Cody Schneider, Co-Founder and CEO of Swell AI, shares his journey to founding a company that uses AI for content generation. He discusses the evolution of Swell AI, which transforms audio and video content into other formats such as blog posts, and emphasises the importance of using human-generated content when prompting AI to create unique and high-quality outputs.

Cody highlights the importance of building a sustainable marketing strategy, the impact of AI on content creation, and the necessity of reaching audiences through multiple channels. He also offers insights into effective marketing tactics, including the use of podcasts and social media, while encouraging aspiring marketers to embrace technical skills and practical experience in their careers.

About Swell AI

Swell AI is an AI-powered platform designed to streamline content creation for podcasts, helping creators automate the process of generating show notes, transcriptions, and summaries.

By leveraging advanced natural language processing and machine learning algorithms, Swell AI transforms audio into structured, written content, making it easier for podcasters to engage their audience, enhance SEO, and save time.

The platform is particularly useful for podcasters who want to focus on content creation while automating the more tedious aspects of post-production. Swell AI is ideal for independent podcasters, production teams, and agencies looking to scale their podcasting efforts efficiently.

About Cody Schneider

Cody Schneider is an innovative inventor who uses AI to refine digital processes. As the CEO of Draft Horse AI and Swell AI, he’s known for creating tools that streamline content workflows and deliver faster results. With experience in rapidly scaling startups, Cody helps turn organisational challenges into efficient, automated solutions.

Time Stamps

[00:00:41] – Cody’s Career Journey

[00:02:38] – The Origin of Swell AI

[00:06:45] – The Value of Human-Generated Content

[00:10:57] – Accessibility of Swell AI for Users

[00:14:28] – Future of AI in Marketing Tasks

[00:20:09] – Cody’s Marketing Strategies for Swell AI

[00:25:55] – Best Marketing Advice Received

[00:26:13] – Advice for Aspiring Marketers

[00:29:01] – Conclusion and Contact Information

Quotes

“We realized that podcasts, especially in the B2B world, were this incredible tool to create media on a regular cadence… Podcasts are one of the most effective sales tools that exist currently.” Cody Schneider, Co-Founder and CEO of Swell AI.

Follow Cody:

Cody Schneider on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/codyxschneider/

Swell AI website: https://www.swellai.com/

Swell AI on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/swell-ai/

Follow Mike:

Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/

Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/

Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We’d also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.

Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547

Transcript: Interview with Cody Schneider at Swell AI

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Cody Schneider

Mike: Cody, thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.

Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier, today I’m joined by Cody Schneider. Cody is the Co-Founder and CEO of Swell AI, welcome to the podcast, Cody.

Cody: Thanks for having me. Super excited to be here.

Mike: It’s great to have you on. Let’s start off. We always like to find a little bit about the person before we talk about your company and what you’re doing. So tell us a little bit about your career and how you got to found Swell AI.

Cody: Yeah, absolutely. So originally started out in E commerce, somehow ended up at a BD marketing agency, where my role there was doing digital strategy for like fortune 500 companies. These were, like manufacturing companies, things like doors, windows, you know, very unsexy businesses that are multi billion dollar, huge market gap companies. So we were helping them basically transition from physical media into digital media. From there, I ended up, my boss at that company had gone to through Y Combinator and, you know, ended up in the tech world. So he kind of indoctrinated me that there’s this whole other world that we could open up. So ended up at this company called Rupa health. Was employee six hired there, helped take Rupa from $20 million valuation to $110 million valuation in about six months. Our whole strategy there we were marketing to practitioners, which are traditionally so think like doctors, anybody in the medical world, traditionally very hard to get in front of, because they are high income individuals, and they’re being marketed to do from every angle, whether it’s financial advisors or whatever, etc. So we realized really early on we were gonna have to make a media arm of the company that was going to be the only way for us to create a relationship with them and do demand generation. And so ended up spinning up a whole live class, series, podcast series, wrote 1000s of blog posts. If you go and look at their SEO. It’s insane over the last two years, but yeah, so that was really kind of what all led up to swell. I realized that, like podcasts, especially in the B2B world, were this incredible tool to create media on a regular cadence that could be basically repurposed and chopped up into any form of content that you could think of, right? So it can turn into clips, it can turn into blog posts, it can turn into newsletters, et cetera. And so that was really the origin of it. We saw what AI was doing, saw that it could be this incredible vehicle for it, and that was kind of the inception of the company. So, yeah.

Mike: And so when you founded it, did you have a technical co founder, or are you a coder?

Cody: Yeah, yeah. So I’m technical, but I’m definitely not at the level of my co founder, Max. He’s like, savant level. See how the origin of the company is kind of ridiculous. I was doing consulting for this company. I would spun up a podcast form, you know, same strategy that I’d kind of used over and over agAIn. Realized, hey, you know, we this was July of 2022, we saw that AI was starting to get to the point where I was like, Oh, this is good enough. We could actually use this. And so was on a road trip with my girlfriend. We stayed in my now co founder house. He was just my friend. We had worked at Rupa health together, and that’s how we met each other. And was like, Hey, I’m trying to do this. You think it’s possible? And at the time he was working with embeddings deeply, he was like, Yeah, within 24 hours, spun up the first version of the product. It was a Google Drive folder that friends could upload, like mp three files to. I sold it to like 10 people. We would download the mp threes from the Google Drive folder, run it on our, like laptops, locally, and then I would, you know, manually, emAIl them the content that we generated for them. But anyway, yeah, so that was kind of the the org of the of the initial product, and how it came to be from a co founder standpoint.

Mike: 

that’s really cool. Definitely, minimum viable product there. I think

Cody: So for sure, for sure, we didn’t have a website. I just sent out emAIls to friends that I knew that and were using, like webinars and podcasts as a way to grow their businesses, and saying, hey, you know, just send us the recordings. We’ll handle the rest.

Mike: So, I mean, the interesting thing is understanding you’re not VC funded. You’ve bootstrapped the company.

Cody: So we’re self funded. I own other companies, and so we cash flow this out of them, and then Max had exits and basically just annuities. So he’s kind of covered on that end. So yeah, we just wanted to build a profitable company. We’d seen VC land, and there was definitely a venture track we had got approached early on and just leaned into, hey, let’s just, you know, build something that’s sustAInable. Our bet was, you know, we don’t know where any of this is going. Like every it feels like every week something new drops within the AI world on Twitter that changes the entire kind of ecosystem or landscape of this, especially in the space that we’re in with content generation. And so for us, it was like, Oh, we could go rAIse but what would that look like from just the defensibility long term? So we’re now way more confident with that of like, okay, this is we built this complex, like workflow product, where it’s like, you can take. Raw media and turn it into basically any form and have it published to anywhere that you’re looking to create. And that’s kind of what we’re more obsessed with now, is like, what are these AI enabled content generation workflows? But, yeah, so we are self funded, though.

Mike: Oh, that’s really cool. Sounds kind of old school. And I love that. I’d like to just investigate a little bit more about what spell AI does. You’ve mentioned a couple of times, you know, alluded to what it does, but basically what you’re doing is you’re uploading audio and it’s generating written content. Is that correct? Or are you doing more using video? You’re generating clips? How does it work?

Cody: Yeah, so we started out just as audio to text generation quickly expanded into basically any media format that you want to provide us. I kind of talk about it as we’re content repurposing powered by AI. That’s really our core format we’re quickly evolving into, like your AI content marketing team, is how I would describe it, but how most people use it currently is, they take a long form piece of content, you know, a video podcast, they upload it into swell. Swell generates clips. It generates blog posts. It generates newsletters. The big kicker within it is that you can build out these templates and these workflows within the platform so that you will basically, once you provided that raw material, that long form piece of content, it automatically will generate that output that you’re looking for. And so this is, you know, in contrast to using, like, a chat sheet or any of these other tools, I don’t think anybody actually wants to chat with AI, you know, at the end of the day, like it’s just a sandbox to figure out, okay, what is the prompt chAIn that gets the output that I’m looking for? And so swell, what we really tried to do is make it into a platform that allows you to create those, you know, templated outputs, and then agAIn, by providing these raw materials, I just generate that from that so.

Mike: And I mean, we talked about this a little bit before the podcast, but I think the really cool thing you’re doing is you’re actually driving content from something a human created originally, rather than trying to pull all the content out of a large language model. And certAInly for a lot of our listeners, in B2B Tech, that’s really inefficient, and being able to use human content seems to be very different. I mean, can you talk a little bit about why that works so well?

Cody: Yeah, absolutely. So when you think about an LLM, right, like it’s just trAIned from the general knowledge of the internet. If you spend time on the internet, you know what the general knowledge that average is. It’s very average. So if you want to get unique ideas or unique concepts, you have to still talk to thought leaders. Thought Leaders are actually now more valuable than they ever were before. And so podcasts are this incredible way to basically capture that expert knowledge. You take that transcript and then we can transform that into, for example, a blog post. So that whole workflow would look something like, Okay, I invite on, you know, five different hotel marketing experts. I record those conversations, I put it into, you know, a single recording. Drop that into swell. I suddenly have, you know, a transcript of with all this knowledge, but then I can go and say, okay, create a blog post outlined based off of this transcript. Now write a blog post based on that outline, that prompt chAIn, and you’re going to see that the quality you get out of that output, especially if you tell the AI, hey, use vocabulary that they use within the transcript, right? So, like it has that tone, style and voice that is similar to what was actually recorded, you’re going to be, you know, in that top, whatever, 5% of content in comparison to just having an LLM, like, if you prompted an LLM hotel marketing strategies for 2024 it’s gonna do some generic output. But when you create that source file that is unique, from that expert point of view, that’s where you can create this differentiation within the content. This is this way to basically create stuff that’s different. That’s going to create that differentiation is you have to have that expert source material. And there’s different ways to do this too. Like we’ve seen this done with PDFs as an example. So, like, here’s five different reports. Okay, now we’re going to write based off of these reports. But other examples, like, I have a target keyword phrase, I go and scrape everything that’s on page one on google for that target keyword phrase. So I extract all that blog post data, I extract the YouTube videos, anything that’s there, I put that into a context window, and then I write a piece of content based on that. You’re going to see an output that is 10x better than just prompting the LLM to do that. And so I think to zoom out, what I’m trying to advocate for, for any of the companies that we’re working with or talking to, is give the AI almost this like walled garden that they have to work with. And here’s your source material that you have to work from. And when you provide that, it context orients them, so that the output is just so much more high quality in comparison to the just a general prompting, prompt output that the AI would provide.

Mike: I mean, that’s fascinating. I think you know, the superpower of this is a lot of subject matter experts actually really don’t like writing, but they’re very happy to talk, and even, you know, in formal interviews, rather than formal podcasts, might be great sources. Do you see people, you know, using all sorts of content as the source material?

Cody: Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I’ve seen it where it’s just like fireside. Chats, I’ve seen, webinars I’ve seen, and I think that the to your point on the these experts want to talk about this, you know, they don’t want to write about this. Podcasts are one of the most effective sales tools that exist currently, so, and I see this especially for early stage companies like I always advocate for them to create a show. And the reason for that is, like, if you just go and reach out to your target, ICP, and you’re like, you know, hey name, I want you to come on the show. And it has, we have an emAIl newsletter that it gets sent, sent out to that has 10,000 subs on it. And we also provide clips back to you for your social like, we see a 20% response rate on that outreach right for clients that we work with. So from that, I mean, it’s basically sales in disguise. Suddenly you’re in relationship with your target customer. The other side of it is when you grow an emAIl newsletter that promotes the podcast, people don’t think that podcasts are marketing yet, and so you can just emAIl out these podcasts. It’ll land in people’s inboxes, they’ll open it, and they’ll listen to these episodes and spend an hour with you each week, right? I mean, you couldn’t pay people to do that, but for some reason, when you have these industry experts on it creates almost this honeypot. It’s this trap that’s basically, you know, creating this inbound for you. And so agAIn, the byproduct of that is okay. Now I also have clips. Now I also have social posts. Now I also have blog posts. Now I also have newsletters, all of these other knock on effects that are coming from it. But I think that there’s just, like, there’s so many different ways that this can be used, but from a content standpoint, like from a source material, the ones we’re seeing most often, or, like, interview style conversations, you know, traditional podcast. I mean, video podcasts are basically taking over. Looks like YouTube’s gonna win, based on all the data that we’re seeing, which is really fascinating. The other thing that we’re seeing more and more of is webinars as well. So basically, you know, we have clients where they have 500 plus webinars that they’ve done over the last three years, and they’re like, Okay, well, what do we do with this now? And so by taking those webinars, you can, you know, use swell as an example to turn those all into blog posts. I can also prompt swell, hey, list 10 long tAIl keywords related to this webinar. Now write a blog post about each of those long tAIl keywords. I publish that post, I embed that webinar within each of those blog posts, and suddenly I have more basically, views occurring to that to that blog post. We’re also seeing people take those webinars, chop them up into segments where it’s like, okay, maybe it’s an hour long. Let’s find five to 10 minute clips that are, you know, insights from that, that whole webinar, we’ll turn those into more YouTube content. And what we see is those actually go more viral than the webinar itself, right? Like the webinar will have as an example, like 97 views, but the clip that’s from the webinar, where it has like, a hook right at the beginning of the clip that will do, you know, close to 1000 views from the same piece of source content. And so I think, you know, agAIn, these are kind of some of these tactical ways that we’re seeing people use the product to effectively do just content marketing and distribution.

Mike: So, yeah, I mean, it just feels that there’s so little limitation on what you can do with swell AI. I mean, I think the interesting thing is, in terms of who you’re selling this product to, this is not a high end enterprise product, is it? This is something that’s very accessible.

Cody: Totally. Yeah. So just early on, we saw that, and we our wedge into the market was podcasters. That was kind of what we saw as the vehicle to get initial traction. And so I would definitely say it’s more of like a prosumer type of application, like, we have a free tier, and then it just, it’s just usage based, right? So it’s, like, depending on how much volume you’re doing on a monthly basis. But yeah, I mean, with a lot of these AI tools, like, we can have these approachable, like numbers, right? Because of, like, how these models function and how cost effective it is to basically, like, do this like, so for example, like, our cost is only based off of the upload time of the source file that you put into us. So you basically just, like, pay for the transcription, and then you can make, agAIn, unlimited clips, unlimited text, etc. And the only reason that that’s possible is because, like, the cost of all this has gotten so approachable. So in all reality, like, every company is trying to make content right now, like they’re just having to. That’s the only way that they can create differentiation. And so we’re just trying to be that platform that entire marketing team sit on top of, to be able to build this content marketing engine that’s powered by AI.

Mike: So that makes sense. I mean, I think perhaps some people listening to this, who’ve been in marketing for a while, they’ve seen a lot of platforms come out recently based on generative AI. So I’m really interested what’s swell doing that you think is going to make you successful ahead of some of those other competitors?

Cody: Totally. Yeah, what I am most obsessed with right now is, can we automate, really like tasks or job roles that are occurring within the marketing, like organization? So as an example, we’re just starting to build this out internally. It’s a social media manager agent, AI, right? We’re calling her Jenna internally, but basically, imagine I upload a piece of long form content and swell goes and makes clips, and then it gets scheduled out to your social media platforms. Publishes those. It analyzes the data to see whichever the best performers. It goes back to your clips. It then finds more like that from your back catalog, and it creates this growth flywheel. And so that whole thing that I just described is entirely possible now with AI, right? So like this agent that basically is functioning as a social media manager, all you have to do is provide this raw file, these source materials, and then it just goes on and runs right? And so like, hypothetically, you could just have this AI employee that is doing this task or this joB2Be done for your business. And so maybe it’s not perfect, right? When it first goes, like, all these go live, and we’re just starting to see these kind of slowly come to market, but in the beginning it’s probably like, maybe that’s 50% as well as what a human would do at the job. I mean, if I can pay 149 a month for that, and also it’s like, creating impact in my business. And then we know that all this is going to get better over time. What happens when this gets to scale? And so, you know, that’s just in the social media management side. I think this can be done for, like, Google Ads management, and for, you know, Facebook ads management, I think this can be done for like, programmatic SEO, and, you know, basically an SEO specialist, where they’re doing keyword research, writing blog posts, looking at the data to see what made signups, going back, writing more content based on that, right? So it’s like these growth flywheels basically get created by these employees, these AI employees that you just hire, and they show up in your slack, and they start working, right? So I think that’s where I see all this going is. And what I’m excited about is a, you know, from a product standpoint, is, can we make it or just enable companies where it’s like, hey, they just plug into this thing, and you just start proliferating content across all the platforms, wherever your target customer is. And so I think that’s the long term where I see this. The biggest differentiator that we’re finding, though, within the AI space is you’re going to have to build your own custom models, right, that are specifically trAIned for whatever the outcomes are. So for example, like clip making, this is one that’s like, we’re realizing the AI is like, okay, at finding clips. It is not, you know, as capable as a human, but that’s because it’s trAIned off of all the clips that exist on a platform, right? So if you think, look at it, it’s trAIning data. It’s trAIned off of just average YouTube shorts or, you know, tiktoks or Instagram reels in contrast. Like, what people actually want is they want the top performers. So if you went you trAIned a model of, hey, here’s what good clips look like. Here’s the top 1% then what you’re going to see is its clip selection ability is going to be way higher when you do that. But to go and trAIn these, like, we got quoted like it was like, 1.2 million, basically, to go and trAIn like a model like that. And so, like, that’s something that we’re going to do, like, down the road, basically. But what you’re going to see is, like, these core models are going to be fine tuned, or companies are going to trAIn their own models, like the they’ll use this kind of base layer, which is the LLM, to do their first version of this, and then the next layer will be like, cool. We found this, you know, custom thing that we’re trying to do. Now, let’s trAIn a model, basically, to facilitate that, that outcome that we’re looking for.

Mike: So that’s super cool. And also, I mean, fAIrly scary in terms of the amount of investment you need to trAIn these models.

Cody: So it’s getting so much cheaper. I want to throw that out there. So like, that cost, like, 18 months ago, that cost was probably, like, closer to nine to 10 million so, like, it is dramatically decreasing, just because we’re really starting to understand how to do these more effectively, and then also just the amount of GPU clusters that are avAIlable, like a company that, for example, you can just go hire. They call it like GPU bursts, but it’s called SF compute. So it’s literally like sfcompute.com but you can go and you can basically just like, I need, you know, 10 h1, hundreds to run for four days strAIght to trAIn this model, and you can just hire out that time, right? And so traditionally, if you wanted to go get that same cluster, you would have to go and, like, get a whole year’s worth of, you know, GPU time, which the only people that could afford that are these large corporations, right? So I think it’s going to become more and more approachable. There’s also really interesting stuff that’s happening in the blockchAIn world now where they’re basically saying, Hey, we’re going to do distributed compute. So you can, like, plug in your GPUs into this cloud, and then anytime that trAIning is happening on your GPUs, you get pAId out in some cryptocurrency or whatever. And so it’s this way to do distributed trAIning on these, like GPU clouds, which is also just super fascinating in its own right. Like what happens there when it as that it gets to scale. So I don’t know where any of this goes, but agAIn, I think, well, just the pace that we’re seeing the cost of this go down is dramatic. So I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think, like, in a couple of years, you’ll be able to trAIn a model for, you know, 100 to 150 grand, and then that’s just trAIned on this very specific action that you’re trying to create within the product of your application, which is going to create mode. It’s going to create defensibility for the company. So

Mike: So that’s super cool. And I mean, people who know me will know I’m actually an X engineer. So I love all the technical stuff. I just want to switch tack. Bit Cody now and look at, you know, what you do with swell? AI, I’m interested. You know, you’re a B2B marketer effectively. So how do you promote swell AI?

Cody: Yeah, great question. So our, our world, is a little bit different, agAIn, because we kind of have this consumer side, and then also this, you know, larger media organization, like, for example, you have, like, local news channels that use us as a way to, you know, create content from it. So my background is in what would probably be labeled as, like, degenerate growth tactics. So I like, we cold emAIl, like so many people a month, like close to 100,000 we are also, like, doing pAId ads across all channels. We do programmatic SEO to get in brown lead traffic. We just figured out how to build out basically, I’m talking I’m calling it like a tick tock cloud network. So imagine 100 different tick tock accounts that are all posting dAIly. We created virtual machines and then proxy networks for them so that they don’t get shadow banned on the platform. And then we post content that’s AI generated. So I have AI write scripts, and then we use Hey Gen to have a video avatar read the script, we do a background removal on the video avatar, and then do like, a recording of the product and the background of that. And like, what we see is like, we can get like, 600 to 700 views on those videos, which is crazy, but when you scale that up to, okay, I have 100 accounts doing that, right? That turns into, you know, 3.2 to 3.5 million views a month, right? And so suddenly, like, I mean, we see this like in the in the data, where just more branded searches happen for the platform as time goes on. You know, to zoom out, my whole strategy with all this is like, take every growth lever that exists, like, wherever your target customer is, like, you need to meet them there, and then what you need to do is basically layer on all of these growth strategies onto each other, and that’s how you break the laws of physics. When it comes to marketing, like, there’s no other way to do it. It’s just being like, almost present, wherever, wherever they are, with some type of educational content or media content, or, you know, or even just an offer for them. So that’s we really try to go through every strategy that’s avAIlable for the growth of this.

Mike: Well, I mean, it sounds like, you know, as well as trying to produce this quality content, you know, it seems like it’s a balance between quality and volume. From your point of view, you’ve got to get the right quality, but if you don’t get the volume. I mean, do you think that reach is a problem for a lot of B2B companies, where they they try and be very focused and very precise, and maybe they don’t reach everybody.

Cody: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so I think this is Tiktok changed everything, right? So they invented for you page content. So what is for you page content? It’s basically content that the platform decides that you’ll have interest in that will most likely keep you on platform for a longer period of time. So how do social media companies make money? Right? It’s like they’re selling your attention. They want to show you whatever content will suck up as much of your time as possible. And so Tiktok was like, really the first one, it doesn’t matter where you follow. It doesn’t matter, you know, it just figures out what your interests are, and then it shows you videos based off of what your interests are. And so you’re seeing that across all platforms now, YouTube, shorts, Instagram reels. Is this even LinkedIn and, you know, Twitter have both added for you pages, right? Like you see more LinkedIn content now from people you have no idea who they are than you did previously. And so with that in mind, then this becomes a numbers game. Like, yeah, good content matters. But also, like, if the platform is deciding, you know what it’s going to show and not show to people based off the engagement, like what we’re talking about, you know, on LinkedIn as an example, like, say, you’re posting once a week, that means you have four at bats to get the right, you know, right content, right boy, you know, at the right time, etc. In contrast, I have a friend that posts five to six videos, like video shorts a day to LinkedIn. He has 7000 followers on his LinkedIn, but he’s doing about 2.7 million views across that before that account on a monthly basis, right? And so what you see is like one out of those five videos will go more viral than the rest. And so it’s just a numbers game at that point, especially with this for you, page content change. And so I think in the B2B world, thinking about that, okay, how do I create, you know, a bunch of different because we don’t really know what’s going to work with this for you page, it’s really like you’re at the will of the algorithm. We have an idea of what our audience will be interested in, but at the end of the day, it’s, you know, you’re still still roulette. And so I would rather, personally have more bats, you know, than than not. And agAIn, just to use that baseball analogy, like if you hit one time, and your batting averages, you know, points you like, your likelihood that you actually get on base is super low. But in contrast, if I hit 100 times, right, like, I’m gonna get on base 20 times. And so it’s the same idea with content now, and really, the for you page is made this change.

Mike: So that’s been fascinating. I think, you know, we’ve covered an awful lot, from swell AI through to how to market, particularly with Tiktok, I really appreciate your time Cody. Just before you go, there’s a couple of quick questions we really like to ask people. And the first is, what’s the best bit of marketing advice you’ve ever been given?

Cody: Yeah, the best marketing advice I ever got was Don’t even start the thing on. Sits repeatable so often I see, especially, you know, marketers, where they’re like, Okay, we’re gonna do this. Like, it’s like, they think about it as the in the form of, like, oh, we do a campAIgn, right? And in contrast, like, what we should think about this as is, okay. Can we do this indefinitely, into the future, for forever? Like, we’re never gonna stop this, this activity, right? And so that needs to be the filter that we’re approaching all of this with. It’s really funny because, like, campAIgns were actually the origin of them is when, basically, the advertising industry came into existence post World War Two. They just took that over from the military. Like, that’s why it’s called the campAIgn. Is because you used to go and you would like perform a campAIgn there was, like, a stark and an end in contrast. Now I think it’s evolved where it’s like, no, this is like, we have to do this thing, and definitely for forever. Can we sustAInably do that in thinking about this time horizon? Can we do this for two years, every week, every month, every day, whatever that ends up being from a cadence standpoint, if the answer is no, don’t even start the thing because it won’t make impact for your company. So that was the best advice I ever got. It served me super well. And I think, you know, for every other marketer will probably serve them also.

Mike: That’s awesome. I mean, the other thing we like to know is, if you were talking to a young person thinking of entering marketing as a career, what advice would you give to them?

Cody: Start a blog, figure out how to get traffic to it. Figure out how to sell something to them. From that traffic. If you can do that, you’re in the top 1% of marketers in the world. And all of this information is on YouTube now, right? Like, I mean, I even have a YouTube channel where, like, all I do is just talk about tactical things, right? So you can find every all of this way more than, you know, when I started my career. I mean, when I started my career, like, I’m, I’m probably, you know, built by the internet as well. But the, I mean, it was like masterminds, and you go deep on, like, black hat forms to figure out how to do any of this stuff. And now people just give it away for free. Like, you don’t, you don’t need to buy courses. You don’t need to do this. I think the only ways look at what other people are doing and then try to imitate that, and then you need to be a practitioner. Like, there’s not a course that you can take that will teach this. All of this evolved so quickly, like, I mean, this morning right now, you know, I was just troubleshooting cold emAIl, because what we were doing for cold emAIl three days ago, you know, is it working right now? Right? I’m in the weeds like testing new stuff to figure out why, why this is happening. And so the only way that you can learn this is trial by fire. There’s no There’s no other way to go about it. But I think with that sAId, it’s, it’s easier than ever, especially with AI. Like, I mean, you can go to complexity AI and be like, I want to learn how to do Google ads. Like, write a curriculum for me based off of what the internet says is the best way. Boom. It does that. And then it’s like, okay, list me YouTube videos for each of those items within that curriculum. Cool. It goes in a list of YouTube videos, and you just built out, you know, a top tier educational at that point. Like, you just learn Google ads, right? It’s going to take whatever 10 hours of your time, but that’s done. And I think that’s, I mean, we’re seeing this on the programming side as well. Like, it’s become more accessible than ever to go and create softwares, especially as a marketer. Like, if you can learn how to, and this is, like, my call to action, everybody that’s in, you know, it’s, how do you get more technical with this on the marketing side, because if you can figure out how to prompt AI to just write Python scripts for you as a marketer like you suddenly become god tier, right where it’s, like, cool. Like, I mean, I just did this a couple days ago. Like, we’re scraping toast their website to pull out lead data. This is for a friend’s company. And then we would built a like a proxy that is then going it’s googling that that company information. So like the name of the company in the address, it’s finding the website on their Google Maps. It’s putting that into a folder. And then we built, like a workflow hour. It’s like, okay, cool. We take that spreadsheet, it goes into Hunter IO, goes into phantom Buster, we find all the emAIls associated with that company, and now they suddenly have leads, right? And so that whole thing, like, I mean, that used to be, I would have to go get engineering talent, and, I mean, all of these, yeah, that’s basically just hacked together with prompts, you know, by prompting AI to write me Python scripts, and then also, like, no code tools like Zapier, right? And so just figuring out how to piece those things together, that’s the new future, in my opinion.

Mike: So, Oh, that’s awesome. Code, it’s been amazing. It feels like we’ve covered so much. If people are interested, they want to find out about swell AI or have questions, and I have to say here that actually, you persuaded us to try swell AI, and we’re now a customer, so we’re big fans. You know, what’s the best place for them to go?

Cody: Yeah. So swell AI. COMM, you can sign up for free. You can just reach out to me at cody@swellAI.com I’m happy to give you some extra credits to play around with the tool as well.

Mike: Thanks so much, Cody. It’s been awesome. Thanks so much for being a guest on marketing B2B technology. Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode, and if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you’d like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

 

Author

artificial intelligence in B2B marketing media page podcasts