- Episode AI notes
- The AI Voice Generation and Podcast Production Platform offers script generation, AI voice creation, video clip creation, support for multiple languages, show notes production, and podcast hosting capabilities. It emphasizes the importance of preserving the RSS feed for open podcasting and discourages hosting on Anchor, Spotify, and Apple Podcast.
- The speaker discusses experimenting with new internal podcasts and expresses interest in creating audio content for platforms like Reddit. They also highlight the challenge of consuming image-based content and mention developing a solution to aggregate and convert Discord content into a daily newsletter.
- Startups often need a push from the founders to succeed, and not all startups succeed simply by building a better product. Reading essays on startups can be influential in motivating individuals. Efforts to produce podcasts with meaningful content are acknowledged and presented as is without playing around with it.
- A successful experiment with a paywall strategy resulted in significant inbound interest and $3,000 in one day. This indicates the potential for monetization and validates the demand for the product. AF owners’ concerns about paywall strategies are addressed.
- AI technology should be user-centric and tailored to specific use cases. It is important to consider the perspective of the user and choose specialized AI tools that cater to their specific needs. Podcast creation is made easier with tooling and templates, and selecting preferred speech speeds is possible. Building the right product for the right use case is crucial, and being the first mover is not always the most important factor in innovation.
- The challenges of dubbing across different languages include the difficulty in determining what sounds good in other languages and the importance of professional translators and QA processes. Leveraging AI tools, such as using scripts for editing, is helpful in content creation and podcast production.
- Optimizing show formats and tooling is crucial for podcast production. The three show formats include the fundamentals show, Twitter spaces show, and a show using SmallPodcastor to generate show notes. Marketing on Twitter can involve various strategies, and promoting podcast episodes can leverage the fame of guests. Handing over marketing tasks to AI may pose challenges.
Building a personal brand requires effort and establishing a unique voice. AI’s tendency to suggest using emojis and hashtags can be limiting. Starting a podcast with help is easy, and for AI engineers, it is important to believe in the value of their work and be smart about spending money. Time 0:00:00
Features Overview of AI Voice Generation and Podcast Production Platform Summary: The platform offers script generation and AI voice creation with 11 available apps as its core features. It also provides video clip creation for YouTube, supports production in 28 languages, offers show notes production, and includes podcast hosting capabilities. Additionally, the platform emphasizes the preservation of the openness of the podcast ecosystem and highlights the importance of respecting the RSS feed.
Speaker 2
I want to go through features so that people have a high level overview of what you offer. So I think at the core, it is basically two things. One is you generate scripts. And that’s optional, obviously, if you if you want to just write the script yourself, you can write a script yourself. But most I think most of your users will generate a script. And then two is from that script, you create use AI voices currently using 11 apps. Is that the rough flow? And that’s like the really core basic. That’s the core basic. There’s a lot of plumbing on top of it. Yes. And then you offer video clips for YouTube. You offer 28 languages that you can produce. You offer show notes production and podcast hosting too. So they don’t have to host it on like anchor. Don’t not host it on anchor, by the way, people don’t host it on Spotify. Don’t host it on Apple Podcast. It’s these people don’t respect the RSS feed. Anyway, I have very strong feelings about like preserving the sanctity of the RSS feed for open podcasting and all these spotify of the world want to close the podcast ecosystem. So I have this tirade about that. But yeah, those are your top level features on your landing page, anything that you highlight to go deeper on.Experimenting with Podcasts and Content Consumption Challenges Summary: The speaker discusses experimenting with publishing new internal podcasts and expresses interest in creating audio content for Reddit and other platforms. They highlight the challenge of consuming image-based content and mention developing a solution to aggregate and convert Discord content into a daily newsletter.
Speaker 1
Oh, okay. So we do the hack news recap on the PG as I think it was the two most popular ones. Yeah. We’re constantly experimenting with new internal, like podcast that we publish. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2
I think what are your other needs? You can tease a little bit. What are you thinking about? T’s a little bit. Well, are you like Reddit? Yeah.
Speaker 1
I’d love to listen to some of the Reddit things going on there, but instead of like reading them, it’s always just a notification that I got them like, Oh, this sounds interesting. But I don’t know. You can do it like per sub Reddit that you care about. Yeah. A few things like that. I love live pro tips. Yeah. Life. I see. Yeah. Like super interesting things or Wall Street bets or whatever you’re into.
Speaker 2
Yeah. Well, the problem with these things is that a lot of them create involve images and memes, which you cannot consume. Well, yes, we cannot consume.
Speaker 1
This is like a simple, yeah, we can’t consume that at the moment, but you know, maybe on the beat, a few weeks down the line on the video feature of ours gets a little better. You can actually start tripping like that. Okay. Anyway.
Speaker 2
Yeah. Yeah. And so I’ll just feed you an idea. To keep up on the AI, a lot of stuff actually happens in this course. And there’s way too many discords, way too many and they’re way too active. Yes. So I’ve actually built a little feed for myself that scrapes a bunch of discords and creates a daily newsletter for myself. Amazing. And I have thought about turning you into an audio feed, but then this is the problem for wonder crafts. I read better.The Importance of Doing Things That Don’t Scale for Startups Summary: Startups often believe that their success is based on whether a product takes off on its own, but in reality, startups take off because the founders make them take off. It usually takes some sort of push to get them going. Additionally, essays on startups are considered seminal and have motivated individuals to read more of them. Efforts to produce podcasts with meaningful content are acknowledged, and there is a commitment to present the material as is without playing around with it.
Speaker 3
One of the most common types of advice we give at why combinator is to do things that don’t scale. A lot of would be founders believe that startups either take off or don’t. You build something, make it available. And if you’ve made a better mouse trap, people beat a path to your door as promised, or they don’t, in which case the market must not exist. Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. Like, I don’t know if we’re coding someone or like use a different voice.
Speaker 2
Yeah. Right.
Speaker 1
Yeah. I think it’s just what produced. And I also think, you know, the essays are so seminal to like everyone in startups reads them. Yeah.
Speaker 2
It’s actually got me to read more PGSes than I would have otherwise. Yeah. His his last mission accomplished. I don’t know if it was the last one. Well, the time was how did it work? How did it work? How did you great? That wasn’t like that was a one hour podcast. Yeah. Oh my God.
Speaker 1
No one I could I did not read it. I just had to listen to. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, if I’m being honest, I think the motivation for PGSes, which like I need this. Yeah.
Speaker 2
Yeah. For for that one, if it’s like one hour, I would have actually appreciate it. Segmentation. Hey, high level, you know, and this is about to be an hour. Yeah. But like, there are three main high level things and then keep that in your mind and then go like part one, but part two, I think we so we do that to some extent and like we produce like chapters, I guess. Yeah.
Speaker 1
So you can just look at them. Yeah. Probably could do a better job like introducing it, but we do try to like not play around with the PGSes.
Speaker 2
For sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1
I mean, it’s you know how much work he puts into the just kind of show it as is. Yeah. Yeah.Successful Experiment with Paywall Strategy Summary: The insight from the snip is about a successful experiment with a paywall strategy. The speaker shared that they received significant inbound interest after someone picked up their product on Twitter. They quickly implemented a janky stripe integration to paywall the product and were able to make 50 per month. They were surprised that people paid for the product despite its janky nature, which encouraged them to further pursue the idea. This successful experiment indicated the potential for monetization and validated the demand for their product.
Speaker 1
The single that we got is that someone picked it up on Twitter and just like, you know, all these like AI, influencer voice. So someone picked it up, posted it, we started getting a ton of inbound. So we’re like, holy shit, let’s just like pay wall this. So we just like, again, the janky stripe integration, which was basically like, we have an app with a stripe integration. This was just to ship it within the hour. We have an app with a stripe integration. Yeah. That once you click, then takes to a different app hosted somewhere else. So that one was still unauthenticated. It was it was security by Obscure. It was hilarious. Yeah. But but we basically just made that like 3k and and one day one day. Yeah. We charged around like 50 bucks. We didn’t even literally didn’t think about charge 50 bucks and people paid and we’re like, okay, well, there’s something there. So then 50 bucks for one for a month. I don’t want to just we were just charging 50 bucks from I see nothing. It’s like just like will someone pay you were just like on one like VPS somewhere. Yeah. Will someone pay for this? We were like on one EC2 instance. Yeah. You know, I mean, like it was janky. We’re like, just someone needs to pay for this before we move further. Yeah. Someone did. People did. Yeah. So then we’re like, okay, cool. This is interesting. Interesting.
Speaker 2
I’m going to move up the question that we said was going to be the meteor’s question of this interview. So you chose this out of your list of ideas. And this is one of the things that a lot of AF owners are worried about.Importance of considering the user perspective in AI technology development Summary: The AI technology should be built with the user perspective in mind, tailored to specific use cases, and not just as a one-size-fits-all solution. Users should consider who the technology is built for and how it serves their needs. For example, in podcast creation, AI tools are being developed to make the process easier with features like direct posting, intro and outro setting, music, and template creation. Therefore, users should opt for specialized AI tools that cater to their specific needs, rather than generic solutions.
Speaker 1
And I think typically when people ask this question in the AI context, they’re thinking of like, okay, you’re a thin wrapper, you’re an application layer thing, as opposed to you’re One of the like underlying technologies or APIs that people use. Cool. I think that’s fair. But I think the reality is that like, yeah, these API exists and they probably do serve a million different use cases, but they’re not built to serve these million different use cases. So whenever you ask the question of mode, it’s always has to be with the perspective of who is the user and building this for. Right. I can use chat GPT to do half of my writing. But you know, but I don’t know, Jasper claims that they do this much better for marketing. So it’s tailored. Actually, you know, don’t quote me on how well they’re doing after Traged GPT came out because they were really big before. Yeah, but some negative data points, but I’m sure they I don’t know. But the point is like, you’re you’re making this easier. We make creating a podcast easier and there is tooling there. There’s we help you. We can post it directly through us. We have the tooling around, you know, setting the intros and the outros. We have the music. We have an editor. All these things are also getting just much more and more and more developed. We’re building templates so that you can do different style of podcasts. So the idea is, if you’re trying to start a podcast, yeah, don’t go to a generic text to speech engine come to us. Yes. And the reality is that we then can in a very opinionated way actually select which takes the speed and we want. Right.Building the Right Product for the Right Use Case Summary: The focus should be on building a product for the right use case rather than simply framing a company as an AI company. It is important to prioritize the use case over the implementation. The key question for SaaS companies is identifying their mode as an API, rather than just focusing on being the best at a particular technology. First mover advantage is not always the most crucial factor in technological innovation, as demonstrated by Google’s approach to the GPT technology.
Speaker 1
Yes, there’s no doubt that companies can do this. The question is just like, are you building the right product for the right use case? I think particularly like always framing your company as a as an AI company, then you’re you’re putting the like the carriage before the horse in the sense that you focused on the implementation Rather than the use case, focus on the use case, and then build a product for it. Yeah. Right. Because fundamentally, you know, any of the SaaS is that exist. Think like more traditional sauce. What’s their mode? The technology everyone has access to it. So they just pick the thing that does it better than than the other. Now, that mode question is super interesting because I think you should actually flip it around, which is what is your mode as an API? Yeah. Right. So Chad GPT, like, yeah, fine, they had a first mover advantage. And I think, you know, by no means, this is my opinion, but by no means was Google like caught off guard with this, right? It just Google has some half the technologies that Google invented are actually used to power all these transformers. But you know, went against Google’s strategy, maybe to like be the first mover in this because they’d kind of buzz their market, whatever it was. I’m not sure.Challenges of Dubbing Across Different Languages Summary: The fundamental problem with dubbing is that it is challenging to know what sounds good in other languages, as individuals are not familiar with the nuances and accents of those languages. Professional translators and QA processes are crucial to ensure that the dubbing product meets the necessary standards across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. Additionally, leveraging AI tooling, such as using scripts for editing, is an important aspect of content creation and podcast production.
Speaker 1
Yeah. And I think that’s the problem with dubbing, I think. So the reason one thing we’re graduating at, but we already have this part of our dubbing product is that we have QA as part of that. So we actually work with professional translators to just make sure that the things that we publish, oh, nice. Oh, you should put that up front. Yeah. So so that’s really one of the like, fundamentally, the problem with dubbing, if you ask anyone who’s ever tried to dub is you don’t know what good sounds like in these other languages. You’re like, I can tell you I dub, but I’m going to tell you that, yeah, I think there’s a lot of big podcast videos you have tried this before. There’s one I can think of that’s tried this maybe five times with five different companies in the last five years.
Speaker 2
Their fundamental problem is that you just cannot, yeah, I find Spanish sounds good to me as the person doesn’t speak Spanish, but like it doesn’t sound good to a Spanish person or an Argentine person who have totally different accents. Right. Cool. Well, if you ever need Chinese validation, I know I have some very fanatical Chinese listeners who translate every podcast. Oh, that’s amazing. So we can use that as QA. Yeah, definitely love that. So shout out to Chinese Chinese army. Great. Great. Awesome. What do you want to ask me as a podcaster?
Speaker 1
So this is a whole interesting conversation because we’re a human podcaster, AI podcaster. Yes. Right. So as a human podcaster and someone who was with like a really popular show and also someone who can actually like implement this stuff himself, what is some of the AI tooling recently That you’ve like baked into your processes?
Speaker 4
I only use the script for editing.
Speaker 2
And by the way, this is this goes into a theory of content, which as a content creator myself, professionally and as an advisor, I have, which is that we develop a few show formats.Optimizing Show Formats and Tooling for Podcast Production Summary: The speaker uses different tooling for each of their three show formats. The fundamentals show requires no tooling as the show is meticulously planned and executed, resulting in high-quality content. Twitter spaces show requires scripting and editing to remove silences and arms, but it allows the speaker to attract high-profile guests without scheduling. The third show uses SmallPodcastor, a 100-line Python script, to convert transcripts into show notes.
Speaker 2
Yes. So we have three show formats right now. And I would say the, we have different tooling for each, right? So the one that I don’t need any tooling for essentially is the fundamentals one, because we plan basically every minute of that show. It is a lot of work. But it’s high quality because people love it. It’s got the longest tail by design, right? Yeah. The Twitter spaces require the script because a lot of silences and a lot of arms.
Speaker 1
And that’s not good podcast audio. So you got to cut it out. So you literally just go in like you, you, you, you edit out the Twitter space that you did. Yes. Usually it’s like two hours, we cut it down to one. Okay.
Speaker 2
And it’s a lot of pay and a lot of work. But it’s the only way that I get some pretty high profile people onto my podcast without booking them. They just show up. And that has value to me, right? Like Simon Willison has been on my podcast three times and never had to schedule him. And people love him. I mean, he’s great. Yeah. And then this one, I don’t need the script, obviously. But I do, we do use SmallPodcastor, which is 100 line script, Python scripts that those the transcripts into anthropic and then generate show notes. So that’s about it for now.
Speaker 1
Nice. So but it’s interesting because I think you know, you’re in a very nice position where you’re able to do a lot of these services. Yeah, I can write our own just do it yourself. Yeah. So it’s an interesting one.Marketing on Twitter and Promoting Podcast Episodes Summary: The speaker’s main job is marketing, but they find it challenging to market on Twitter. They have tried posting clips, but it’s too much work. Instead, they create a big post about the podcast episode, especially if the guest is well-known, and sometimes the fame of the guest carries the episode. For less famous guests, the speaker introduces who they are and why the audience should care. They feel this is a lot of work, and it would be challenging to hand over to AI. The speaker also criticizes the idea that tweeting requires emojis and hashtags as they find it obviously dumb.
Speaker 2
Like that is mostly my job. So how do you market Twitter? Twitter and Hagenus threads or or like you post clips or what do you do? I have tried posting clips. It’s just too much work. So if you guys do a good job of clips, I will use your stuff. But it’s just too much work. So mostly I just, you know, put like a big posting like so far, like our George Hott’s episode. We’re like, lane space is excited to present George Hott’s on Tiny Corp, commodity, commodity, peta flops, something like that. And just sometimes the the the fame of the guest will just lead the episode. So the one I dropped yesterday was Chris Ladner. Right. And people were like, Chris Ladner is a boss. I don’t care about anything else. Just like, I want to hear it as much as many Chris Ladner tokens as possible. Others who are like less famous, like I have to introduce who you are and why I care about you, why they should care about you. Because most people will not have heard about you as one of you have done. So then I need to make the case a little bit more. But that’s fine. That’s my job. I just think it takes a lot of work. And that’s the part that will be hardest for me to hand over to AI. Because I have a very specific voice for myself. And apparently all AI is think that Twitter to tweet, you have to have emojis and hashtags, which is so dumb. It’s so obviously dumb. Makes sense.Key Insights from a Discussion on AI and Podcasting Summary: Building a personal brand can be challenging, requiring a lot of effort to establish a unique voice. AI’s tendency to suggest using emojis and hashtags can be seen as limiting and unhelpful. Starting a podcast with help is easy, and for AI engineers, it’s crucial to believe in the value of what they are building and to be smart about spending money. The success of AI engineers depends on convincing oneself of the value in their work and launching that work without spending too much money.
Speaker 2
Because most people will not have heard about you as one of you have done. So then I need to make the case a little bit more. But that’s fine. That’s my job. I just think it takes a lot of work. And that’s the part that will be hardest for me to hand over to AI. Because I have a very specific voice for myself. And apparently all AI is think that Twitter to tweet, you have to have emojis and hashtags, which is so dumb. It’s so obviously dumb. Makes sense. Yeah. Great answers. Obviously, you’re happy to offer any thoughts as you as you build out for processors. What is one message you want all the listeners to remember? Take away with them.
Speaker 1
If you would like to start a podcast, start with your help. Super easy. If you have a podcast, we want to help you make your work span accessible by dubbing it. On the other side, if you are like a founder and AI engineer, I think it’s really important to convince yourself that what you’re building is valuable. Don’t like listen to people saying, I have a mode to you. Don’t have a mode to convince yourself of what that is and launch. Launch and don’t bring that much money. Frequently enough, and don’t spend your money.
Speaker 2
Be smart about it. Yeah. I think you are one of the most successful cases of AI engineers so far. I’m really glad to spend time with you in person and excited to see what comes next.
