot for coming up with ideas for titles and thumbnails. I'll go into ChatGPT and say, here's the video I'm releasing today.

What are some titles and some thumbnail concepts for this video? And it'll list off 10 titles and a handful of thumbnail concepts that I can go and build out. So I use it in that way on a daily basis. My website has an AI news section where I update it every single day with all the latest news in the AI space.

The way I get that news is I use an AI tool called Feedly Leo, and Feedly is basically just an RSS reader. You plug in blogs, RSS feeds to it, and it'll just keep you up to date. But they also have this AI in there called Leo, which is like an AI advanced version of Google Alerts, right?

It will scour the internet for websites that you're not following and look for any news topics around AI for you or any, any topic that you plug into it. But for me, it's AI. It'll look for any topics around AI and bring those into my news feed for me and so I'm keeping up to date with all the latest news on a daily basis using AI.

Last thing, I know I'm ranting for a while here, but the last way that I use AI that, that comes to mind right now is I do a newsletter as well. I've got an AI newsletter with 150,000 subscribers on it, and I actually use Clod by Anthropic to actually help me write a lot of those emails.

I'll actually say, here's the news I want to share, can you, you know, help me summarize this news down into something that's easier to consume for the readers? And then also it does spell check, grammar check, and readability check. If I write something myself, I'll plug it into there and say, fix this for grammar, spelling, and readability, and it will sort of re work that paragraph for me a little bit so that it's easier to read.

And yeah, those are the main ways I'm using AI, but I'm sort of in the thick of it every day using these AI tools. No, I love it, man. This is great because I feel like a lot of people who are creating content around this, they're not using it for everyday tasks. You're actually using it to power your website.

That's like the main thing, right? Other than your YouTube channel, of course, but you have a lot of links there, so we can maybe get into a little bit. The monetization side of things later, but what I wanted to see, like, if you, I know we have the screen up, we could actually get the screen to showcase something if you don't mind, how you're actually, some of these examples you brought up, how you're using it, maybe you can, if it's not too complex, maybe something that you're doing that is possible to share on a session like this.

Yeah, I feel like any of the ones I just mentioned, I could probably share. Yeah, which one is your favorite way? I mean, what do you like most to do? And I mean, what do you feel is more useful? Because I guess the website is pretty, that's a pretty unique use case. So that's like if you have a tool database, I would love that.

If I had a tool database to just pull from that, and this you see here on the screen as well, FutureTools, that's like a database, I'll link that in the description as well so you can check it out, but yeah, let's show some other, maybe about the YouTube channel is interesting, about how you create these images and titles and things like that, I think that would be really interesting for people if they are looking to create videos, I think that's where it's going to anyway, SEO and stuff is a lot harder for blogging.

I think you have more opportunity if you're going into YouTube actually creating this content, because if we are doing a video like this, we can also repurpose this, which is another thing we can get into later. I'm sure you're doing a lot of that as well. So have you, are you familiar with the newest stuff that OpenAI just released?

Of course with the GPTs? Yeah, a hundred percent. I even built some stuff myself in there. Yeah, I'm creating some stuff with my business partner in the summit where we did, and yeah, it's really nice and I'm the builder myself. I created this custom GPT called, basically YouTube Title Optimizer, right?

And this is, this basically helps me come up with titles and thumbnails. Now this one is purely trained on my channel. I can actually show you real quick. If I go to the explore tab here, GPT has been really slow lately because they're really bogged down right now. I couldn't even log in, I have the plus, I have the plus account and I cannot even log in sometimes.

It's bugging me and I have to log in from a different browser or something like that happens sometimes. They have a lot of users logging in. As of the date of this recording, they're actually closed down. They're not letting any new people sign up for a GPT plus right now because there's too many, too much going on.

But this YouTube title optimizer if I show you this configure page here, You can see I wrote all of these custom instructions here that are very tailored to my YouTube channel. So you can see the YouTube channel is designed, focuses on AI, tech, and futurism. Matt Wolf is the creator.

When generating titles, the titles should never exceed 50 characters. It should be attention grabbing, intriguing, and make viewers want to click on them. Always give it a minimum of 10 title ideas. And then here's some data about some of the stuff that I uploaded and then you could see down here I actually uploaded a screenshot of my top 16 videos so you can actually see the thumbnail, the title, and how many views each of these videos have gotten.

And I uploaded this and gave it custom instructions to look at my past thumbnails and titles to help me come up with new titles and thumbnails. I also uploaded a CSV file that I downloaded directly from my YouTube account with all my titles, the view counts, the click-through rate, you know, all of the data from my YouTube channel.

So when I am using this AI and asking it for titles and thumbnails, it is actually looking at my existing titles and my thumbnails and the view counts and the click through rate ratio. And which one's got the most subscribers and all of that data to help inform the decisions of coming up with new titles and thumbnail concepts.

What do you feel works the best, like, for your channel now? You have a very tech's, I guess a lot of people are interested in future tech and things like that coming in there. But I think your thumbnails are very eye catchy. Some people might have it more toned down depending on what they are doing.

But for you, I guess this works well. It also stands out compared to other people, I guess. What have you found worked the best for it? If you can get, is there a formula for it, what works the best on YouTube for you? I'm like, when it comes to titles, it's something that I'm constantly trying to balance, right?

I'm trying to balance the amount of what am I actually talking about in this video, but also what's going to get the click. And they're usually not the same thing, right? Like I can do a title that's like, This is the most mind blowing thing I've ever seen and give you no info about what the video is about in that title and that video will probably get hundreds of thousands of views, but I'll get a ton of comments from people going, I hate how you clickbaited me, I hate like, you know, your title didn't tell me anything.

It's like doing a long session like this, for example, we're going to talk about different things here, like maybe how you made money, we're doing a little tutorial now. And then I could take something from this, but maybe that's not in the beginning, maybe that's somewhere else in the video, so the people coming in, they're not going to get that right away.

So then, yeah, there might be a slight disconnect when you're doing that, but yeah, the title is going to bring the people in, as you said, that's what happens. Right, so it's a constant balance of not feeling like I'm trying to clickbait people and go like over the top with my titles.

and also trying to give them information about what this video is about. I do have a balance there, and if you ever watch, I mean, nobody's watching my YouTube channel that closely, but if you are looking at it closely, you'll see that I will upload a video, and an hour after the video goes live, there'll be a different title, or a different thumbnail, and then, three days after the video is live, it'll be a different title and a different thumbnail again, because one thing, we've noticed, I do have a team member who I call my creative director who helps me with titles and thumbnails and video ideas and stuff like that.

But one thing that we've noticed is that you've got sort of two separate approaches on YouTube. When you publish a video on YouTube, the first, let's say, 24 48 hours is gonna be mostly the people who are already aware of you, right? It's gonna be your subscribers, it's gonna be the people that have watched one of your videos recently, the people that are already familiar with you are going to watch your video within that window.

After the video has passed that 48 hour, 72 hour mark somewhere in there, then the algorithm starts to push the video to people who may not know who you are yet. It's starting to test the waters and show it to other people that are outside of your normal viewership. And so one thing that we've found to be really effective is to have one title and thumbnail for the first 48, 72 hours to bring the fans, bring the people that are already watching your videos in and then after that window is up, switch it out to something that's going to have more mass appeal and suck new audience in that maybe hasn't seen you yet.

So you will see us constantly change titles and thumbnails and things like that and we also recently got the feature inside of YouTube where we can split test thumbnails directly in YouTube now, so now every video we upload gets three thumbnails, and they're constantly split testing thumbnails to try to optimize.

but yeah. Let's go , what's interesting... It's really interesting that you're saying this because I think as you say you're using AI for a lot of the image generations, but it would take you probably a lot more time if you had to have a human to go into creating all these different designs and iterations and now you're using AI and you're doing it like in a very cool way.

You have like yourself on there, like an AI version and you're changing things up. I mean, I think that is pretty cool. So let's show this because I think anyone could kind of build like a GPT like this with their own data and make it more personalized So, let's get back to the screen, you can demonstrate this a little bit more, what this does.

Yeah, so if I go and let's go ahead and view the actual GPT. I could do it in the preview window, but I'll just do it in this. I did create two, prewritten prompts, because two styles of videos that I always do, I always make an end of the week news video of here's all the AI news that happened this week, then I like to do videos of like, here's cool research that I came across, so I created two pre written prompts for me, so for example, I can click on this one, I need a title and thumbnail for a breakdown of this week's AI news, And then it will just go off.

What it's doing right now is it's analyzing that information that I already gave it. It's looking at that, that screenshot with all the thumbnails again, it's looking at all that CSV data. It's looking at all that information before it comes back with responses for me and you can see here now it's coming up with titles, AI's Hottest News, Weekly Breakdown, and then it's giving me two thumbnail concepts for each idea.

A vibrant high contrast image featuring an AI generated version of your face with an expression of awe surrounded by dynamic news headlines and AI symbols. See, it knows that me putting an AI version of my face in these videos is what works, so most of these suggestions are going to say an AI generated face and a surprised expression.

But do you feel that it's changing things up? I mean, It's changing things up on a week to week basis, basically, or like, I mean, some things are the same, you want to keep the consistency, of course, but every, depending on the topic, it might change it up a little bit, right? Yeah, and one thing that's smart is with these GPTs, they're not going to just automatically update over time.

So that CSV file with all of my view data, that screenshot of all my most popular videos, those will need to be replaced from time to time to make sure that the GPT is constantly updated with the most recent information. But once this is done, because this actually has DALL E in it now, I can actually go and tell it, it's generating really slow right now, that's just the way ChatGPT is right now, but once it's done, I can say make that thumbnail of Concept 8 Thumbnail 2, and it will go and actually generate a mock up of what that thumbnail can look like.

Now it's not going to have my face in it, DALL E doesn't, isn't trained on my face. But let's see a dynamic high contrast image with AI generated version of your face in a thoughtful pose surrounded by floating news stibbits. So that's, titled... If you say this strategy still would work if you have, let's say you have a brand new channel, you can probably go into, I mean, you don't have data then, but you could still probably get ideas for a hype, like, based on, here's how I would think about it.

Probably, I would look at someone in my industry or what they are doing and I would like probably upload that because I don't have data yet and I would like see what's our similar videos I can look at and then I would like tell ChatGPT or this GPT you are building to actually look at this to analyze what it would make a great thumbnail something like that at least that's how I would think about it I don't know how you would do it.

100 percent yeah yeah 100 percent that's what I would do I would go to another YouTube channel that's probably in a similar niche that's gonna make similar videos but is popular sort it by most popular videos, use that as the screenshot, maybe make like a Google sheet of really good titles that you've come across, upload that Google sheet and say these are titles that have done really well for other people and let it start with that data for sure.

Could you put titles and stuff in a description as well or is it more efficient if you just put a long list of titles in a Google sheet or spreadsheet? You can put them right in the prompt. It'll essentially end up doing the same thing. The only reason I did it as a CSV is so I don't have to copy and paste them every single time.

All I have to do is give it this one little sentence prompt and it will give me this entire giant output. But now if I want, I can actually go and get a concept. I can say create the thumbnail for concept 8 thumbnail 1 and then what it's going to do is it's going to go and look up here at this concept read through this and then generate a prompt that will generate an image like that.

So you can see now it says creating images, and it's going to try to create an image that's close to that idea. Yeah. So it's always interesting what DALL E-3 comes up with. I would be. Out of all of the image generators, right? You've got Midjourney, you've got Stable Diffusion, you've got DALL E-3 you've got Adobe Firefly, you've got, now we've got Meta's Emu.

There's a whole bunch of different AI. Leonardo AI, I think. Have you tried that one? Leonardo AI as well? Yeah, yeah. I'm actually an investor in Leonardo. Okay, nice, nice, nice. My friend is using it quite a bit. I love Midjourney, man, because I like photography. I like to do this photorealistic stuff, so I can like replace certain things I'm doing.

And, I mean, it took a while to get used to it because it was pretty complicated, but when you get a hang of it, it's really fun, actually. Yeah, oh, for sure. I use them all. I love, they're all good for different reasons, right? DALL E is actually the best at hearing to your prompt.

you can do a really complex prompt of like, draw me a three headed monster where one of the heads is Mario, one's Luigi, and one's Bowser, and in the background they're in March. I think what DALL E is not the best at is like, 100 percent realistic images. I think for your stuff it makes sense.

If I wanted something realistic, I would probably go to Midjourney and try to you know, do that, or, but for your stuff, this, looks pretty, pretty cool. Yeah. So I would then take this image and I would go through this whole process of plugging this image into Stable Diffusion now, and then have Stable Diffusion replace this face with my face.

And that's essentially how I come up with thumbnails. Every once in a while, I don't like the thumbnail DALL E creates, so I'll go into Midjourney, give it a similar prompt and see what Midjourney comes up with for me, right? So I really am using all of the AI art tools and like each one has pros and cons.

I actually did a video that's like the longest video I've ever put on my channel, it's like a 50 minute video, where I compare literally every single AI art generator and what the pros and cons of each one are, and Midjourney, Midjourney is definitely great, but by the end of the thing, I came up with Leonardo is probably the best all around AI art generator, and not just because I'm an investor in it, but when I actually scored everything out, it was the best sort of like, all around for pretty much most purposes.

Why do you say that? I'm just curious and why would you recommend it to someone to try out? Well, because so Leonardo uses Stable Diffusion under the hood and Stable Diffusion is, it's uncensored. It's never going to say , oh, we can't generate that because you're using IP, right?

Like you can go generate images of storm troopers battling with Super Mario or whatever, like it's not going to stop you from doing any of that. There's no sort of censorship on it. You could use things called control nets with it, which are essentially ways where you can upload another image and say, see the pose this person's doing in this image, make sure my new image is following that same exact pose, it's got what's called LoRas in it, and the best way I can describe LoRas are like, they're almost like plugins for AI art generators.

There might be a LoRa that's a shiny LoRa. And you turn that LoRa on and it'll make any images you generate shiny, or there might be a neon glow LoRa, and it'll take any image you try to generate and make it look like it's got a neon glow sign look to it. So it's got all of these LoRa's, it's got all of these other AI models that other people have created, like it's got Stable Diffusion XL in it, it's got, Leonardo Diffusion, which is their own custom tuned model that they created.

You can create like pixel art images in it. It really it's uncensored, you can make anything you can imagine, you can control the way the images look using control nets, it's got in painting, meaning you can sort of, mask off a certain portion of the image and say put a butterfly there, and then it will just affect that little piece of the image, Midjourney has that now as well, but they didn't for the longest time, they've got out painting, which is, you've probably seen it in Adobe Photoshop's generative fill, where you have a square image and you want to turn it into a 16 by 9 image, well it will automatically fill in the new space that you just added.

Leonardo has that built into it, Midjourney does now as well, but several months ago, they didn't have any of those features, Leonardo had all of that stuff early on. Okay, very interesting. I believe that AI is just boosting creativity, I think that's what it's doing, and if you are already a very creative person, maybe you are a photographer or videographer, of course, you're probably going to edit a better video than what AI can do, but it's just going to amplify.

Like in a lot of these tools we have now, AI, Adobe Premiere, they're adding certain things. There's things for multicam podcasts. Why would you do these mundane tasks that would take hours and hours? Now AI can do that. That's kind of how I see it. We are doing this session here.

This takes our time, but I don't like writing the descriptions for my YouTube or adding the tags and things like that. Yeah, I can have a human check that, a VA or something, I can check it myself. But I like doing these things, I kind of, this is the main content, and you do the same on your YouTube channel, Matt.

You create this, it's your time, but then the things afterwards, that's you can amplify this with AI, so I'm interested to get into that a little bit, and speaking, I think that's how you should see it, AI is an assistant, it's not a replacement for you exactly as the creator. A hundred percent, I totally believe that, I do get a lot of messages and comments on my videos of like, oh, you're, you know, you're promoting the downfall of society.

You're teaching people how to do the things that are taking our jobs and all of that kind of stuff. But what I've really, really learned is that there is a sort of vocal minority. My, my next door neighbor that lives across the street from me, he's a graphic designer, and he's loving the AI stuff, right?

He's like, man, it's made my job so much easier. It's made my workflow so much easier. I know a bunch of graphic designers, a bunch of authors, a bunch of you know, copywriters, all of these different professions that AI has sort of impacted. The majority of the people that I talk to are actually stoked on the fact that it's made their lives easier, not in fear that it's taking their jobs.

I'm totally, you know, AI is not a person, it's a tool, right? It's a thing to assist you and make your life easier. Most coders and developers absolutely love AI because it does, it takes all the monotonous work out and they just kind of solve the little problems that make the game or product unique.

And it does all the sort of grunt work of laying the foundation for their code where they're just doing the pieces that are actually going to make a novel product, you know, so, um, yeah, I really, really agree with that. I think people need to see AI as a assistive tool and that's the way I see it and I use it.

But, at the end of the day, it is accelerating really, really fast, and we don't know where it's all going, so, who knows? There isn't a chance where... I've had so many conversations. Some people are more, like, really positive, some people are I brought some people that have a little bit you know, they are embracing it, they are using it, but they also can see like, okay, what's gonna happen in the future, are we all gonna die, AI is gonna take over, I had some people with thoughts like that as well, I don't know to be honest, that might happen, we might, we don't know what's happening, but I would hope that we as humans, we are learning how to do it the right way, like with the, with this technology, of course, it's very

powerful and things, you know, I think it's going to get smarter and smarter, or we have seen this with the different models, and now with GPT 4, sure, GPT 5 is going to come out, it's going to be even better, even this announcement with DevDay, there's so much that's happening so quickly, I mean, you're staying on top of things, Matt, so you have, I don't know if you have any insights on this and what you're seeing in the industry in general.

Yeah. So I think it's almost impossible to not go deep down the rabbit hole and not have a little bit of fear about where this is all going. Like I'm immersed in it every day. I'm talking to AI researchers, I'm talking to AI tool builders, I'm reading the news on it every day. I'm trying the new products every single day and it's hard to not go, all right, I can see how this could go terribly wrong if it goes wrong.

There is some really, really good arguments for where this could go wrong. Now, personally, I'm not super scared of the Terminator sort of Skynet scenario where the robots are gonna rise up and try to destroy humanity. That's not really where my fears around AI lie. My fears around it tend to lie more around the misinformation, the scams, the misuse of these tools and these tools in the wrong hands, right?

Like, we've heard stories about people using tools like 11ElevenLabs, which can mimic anybody's voice, and calling up somebody's parents and saying that they're in trouble and they need 10,000 to get out of this trouble, and then the parents end up wiring the money to this scammer because this scammer was able to use their child's voice, right?

There was another scenario where somebody acted like the, a kid was being held hostage and that they were trying to get ransom money out of the person, but they never had the kid. They just had the kid's voice because of some of these tools. Right? Deepfakes are getting better and better and better and we're getting into this season here in the US at least where, we're getting into elections and you know there's going to be a lot of misinformation and fake news and deepfakes and images that aren't even real popping out and people are going to have a hard time discerning, like, did this guy really do what we're seeing in this picture or was this generated with AI?

Like, that's the stuff that worries me more than anything, is the, is our sort of lack of ability to tell the difference between what's real and what's not real anymore. That's where my fears lie, not the sort of doomsday scenarios. No, I'm more like in the present. I see kind of what can happen in the future, of course, but I see this is here right now.

This is happening, 11ElevenLabs and things like that. You can use it for good, like, I mean for example, this video is in English, of course, but if you wanted to reach a different audience in Spanish, they're not gonna, I mean, even we might have captions, right, in different languages, that's not the same, they're not gonna connect with us, so I think, using a tool like that, maybe with HeyGen or something, you can actually generate this, but it's, I think it's not accessible for long form content as much, It's too expensive, it's like, too time consuming to do some of this.

I think when YouTube integrates this to their platform natively, which they have, I think they have tested certain things with very big creators, maybe MrBeast and things like that have tested certain things. So I do think that will come at some point, I don't know, because you are deep into YouTube, Matt, so that would be a game changer, right?

I don't know if you speak any foreign languages, but you don't, you're only doing your videos in English at least, and it's not the same, even if you dub the videos like some creators do, it's still not the same because your lips are not synced. I think when your lips are synced, that's a big positive.

But I see some of my guests, they have actually talked about the negatives in this way as well, that there's a lot of misinformation and things. So I think you have to see both sides. I'm glad you mentioned it for sure. Yeah. Yeah it, it, the YouTube stuff is really interesting 'cause YouTube is working on a tech where you upload the video and whatever your negative language is, and it's going to try to dub it in all the other languages.

I don't necessarily think the tech they're working on is going to change your lip movements like HeyGen does. I think it's just going to dub it. but, I'm actually really, really excited about it. I don't know how the dubbing stuff where it moves your lips is going to work out because sometimes I might say something in English that only requires one word, but that same sort of thing translated into a different language is a lot longer of a word with a lot more syllables.

So how is that kind of thing gonna translate, um, you know? When do you think that might become? When do you think? What do you think the timeline is that we have? This is, I think this might be the first iteration, as you said, like actually having the dub so it's accessible to everyone because for the average creators to do this, it's pretty expensive.

Like some big channel are doing this and they're going to get, like people to record their sessions in Spanish or whatever. That is not that cheap to be honest. It still requires effort, but if that's available in the platform, everyone would use it and what's gonna happen for YouTube, what do they care most about?

Retention. People actually staying on the platform. More people will stay on the platform, more money for YouTube, right? That should be a high priority for them, I think, so yeah. Yeah, it's interesting, because I've got very mixed feelings about it. On one hand, it takes my content and it exposes it to a lot more people, right?

There's a lot more people that can potentially watch my videos, but at the same time, the volume of content that's available for anybody to watch also went up dramatically, which sort of dilutes every single channel by a little bit. So I'm like, I have very mixed feelings about it, but I'm like you, I don't really like watching dubbed videos, but I can see myself watching videos once the mouth actually looks like it's moving to the person's lips.

I think the problem is that there's some languages are not enough great content, I think. In English, there's an overflow, right? But it's certainly, I mean, for example, in Spanish, it's coming more and more. Creators doing great things. I think initially it wasn't like that. It was more like entertainment and they like to watch this stuff in the Latin countries.

Not so much actually useful content that we are used to for years, like with courses and stuff like that. But I think that's coming, but still someone might want Matt's insights on something and they found your channel, but they couldn't understand most of it because it's in English.

So I think for these things can be useful because they wouldn't have watched most of your channel anyway otherwise. So that's how I see it. Yeah, it's interesting, my channel right now, if you look at the stats, I think it's, US, UK, Canada, are like the top three uh, countries that view my channel, but then below that it's India and Germany, so, I mean, people must already be watching a lot of my videos with subtitles already.

India is for sure, I mean, I know India, they are big on social media, but just wanted to get into, you have, I assume you have a pretty small team at this stage and you would have to have a much bigger team if you didn't use AI, right? I don't know, how big is your team right now, Matt, for the things you're doing?

Internally, people that are working full time for me, I've got two people that work full time for me if I'm considering contractors and the people that sort of work for me on a regular basis, but they're not just working for me. I think it's like 12 people or so. Alright, maybe you can break it down, like what are they doing and how would you amplify things with AI, like in terms of what can't you outsource to AI right now?

And maybe what your team would do that would actually help them do the tasks better for you with AI. I've got, uh, basically two agents that are out there trying to find me sponsorship deals. They basically handle all of the inbound, if somebody is interested in sponsoring a channel, or partnering with me, or getting me to speak at a conference, or things like that.

They go to them, those guys jump on a call with them and negotiate the prices, and figure out the terms of the deal. So, there's actually two people that work together on that process for me. I've got basically a manager as well. The manager is the person who takes it over after the agent closes the deal, right?

So the manager, once a deal is closed with a partner, the manager then talks to the partner, figures out the deliverables, figures out the timeframes, figures out all of the information that I need to know, communicates that information with me, make sure that I stay on schedule, I'm dropping the videos on the date they need to drop, I'm integrating the sponsorships on the newsletters on the day they're supposed to be integrated.

So she's kind of that, once the deal's closed, make sure everything stays on track and I know what I need to be doing and the sponsors know what they need to be doing. So those three key roles, I haven't really figured out how to, you know, outsource with AI yet. The going in, inbound and outbound sales and then the sort of making sure I know what to be doing when I'm supposed to be doing it.

So I've got those roles there. When it comes to the YouTube channel, I've got my creative director and I've got my editor. Those are the two people that essentially work full time just for me. They don't have any other jobs outside of working with me. My editor, pretty self explanatory.

I create the videos. Where are they based by the way, where's your, most of your team based, depending on the role? The two agents and the manager are all in New York. My creative director is based in L.A. My editor is actually in the Philippines and then, uh, let's see. And then I've got a couple people that are in India that help me run the FutureTools website.

So the FutureTools website, I've got one person that's like a Webflow expert, that they're a contractor, they don't work just for me, but they're like a Webflow expert whenever I need updates or there's bugs on the site or whatever, I go to them, they keep my site up to date and fixed.

And then I also have somebody that is my, you know, sort of FutureTools maintenance guy, I guess. He doesn't do like the web dev stuff. He's not fixing the website or fixing bugs. He's the guy that's going and making sure all of my affiliate links are up to date. When somebody submits a change request to the site saying this tool is inaccurate or the description's inaccurate or change the image or whatever, that data is all going to him and he's swapping out that information on the site.

So those two people are in India running the website. Let's see, who else do I have, I've got working for me right now, I've got, I actually did a breakdown of it on my Discord recently, but I'm drawing a blank, but those are really the, those are really the core people. I think it's a great breakdown, I just asked it because it's interesting that you can run a pretty a substantial channel with a small team and most, you have some full time people, but I think it's because you, I think, the tasks you're outsourcing to mostly full time, it sounds like they are focusing on the revenue generating activities, and bring that down for us as well, Matt.

So you started this, I mean, this didn't make a lot of money when you started, I guess it was like a side project and it grew very quickly. What was the starting point for kind of getting it to actually make sense for you in terms of making money? But I, from an outside perspective, it looked like you had a lot of fun doing it.

So you would have done this anyway, and that's probably why you succeeded, because you really enjoyed it. Oh, for sure. Yeah. So, you know, my costs in the beginning were really just like Webflow, right? I was doing all my own video recording, all my own editing. When I started ramping up the AI stuff on YouTube, I was making a video every single day.

I think I had like a 30 day streak where I dropped a new video every single day, including Saturdays and Sundays. Didn't miss a day and during that time, that's when things like really, really scaled and I was doing Everything myself, I had zero team members helping me at that point, but now, it's gotten pretty lucrative, so, I've got, so, you want a breakdown of the, where the various revenues are coming from?

Yeah, if, I don't know if you can share numbers, how public you are with these things, if you can people love that stuff, if you can't, it's up to you, I'm not gonna push you to do it if you don't want me to. I like that stuff, you know me, man. Well, the only thing that I'm not sure I'm comfortable sharing is what the sponsors are paying, because there's Okay, no, that I understand, that's like YouTubers, they can't do that, but share like a ballpark if you can and cause I assume a lot of money comes from the sponsorship when you mentioned tools and stuff.

You have your affiliate deals as well, but yeah, just break it down. It would be interesting for sure. Yeah, so, when it comes to what the agents are actually out there selling for me, they're selling sponsorships on the YouTube channel and there's really two types of sponsorships.

There's integrations. That's like a 60 to 90 second shout out about their product in a video and then there's dedicated videos where I make a whole video just talking about their product. I try to avoid dedicated videos as much as possible, unless it's a product I really want to talk about anyway.

Otherwise it'll probably come out as inauthentic. So I've only ever done two videos that are full on integrations that are full on, dedicated videos, but they're selling the dedicated videos. They're selling the integrations. I've got a newsletter that goes out twice a week, every Wednesday and Friday.

We have two sponsorship slots, a primary sponsor and a secondary sponsor that are two separate rates, and that rate's sort of a climbing rate as the newsletter grows as well. I've got AdSense revenue coming in from YouTube. I've got the FutureTools website. We actually sell featured listings, so at the top of the FutureTools website, people can actually pay to have their tool pinned to the top for one week.

So we sell those, and then we are, and then I've got the affiliate commissions that are coming in from the FutureTools website. I think that's pretty much all of the revenue that's coming in. I also am getting some speaking fees. I'm speaking at a couple of events and we're getting speaking fees for those as well that, um, the agents closed, but the way the agents work now, because I have the YouTube channel, because I've got the FutureTools website, because I've got the newsletter, because I've got all of these different things, they're going and selling like bundles, right?

So they're not going and selling on like a typical CPM basis for these, these various things, they're going and saying, All right, we'll integrate you in six different videos uh, we'll give you a featured listing for two weeks on the website and we'll give you two primary listings in the newsletter.

This whole package is 60,000$ or whatever, so, that's what those guys are out there doing. Is they, can bundle stuff. With affiliate revenue, I would, if I had to estimate how much affiliate revenue FutureTools was generating. I would say it's somewhere in the 5,000 ish a month range.

It's really, really hard to break down, right? I would have expected it was more, but I guess it's just links. So people are just going, they're browsing and things like that so maybe there's room for, you're getting a lot of traffic there, right? You're selling sponsorships on there featured slots, but I would expect the affiliate would make more, but maybe I'm wrong.

Yeah, it's interesting because so FutureTools, only like 25 percent of the tools on the site actually have affiliate links, and it's not always the best, most popular products that have affiliate links, right? Like Midjourney doesn't have an affiliate link. ChatGPT doesn't have an affiliate link.

Like the most popular tools on the sites aren't the ones with affiliate links, right? It's the lesser known tools that tend to have the affiliate programs. So that's kind of where that is and they're not like the typical internet marketing world where they're all giving away 50%, 60% commissions on everything.

It's typically a lot lower in a lot of these SaaS products, it's somewhere in the 10 to 30%, 30% is the high end, right? So it's a different world than what we're used to when we're selling, when we're promoting online courses or SaaS products made by like other internet marketer type people.

They're definitely, those companies have a lot higher costs typically because of the GPT APIs and that sort of stuff. So they typically have lower commissions but again, that's just an estimate. I actually have no idea how much affiliate revenue it's generating. I guess it's difficult to predict, but you're getting from YouTube as well.

You have some spot, I mean, I think what makes the most sense is you're making most money from the sponsors, feature sponsors you have, because that's what you're doing most, do you want to be in that boat to have, to mostly make money from sponsorships? Or do you want to change that in some way to actually have, I guess, also you don't technically have control, but like, as your channel grows, I'm sure you're going to increase your fees too.

And you have this kind of, these kind of assets, which is , it's unique because a lot of creators, they don't have different platforms like you have. So I think that, that is a good benefit of yours, but I don't know if you wanted to change that up and have some other revenue streams.

When it comes to sponsorships, it's interesting. I have a sort of love hate relationship with the sponsorship model. The sponsorship model is definitely the most lucrative model of everything that I'm doing but at the same time, I kind of like just making videos without sponsors, right?

I just like to be able to turn on the camera, hit record, and talk about whatever I want, and not have to work in, oh, and by the way, this video is sponsored by X. That is exactly what Ali Abdaal said in a video. I was just checking it out. He was like, I don't really like having the sponsors because I stress and pressure.

I need to deliver it on time. It's like relaxed about it, you know, but it's making it, but it's making money. The team is pushing, but he doesn't like to do it. So he wants to have like more time and the sponsors want to have it on a specific schedule. So yeah, as you're getting bigger, it gets easier to say no to certain things.

And then you can have, I only do it in this kind of schedule. And yeah, I don't know. I'll tell you my sort of compromise that has worked out now is that I'm only working with, on the YouTube channel, I'm only working with four long term sponsors, right? So I've got four sponsors now that have signed one year contracts with me, and each one is getting one video a month.

So I have one sponsored video per week, and it's one of these four sponsors. And any other videos I make outside of those four sponsorship videos are whatever I want to do, whatever I want to talk about, and these four long term sponsors, were willing to pay a lot bigger sum of money, you know, in the six figures per sponsor to basically sponsor a full year with some newsletter integrations, with some speaking, one of them I'm actually doing consulting for as part of the bundle because they want to stay in the loop with all the latest AI news and tech.

So I get on a call with them once a month and just sort of give them a breakdown of here's what I'm seeing so they can inform their decisions on where to take their tools. So, I mean, I don't even mind, I'll tell you who those sponsors are, HubSpot's one of them, TubeBuddy is one of them, a company called InVideo is one of them, and the other one's a company called MindStudio, and they're all companies that sort of do really cool AI stuff and are sort of pushing the needle with AI.

And each one, I just talk about them once a month, and then any other videos outside of that are just me. I would say, a couple years down the line, if the YouTube revenue gets to a point where it's generating really, really, really good money, I might phase out sponsors a little bit, and do even less sponsorships.

But right now, I mean, the sponsors are the largest chunk of the revenue, so it's kind of... What's the CPM on a channel like yours, for example? In the business space, it's very high. It should be pretty high and we're talking about AI tools and tech as well. I'm not sure it's as high as finance, but it should be pretty decent.

Yeah. So you're talking like from a YouTube Adsense. Yeah, YouTube Adsense perspective. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so I'm around the 8$ range on that. That's good. I think that's what you normally, I've seen that even on, when I was doing YouTube more, I'm going to now I'm going to publish a lot more and then it usually was like 9 to 12.

I mean, I had a really good one. 9 to 12 or something like that. Sometimes even higher for some videos, but that's interesting. I love talking about this kind of stuff. I think that's an interesting take and I'm getting your breakdown on this, but there's going back to kind of how you're producing the content a little bit and like how you're doing your main content with the videos and I assume you are on other platforms too, and you're trying to kind of spread the word in many ways.

How are you then taking what you're doing on YouTube, do you like repurpose that or do you always create unique content for other platforms? What's your take and how do you leverage AI for this? So really the only platforms that I focus on are YouTube and Twitter/X, right? like those are really the only two that I put a lot of effort into.

I do have a TikTok account. I do have an Instagram account. I do have a Facebook account. I do have all of those other accounts. Facebook, I don't even think I've logged into my Facebook account in a year now. It's just, I, can attest because I messaged you there and I didn't see a reply, so I know.

Yeah, yeah. Facebook is probably the worst place to get a hold of me these days. I'm just I don't really think to log into it. I don't know why I deleted it from my phone a couple of years ago. And once it wasn't on my phone, I just never checked in on it again. But I'm on Twitter a lot.

Twitter is my second biggest platform behind YouTube, Twitter, I'm, I've got something like 66,000 followers on Twitter and I get pretty good reach when I tweet stuff there, so I do use Twitter quite a bit. I've tried posting videos on TikTok. I've tried taking little chunks from my video and posting them as TikToks and YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels, but I never seem to get any traction on short form content.

It just doesn't go anywhere. Um... Have you tried different tools or do you use that with manually with your editor? Opus Clip is one. I'm sure you've tried all of 'em. There's, there's a bunch of, there's Munch there's a lot of other ones that do this as well. Yeah. Yeah. So I've worked with Opus Clip a little bit.

I know the founders there. It works. It does a decent job, but it seems like some of the clips it makes sort of cut off in weird spaces, and it finds, I think it still needs a little bit of work, right? I wouldn't take something straight out of OpusClip and just post it straight to TikTok or Instagram Reels or something.

I feel like you still need to go in and like, clean it up a little bit, but it might help you find like, that chunk of video that is worth posting. But I think they're getting better and better. I think those tools are going to come in handy. My editor has been pushing for me to do more things on TikToks and Reels and stuff like that, so I'm probably going to let him just go for it and make videos for those platforms, but at the end of the day, YouTube drives all of my revenue, so I really want to get all the eyeballs to YouTube.

Instagram for the most part has just been a place where I post cool creations that I've done, right? So if I make a really cool AI video or a really cool AI image, I'll post it on Instagram, and then in the description I'll be like, my latest YouTube video shows you how I made this, kind of thing.

That's done okay, but really, my main focuses are just YouTube and Twitter, and with Twitter, I make pretty much unique content for Twitter from what I do on YouTube. I do like to post videos, I do like to post AI generated images that I think came out really, really cool, so I share that kind of stuff on Twitter, and that tends to get a lot of love on Twitter, and then I can sort of spin that into a call to action back to YouTube, like, Hey, like this art Do you use X to test the ideas.

I think that's a great platform for testing, like maybe hooks and things like that. I don't know if you use it for this and that's maybe it turns into a longer video on YouTube. I haven't really used it a whole lot for that specific purpose. I've used it to pull the audience and say, Hey, would you rather have a video about this or a video about this?

I've used it a lot to engage the community in my videos where I'll say like, what's the coolest thing you've generated with Midjourney so far, share it in this thread, and people will reply with Midjourney Generations, and I'll go make a whole YouTube video sharing everybody's Midjourney Generations, and that works really well, because then anybody that I shared then turns around and goes, Matt mentioned me in his latest video, and so that sort of helps get extra reach to the videos.

But I haven't done a whole lot of like testing ideas on Twitter. Twitter is almost like my new blogging platform. Like when I just have a thought about AI or I want to share an opinion about a new tool or something, I'll go and write two paragraphs about it and throw it up on Twitter.

So it's like... I literally use it as like a micro blogging platform for the most part. No, it's cool. I think you would also do well on LinkedIn, actually. If you had the time to focus on it, I think that's a platform that AI does pretty well on with tools and different things. There's a lot of creators on there that have had some on the summit, but yeah, I'm sure you could do well because that's like they like education there.

They actually like to, they, you know, even the carousel, I don't know if LinkedIn is going to phase it out. There's been some talks about this, but you can have so long carousels, like with the 50 slides or something like that. And Instagram is just 10, for example. So you can already see the attention span is longer, but something else, we talked about it before, your newsletter, I think that's a really key piece of content.

Do you want to if you have some time, you want to showcase the process a little bit, how you're doing this, because a newsletter is like, it's time consuming, at least in the old days, it's hard to stay consistent, but you have done it for a while now, so how do you write two newsletters per week, and doing all of the things you're doing, and I think you mentioned you're using AI to actually get all this information into it.

Yeah, so when you were asking about my team and I was trying to think of all the people, I actually have two people that help me run the newsletter now as well. So I actually have somebody that helps with the writing and I have an editor that helps with that as well. They're not full time just for me, they actually manage a few other newsletters as well.

It's actually the same people behind Colin and Samir's newsletter. They also, they write, The Publish Press newsletter for them. So, same team that works with Colin and Samir is actually helping me run my newsletter now. No, no, sorry, do you aggregate this information, from, like, by using AI?

Because it's a lot of news, right you're getting into it. Or do they manually score the web and get all this information? Yeah, so the information comes from the FutureTools website. So right now I'm doing two newsletters a week, Wednesday and Friday. When it used to be just a Friday newsletter and the newsletter was really long, right?

It was like, here's all the cool tools. Here's the latest news. Here's my latest YouTube videos here, you know, and then I used to put in like, here's one cool way to make money with AI. Um, And that newsletter was really, really long and we decided, Hey, let's break it up into two weekly issues.

Cause that, you know, doubles the inventory for sponsors, but it also breaks it up into sort of shorter, quicker bites for people each week. So now every Wednesday's newsletter is just the cool tools I've come across. And every Friday newsletter is just the most important AI news for the week that I think you should know and that comes from the FutureTools website.

So I'm posting all of the tools to FutureTools. I'm posting all the news to FutureTools and then the person who's helping me write it, she's going and looking at the tools and going, here's the five coolest tools that I think you've posted. What do you think are the five coolest tools that you post that, you know, that you think you've posted?

And I'll, and usually we'll stick with like three of the tools that she picked and I'll say, well, I think this tool is better than that one and this one's better than that one. And we have a discussion back and forth about which tools to share each Wednesday newsletter. And then it's pretty much the same process on the Friday newsletter.

I share the AI news to the website. She goes and picks from the news that I shared and says, these are the three that I'm thinking about sharing. What are your thoughts on it? and then we usually go back and forth, the way I used to edit them was I would take the entire newsletter and I would just plug it into Claude.

So, for example, I would, if I go to Claude.Ai here, they have a large context window of, here let me, I logged in for some reason. They have a large context window of 100,000 words, which is, Or 100,000 tokens, which is approximately 75,000 words. Didn't OpenAI increase it on ChatGPT as well?

On their DevDay? Yeah, yeah, they mentioned it was going up to, what, 128,000? Yeah, 128. But I don't know if that's rolled out fully in ChatGPT yet. That might just be the API. That's my thought when I've been using it myself. I don't feel it's rolled out. Yeah, I, yeah, I think, you know, I think it might be rolled out in the API version, but not fully in the ChatGPT version.

But if I go to like my newsletter here, which is on this Beehive website, I would literally just write the whole newsletter, copy and paste everything. You can actually see down on the bottom, P.S. This newsletter is 100% written by a human. Okay, maybe 96%. Thats just because we double check it.

So what I'll do is I'll take a whole newsletter. I see this like this is a structure like you have the same sections every week, right? Yeah, it's basically the same format. It's a format newsletter essentially. So this makes it easier like if anyone watching or listening into this.

Like, you should have, you should build your email list, in the creator economy, it's so important, I think a lot of creators on YouTube and these platforms, they neglect it, we're coming from a different background where we actually, email list building is really, really important, I think, and even you were featured on a list building summit I did years ago as well, so you know the importance of this, even with your podcast, you're building your email list with these lead magnets, So I'm glad you're embracing this now, although your channel is like blowing up and you could just focus on this and making, you're making a full time living even without your list.

Right. But I think that this is something you own. You don't know what's going to happen tomorrow with other platforms. YouTube could decide all of a sudden to shut me down. People could, try to copyright strike me on YouTube, Look what happened to Tik Tok with their fund for creators, man.

Like it's not a great place if you wanna monetize, you know what I mean? Like YouTube, I think it's still the best, platform for creators in general. I do completely agree. Yeah. I don't think I will ever not have an email list no matter what I'm doing. I'll be growing my mailing list off of it.

It's more personal too. You're like having a, I'm not sure what your engagement is, but I'm sure it's pretty good if you're writing this kind of valuable information every week. I'm sure it's even better than when you promoted ever, like internet marketing offers or courses and stuff like that.

I'm sure this might be even better because they're more engaged with what you're offering. Yeah, yeah. The, compared to when I was doing a lot of affiliate marketing and mailing about internet marketing related offers the open rates and click through rates are just another level now, right?

Back then a good open rate might have been 10%, now a good open rate is probably 40%, so it's a completely different level. Yeah, I was aiming more for 20 to 30, but I think it's about how you position it, right? I mean, there are creators, like, who don't push, like, you can push in different ways.

Ali Abdaal, I think, is a great example. He's doing it in a great way, and then he has his launches every once in a while, but it's not like pushing it in their face, in the face of people, like they, if they want to buy it, they buy it essentially and they get into the world, but there's different schools of this, for sure, different people have different opinions.

Yeah, for sure. That's where I say like the Venn diagram was perfect, right? Like I was doing so much in the marketing space with paid traffic from Facebook and Google and SEO and all that kind of stuff. And I was doing copywriting and email list building and funnel building and I learned all of that world for, you know, 2009 was when I quit my day job to go full time internet marketer, right?

So from that, all of that world, I learned all of these marketing strategies. And then when the YouTube channel and FutureTools started to get more popular, I went, Oh, cool. Now I actually have a place that's not internet marketer teaching how to be an internet marketer that I can use all of these skills that I've gained, you know.

Ah, well this is, this is pretty awesome. This is doing its, doing the work here. Yeah, yeah, basically I gave it the prompt, please proofread this for grammar, spelling and readability and give me back the updated version. And you can see it's just basically rewriting the newsletter.

And then what I'll typically do is... I'm gonna share something I've tried based on this. I've tried, I'm doing this myself a lot for proofreading and stuff is really useful. But I think if you already have an email or like some kind of thing you want to rewrite, you can give that to the AI basically, your favorite AI tool.

And you can actually tell write this in this format and have this, and add this on top of it or something. And it does a great job with that when you're giving it clear instructions, I believe. And the, GPTs instead of ChatGPT makes that even easier now, because now you can just feed it.

you know, five versions of the email in this format and say This is the format. Yeah, the same example you showed for your YouTube title generator. I will do the same for the email, like if I have a format email newsletter, you can build a GPT around it for yourself, not something you share publicly, but that will work extremely well I think.

Exactly. Yeah, and then now I just asked it to break down what changes you made and then it gave me a bulleted list of the fixes that it made. Awesome. Yeah. I like, I like this process for sure. This is cool. So that's how I always did my newsletter myself. And then now that Angelina, the person who helps me write it now, took it over.

I have her following the same process to clean up the newsletters. Great. I love it. I love the practical stuff you're sharing here, but I'm going to have a few more questions before we can wrap it up. So what's your number one piece of advice you would give to creators to get started when it comes to leveraging AI and getting into this world to grow their bussines?

It's a good question. The thing that I tell everybody, and I feel like it's probably cliche at this point, is to go and use ChatGPT and let ChatGPT almost be like a consultant for you. One thing that I love to do in ChatGPT, and I do this at least once a week, is I will go into ChatGPT and borderline like journal on my problems with my business or things that I'm struggling with or things that are feeling overwhelming for me in the business right now.

And literally just journal it into ChatGPT and let it give you advice on what you can be doing. I feel like that's a very practical thing that anybody can do, is just go into ChatGPT, break down, here's what my business is. I'm a YouTuber, I've got this many subscribers, I've got a newsletter, I've got a website, here are the struggles I'm having, here's, you know, here's the problems I'm running into.

I need to scale. What are some ideas for scaling this up even more and just having a conversation with ChatGPT and letting it give you advice, because I think going through that sort of like consultation process instead of ChatGPT was one of the first things I ever did that made me realize, Oh crap, this is powerful.

This is basically taking the knowledge that's been scraped off the internet from every marketer out there telling you what the best practices are and condensing it into simple advice that I can use that's tailored for me. So that's probably the first thing I would tell anybody to do.

My, my dad to this day still runs a shutter company, like a window covering shutter company. And the first time I showed him ChatGPT, I had him do that and it changed his life. He's basically changed the different things that he's doing at his company now because he asked ChatGPT what things he can do to optimize and improve his business.

So just doing that process can be pretty game changing for most people. 100%. That's exactly how I actually learned to use it myself, like, when it came out and then obviously with the different models that we have with GPT 4, I'm sure it's going to improve with the future, but you can treat it as a human, basically, like you having a conversation and if you would hire an intern in your business, you would not expect the intern to know everything about you.

You have to kind of mold things, you have to go back and forth a little bit, and then you're going to get a better output, essentially. You have been growing so quickly. I'm interested. I'm sure, I'm not sure anyone has asked you this question, but let's say you would actually lose everything.

Everything was wiped out and you had to start over from scratch. I hope that doesn't happen, but let's say it happened and you need to start over as a content creator and, or as an online business owner. How would you leverage AI to get a competitive edge and advantage and build up your business again?

And tell me also what kind of business would you do the same thing as you're doing currently? Yeah, so the first thing I'd probably do is go and ask that question to ChatGPT, um, basically say, I'm starting from scratch, here's the things I'm interested in, here's the things I'm good at, what would you recommend and just see what kind of advice it gives me, but I think, I do think I would do what I'm doing now, content has always been my thing, I just love creating content, I've always seen myself as like this, excited little kid on Christmas who sees new toys and just wants to call all my friends and tell them about this new toy that I just got, right?

Like, That's the way I've always seen my content, is I come across a new WordPress plugin that I think is really cool and I want to tell everybody about it. And that was the genesis of the WordPress Classroom, which ended up becoming Learn to Blog, right? I learned about pay per click ads in Facebook and Google and I really, really wanted to show other people like, traffic and list building is really easy if you just want to spend the money to pay for the advertising and I just wanted to make videos and show everybody about it and that's always been my MO really is like I come across things that I think are cool and I just want to create content about it and I think when I made videos about AI, when I made

the first video I made about Midjourney and the first video I made about ChatGPT, I had zero expectations anybody was going to see the videos, right? I had a thousand subscribers on my YouTube channel. I, if I was lucky, 300 people were going to see it, right? That was my thought process going into making some of those videos is this is cool.

I just want to make a video about it cause I think it's cool and I have fun making videos. And so I think I would probably do the same thing and I guess, hope that my enthusiasm and excitement about this stuff catches on again and people gravitate towards it. But I would also make sure that I'm building a list on the side.

I would also make sure that I have other business models, right? Like I have other friends that are AI YouTubers. I'm actually in a Discord community with about 20 other people that specifically make YouTube videos about AI and we're constantly in there talking and most of them haven't figured out how to make this a full time thing yet.

Right? Most of them have other day jobs. Most of them are still um, you know, one of them's a college student who does YouTube on the side. Most of them haven't been able to make YouTube a full time gig, and my thinking going into this is YouTube is just going to be one of my revenue streams.

I'm going to have FutureTools, I'm going to have a newsletter, I'm going to have, I'm going to do speaking, I'm going to do all of this other stuff, so that if YouTube ever goes away, okay, that's one of the revenue streams gone, that sucks, it hurts a little bit, but at least I've got all of these other things still going for me, if YouTube goes away today, I would still have my email list and I would say, Hey, come follow me on Vimeo or whatever.

I don't know where I'd send them, right? But I would be able to bring them to another platform. Probably not Vimeo, but maybe another platform. Yeah, I don't know. First thing that came to mind. Come follow me on Twitch or whatever. For sure. No, I love, I love this answer and my final question is, was there any question that you wanted me to ask, but I didn't, or do you have any final words of wisdom for anyone watching or listening into this?

Oh, that's a tough one. I really feel like you covered a lot of ground on this one. I think we had conversations that I didn't know we were going to have. you know, I think, yeah, I don't know. I really can't, I can't think of anything off the top of my head. you know, one thing that comes up a lot, that people tend to ask me a lot on Twitter and when I'm on podcasts and stuff is the sort of topic of like the burnout of it, I was doing a video a day for 30 days, and now I'm still trying to make 3 videos a week, publish 2 newsletters a week, keep up to date on a daily basis with the FutureTools website, and I'm also launching a podcast starting in January with a co host in the AI space.

So, I'm doing all of these things while at the same time trying to make sure that I don't completely burn out and uh, You know, uh, hate life while doing it all. But, How do you deal with the crit I think that's a good one as well, that kind of leads into the same thing, burnout, but you're also I'm sure you're getting a lot more comments now, you have a ton of videos, how do you deal with criticism?

Because you were probably not used to getting this many comments before, you were doing well with what you were doing, but you know, the marketing space, we rarely get a comment, on a blog or something like that. So it's like just people seeing the newsletter, they reply, usually they are pretty nice, but on YouTube, it's like anonymous and they can do whatever they want.

So what's, how do you handle this? That is a great question, actually, because that was something that I really struggled with on the first video that I ever put out that went viral, like I was making videos for years and years and years, putting them on YouTube. My YouTube channel started in 2009 and my most popular video ever probably had 10 comments on it, I put out a video that ends up getting, 600,000 views in 24 hours.

Now all of a sudden, people who have never heard of me are now making comments about how I look, how I speak, maybe, a piece of news that I explained in a wrong way, or, you know, comments from people just going like, oh, you're an idiot, or whatever, no extra context, just like, trolls being mean.

And that really, really impacted me for the first like couple of weeks that the YouTube channel was starting to take off, because even though a lot of the YouTube comments might be positive, like maybe 90% of the comments are positive. It's those 10% of trolls that tend to like get in your head.

And so that was a big, big struggle. I don't know what changed, but I would just say the repetition of it, the consistency of it just thickened my skin, like now when I see trolls and negative comments, I almost laugh at them. I mean, like me and my creative director who I'm working with, he'll screenshot them and send them to me and we'll joke about the troll comments and sort of make fun of the people sharing them, not really make fun of them.

But, you know, I've gotten to a sort of realization that anybody that's making these negative comments. They don't know me. They don't know me personally. They've never met me. They don't know my personality outside of what they see on YouTube. So whatever comment that they're making is never really a reflection on me personally.

It's just a reflection on the content or maybe they're having a bad day or something negative is going on in their life or they're fearful of where this AI stuff is going and that fear is manifesting in a way that causes them to troll in comments. I think I've grown this thicker skin, but also become more empathetic to the type of people that make those comments.

Like I sort of had this realization that they're not necessarily targeted at me. It's more a reflection of the person making the comment than it is on my content or me personally. So just the repetition of it, I think made it easier over time. But now, to be honest, I don't really read YouTube comments anymore.

I just, every video I put out gets roughly a thousand plus comments, and it's almost impossible at this point to keep up with them. So now I've created a Discord, I've got my X account, and so I think the people that are really following, and that really are fans, are either in Discord or X and they'll ask follow up questions or comment on what they thought of my videos in one of those places, which I can moderate a little bit better than I can on YouTube.

So, and I do want to see a lot of the positive comments so that my creative director, John, when there is a comment on YouTube, that's really, really positive or something that he thinks I should see, or it is feedback that he thinks is valuable feedback. He screenshots it and sends it to me and says Hey, this is a comment I think you should see.

So he still reads every single comment, but he's a little bit removed from it because he's not the one actually making the video. So he'll read all the comments and then just send me the ones he thinks I should see and then the rest of the communication these days happens in Discord or over on X.

Yeah. No, this is great advice. I think that happens when you grow quickly, but I just thought of something. What's your, we mentioned it a little bit. What's your Webflow bill by the way? Like you mentioned it in one post that it was like skyrocketing and your revenue didn't grow at the same rate.

Did you manage to work this out? Yeah. So at the moment I'm still overloading Webflow. but, I've sort of worked out a deal with Webflow. I went back and forth with emails. I don't know if I should be sharing this publicly, but basically the way it went down was, you know, Webflow reached out, said they needed me to go to an enterprise version.

I went, okay, no problem. How much is the enterprise version? They went 60 grand a year. And I went, whoa, that's a pretty big jump from 50 bucks a month. Can I at least pay it in a monthly payment? They're like, no, you got to pay it all up front. I went, okay, well, I don't have 60K in my bank account.

At the time of this posting, at the time of that email, I don't have 60K to pay you. Like I would have to go into debt to pay you the 60 grand. And so we kind of went back and forth and I went, just so you know, I'm a content creator. This is what I do. I go and I make content on YouTube.

I make content on Twitter. I write blog posts. Do you, if I switch from, I've made content about building in public and building on Webflow. If I move over to WordPress or one of these other platforms. I am going to make content about how I am moving away from Webflow over to this new platform.

Is that something you guys are okay with? Because that's what's going to happen if I, if you, like, basically bump my bill to something that is not, that I'm not capable of paying. I'm going to move, and because I'm building in public and I'm a content creator I am going to publicly talk about why I had to move.

What do you want? How do you want to handle this? And they sort of backed off and said, all right, you're fine on the plan you're on for right now. I love this. I'm glad I asked because I just caught my mind, but it's great. Man, I really appreciate you for coming on here. You shared so much value, and I'm gonna link up your Discord, your resources, of course, your YouTube channel below here as well, so people can check you out, you're doing well, probably when this goes out, or when you're watching this, Matt has grown even more, his videos are really insightful, if you wanna have the latest AI news and tech, and see all of that, and also FutureTools is a great resource for you, so you can check that out, and yeah, if you have any takeaways, leave a comment

below, do subscribe to the channel if you want to hear more like this, like the video, and I'll see you in the next one. Ciao for now. Bye. Peace.